ServerlessDays Stockholm is a one-day conference about serverless technology taking place on the 24th of October at Openlab in Stockholm.
Full information, agenda and tickets are available at https://stockholm.serverlessdays.io/
Introduction
When first starting ServerlessDays Stockholm, we knew that there would be a lot of work starting a conference. There are quite a lot of moving parts, that we as organizers aren’t familiar with.
We wanted to make inclusion, diversity and sustainability our highest priority.
Goals
We decided to establish these goals for the conference.
- Interesting content and current topics
- A diverse speaker lineup
- A sustainable conference with low environmental impact
- An affordable event, available for all to attend.
- By the local community for the local community.
With these goals in mind we started to organize.
To realize the goals, we tried all kinds of things, these are some of the actions we've taken.
Content
We decided that half of the speakers should be local, and the other half international speakers. We started to contact everyone that had something interesting to say about serverless in and around our extended network. During the period when the call for papers has been active, we have actively been contacting speakers inviting them to submit proposals. This to make sure that we should get a mix of inspirational talks and talks based on real life experience. We wanted to have content that, after attending ServerlessDays Stockholm, you should be able to go back to your office and practice what you’ve learned directly.
Diversity
To achieve a diverse speaker lineup, we have focused on inviting women speakers and reaching out to the ones that might not normally submit to a CFP. We've worked hard to reach as many as possible and spreading the word. We have also pinpointed certain people that we know have interesting content and that we would like to see at our conference.
Early on, we decided to have a non-anonymous selection process. That is to make sure that we get a diverse lineup. This way we can be sure that we can reach our goal.
We have also worked on how we communicate in social media to avoid a non-inclusive language and non-inclusive behavior.
Sustainability
The conference should also minimize waste, have a zero-carbon footprint so it should not affect the attendees carbon budget negatively. We do this by being thoughtful and try to avoid giveaways with a single use purpose. We also decided that we want to have catering that minimizes food waste and garbage and have a low negative impact on the environment. We managed to find a really good alternative that, together with KTH, explores how to be a climate friendly restaurant. We also said that if the budget allowed for it, we would cover travel costs for speakers if they travel by train.
Affordable
The price should be low making it possible for everyone to attend. We decided that we should charge a small cost for tickets. The aim of the conference is not to make any profit, if there are any money over when we close the books they will be invested in next year’s event. With that in mind we decided to have a low price that covers venue, food.
Local community
As mentioned earlier, we set a goal that half of the speakers should be from the local community. We knew that this would be hard since we knew that a majority of the speakers at other ServerlessDays are speakers that travel the world speaking at conferences. Actions we’ve taken towards that goal is to prefer speakers from the local community when possible.
We have also worked hard to reach out to local companies for sponsorship opportunities to further focus on the local community.
How did that go then?
ServerlessDays Stockholm got 140 submissions. We got more submissions than both London and Milan, both have done ServerlessDays for a couple of years. That is, we got 140 different talks that we had to go through to select an agenda. Out of all these 140 submissions, 12 were from women and non-binary individuals, that is 8.6% of all the submissions where not from men.
Out of all 140 submission, 128 of them were submitted by 72 different men. 12 of the 140 were submitted by 12 women or non-binary individuals.
We got proposals from Zambia, Philippines, India, Israel, Turkey, Australia, South Africa, USA, Brazil, Greece, Netherlands, Ukraine, Estonia, Poland, Ireland, Germany, UK, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, France, Austria, Croatia, and Serbia.
The majority of the proposals come from the US, with 30% of all the submitted topics. Combining all submissions from Europe we get 39% of all the submissions. The proposals from Sweden made up 5% of all the submissions.
At our first speaker selection 40% of the speakers were women, but 2 of them unfortunately had to decline. So, based on the circumstances we are happy that 20% of all the speakers are women speakers. We are also happy that out of all speakers, 20% are Swedish speakers. Of all the speakers, 40% of them from the Nordic countries.
Retrospective
After the conference we in the organizing team will sit down together and have a retrospective and reflect on that we need to improve, and how to do that.
We have gotten some feedback on that we need to reflect on our effort to reach "diverse" people. How are we reaching out to women speakers, what are we doing and offering when reaching out to them? Do we offer any support with coaching? This is an important topic that we will talk a lot about and reach out to the community for help and inspiration.
We will also talk about our ambition on sustainability and how to have a sustainable conference.
Final words
We are happily welcoming any input or ideas on what we should stop doing, start doing and continue to do.
Top comments (0)