The 10 Commandments of Community Organizing
Wadella, Jennifer
Welcome to the advanced class on community organizing. You’ve got a decent amount of members in your Meetup.com group, you hold events fairly routinely, maybe you’ve pulled in some legit speakers at your last conference or event … and you want to do more. This talk will focus on community organizing for growth and longevity by building out teams, improving communications, implementing processes, and most importantly will discuss how to maintain sanity in your work-life-volunteer balance. If you’ve ever had to answer the question “Oh, this ISN’T your full time job???” - this talk is definitely for you. If you’re just starting out organizing and don’t want to fall flat on your face, this talk will be very pragmatic for you.
 Can you guys hear me okay? Alright, we hyped. We're ready for DjangoCon Day 2. Yeah, you pumped! Alright, so hopefully you're in this room if you, Dj would like to start organizing events or be if you've ever got the question, oh, this isn't your full-time job as an event organizer. A little bit about myself, I do work full-time as a software engineer, but I also run a massive, massive community and blow people's minds the fact that I do both at once. So, a lot of this talk content is going to be about that, how to do it effectively, and a lot of things I wish I would have known four years ago when I started. So a little bit about me, you can follow me at likeomgitspedy on Twitter. Be warned, I do watch the Bachelor of Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise, and we watch Live Monday nights and I do Live Tweet. This is your one warning. Like I said before, a JavaScript developer, community organizer, and diversity advocate. Obviously, as a woman in technology, I've spent a lot of time being isolated or being the only woman, which is why a lot of my community work is very focused on increasing diversity efforts and helping bring people up who may have a hard time. I want to kind of give you the overview because if you're not from Kansas City, you've probably not heard about the work I do. So many years ago, I decided to found a nonprofit called Kansas City Women in Technology because I was sick of being the only damn woman. And I launched this organization. We had this really big kickoff event, like 300 people attended, and I don't know if I ran into a single other female developer at this event. There were women who wanted to get into tech careers. There are educators wanting to know how to bring their code to the classrooms. And I like to share this because it really kind of set the trajectory of our organization. So from there, it became very clear that we couldn't just, you know, like put out one call to action and unite all the female engineers across the city. So we put in place a lot of different programs based on community requests and requests we got from the feedback. The first one of those is our Coder Dojo chapter. Has anybody heard of Coder Dojo before? Okay, got a couple. So Coder Dojo is a global nonprofit that was founded over in Ireland with the idea of creating a code for kids to learn how to code. The really cool thing about it, much like Django Girls, is they kind of packaged it, branded it, and made it very easy for other cities to pick up and launch. More than happy to talk to your ear off all day about Coder Dojo, tell you how to launch one in your own city, find me or tweet me. But our chapter serves both boys and girls, kids, K through 12. And our goal with this program is to create an idea of gender blindness, the concept that it's not weird to be a boy or a girl writing code, just everybody's rocking out writing code, having a good time. Another key element here is we don't teach kids how to code. We teach kids how to teach themselves how to code. Because what we want to do is create really viable skill sets for them to go and be the engineers of the future and create new rules and blow past any boundaries and do things that aren't written in books simply because they haven't been done yet. So from there we launched a program called Coding and Cupcakes. Coding and Cupcakes came out of promoting Coder Dojo, and I would get the programmer to answer and be like, oh my god, this sounds awesome, sign my daughter up. But I would get a very different reaction from a lot of mothers who would see Coder Dojo and say, I don't think my daughter would like that. Maybe I'll bring my son. And so already we're fighting this kind of like disposition that parents have as against coding as an acceptable hobby or career path for girls. So what do we do? We brand it. We make it pink. We make it girly. And all of a sudden this program is sold out every month for the past three years. We've been running it. So, yay. We want to get them in. We want to get excited. We want them to get exposure to coding in a positive light. Midwest Dev Chat is a Slack channel I run for developers all throughout the Midwest. Coding in cocktails is our adult series for women because, again, one of those things that came out of our community were women saying, you're a women in tech group. Why aren't you teaching me how to code? There are a ton of great organizations around the country, Girl Develop It that do this, but this is our own branded version, specific to Kansas City based on our needs in our community. And then, of course, we run a Django Girls workshop every year. I'm talking a little more about that later in the presentation, but if you haven't heard of Django Girls before, I would encourage you to check it out. Again, very easy implementable model to implement in your communities. The curriculum is stellar and half the problem around running a coding education program is writing curriculum. It sucks. Django Girls has done the work for you. Okay. So, why Ten Commandments? This actually came out of a joke in that Slack channel that I was talking about. We do have a group for community organizers in there, and somebody was bitching about some problem that happened, and I was like, thou shall confirm with the venue thrice. And so, it kind of became this running joke, and just as I've spent time running events and doing community organizing, these kind of truths have started to pop up and happen that I wish I would have known about because I could have planned and executed better from the beginning. So, that's the basis of this talk. So, I'm going to give you a quick overview. Oh, so I was raised Catholic. I'm not religious anymore, but the Ten Commandments thing is a joke. God, you know, sent rules down to Moses, and he brought them down to the stones, and the one stone had the three that were the most important commandments, and then the other seven, still important, but not as big as those big three. And so, this is very much the same way. These are your three big ones that absolutely take priority, and then the other seven are definitely going to keep your sanity. So, real quick, thou shall practice self-care, commandment number one. Thou shall become an expert communicator, commandment number two. Thou shall manage expectations, number three. Thou shall not neglect thy volunteers. Thou shall plan as far in advance as calendarly possible. Thou shall confirm the venue thrice. Thou shall arrive at least one hour before starting time. Thou shall test the Wi-Fi. Thou shall have a designated chaos lead, and thou shall focus on process improvement wherever possible. I would like to prioritize that last one, but that's a whole other talk in and of itself. So, let's talk about self-care. As an organizer in the community, it is so easy to get so excited and passionate because the world has so many problems we want to solve, right? But you can very, very quickly bite off way more than you can chew, and all of a sudden, like, starting off the calendar year is June, you're already burned out, you're like crying yourself at sleep tonight because you're so stressed out with your million to-dos. Oh, and there's still your day job, which is suffering madly. So, avoid burnout at all costs. And we're going to talk about ways to do this, but I'm very big on self-preservation because your community will suffer if you do not prioritize your own self-care. Take on small tasks and improvements. This is really big because, again, you see all these different problems you want to solve. But if you want to be effective, if you want to avoid burnout, you want to break those down into very small pieces. For instance, we'll get feedback from all the programs we run, and we'll take that feedback and we'll say, okay, here's a big picture item, like, let's say, motivating the kids to take some new challenge. How do we break that down into smaller pieces where it's not this huge implementation standpoint all at once? So, we'll start planning, we'll start documenting, we'll start a process, and then piece by piece implementing that idea that we've come up with. So, breaking down tasks and small improvements and thinking, what can I feasibly get done as a volunteer, as somebody who does not do this full time and not hate my life? Give yourself office hours. This is huge when it comes to responding to email because that's what gets me every time, is email hit my inbox, and I think I have to insert right away, but then that totally breaks my flow of whatever project I was working on at work with this massive refactoring I was redoing. So, what I do is I give myself office hours where I say, okay, I'm gonna check and respond to email, 6 a.m., go to the gym, 7 a.m., get back at 8 a.m., answer emails for another hour, and then I start my work day, and I do that nine to five, take a break for dinner, and then I go back to my email answering. For all those emails in between, I love, love, love inbox by Gmail because it has a snooze feature, which you can custom set your emails to alert you again. It will save your life, and you will look like such less of an asshole when it comes to your email and communications. Nothing makes me feel worse than when I get that email from somebody being like, hi, I don't mean to bother you, you didn't respond to my last email, and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry, please nag me, I am the worst, I do care about you, let me respond to that. So, inbox snooze feature, highly recommend. Guard your time carefully. Your time is the biggest asset you have to offer, and sometimes that's gonna mean saying no. Sometimes that's gonna mean prioritizing something over something else. If you're used to working on a product with features, and the sales team comes to you, and they're like, well, I want A, B, and C, and it has to be done tomorrow. No, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe I can give you A, I can get a start on B, but manage other people's expectations and guard your time because that is the most precious asset you have. No is a complete sentence. Speaking of guarding time, Jennifer's first law. A person's incompetence in email is directly proportionate to the likelihood that they will massively waste your time. Again, this is four years of experience speaking that when somebody emails me about something and it's just like word vomit, and I'll email back and I'm like, I'm sorry, can you please understand, A, what the time of date for this thing that you want me to show up at, B, what your target demographic audience is, so I can know the way I'm presenting or what kind of thing and see some other question. If they can't answer three simple direct questions and continue to vomit at me for another three email threads, I know this person, if they can't communicate effectively in an email, are going to waste my time. I made this mistake. I lost two hours of my work day volunteering to do this panel that this woman was endlessly berating me about. It was a poorly run event by time. It was my turn to speak. I had literally 30 seconds with further people behind me and we were at the end mark of time where none of us were gonna communicate what we were there to communicate because this event was so poorly managed, so mishandled and there were only four people in the audience. Again, one of those four people might have been valuable but me and my time are very valuable and I need to guard and protect because I am going to be more effective as a community organizer and a lead if I'm prioritizing where I'm spending my focus instead of edging towards burnout. Define your personal scope and don't go outside it. As a diversity community, since day one of launching, we receive so many requests from the community and it's really, really hard because you wanna do everything and you wanna solve everything and you wanna be everything for everyone but that's not feasible. That is not something you as a single human being can do. So this is where you need to define your personal scope. You're gonna say, okay, I'm gonna take on X amount of speaking engagements per quarter. I'll vet those whether it's a form based on validity or who needs it or whatever your personal preference is but understand that you can set a personal scope and then don't step a foot outside it. That's how burnout happens. Find a task tracking system that works for you. Trello is a big one, very easy to use. We're actually talking about this at breakfast. I get really bad anxiety sometimes when I have so much on my to-do plate that I have found the most effective solution for me and yes, this does great against me because I'm a software engineer, right? But I write it down on a piece of paper and I don't know what that step is but all of a sudden I feel so much clear and so much more coherent that I have this list on my desk and this is what I'm gonna get done Monday. This is what I'm gonna get done Tuesday. I have to get this done by Thursday and so that's been really helpful for me. Again, utilizing technical tools, setting calendar to do is our crucial. There are a lot of steps that I'm gonna talk about a few slides from now in our, kind of the way we run our program so we set calendar reminders to make sure we're always following up on these certain details that we need. Own your calendar. How many times have you like, wanted to set up a meeting with somebody and there's like four back and forth emails of will this time work for you? Will this time work for you? Will that day, oh no, actually I'm gonna be a vacation. Anybody? Yeah, okay. I gift you Calendly. So Calendly is a service where you can basically set up your own personal calendar, syncs with your Google calendar and so you can block off time slots. Like for instance, I have my nine to five work day, right? I don't take meetings during that time except twice a week I'll have a 45 minute mentoring window open if somebody is trying to get mentoring in launching organizations like mine. It's my one exception. But then from there I have my morning meetings and my evening meetings. So when we're interviewing new team members for our organization, I'll send them my Calendly and I can say, hey excited to talk to you, schedule something that works for you on my calendar, done. So there's no back and forth that weighs so much less of my time. This is one of the best tools I've ever used. It does have a free tier. I use the paid one because it gives me multiple time slot options and it also has hidden options. So my leadership team has access to like my hidden calendar availability but the general public only has this other view. So this tool has saved my life. Fielding criticism. I don't say this to scare you, but if you do anything whether it's running an event, getting in front of the community as a leader speaking, you will get criticized. You will get criticized a lot. Some of it will be valid. Some of it will not be. Some of it will, people will have no understanding of the limitations that you're up against but that will not stop it. So I like to kind of brief people because I was not prepared for the amount of criticism I received when I started running an organization. Especially if it's an organization supporting minorities, that bullet on your back, that target on your back for criticismism is gonna get that much bigger because what about white men? Sorry. So the key here is learning to decipher the criticism. It's incredibly hard when somebody criticizes your event, your organization, something you have created. It's really hard to not take that as a criticism of yourself because you created it. It was your decision, it was your thought process. It was these things that are tied to yourself that made it run that way. And this is incredibly difficult to not devastate you and make you wanna quit because you didn't do something perfectly. Perfect is the enemy of good. So the trick is learning to decipher it. I love this quote by Hillary Clinton. Take criticism seriously but not personally. If there's truth or merit in the criticism, try to learn for it, otherwise let it roll right off you. Story time. We had a leader on our team who came on. She was very excited, very energetic, really wanted to do the roll. And this is what she told me repeatedly. However, she consistently didn't do her role, didn't fulfill her task and responsibilities and would consistently no call, no show our board meetings. We're a very flexible organization. A lot of the women involved with our organization have families and sometimes they can't get kid duties handled or anything like that. And so I'm very big on what I call work, life, volunteer balance. All we need is clear communication, let us know what's going on and we're gonna figure out a way to help each other out and work as a team. However, this person was repeatedly not communicating with just no call, no show. This person would then post very passive aggressive messages on our Slack community pertaining to information that she A, missed at that meeting and B, did not read in the meeting minutes that were sent to everybody else to follow up. So this was kind of happening and this is back when I gave people more chances. And lesson learned. So I was interested in asking her to step down but one of my team members was like, oh, she's going through a job transition, give her a chance. Well, this person then rage quit in the middle of our board meeting by sending the nastiest email about me to our entire leadership team that I have ever received. Four paragraphs of why I was a horrible human being, why I was anti-feminist, like all this stuff. 90% of it was just horrible and her trying to point fingers because she realized that people were realizing she wasn't doing her role. However, each block of criticism that she had against me, I knew started from somewhere. So it was my job to say, okay, a lot of this is unwarranted, this is her venting, this is her trying to point fingers and throw shade at me. That being said, what was the trigger point for this comment? What could I have done in my behavior or in the way I was communicating to trigger to get to that escalation? And so that's the real spot you need to be at criticism is understanding when people are just being crazy, but understanding your part in the role and figuring out how you can communicate better. I'm not saying that you were the one in the wrong, I'm not saying that they're not completely wrong, but it will save you headaches down the line and you will feel better about yourself and the decisions you make when you kind of get this clarity. Embrace the mocking, Jay. I'm assuming everyone has seen Hunger Games, yeah? Okay, I very strongly identify with Katniss because she just set out to do this one good thing, right? I just wanted to launch an organization for women developers. But the thing that happened that I was not prepared to handle, it was becoming this lightning rod, becoming this symbol. All of a sudden, I was the token woman in tech in Kansas City. And it was a lot of spotlight that I was not prepared for. I remember our first kickoff event, I had to get off on stage and I'm literally just slamming shots of bourbon because my hands are shaking and I'm terrified and I'm so scared of having that spotlight on me and people looking at me. And I was not prepared for this and I struggled against it for a very long time, but I realized as a community leader, as an advocate, people want something to look up to, they want something to aim towards. And so instead of letting my insecurities take over, I had to learn a way to kind of embrace the mocking, Jay, embrace being that symbol and learn to operate in that world in a context of what people needed me to be. Build your network. Community organizing, any leadership roles can be lonely because you have a certain level of stature and way you need to present yourself and sometimes that means you're not gonna be able to talk to your team about certain issues. You're gonna have rogue volunteers, you're gonna have awkward, difficult conversations, codes of conduct, the way we're being inclusive or exclusive. These are conversations that warrant group think. So the more you can find other community leaders to talk through your problems, find a mentor, mentor other budding community leaders because you don't wanna do this for the rest of your life and only be the only one, we want that multiplier effect, the more you can do this, the better your network will be. I really love connecting with other community leaders because I've been through crazy shit. Like some of the stories I have to tell blow people's mind, but I want them to be prepared for that because we weren't prepared for that. And at Coder Dojo, we had two dads almost get into a literal fist fight. There's no class on community organizing and how to de-escalate two dads, right? So the more we can share stories and support each other and figure out how to be very proactive about situations that might happen, the stronger our groups will be. Learn to delegate. So when I started my organization four years ago, I went with a committee of women and it was like herding angry bitchy cats. Everybody had a different idea. Everybody was going a different direction and there was a lack of unity, there was a lack of vision. And because it was a committee, nobody had specific roles. And so a couple of the girls had marketing backgrounds and I'd say, okay, hey, take this meeting time, let's put up a social calendar that's gonna outline our events for the next six months. Well, they'd be there for two hours, they'd come back to me and tell me, well, we need to change the logo. So, made a lot of mistakes along the way. The point that we operate now as an organization is I write actual job descriptions. Yes, we are a volunteer organization, but if you come onto our team, you have a job description, you have responsibilities, you have quarterly goals and objectives. Again, keeping in mind this offers work-life volunteer balance and we make sure that all our workloads and our responsibilities are manageable from that time and if it gets to be too much, well, that's when we start recruiting more people to help. But this is huge in delegating because some people you can't just like lob a general task list out and say, do this. Sometimes you as a leader need to take it on yourself to better prioritize and delegate. I love this photo, this is from our Jingle Girls event this year, this is our second year. The first year I did almost everything myself, everything from marketing to communicating and recruiting mentors to all the attendee communications, to dealing with the vendors to get our food and dietary restrictions covered. And it was a lot of work. But this year I started early and recruited this amazing team and the fun thing about this was they took what I did the year before and they doubled it. They did so much better than I as a single person could ever do alone. They brought way more mentors in, they got way more attendees in, they were on the news talking about this. The amount of work this team put in blew my damn mind and it's the best feeling in the world that you can have as an organizer to do something and then have a team come together and do it way, way better. That's the multiplier effect. That's how we grow and build sustainable communities is by bringing other people into the fold to then supersede everything we've done before. So learning to delegate is huge. If you're a type A neurotic control freak like me, it's gonna take some moves on, some stress relief. But documentation is key, creating clear and defined roles and making it easy for people to step into this. That being said, a mistake I've been in the past is I am a mom of lion. I like to protect my people. I probably call it a coddle way more than I should. And so sometimes it's hurt me that I've not, I've tried to solve all the problems for everybody instead of giving my leadership team key opportunities to solve their own problems and then become efficient in that area. So that's something to keep in mind is if you're like me, you might wanna protect everybody and make it easy and make sure everybody's lives are manageable, but make sure you are not blocking their opportunities for growth and for leadership. All right, that was a big commandment. That shall become an expert communicator. Communication, I'm pretty sure is the problem behind every issue, poor communication. So this is something I really, really harp on. Never assume people are as in tune to your organization as you are. So I like to bring this up because when you're working full time and when you're running something on the side, it's so easy to get tunnel vision, right? Because you're trying to implement and you're trying to execute. And it's easy to assume that everybody is on that same page. Everybody's operating on the same level of priority about your focus that you are. And that's just not how the world works. People are dealing with their own shit. And so that's why communication is key to make sure that what you have prioritized is getting communicated to other people who might not have it as high on their list. I have a lot of communication patterns, just like design patterns and code that I use all the time for effectiveness. I like to make things easy for people with lists and call out important information. Like I mentioned those word vomit emails earlier, no, do not word vomit at me. If it takes me two or three times to read your email to gain valid information from that, you just wasted my time and reduce my willingness to work with you. And so I hold myself to that same standard. If I want to communicate to a group of people I am going to write, craft, reread and tweak this email until I know that they can glean all the information that they need necessary and it's not gonna be a pain in the butt for them to digest. One of the things I do that I like to call out is when I mention a date, I do this certain date formatting. I say the date of the week, so like let's say Friday, the actual date of the week, let's say August 18th and the time zone. This is a little trick from my mentor who would tell me about trying to get people to follow up on things and if you didn't include the time zone, it was very easy for people to be like, oh, well I thought you meant like six o'clock in the evening, not six o'clock in the morning. So these are kind of safeguards you can put in to let people know exactly what timeline you're communicating on, especially if you're event planning and have to have certain things in place, giving that sort of deadline that will easily stick in people's brains is great. Like if you were to just say August 18th, would you know off the top of your head what day of the week that was unless you had something else going on on Friday, August 18th? So this is just the tiniest little trick that can help you get other people on your same level of remembering when things are happening. So this is probably hard to read, but this is an example of the email I sent out at the beginning of the month to my leadership team. I've got about 23 people right now and they're all across our different programs that we run. And so I kind of like to lay out, again, people get tunnel vision on what they're focusing on. So here's where I call out everything that we're gonna have going on with the month with that date format. Overall updates, any big sponsorship updates, like if our marketing chair needs to know to put a new sponsor in the newsletter and any leadership members we might be interviewing. I also always include an opportunity for one-on-one meetings in my calendar. Again, with our leader that went nuclear and sent that email, I think I could have been better about following up with her and saying, hey, if you have any concerns, please let me know. Hey, if you have any criticism or feedback for me, please let me know. And instead of letting it just escalate to this point where she went a little apeshit. Okay, that showed me an image expectations. People are not psychic. People are not psychic. People are not psychic. So this is a pitfall that hit me very early in my organizing career because if you're like me, time is important. And if I'm gonna go to an event, I'm gonna read all the texts on that event for my page. I'm gonna know where the venue is. I'm gonna know exactly what's happening. I'm gonna know exactly when the schedule is of things. And so I just assume that everybody operates on this baseline I do of reading what event they're going to. This does not happen a lot, especially with parents. And so they'll come in not having read and me having the expectation that they have read saying, well, I thought it was gonna be this. And that's where the contention happens. That's where people get pissy. That's when they get upset that things weren't the way they were expecting. So the more you can do to communicate effectively, whether it's on event descriptions or sending out emails or whatever works for your organization to better manage people's expectations, the less bullshit criticism and complaints you're gonna get. Oh, you need my real job. So I mentioned this at the beginning of the talk. This question a lot. There's this weird thing that happens with volunteer organizations that people just assume that you're not restricted to traditional business restraints. That economies of scale don't apply to you because it's volunteer. It's that same thing of like when you get an app for free in the app store and you expect way more than an app you'd pay a dollar for just because it's for free, right? They can do everything. So this is something that's very easy to fall prey to because people don't understand. Sometimes you'll have to explain that. I do kind of mention at least once a year at a lot of our events, please be nice to our volunteers. They give up their Saturday morning to help your kids code. So please keep that in mind. We're not paid to be here. Sometimes people need that reminder. Crazy's gonna cry. This is a gift from the bachelor. She is like possibly my favorite villain of all time. I wanna say that no matter how well you do in managing expectations and clearly communicating, some people will never be pleased. I'm running a little low on time but I love to share the story just because it's hysterical. So I got a tweet when my Twitter account had to be private for a period of time with this dude reaching out about my, or Kings the City Women Technology. He's like, well I tried to email you. Your website is broken. Why don't you have a phone number? In my head I'm like, you're why we don't have a phone number listed. But so I respond to him but my account is private so he couldn't see my tweet which I realized after the fact. But we had a tech talk which are one of our general networking events that Wednesday night and we were doing it at this arcade bar. And so the event had just started. Like I'm sitting facing the door and two girls had just walked in and they were sitting, we were talking. This crazy looking dude, like his hair puffed out to here. Like walk size with me and beeline. So I'm like, oh shit, this can't be good. And so he immediately begins laying into me about the fact that his daughter is interested in computer science and goes to school like 45 minutes away. And she doesn't have a mentor and her friends make fun of her for being interested in computer science and it's just reaming me about this. And I'm deescalating. Okay, I'm sorry sir, we're still a small organization. We haven't been able to expand out to colleges yet. Absolutely want to do everything we can to support but we're still small and growing and trying to build up. None of this was satisfying. I mean he was just reaming my ass. And so finally I'm like, you know, I'm more than happy to give you my email address for your daughter. Like I understand what it was like to be your daughter. I was definitely made fun of for my computer interests and he's like, well I can't do that. She won't listen to me anyway. And so I was like, oh okay, you literally just came here to bitch me out. There was no conflict resolution you were looking for. You just wanted to yell at me. Crazy's gonna cry. So another issue I've run into is being a good community partner because when you're launching an organization, other organizations in town might want to partner with you. And I firmly believe that you need to secure your organization's oxygen mask first before partnering with other organizations. You need to get your house in order to be an effective community partner and it's okay to express that. So get your house in order, then you can begin building partnerships and helping others. That shall not neglect the volunteers. I knew this was a lot of content to get there. Okay, do not make your volunteers herd cats. I don't know if you've ever showed up to an event before where it wasn't real structured or real planned and you show up and you're excited and ready to help. And there's just a million things going on. You can't get instructions for what to do. Like nobody really has a place and you feel like maybe your time was wasted. If you want your volunteers to come back, have everything structured and ready and set up for them. Don't ask them to go do all this insane problem solving and cat herding. It's not fun, especially if you don't know what's going on. You don't have contacts and you're not in control. It's just stressful. Make things easier for your volunteers. Make parking and arrival instructions clear. Have an emergency contact number available. Have clear instructions, duties and responsibilities for your volunteer. And as much as possible, keep your volunteers out of the line of fire of criticism. See earlier, crazy's gonna cray. I don't like putting my people in the crossfire of people that I know will never ever be happy. Plainier events ahead of time give volunteers plenty of notice. I really like sending out reminder emails and creating calendar invites. The key here is to make sure that one person is in charge of communications and your volunteers aren't getting communicated with for multiple people that may have conflicting priorities. Again, falls back to communication. Excellent communication is clear in keeping your community, your volunteers and your mentors happy. Find ways to thank your volunteers. Solicit their feedback and act on it. We hold retrospectives after every single one of our events and we ask the mentors for their feedback because we wanna keep them coming back. So we want to take their input and implement what we can to make their experience better. Offer leadership opportunities. And so as we've grown, instead of trying to be a control freak and handle everything, we very much try and build our volunteers and our mentors up, allow them to take on organization roles, build the resumes, get some leadership practice. Provide nice volunteer shirts. I hate crappy shirts that don't fit and everybody else does too, so please prioritize that. Plain appreciation dinners and parties. After a big event, sometimes it can be nice to wind down nice dinner and a cocktail. So this is something we always prioritize. Actually, thank you to RevSys for sponsoring our mentor appreciation party this year after our Django Girls event. It was quite lovely. Promote their efforts. So developers, especially women, aren't always the first to step up to brag about themselves. So brag for them. This is just the teeniest, tiniest thing that you can do to show how much you appreciate your volunteers. They're working on an open source project. Tweet a little bit about that. Offer to feature them in a blog if you have more of a platform to offer them. Nominate them for awards. I'm so excited. My organization has needed to do this for almost four years, but we finally recruited a stellar PR chair, and one of her roles is simply to take all the amazing women in our organization, get information, and submit them from awards. Again, back to that, me being the token woman in Tech and Kids of the City problem, we're very actively trying to dispel that by getting all these other women in the spotlight. So if you can do that for your volunteers and your mentors, you already know they're donating their time and they're good people and doing great work. So let's make sure they get recognized for that. Again, this is gonna take more time and more effort on your part, it will keep your volunteers coming back, feeling happy, and also recruiting other volunteers to come and join your organization. Now, shall plan as far in advance as calendarly possible. That was the worst word, but it's effective. Sorry, my slides are tripping out a little bit. Okay, moving on. So if you plan your advance in advance, it'll be easier to book speakers, volunteers, and venues. Granted, people have their own schedules, so if you can get on their schedule earlier, that's key to do. If you've ever planned a wedding, you have to book your venue at least a year in advance, so keep that in mind. If you have diversity goals, make efforts sooner rather than later. Nothing drives me up the wall more than some organization putting on some event and then emailing me, less than 24 hours for this event because they've suddenly realized they don't have any women on their panel and they might get chewed out for lack of diversity. Like, sorry dude, if you really wanna make a diversity effort, I'm not gonna be your token woman 24 hours in advance, like do a better effort from the get go. Thou shalt confirm the venue thrice. Cover your ass. We've had events before, we've had routine monthly events and then I've shown up like one month and knocked at the door, nobody's there, the space is a mess, my attendees arriving. Who looks like the jackass here? It's me, it's not the vendor. So anything you can do to keep your vendors and your venues on the same page with you, the better you will look. Again, more work on your part, but you will have better feedback and you will have solid events if you make sure that you're notifying everybody and reminding them because they have more to focus on than just your events. And here we go again with my, okay. Follow up or look like a jackass. This is something that I felt pretty too early where I would get feedback and be like, well they should have just known or I'm a volunteer so they should know. I only have five minutes left. Okay, thou shalt arrive at least one hour before starting time, the setup will always take longer than you expect. Your team and speakers will be late, your attendees will show up early. First year we ran Django Girls, our attendees showed up two hours early. Our volunteer staff wasn't even there yet. We were still getting off work and setting up the venue. So it happens, be aware, be prepared for it. That shalt test the Wi-Fi and bring any supplies needed. Bad Wi-Fi will tank your technical event in a heartbeat. It's not fun, there's no coming back from it. That being said, test ahead of time if you can and really key have the phone number of the contact information for the person who, A, know where the router is, B, can unlock where the router is and three, reset the router. Bring all the dongles. I firmly believe that it's on speakers to bring their own equipment but again, you're the one who's gonna look like a jackass so be prepared. Thou shalt have a designated chaos lead. Murphy's Law, what can go wrong will go wrong. No matter how well you plan an event, there is something that will happen that you will not have planned for. I'm assuming everybody's seen this gift before. There will always be problems you can't plan for. The one thing you don't wanna have is your leadership team that's already in charge of running an event, being those people running around to solve problems on the fly so have a designated chaos lead. Somebody who is there simply to deal with all the random things. Oh, the toilet paper ran out of the bathroom. We've got a random person to go make a Costco run to handle that. That did happen in the New York City Django Girls event, by the way. It's terrified me ever since I heard that story. Constant vigilance. Again, I don't wanna scare you from community organizing. I just wanna, I like to send my troops into battle prepared, right? So I want you to know everything that can go wrong so you can hold effective events, being aware of that. Thou shalt focus on process improvement wherever possible. We do retrospectives after all our events. We solicit feedback from our attendees, from our mentors, from our volunteers, from the parents of our attendees. And then we take this feedback, we collect it in docs. There's some big items that we can't tackle right away, but there's some small things that we can tweak and add to our process improvement that's allowed us to run really great events over time. Over the past four years, our retrospectives have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter and finally they got to the point where nobody had anything to say. And I'm like, all right, what's our next big challenge? Innovator die. Talk about what went well, what didn't go well, and what can we do better next time if you've never been to a retrospective before? Repeat emails. If you get a lot of emails asking the same question, those questions should be on your fax page. They should be on bold in your fax page. People will miss stuff on the fax page. Make it easy for them to read. Identify your pain points and work on those first. Again, biting off what's feasible, but definitely identifying what your leadership team is spending the most time on, especially if it's monotonous and can be automated. Streamline your check-in process. Automate posts to social media wherever possible. I'm a software engineer. I suck at social media unless it's live-tweeting the Bachelor. I have a very amazing team who does that instead and they're so much better at it than I would ever be. Begin gathering data and feedback as soon as you can. I'm getting these processes in place. Are the best thing you can do for continuing to improve, and also going after sponsorship money. You can say, hey, these were the numbers we hit last year. This is what we're doing this year. This is projected for the next year. That can really be great in your tool belt. Summary. Those are 10 commandments between you organizing. If you follow me on Twitter, I am working on a book that summarizes a lot of this and a lot more. So if you want to get more information, that will be a good place to look. These slides are available on GitHub at that link. Does anyone have any questions? Thank you. Thanks for the great talk and the tips regarding Inbox by Google and Calendee. My question is, I have an 11-year-old niece who lives in Jacksonville, Florida. And she has a 13-year-old brother who has really embraced writing Python code with the Pygame Library. What resources would you recommend that my niece can access online? Perhaps a specific resource on Coder Dojo, or a book I can order for her to give her a fair opportunity to get excited about code? So she's a little young right now, but when she hits, I think, 18 months, it's either 18 months or three years. I can't remember. It's a Codepillar by Fisher Price, which is this little caterpillar you can connect to do cool programming. So that's good for her age. As soon as she is capable of reading. She's 11 years old. I might have said 11 months old. Sorry about that. All right, that changes my answer then. We start all our kiddos off on Scratch, which is the drag-and-drop UI developed by MIT. That being said, at a conference a couple of weeks ago, I just gave a talk on Jewelbox, which is a programmable jewelry founded by Sarah Chips, who's the co-founder of Girl Develop It. And so those are programmable bracelets. I mean, it's basically a nicely packaged Arduino, but they can sync via Bluetooth, connect with her friends, have a really great community, and utility library and docs around it. So I'm interested in getting something like this set up in my community. But I'm wondering, how as a male do I get women to feel comfortable to come to things like that and believe I'm going to respect them and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, and I get this question a lot. We've actually got a Women Techmakers group in town, which my buddy Kyle runs, because he's affiliated with the Google Developer Group. This is something, but if you start there, if you're a lightning rod and create a group for women, eventually women are going to come that want to step in and join your leadership team. So if you can just start, if you can just plow through that wall, get things going, and then help support the women who want to come up and lead it, that's the best way to go. So in terms of community organizing, the processes that you're proposing here, they definitely sound really great, and you're going to run really great events with them, but they also sound like they take a lot of time, like you were saying. I was wondering whether you were talking about work-life balance, and are you able to still sustain other hobbies, or how much of a life do you have if you're spending three hours a day answering emails? How does that work? I totally got to play Halo for four hours on a Friday night. It was awesome. No, so this has been a lot of work from the get-go, and this was so much time, and this was so many nights, like crying on the phone, like struggling, but once I got to this point of getting all these processes in place and building up a leadership team, I don't spend nearly that much time anymore. Like if I had better known how to set up leadership and roles and better delegate from the get-go, which is why I give this talk, I would have had a lot more time in the beginning. So as far as the time I spent on this a week, I mean, between composing emails and managing my leadership team and dealing with random issues that come up, it's probably gotten down to maybe five hours a week. It's been low enough that I've been able to get back on the speaker circuit again and start doing talks around the country. So just put in the hard work at first, and then it'll level out. I was just curious to hear a little bit more about. I run an organization as well, and I've started to delegate, and the problem I'm having is kind of, you talked about that email you sent at the beginning of every month to kind of like level set. I'd be curious to talk just to hear a little bit more about your experience once you delegated how you kind of started to see communication be useful to those people, to make sure stuff didn't fall to the cracks, to make sure the communication came up to you and back down and just how to manage that. Yeah, I asked my team to CC me on everything, just so I kind of have like a bird's eye view. Again, I'm trying not to be such a mom a lion and give them opportunities there. But so having them CC you on communications, we have several different program teams that are running on their own schedules that I don't even attend those meetings. I just ask that they're on the calendar and then meeting notes from everything or add it to Google Drive. We do monthly board meetings where we do a recap of everything that's going on so people are aware, I'm aware. Most of my team will approach me if there is an issue that I need to handle. And then other than that, we do quarterly objective meetings once a quarter that are for three hours that are really big like hash everything out, like talk about big picture vision. And so that's, yeah. All right, I'm gonna actually ask the last question here while I've got the mic. So I'm a community organizer as well. How do you hold yourself accountable? Are there like support groups for this kind of thing? No, but I'm working on that. Okay. Sorry, I'm trying to organize a glamping retreat for women and tech organizers so we can go and talk about a lot of these issues. But Slack communities are a great place to go to find other community leaders. Awesome. If people have more questions afterwards, can they find you on Twitter, Slack, or? You can find me on Twitter, like omgitsvedi, DMU, whatever. I've gotta catch my flight in like 20 minutes, but you have until I make it out the shuttle door to ask me more questions. Awesome. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you.
 Can you guys hear me okay?  Alright, we hyped. We're ready for DjangoCon Day 2. Yeah, you pumped!  Alright, so hopefully you're in this room if you,  Dj would like to start organizing events or be if you've ever got the question,  oh, this isn't your full-time job as an event organizer.  A little bit about myself, I do work full-time as a software engineer,  but I also run a massive, massive community and blow people's minds the fact that I do both at once.  So, a lot of this talk content is going to be about that, how to do it effectively,  and a lot of things I wish I would have known four years ago when I started.  So a little bit about me, you can follow me at likeomgitspedy on Twitter.  Be warned, I do watch the Bachelor of Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise,  and we watch Live Monday nights and I do Live Tweet. This is your one warning.  Like I said before, a JavaScript developer, community organizer, and diversity advocate.  Obviously, as a woman in technology, I've spent a lot of time being isolated or being the only woman,  which is why a lot of my community work is very focused on increasing diversity efforts  and helping bring people up who may have a hard time.  I want to kind of give you the overview because if you're not from Kansas City,  you've probably not heard about the work I do.  So many years ago, I decided to found a nonprofit called Kansas City Women in Technology  because I was sick of being the only damn woman.  And I launched this organization. We had this really big kickoff event, like 300 people attended,  and I don't know if I ran into a single other female developer at this event.  There were women who wanted to get into tech careers.  There are educators wanting to know how to bring their code to the classrooms.  And I like to share this because it really kind of set the trajectory of our organization.  So from there, it became very clear that we couldn't just, you know,  like put out one call to action and unite all the female engineers across the city.  So we put in place a lot of different programs based on community requests  and requests we got from the feedback.  The first one of those is our Coder Dojo chapter.  Has anybody heard of Coder Dojo before?  Okay, got a couple.  So Coder Dojo is a global nonprofit that was founded over in Ireland  with the idea of creating a code for kids to learn how to code.  The really cool thing about it, much like Django Girls, is they kind of packaged it, branded it,  and made it very easy for other cities to pick up and launch.  More than happy to talk to your ear off all day about Coder Dojo,  tell you how to launch one in your own city, find me or tweet me.  But our chapter serves both boys and girls, kids, K through 12.  And our goal with this program is to create an idea of gender blindness,  the concept that it's not weird to be a boy or a girl writing code,  just everybody's rocking out writing code, having a good time.  Another key element here is we don't teach kids how to code.  We teach kids how to teach themselves how to code.  Because what we want to do is create really viable skill sets for them to go  and be the engineers of the future and create new rules and blow past any boundaries  and do things that aren't written in books simply because they haven't been done yet.  So from there we launched a program called Coding and Cupcakes.  Coding and Cupcakes came out of promoting Coder Dojo,  and I would get the programmer to answer and be like,  oh my god, this sounds awesome, sign my daughter up.  But I would get a very different reaction from a lot of mothers  who would see Coder Dojo and say, I don't think my daughter would like that.  Maybe I'll bring my son.  And so already we're fighting this kind of like disposition that parents have  as against coding as an acceptable hobby or career path for girls.  So what do we do? We brand it. We make it pink. We make it girly.  And all of a sudden this program is sold out every month for the past three years.  We've been running it. So, yay. We want to get them in.  We want to get excited. We want them to get exposure to coding in a positive light.  Midwest Dev Chat is a Slack channel I run for developers all throughout the Midwest.  Coding in cocktails is our adult series for women because, again,  one of those things that came out of our community were women saying,  you're a women in tech group. Why aren't you teaching me how to code?  There are a ton of great organizations around the country,  Girl Develop It that do this, but this is our own branded version,  specific to Kansas City based on our needs in our community.  And then, of course, we run a Django Girls workshop every year.  I'm talking a little more about that later in the presentation,  but if you haven't heard of Django Girls before,  I would encourage you to check it out.  Again, very easy implementable model to implement in your communities.  The curriculum is stellar and half the problem  around running a coding education program is writing curriculum.  It sucks. Django Girls has done the work for you.  Okay. So, why Ten Commandments?  This actually came out of a joke in that Slack channel that I was talking about.  We do have a group for community organizers in there,  and somebody was bitching about some problem that happened,  and I was like, thou shall confirm with the venue thrice.  And so, it kind of became this running joke,  and just as I've spent time running events and doing community organizing,  these kind of truths have started to pop up and happen  that I wish I would have known about  because I could have planned and executed better from the beginning.  So, that's the basis of this talk.  So, I'm going to give you a quick overview.  Oh, so I was raised Catholic.  I'm not religious anymore, but the Ten Commandments thing is a joke.  God, you know, sent rules down to Moses, and he brought them down to the stones,  and the one stone had the three that were the most important commandments,  and then the other seven, still important, but not as big as those big three.  And so, this is very much the same way.  These are your three big ones that absolutely take priority,  and then the other seven are definitely going to keep your sanity.  So, real quick, thou shall practice self-care, commandment number one.  Thou shall become an expert communicator, commandment number two.  Thou shall manage expectations, number three.  Thou shall not neglect thy volunteers.  Thou shall plan as far in advance as calendarly possible.  Thou shall confirm the venue thrice.  Thou shall arrive at least one hour before starting time.  Thou shall test the Wi-Fi.  Thou shall have a designated chaos lead,  and thou shall focus on process improvement wherever possible.  I would like to prioritize that last one,  but that's a whole other talk in and of itself.  So, let's talk about self-care.  As an organizer in the community,  it is so easy to get so excited and passionate  because the world has so many problems we want to solve, right?  But you can very, very quickly bite off way more than you can chew,  and all of a sudden, like, starting off the calendar year is June,  you're already burned out, you're like crying yourself at sleep tonight  because you're so stressed out with your million to-dos.  Oh, and there's still your day job, which is suffering madly.  So, avoid burnout at all costs.  And we're going to talk about ways to do this,  but I'm very big on self-preservation  because your community will suffer  if you do not prioritize your own self-care.  Take on small tasks and improvements.  This is really big because, again,  you see all these different problems you want to solve.  But if you want to be effective, if you want to avoid burnout,  you want to break those down into very small pieces.  For instance, we'll get feedback from all the programs we run,  and we'll take that feedback and we'll say,  okay, here's a big picture item,  like, let's say, motivating the kids to take some new challenge.  How do we break that down into smaller pieces  where it's not this huge implementation standpoint all at once?  So, we'll start planning, we'll start documenting,  we'll start a process, and then piece by piece  implementing that idea that we've come up with.  So, breaking down tasks and small improvements  and thinking, what can I feasibly get done as a volunteer,  as somebody who does not do this full time  and not hate my life?  Give yourself office hours.  This is huge when it comes to responding to email  because that's what gets me every time,  is email hit my inbox,  and I think I have to insert right away,  but then that totally breaks my flow  of whatever project I was working on at work  with this massive refactoring I was redoing.  So, what I do is I give myself office hours  where I say, okay, I'm gonna check and respond to email,  6 a.m., go to the gym, 7 a.m., get back at 8 a.m.,  answer emails for another hour,  and then I start my work day, and I do that nine to five,  take a break for dinner,  and then I go back to my email answering.  For all those emails in between,  I love, love, love inbox by Gmail  because it has a snooze feature,  which you can custom set your emails to alert you again.  It will save your life,  and you will look like such less of an asshole  when it comes to your email and communications.  Nothing makes me feel worse  than when I get that email from somebody being like,  hi, I don't mean to bother you,  you didn't respond to my last email,  and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry, please nag me,  I am the worst, I do care about you,  let me respond to that.  So, inbox snooze feature, highly recommend.  Guard your time carefully.  Your time is the biggest asset you have to offer,  and sometimes that's gonna mean saying no.  Sometimes that's gonna mean prioritizing  something over something else.  If you're used to working on a product with features,  and the sales team comes to you,  and they're like, well, I want A, B, and C,  and it has to be done tomorrow.  No, no, no, no, no, no.  Maybe I can give you A, I can get a start on B,  but manage other people's expectations  and guard your time  because that is the most precious asset you have.  No is a complete sentence.  Speaking of guarding time, Jennifer's first law.  A person's incompetence in email is directly proportionate  to the likelihood that they will massively waste your time.  Again, this is four years of experience speaking  that when somebody emails me about something  and it's just like word vomit,  and I'll email back and I'm like, I'm sorry,  can you please understand, A,  what the time of date for this thing  that you want me to show up at,  B, what your target demographic audience is,  so I can know the way I'm presenting  or what kind of thing and see some other question.  If they can't answer three simple direct questions  and continue to vomit at me for another three email threads,  I know this person,  if they can't communicate effectively in an email,  are going to waste my time.  I made this mistake.  I lost two hours of my work day volunteering  to do this panel that this woman was endlessly berating me  about.  It was a poorly run event by time.  It was my turn to speak.  I had literally 30 seconds with further people behind me  and we were at the end mark of time  where none of us were gonna communicate  what we were there to communicate  because this event was so poorly managed,  so mishandled and there were only four people in the audience.  Again, one of those four people might have been valuable  but me and my time are very valuable  and I need to guard and protect  because I am going to be more effective  as a community organizer and a lead  if I'm prioritizing where I'm spending my focus  instead of edging towards burnout.  Define your personal scope and don't go outside it.  As a diversity community,  since day one of launching,  we receive so many requests from the community  and it's really, really hard because you wanna do everything  and you wanna solve everything  and you wanna be everything for everyone  but that's not feasible.  That is not something you as a single human being can do.  So this is where you need to define your personal scope.  You're gonna say, okay, I'm gonna take on  X amount of speaking engagements per quarter.  I'll vet those whether it's a form based on validity  or who needs it or whatever your personal preference is  but understand that you can set a personal scope  and then don't step a foot outside it.  That's how burnout happens.  Find a task tracking system that works for you.  Trello is a big one, very easy to use.  We're actually talking about this at breakfast.  I get really bad anxiety sometimes  when I have so much on my to-do plate  that I have found the most effective solution for me  and yes, this does great against me  because I'm a software engineer, right?  But I write it down on a piece of paper  and I don't know what that step is  but all of a sudden I feel so much clear  and so much more coherent that I have this list on my desk  and this is what I'm gonna get done Monday.  This is what I'm gonna get done Tuesday.  I have to get this done by Thursday  and so that's been really helpful for me.  Again, utilizing technical tools,  setting calendar to do is our crucial.  There are a lot of steps that I'm gonna talk about  a few slides from now in our,  kind of the way we run our program  so we set calendar reminders to make sure  we're always following up on these certain details  that we need.  Own your calendar.  How many times have you like,  wanted to set up a meeting with somebody  and there's like four back and forth emails  of will this time work for you?  Will this time work for you?  Will that day, oh no, actually I'm gonna be a vacation.  Anybody?  Yeah, okay.  I gift you Calendly.  So Calendly is a service where you can basically set up  your own personal calendar,  syncs with your Google calendar  and so you can block off time slots.  Like for instance, I have my nine to five work day, right?  I don't take meetings during that time  except twice a week I'll have a 45 minute  mentoring window open if somebody is trying  to get mentoring in launching organizations like mine.  It's my one exception.  But then from there I have my morning meetings  and my evening meetings.  So when we're interviewing new team members  for our organization,  I'll send them my Calendly and I can say,  hey excited to talk to you,  schedule something that works for you on my calendar, done.  So there's no back and forth that weighs  so much less of my time.  This is one of the best tools I've ever used.  It does have a free tier.  I use the paid one because it gives me  multiple time slot options and it also has hidden options.  So my leadership team has access to like  my hidden calendar availability  but the general public only has this other view.  So this tool has saved my life.  Fielding criticism.  I don't say this to scare you,  but if you do anything whether it's running an event,  getting in front of the community as a leader speaking,  you will get criticized.  You will get criticized a lot.  Some of it will be valid.  Some of it will not be.  Some of it will, people will have no understanding  of the limitations that you're up against  but that will not stop it.  So I like to kind of brief people  because I was not prepared for the amount of criticism  I received when I started running an organization.  Especially if it's an organization supporting minorities,  that bullet on your back, that target on your back  for criticismism is gonna get that much bigger  because what about white men?  Sorry.  So the key here is learning to decipher the criticism.  It's incredibly hard when somebody  criticizes your event, your organization,  something you have created.  It's really hard to not take that  as a criticism of yourself because you created it.  It was your decision, it was your thought process.  It was these things that are tied to yourself  that made it run that way.  And this is incredibly difficult to not devastate you  and make you wanna quit  because you didn't do something perfectly.  Perfect is the enemy of good.  So the trick is learning to decipher it.  I love this quote by Hillary Clinton.  Take criticism seriously but not personally.  If there's truth or merit in the criticism,  try to learn for it, otherwise let it roll right off you.  Story time.  We had a leader on our team who came on.  She was very excited, very energetic,  really wanted to do the roll.  And this is what she told me repeatedly.  However, she consistently didn't do her role,  didn't fulfill her task and responsibilities  and would consistently no call, no show our board meetings.  We're a very flexible organization.  A lot of the women involved with our organization  have families and sometimes they can't get  kid duties handled or anything like that.  And so I'm very big on what I call work,  life, volunteer balance.  All we need is clear communication,  let us know what's going on and we're gonna figure out a way  to help each other out and work as a team.  However, this person was repeatedly not communicating  with just no call, no show.  This person would then post very passive aggressive messages  on our Slack community pertaining to information  that she A, missed at that meeting  and B, did not read in the meeting minutes  that were sent to everybody else to follow up.  So this was kind of happening  and this is back when I gave people more chances.  And lesson learned.  So I was interested in asking her to step down  but one of my team members was like,  oh, she's going through a job transition,  give her a chance.  Well, this person then rage quit in the middle  of our board meeting by sending the nastiest email  about me to our entire leadership team  that I have ever received.  Four paragraphs of why I was a horrible human being,  why I was anti-feminist, like all this stuff.  90% of it was just horrible  and her trying to point fingers  because she realized that people were realizing  she wasn't doing her role.  However, each block of criticism that she had against me,  I knew started from somewhere.  So it was my job to say, okay,  a lot of this is unwarranted, this is her venting,  this is her trying to point fingers and throw shade at me.  That being said, what was the trigger point for this comment?  What could I have done in my behavior  or in the way I was communicating  to trigger to get to that escalation?  And so that's the real spot you need to be at criticism  is understanding when people are just being crazy,  but understanding your part in the role  and figuring out how you can communicate better.  I'm not saying that you were the one in the wrong,  I'm not saying that they're not completely wrong,  but it will save you headaches down the line  and you will feel better about yourself  and the decisions you make  when you kind of get this clarity.  Embrace the mocking, Jay.  I'm assuming everyone has seen Hunger Games, yeah?  Okay, I very strongly identify with Katniss  because she just set out to do this one good thing, right?  I just wanted to launch an organization  for women developers.  But the thing that happened  that I was not prepared to handle,  it was becoming this lightning rod, becoming this symbol.  All of a sudden, I was the token woman  in tech in Kansas City.  And it was a lot of spotlight that I was not prepared for.  I remember our first kickoff event,  I had to get off on stage  and I'm literally just slamming shots of bourbon  because my hands are shaking and I'm terrified  and I'm so scared of having that spotlight on me  and people looking at me.  And I was not prepared for this  and I struggled against it for a very long time,  but I realized as a community leader, as an advocate,  people want something to look up to,  they want something to aim towards.  And so instead of letting my insecurities take over,  I had to learn a way to kind of embrace the mocking, Jay,  embrace being that symbol  and learn to operate in that world  in a context of what people needed me to be.  Build your network.  Community organizing, any leadership roles can be lonely  because you have a certain level of stature  and way you need to present yourself  and sometimes that means you're not gonna be able  to talk to your team about certain issues.  You're gonna have rogue volunteers,  you're gonna have awkward, difficult conversations,  codes of conduct, the way we're being inclusive or exclusive.  These are conversations that warrant group think.  So the more you can find other community leaders  to talk through your problems,  find a mentor, mentor other budding community leaders  because you don't wanna do this for the rest of your life  and only be the only one, we want that multiplier effect,  the more you can do this, the better your network will be.  I really love connecting with other community leaders  because I've been through crazy shit.  Like some of the stories I have to tell blow people's mind,  but I want them to be prepared for that  because we weren't prepared for that.  And at Coder Dojo, we had two dads  almost get into a literal fist fight.  There's no class on community organizing  and how to de-escalate two dads, right?  So the more we can share stories and support each other  and figure out how to be very proactive  about situations that might happen,  the stronger our groups will be.  Learn to delegate.  So when I started my organization four years ago,  I went with a committee of women  and it was like herding angry bitchy cats.  Everybody had a different idea.  Everybody was going a different direction  and there was a lack of unity, there was a lack of vision.  And because it was a committee, nobody had specific roles.  And so a couple of the girls had marketing backgrounds  and I'd say, okay, hey, take this meeting time,  let's put up a social calendar  that's gonna outline our events for the next six months.  Well, they'd be there for two hours,  they'd come back to me and tell me,  well, we need to change the logo.  So, made a lot of mistakes along the way.  The point that we operate now as an organization  is I write actual job descriptions.  Yes, we are a volunteer organization,  but if you come onto our team, you have a job description,  you have responsibilities,  you have quarterly goals and objectives.  Again, keeping in mind this offers work-life volunteer balance  and we make sure that all our workloads  and our responsibilities are manageable from that time  and if it gets to be too much,  well, that's when we start recruiting more people to help.  But this is huge in delegating  because some people you can't just like lob  a general task list out and say, do this.  Sometimes you as a leader need to take it on yourself  to better prioritize and delegate.  I love this photo, this is from our  Jingle Girls event this year, this is our second year.  The first year I did almost everything myself,  everything from marketing to communicating  and recruiting mentors to all the attendee communications,  to dealing with the vendors to get our food  and dietary restrictions covered.  And it was a lot of work.  But this year I started early and recruited this amazing team  and the fun thing about this was they took  what I did the year before and they doubled it.  They did so much better than I as a single person  could ever do alone.  They brought way more mentors in,  they got way more attendees in,  they were on the news talking about this.  The amount of work this team put in blew my damn mind  and it's the best feeling in the world  that you can have as an organizer to do something  and then have a team come together  and do it way, way better.  That's the multiplier effect.  That's how we grow and build sustainable communities  is by bringing other people into the fold  to then supersede everything we've done before.  So learning to delegate is huge.  If you're a type A neurotic control freak like me,  it's gonna take some moves on, some stress relief.  But documentation is key, creating clear and defined roles  and making it easy for people to step into this.  That being said, a mistake I've been in the past is  I am a mom of lion.  I like to protect my people.  I probably call it a coddle way more than I should.  And so sometimes it's hurt me that I've not,  I've tried to solve all the problems for everybody  instead of giving my leadership team key opportunities  to solve their own problems  and then become efficient in that area.  So that's something to keep in mind is  if you're like me, you might wanna protect everybody  and make it easy and make sure everybody's lives  are manageable, but make sure you are not blocking  their opportunities for growth and for leadership.  All right, that was a big commandment.  That shall become an expert communicator.  Communication, I'm pretty sure is the problem  behind every issue, poor communication.  So this is something I really, really harp on.  Never assume people are as in tune  to your organization as you are.  So I like to bring this up because  when you're working full time  and when you're running something on the side,  it's so easy to get tunnel vision, right?  Because you're trying to implement  and you're trying to execute.  And it's easy to assume that everybody is on that same page.  Everybody's operating on the same level of priority  about your focus that you are.  And that's just not how the world works.  People are dealing with their own shit.  And so that's why communication is key to make sure  that what you have prioritized is getting communicated  to other people who might not have it as high on their list.  I have a lot of communication patterns,  just like design patterns and code  that I use all the time for effectiveness.  I like to make things easy for people with lists  and call out important information.  Like I mentioned those word vomit emails earlier,  no, do not word vomit at me.  If it takes me two or three times to read your email  to gain valid information from that,  you just wasted my time and reduce my willingness  to work with you.  And so I hold myself to that same standard.  If I want to communicate to a group of people  I am going to write, craft, reread and tweak this email  until I know that they can glean all the information  that they need necessary and it's not gonna be a pain  in the butt for them to digest.  One of the things I do that I like to call out  is when I mention a date, I do this certain date formatting.  I say the date of the week, so like let's say Friday,  the actual date of the week, let's say August 18th  and the time zone.  This is a little trick from my mentor who would tell me  about trying to get people to follow up on things  and if you didn't include the time zone,  it was very easy for people to be like,  oh, well I thought you meant like six o'clock  in the evening, not six o'clock in the morning.  So these are kind of safeguards you can put in  to let people know exactly what timeline  you're communicating on, especially if you're event planning  and have to have certain things in place,  giving that sort of deadline that will easily stick  in people's brains is great.  Like if you were to just say August 18th,  would you know off the top of your head  what day of the week that was  unless you had something else going on on Friday, August 18th?  So this is just the tiniest little trick  that can help you get other people on your same level  of remembering when things are happening.  So this is probably hard to read,  but this is an example of the email I sent out  at the beginning of the month to my leadership team.  I've got about 23 people right now  and they're all across our different programs that we run.  And so I kind of like to lay out, again,  people get tunnel vision on what they're focusing on.  So here's where I call out everything  that we're gonna have going on with the month  with that date format.  Overall updates, any big sponsorship updates,  like if our marketing chair needs to know  to put a new sponsor in the newsletter  and any leadership members we might be interviewing.  I also always include an opportunity  for one-on-one meetings in my calendar.  Again, with our leader that went nuclear  and sent that email, I think I could have been better  about following up with her and saying,  hey, if you have any concerns, please let me know.  Hey, if you have any criticism or feedback for me,  please let me know.  And instead of letting it just escalate to this point  where she went a little apeshit.  Okay, that showed me an image expectations.  People are not psychic.  People are not psychic.  People are not psychic.  So this is a pitfall that hit me very early  in my organizing career because if you're like me,  time is important.  And if I'm gonna go to an event,  I'm gonna read all the texts on that event for my page.  I'm gonna know where the venue is.  I'm gonna know exactly what's happening.  I'm gonna know exactly when the schedule is of things.  And so I just assume that everybody operates  on this baseline I do of reading what event they're going to.  This does not happen a lot, especially with parents.  And so they'll come in not having read  and me having the expectation that they have read  saying, well, I thought it was gonna be this.  And that's where the contention happens.  That's where people get pissy.  That's when they get upset that things  weren't the way they were expecting.  So the more you can do to communicate effectively,  whether it's on event descriptions  or sending out emails or whatever works for your organization  to better manage people's expectations,  the less bullshit criticism and complaints you're gonna get.  Oh, you need my real job.  So I mentioned this at the beginning of the talk.  This question a lot.  There's this weird thing that happens  with volunteer organizations that people just assume  that you're not restricted to traditional business restraints.  That economies of scale don't apply to you  because it's volunteer.  It's that same thing of like when you get an app  for free in the app store and you expect way more  than an app you'd pay a dollar for  just because it's for free, right?  They can do everything.  So this is something that's very easy to fall prey to  because people don't understand.  Sometimes you'll have to explain that.  I do kind of mention at least once a year  at a lot of our events, please be nice to our volunteers.  They give up their Saturday morning to help your kids code.  So please keep that in mind.  We're not paid to be here.  Sometimes people need that reminder.  Crazy's gonna cry.  This is a gift from the bachelor.  She is like possibly my favorite villain of all time.  I wanna say that no matter how well you do  in managing expectations and clearly communicating,  some people will never be pleased.  I'm running a little low on time  but I love to share the story just because it's hysterical.  So I got a tweet when my Twitter account had to be private  for a period of time with this dude  reaching out about my, or Kings the City Women Technology.  He's like, well I tried to email you.  Your website is broken.  Why don't you have a phone number?  In my head I'm like, you're why we don't have  a phone number listed.  But so I respond to him but my account is private  so he couldn't see my tweet  which I realized after the fact.  But we had a tech talk which are one of our general  networking events that Wednesday night  and we were doing it at this arcade bar.  And so the event had just started.  Like I'm sitting facing the door  and two girls had just walked in  and they were sitting, we were talking.  This crazy looking dude, like his hair puffed out to here.  Like walk size with me and beeline.  So I'm like, oh shit, this can't be good.  And so he immediately begins laying into me  about the fact that his daughter is interested  in computer science and goes to school  like 45 minutes away.  And she doesn't have a mentor and her friends make fun of her  for being interested in computer science  and it's just reaming me about this.  And I'm deescalating.  Okay, I'm sorry sir, we're still a small organization.  We haven't been able to expand out to colleges yet.  Absolutely want to do everything we can to support  but we're still small and growing  and trying to build up.  None of this was satisfying.  I mean he was just reaming my ass.  And so finally I'm like, you know,  I'm more than happy to give you my email address  for your daughter.  Like I understand what it was like to be your daughter.  I was definitely made fun of for my computer interests  and he's like, well I can't do that.  She won't listen to me anyway.  And so I was like, oh okay,  you literally just came here to bitch me out.  There was no conflict resolution you were looking for.  You just wanted to yell at me.  Crazy's gonna cry.  So another issue I've run into is being a good community  partner because when you're launching an organization,  other organizations in town might want to partner with you.  And I firmly believe that you need to secure your organization's  oxygen mask first before partnering with other organizations.  You need to get your house in order  to be an effective community partner  and it's okay to express that.  So get your house in order,  then you can begin building partnerships  and helping others.  That shall not neglect the volunteers.  I knew this was a lot of content to get there.  Okay, do not make your volunteers herd cats.  I don't know if you've ever showed up to an event  before where it wasn't real structured or real planned  and you show up and you're excited and ready to help.  And there's just a million things going on.  You can't get instructions for what to do.  Like nobody really has a place  and you feel like maybe your time was wasted.  If you want your volunteers to come back,  have everything structured and ready and set up for them.  Don't ask them to go do all this insane problem solving  and cat herding.  It's not fun, especially if you don't know what's going on.  You don't have contacts and you're not in control.  It's just stressful.  Make things easier for your volunteers.  Make parking and arrival instructions clear.  Have an emergency contact number available.  Have clear instructions, duties and responsibilities  for your volunteer.  And as much as possible,  keep your volunteers out of the line of fire of criticism.  See earlier, crazy's gonna cray.  I don't like putting my people in the crossfire  of people that I know will never ever be happy.  Plainier events ahead of time  give volunteers plenty of notice.  I really like sending out reminder emails  and creating calendar invites.  The key here is to make sure that one person  is in charge of communications  and your volunteers aren't getting communicated  with for multiple people that may have conflicting priorities.  Again, falls back to communication.  Excellent communication is clear  in keeping your community, your volunteers  and your mentors happy.  Find ways to thank your volunteers.  Solicit their feedback and act on it.  We hold retrospectives after every single one of our events  and we ask the mentors for their feedback  because we wanna keep them coming back.  So we want to take their input  and implement what we can to make their experience better.  Offer leadership opportunities.  And so as we've grown,  instead of trying to be a control freak  and handle everything,  we very much try and build our volunteers  and our mentors up, allow them to take on organization roles,  build the resumes, get some leadership practice.  Provide nice volunteer shirts.  I hate crappy shirts that don't fit  and everybody else does too,  so please prioritize that.  Plain appreciation dinners and parties.  After a big event, sometimes it can be nice to wind down  nice dinner and a cocktail.  So this is something we always prioritize.  Actually, thank you to RevSys  for sponsoring our mentor appreciation party this year  after our Django Girls event.  It was quite lovely.  Promote their efforts.  So developers, especially women,  aren't always the first to step up  to brag about themselves.  So brag for them.  This is just the teeniest, tiniest thing that you can do  to show how much you appreciate your volunteers.  They're working on an open source project.  Tweet a little bit about that.  Offer to feature them in a blog  if you have more of a platform to offer them.  Nominate them for awards.  I'm so excited.  My organization has needed to do this  for almost four years,  but we finally recruited a stellar PR chair,  and one of her roles is simply to take  all the amazing women in our organization,  get information, and submit them from awards.  Again, back to that, me being the token woman  in Tech and Kids of the City problem,  we're very actively trying to dispel that  by getting all these other women in the spotlight.  So if you can do that for your volunteers and your mentors,  you already know they're donating their time  and they're good people and doing great work.  So let's make sure they get recognized for that.  Again, this is gonna take more time  and more effort on your part,  it will keep your volunteers coming back, feeling happy,  and also recruiting other volunteers  to come and join your organization.  Now, shall plan as far in advance as calendarly possible.  That was the worst word, but it's effective.  Sorry, my slides are tripping out a little bit.  Okay, moving on.  So if you plan your advance in advance,  it'll be easier to book speakers, volunteers, and venues.  Granted, people have their own schedules,  so if you can get on their schedule earlier,  that's key to do.  If you've ever planned a wedding,  you have to book your venue at least a year in advance,  so keep that in mind.  If you have diversity goals, make efforts sooner  rather than later.  Nothing drives me up the wall more than some organization  putting on some event and then emailing me,  less than 24 hours for this event  because they've suddenly realized  they don't have any women on their panel  and they might get chewed out for lack of diversity.  Like, sorry dude, if you really wanna make a diversity effort,  I'm not gonna be your token woman 24 hours in advance,  like do a better effort from the get go.  Thou shalt confirm the venue thrice.  Cover your ass.  We've had events before,  we've had routine monthly events  and then I've shown up like one month and knocked at the door,  nobody's there, the space is a mess, my attendees arriving.  Who looks like the jackass here?  It's me, it's not the vendor.  So anything you can do to keep your vendors  and your venues on the same page with you,  the better you will look.  Again, more work on your part,  but you will have better feedback  and you will have solid events if you make sure  that you're notifying everybody and reminding them  because they have more to focus on than just your events.  And here we go again with my, okay.  Follow up or look like a jackass.  This is something that I felt pretty too early  where I would get feedback and be like,  well they should have just known or I'm a volunteer  so they should know.  I only have five minutes left.  Okay, thou shalt arrive at least one hour  before starting time,  the setup will always take longer than you expect.  Your team and speakers will be late,  your attendees will show up early.  First year we ran Django Girls,  our attendees showed up two hours early.  Our volunteer staff wasn't even there yet.  We were still getting off work and setting up the venue.  So it happens, be aware, be prepared for it.  That shalt test the Wi-Fi and bring any supplies needed.  Bad Wi-Fi will tank your technical event in a heartbeat.  It's not fun, there's no coming back from it.  That being said, test ahead of time if you can  and really key have the phone number  of the contact information for the person who,  A, know where the router is,  B, can unlock where the router is  and three, reset the router.  Bring all the dongles.  I firmly believe that it's on speakers  to bring their own equipment  but again, you're the one who's gonna look like a jackass  so be prepared.  Thou shalt have a designated chaos lead.  Murphy's Law, what can go wrong will go wrong.  No matter how well you plan an event,  there is something that will happen  that you will not have planned for.  I'm assuming everybody's seen this gift before.  There will always be problems you can't plan for.  The one thing you don't wanna have is your leadership team  that's already in charge of running an event,  being those people running around to solve problems  on the fly so have a designated chaos lead.  Somebody who is there simply to deal with all the random things.  Oh, the toilet paper ran out of the bathroom.  We've got a random person to go make a Costco run  to handle that.  That did happen in the New York City Django Girls event,  by the way.  It's terrified me ever since I heard that story.  Constant vigilance.  Again, I don't wanna scare you from community organizing.  I just wanna, I like to send my troops into battle  prepared, right?  So I want you to know everything that can go wrong  so you can hold effective events, being aware of that.  Thou shalt focus on process improvement wherever possible.  We do retrospectives after all our events.  We solicit feedback from our attendees,  from our mentors, from our volunteers,  from the parents of our attendees.  And then we take this feedback, we collect it in docs.  There's some big items that we can't tackle right away,  but there's some small things that we can tweak  and add to our process improvement  that's allowed us to run really great events over time.  Over the past four years, our retrospectives  have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter  and finally they got to the point  where nobody had anything to say.  And I'm like, all right, what's our next big challenge?  Innovator die.  Talk about what went well, what didn't go well,  and what can we do better next time  if you've never been to a retrospective before?  Repeat emails.  If you get a lot of emails asking the same question,  those questions should be on your fax page.  They should be on bold in your fax page.  People will miss stuff on the fax page.  Make it easy for them to read.  Identify your pain points and work on those first.  Again, biting off what's feasible,  but definitely identifying what your leadership team  is spending the most time on,  especially if it's monotonous and can be automated.  Streamline your check-in process.  Automate posts to social media wherever possible.  I'm a software engineer.  I suck at social media unless it's live-tweeting the Bachelor.  I have a very amazing team who does that instead  and they're so much better at it than I would ever be.  Begin gathering data and feedback as soon as you can.  I'm getting these processes in place.  Are the best thing you can do for continuing to improve,  and also going after sponsorship money.  You can say, hey, these were the numbers we hit last year.  This is what we're doing this year.  This is projected for the next year.  That can really be great in your tool belt.  Summary.  Those are 10 commandments between you organizing.  If you follow me on Twitter, I am working on a book  that summarizes a lot of this and a lot more.  So if you want to get more information,  that will be a good place to look.  These slides are available on GitHub at that link.  Does anyone have any questions?  Thank you.  Thanks for the great talk and the tips regarding Inbox  by Google and Calendee.  My question is, I have an 11-year-old niece  who lives in Jacksonville, Florida.  And she has a 13-year-old brother who has really embraced  writing Python code with the Pygame Library.  What resources would you recommend  that my niece can access online?  Perhaps a specific resource on Coder Dojo,  or a book I can order for her to give her a fair opportunity  to get excited about code?  So she's a little young right now,  but when she hits, I think, 18 months,  it's either 18 months or three years.  I can't remember.  It's a Codepillar by Fisher Price,  which is this little caterpillar you can connect to do  cool programming.  So that's good for her age.  As soon as she is capable of reading.  She's 11 years old.  I might have said 11 months old.  Sorry about that.  All right, that changes my answer then.  We start all our kiddos off on Scratch,  which is the drag-and-drop UI developed by MIT.  That being said, at a conference a couple of weeks ago,  I just gave a talk on Jewelbox, which  is a programmable jewelry founded by Sarah Chips, who's  the co-founder of Girl Develop It.  And so those are programmable bracelets.  I mean, it's basically a nicely packaged Arduino,  but they can sync via Bluetooth, connect with her friends,  have a really great community, and utility library  and docs around it.  So I'm interested in getting something like this set up  in my community.  But I'm wondering, how as a male do  I get women to feel comfortable to come to things like that  and believe I'm going to respect them  and all that kind of stuff?  Yeah, and I get this question a lot.  We've actually got a Women Techmakers group in town,  which my buddy Kyle runs, because he's  affiliated with the Google Developer Group.  This is something, but if you start there,  if you're a lightning rod and create a group for women,  eventually women are going to come that want to step in  and join your leadership team.  So if you can just start, if you can just plow through that wall,  get things going, and then help support the women who  want to come up and lead it, that's the best way to go.  So in terms of community organizing,  the processes that you're proposing here,  they definitely sound really great,  and you're going to run really great events with them,  but they also sound like they take a lot of time,  like you were saying.  I was wondering whether you were talking about work-life balance,  and are you able to still sustain other hobbies,  or how much of a life do you have if you're  spending three hours a day answering emails?  How does that work?  I totally got to play Halo for four hours on a Friday night.  It was awesome.  No, so this has been a lot of work from the get-go,  and this was so much time, and this was so many nights,  like crying on the phone, like struggling,  but once I got to this point of getting all these processes  in place and building up a leadership team,  I don't spend nearly that much time anymore.  Like if I had better known how to set up leadership and roles  and better delegate from the get-go, which  is why I give this talk, I would have had a lot more time  in the beginning.  So as far as the time I spent on this a week,  I mean, between composing emails and managing my leadership  team and dealing with random issues that come up,  it's probably gotten down to maybe five hours a week.  It's been low enough that I've been able to get back  on the speaker circuit again and start  doing talks around the country.  So just put in the hard work at first,  and then it'll level out.  I was just curious to hear a little bit more about.  I run an organization as well, and I've  started to delegate, and the problem I'm having is kind of,  you talked about that email you sent at the beginning  of every month to kind of like level set.  I'd be curious to talk just to hear a little bit more  about your experience once you delegated how you kind of  started to see communication be useful to those people,  to make sure stuff didn't fall to the cracks,  to make sure the communication came up to you and back down  and just how to manage that.  Yeah, I asked my team to CC me on everything,  just so I kind of have like a bird's eye view.  Again, I'm trying not to be such a mom  a lion and give them opportunities there.  But so having them CC you on communications,  we have several different program teams  that are running on their own schedules  that I don't even attend those meetings.  I just ask that they're on the calendar and then meeting notes  from everything or add it to Google Drive.  We do monthly board meetings where  we do a recap of everything that's going on  so people are aware, I'm aware.  Most of my team will approach me if there is an issue  that I need to handle.  And then other than that, we do quarterly objective meetings  once a quarter that are for three hours  that are really big like hash everything out,  like talk about big picture vision.  And so that's, yeah.  All right, I'm gonna actually ask the last question here  while I've got the mic.  So I'm a community organizer as well.  How do you hold yourself accountable?  Are there like support groups for this kind of thing?  No, but I'm working on that.  Okay.  Sorry, I'm trying to organize a glamping retreat  for women and tech organizers so we can go  and talk about a lot of these issues.  But Slack communities are a great place to go  to find other community leaders.  Awesome.  If people have more questions afterwards,  can they find you on Twitter, Slack, or?  You can find me on Twitter, like omgitsvedi,  DMU, whatever.  I've gotta catch my flight in like 20 minutes,  but you have until I make it out the shuttle door  to ask me more questions.  Awesome.  Thank you, Jennifer.  Thank you.
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Can you guys hear me okay? Alright, we hyped. We're ready for DjangoCon Day 2. Yeah, you pumped! Alright, so hopefully you're in this room if you, Dj would like to start organizing events or be if you've ever got the question, oh, this isn't your full-time job as an event organizer. A little bit about myself, I do work full-time as a software engineer, but I also run a massive, massive community and blow people's minds the fact that I do both at once. So, a lot of this talk content is going to be about that, how to do it effectively, and a lot of things I wish I would have known four years ago when I started. So a little bit about me, you can follow me at likeomgitspedy on Twitter. Be warned, I do watch the Bachelor of Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise, and we watch Live Monday nights and I do Live Tweet. This is your one warning. Like I said before, a JavaScript developer, community organizer, and diversity advocate. Obviously, as a woman in technology, I've spent a lot of time being isolated or being the only woman, which is why a lot of my community work is very focused on increasing diversity efforts and helping bring people up who may have a hard time. I want to kind of give you the overview because if you're not from Kansas City, you've probably not heard about the work I do. So many years ago, I decided to found a nonprofit called Kansas City Women in Technology because I was sick of being the only damn woman. And I launched this organization. We had this really big kickoff event, like 300 people attended, and I don't know if I ran into a single other female developer at this event. There were women who wanted to get into tech careers. There are educators wanting to know how to bring their code to the classrooms. And I like to share this because it really kind of set the trajectory of our organization. So from there, it became very clear that we couldn't just, you know, like put out one call to action and unite all the female engineers across the city. So we put in place a lot of different programs based on community requests and requests we got from the feedback. The first one of those is our Coder Dojo chapter. Has anybody heard of Coder Dojo before? Okay, got a couple. So Coder Dojo is a global nonprofit that was founded over in Ireland with the idea of creating a code for kids to learn how to code. The really cool thing about it, much like Django Girls, is they kind of packaged it, branded it, and made it very easy for other cities to pick up and launch. More than happy to talk to your ear off all day about Coder Dojo, tell you how to launch one in your own city, find me or tweet me. But our chapter serves both boys and girls, kids, K through 12. And our goal with this program is to create an idea of gender blindness, the concept that it's not weird to be a boy or a girl writing code, just everybody's rocking out writing code, having a good time. Another key element here is we don't teach kids how to code. We teach kids how to teach themselves how to code. Because what we want to do is create really viable skill sets for them to go and be the engineers of the future and create new rules and blow past any boundaries and do things that aren't written in books simply because they haven't been done yet. So from there we launched a program called Coding and Cupcakes. Coding and Cupcakes came out of promoting Coder Dojo, and I would get the programmer to answer and be like, oh my god, this sounds awesome, sign my daughter up. But I would get a very different reaction from a lot of mothers who would see Coder Dojo and say, I don't think my daughter would like that. Maybe I'll bring my son. And so already we're fighting this kind of like disposition that parents have as against coding as an acceptable hobby or career path for girls. So what do we do? We brand it. We make it pink. We make it girly. And all of a sudden this program is sold out every month for the past three years. We've been running it. So, yay. We want to get them in. We want to get excited. We want them to get exposure to coding in a positive light. Midwest Dev Chat is a Slack channel I run for developers all throughout the Midwest. Coding in cocktails is our adult series for women because, again, one of those things that came out of our community were women saying, you're a women in tech group. Why aren't you teaching me how to code? There are a ton of great organizations around the country, Girl Develop It that do this, but this is our own branded version, specific to Kansas City based on our needs in our community. And then, of course, we run a Django Girls workshop every year. I'm talking a little more about that later in the presentation, but if you haven't heard of Django Girls before, I would encourage you to check it out. Again, very easy implementable model to implement in your communities. The curriculum is stellar and half the problem around running a coding education program is writing curriculum. It sucks. Django Girls has done the work for you. Okay. So, why Ten Commandments? This actually came out of a joke in that Slack channel that I was talking about. We do have a group for community organizers in there, and somebody was bitching about some problem that happened, and I was like, thou shall confirm with the venue thrice. And so, it kind of became this running joke, and just as I've spent time running events and doing community organizing, these kind of truths have started to pop up and happen that I wish I would have known about because I could have planned and executed better from the beginning. So, that's the basis of this talk. So, I'm going to give you a quick overview. Oh, so I was raised Catholic. I'm not religious anymore, but the Ten Commandments thing is a joke. God, you know, sent rules down to Moses, and he brought them down to the stones, and the one stone had the three that were the most important commandments, and then the other seven, still important, but not as big as those big three. And so, this is very much the same way. These are your three big ones that absolutely take priority, and then the other seven are definitely going to keep your sanity. So, real quick, thou shall practice self-care, commandment number one. Thou shall become an expert communicator, commandment number two. Thou shall manage expectations, number three. Thou shall not neglect thy volunteers. Thou shall plan as far in advance as calendarly possible. Thou shall confirm the venue thrice. Thou shall arrive at least one hour before starting time. Thou shall test the Wi-Fi. Thou shall have a designated chaos lead, and thou shall focus on process improvement wherever possible. I would like to prioritize that last one, but that's a whole other talk in and of itself. So, let's talk about self-care. As an organizer in the community, it is so easy to get so excited and passionate because the world has so many problems we want to solve, right? But you can very, very quickly bite off way more than you can chew, and all of a sudden, like, starting off the calendar year is June, you're already burned out, you're like crying yourself at sleep tonight because you're so stressed out with your million to-dos. Oh, and there's still your day job, which is suffering madly. So, avoid burnout at all costs. And we're going to talk about ways to do this, but I'm very big on self-preservation because your community will suffer if you do not prioritize your own self-care. Take on small tasks and improvements. This is really big because, again, you see all these different problems you want to solve. But if you want to be effective, if you want to avoid burnout, you want to break those down into very small pieces. For instance, we'll get feedback from all the programs we run, and we'll take that feedback and we'll say, okay, here's a big picture item, like, let's say, motivating the kids to take some new challenge. How do we break that down into smaller pieces where it's not this huge implementation standpoint all at once? So, we'll start planning, we'll start documenting, we'll start a process, and then piece by piece implementing that idea that we've come up with. So, breaking down tasks and small improvements and thinking, what can I feasibly get done as a volunteer, as somebody who does not do this full time and not hate my life? Give yourself office hours. This is huge when it comes to responding to email because that's what gets me every time, is email hit my inbox, and I think I have to insert right away, but then that totally breaks my flow of whatever project I was working on at work with this massive refactoring I was redoing. So, what I do is I give myself office hours where I say, okay, I'm gonna check and respond to email, 6 a.m., go to the gym, 7 a.m., get back at 8 a.m., answer emails for another hour, and then I start my work day, and I do that nine to five, take a break for dinner, and then I go back to my email answering. For all those emails in between, I love, love, love inbox by Gmail because it has a snooze feature, which you can custom set your emails to alert you again. It will save your life, and you will look like such less of an asshole when it comes to your email and communications. Nothing makes me feel worse than when I get that email from somebody being like, hi, I don't mean to bother you, you didn't respond to my last email, and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry, please nag me, I am the worst, I do care about you, let me respond to that. So, inbox snooze feature, highly recommend. Guard your time carefully. Your time is the biggest asset you have to offer, and sometimes that's gonna mean saying no. Sometimes that's gonna mean prioritizing something over something else. If you're used to working on a product with features, and the sales team comes to you, and they're like, well, I want A, B, and C, and it has to be done tomorrow. No, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe I can give you A, I can get a start on B, but manage other people's expectations and guard your time because that is the most precious asset you have. No is a complete sentence. Speaking of guarding time, Jennifer's first law. A person's incompetence in email is directly proportionate to the likelihood that they will massively waste your time. Again, this is four years of experience speaking that when somebody emails me about something and it's just like word vomit, and I'll email back and I'm like, I'm sorry, can you please understand, A, what the time of date for this thing that you want me to show up at, B, what your target demographic audience is, so I can know the way I'm presenting or what kind of thing and see some other question. If they can't answer three simple direct questions and continue to vomit at me for another three email threads, I know this person, if they can't communicate effectively in an email, are going to waste my time. I made this mistake. I lost two hours of my work day volunteering to do this panel that this woman was endlessly berating me about. It was a poorly run event by time. It was my turn to speak. I had literally 30 seconds with further people behind me and we were at the end mark of time where none of us were gonna communicate what we were there to communicate because this event was so poorly managed, so mishandled and there were only four people in the audience. Again, one of those four people might have been valuable but me and my time are very valuable and I need to guard and protect because I am going to be more effective as a community organizer and a lead if I'm prioritizing where I'm spending my focus instead of edging towards burnout. Define your personal scope and don't go outside it. As a diversity community, since day one of launching, we receive so many requests from the community and it's really, really hard because you wanna do everything and you wanna solve everything and you wanna be everything for everyone but that's not feasible. That is not something you as a single human being can do. So this is where you need to define your personal scope. You're gonna say, okay, I'm gonna take on X amount of speaking engagements per quarter. I'll vet those whether it's a form based on validity or who needs it or whatever your personal preference is but understand that you can set a personal scope and then don't step a foot outside it. That's how burnout happens. Find a task tracking system that works for you. Trello is a big one, very easy to use. We're actually talking about this at breakfast. I get really bad anxiety sometimes when I have so much on my to-do plate that I have found the most effective solution for me and yes, this does great against me because I'm a software engineer, right? But I write it down on a piece of paper and I don't know what that step is but all of a sudden I feel so much clear and so much more coherent that I have this list on my desk and this is what I'm gonna get done Monday. This is what I'm gonna get done Tuesday. I have to get this done by Thursday and so that's been really helpful for me. Again, utilizing technical tools, setting calendar to do is our crucial. There are a lot of steps that I'm gonna talk about a few slides from now in our, kind of the way we run our program so we set calendar reminders to make sure we're always following up on these certain details that we need. Own your calendar. How many times have you like, wanted to set up a meeting with somebody and there's like four back and forth emails of will this time work for you? Will this time work for you? Will that day, oh no, actually I'm gonna be a vacation. Anybody? Yeah, okay. I gift you Calendly. So Calendly is a service where you can basically set up your own personal calendar, syncs with your Google calendar and so you can block off time slots. Like for instance, I have my nine to five work day, right? I don't take meetings during that time except twice a week I'll have a 45 minute mentoring window open if somebody is trying to get mentoring in launching organizations like mine. It's my one exception. But then from there I have my morning meetings and my evening meetings. So when we're interviewing new team members for our organization, I'll send them my Calendly and I can say, hey excited to talk to you, schedule something that works for you on my calendar, done. So there's no back and forth that weighs so much less of my time. This is one of the best tools I've ever used. It does have a free tier. I use the paid one because it gives me multiple time slot options and it also has hidden options. So my leadership team has access to like my hidden calendar availability but the general public only has this other view. So this tool has saved my life. Fielding criticism. I don't say this to scare you, but if you do anything whether it's running an event, getting in front of the community as a leader speaking, you will get criticized. You will get criticized a lot. Some of it will be valid. Some of it will not be. Some of it will, people will have no understanding of the limitations that you're up against but that will not stop it. So I like to kind of brief people because I was not prepared for the amount of criticism I received when I started running an organization. Especially if it's an organization supporting minorities, that bullet on your back, that target on your back for criticismism is gonna get that much bigger because what about white men? Sorry. So the key here is learning to decipher the criticism. It's incredibly hard when somebody criticizes your event, your organization, something you have created. It's really hard to not take that as a criticism of yourself because you created it. It was your decision, it was your thought process. It was these things that are tied to yourself that made it run that way. And this is incredibly difficult to not devastate you and make you wanna quit because you didn't do something perfectly. Perfect is the enemy of good. So the trick is learning to decipher it. I love this quote by Hillary Clinton. Take criticism seriously but not personally. If there's truth or merit in the criticism, try to learn for it, otherwise let it roll right off you. Story time. We had a leader on our team who came on. She was very excited, very energetic, really wanted to do the roll. And this is what she told me repeatedly. However, she consistently didn't do her role, didn't fulfill her task and responsibilities and would consistently no call, no show our board meetings. We're a very flexible organization. A lot of the women involved with our organization have families and sometimes they can't get kid duties handled or anything like that. And so I'm very big on what I call work, life, volunteer balance. All we need is clear communication, let us know what's going on and we're gonna figure out a way to help each other out and work as a team. However, this person was repeatedly not communicating with just no call, no show. This person would then post very passive aggressive messages on our Slack community pertaining to information that she A, missed at that meeting and B, did not read in the meeting minutes that were sent to everybody else to follow up. So this was kind of happening and this is back when I gave people more chances. And lesson learned. So I was interested in asking her to step down but one of my team members was like, oh, she's going through a job transition, give her a chance. Well, this person then rage quit in the middle of our board meeting by sending the nastiest email about me to our entire leadership team that I have ever received. Four paragraphs of why I was a horrible human being, why I was anti-feminist, like all this stuff. 90% of it was just horrible and her trying to point fingers because she realized that people were realizing she wasn't doing her role. However, each block of criticism that she had against me, I knew started from somewhere. So it was my job to say, okay, a lot of this is unwarranted, this is her venting, this is her trying to point fingers and throw shade at me. That being said, what was the trigger point for this comment? What could I have done in my behavior or in the way I was communicating to trigger to get to that escalation? And so that's the real spot you need to be at criticism is understanding when people are just being crazy, but understanding your part in the role and figuring out how you can communicate better. I'm not saying that you were the one in the wrong, I'm not saying that they're not completely wrong, but it will save you headaches down the line and you will feel better about yourself and the decisions you make when you kind of get this clarity. Embrace the mocking, Jay. I'm assuming everyone has seen Hunger Games, yeah? Okay, I very strongly identify with Katniss because she just set out to do this one good thing, right? I just wanted to launch an organization for women developers. But the thing that happened that I was not prepared to handle, it was becoming this lightning rod, becoming this symbol. All of a sudden, I was the token woman in tech in Kansas City. And it was a lot of spotlight that I was not prepared for. I remember our first kickoff event, I had to get off on stage and I'm literally just slamming shots of bourbon because my hands are shaking and I'm terrified and I'm so scared of having that spotlight on me and people looking at me. And I was not prepared for this and I struggled against it for a very long time, but I realized as a community leader, as an advocate, people want something to look up to, they want something to aim towards. And so instead of letting my insecurities take over, I had to learn a way to kind of embrace the mocking, Jay, embrace being that symbol and learn to operate in that world in a context of what people needed me to be. Build your network. Community organizing, any leadership roles can be lonely because you have a certain level of stature and way you need to present yourself and sometimes that means you're not gonna be able to talk to your team about certain issues. You're gonna have rogue volunteers, you're gonna have awkward, difficult conversations, codes of conduct, the way we're being inclusive or exclusive. These are conversations that warrant group think. So the more you can find other community leaders to talk through your problems, find a mentor, mentor other budding community leaders because you don't wanna do this for the rest of your life and only be the only one, we want that multiplier effect, the more you can do this, the better your network will be. I really love connecting with other community leaders because I've been through crazy shit. Like some of the stories I have to tell blow people's mind, but I want them to be prepared for that because we weren't prepared for that. And at Coder Dojo, we had two dads almost get into a literal fist fight. There's no class on community organizing and how to de-escalate two dads, right? So the more we can share stories and support each other and figure out how to be very proactive about situations that might happen, the stronger our groups will be. Learn to delegate. So when I started my organization four years ago, I went with a committee of women and it was like herding angry bitchy cats. Everybody had a different idea. Everybody was going a different direction and there was a lack of unity, there was a lack of vision. And because it was a committee, nobody had specific roles. And so a couple of the girls had marketing backgrounds and I'd say, okay, hey, take this meeting time, let's put up a social calendar that's gonna outline our events for the next six months. Well, they'd be there for two hours, they'd come back to me and tell me, well, we need to change the logo. So, made a lot of mistakes along the way. The point that we operate now as an organization is I write actual job descriptions. Yes, we are a volunteer organization, but if you come onto our team, you have a job description, you have responsibilities, you have quarterly goals and objectives. Again, keeping in mind this offers work-life volunteer balance and we make sure that all our workloads and our responsibilities are manageable from that time and if it gets to be too much, well, that's when we start recruiting more people to help. But this is huge in delegating because some people you can't just like lob a general task list out and say, do this. Sometimes you as a leader need to take it on yourself to better prioritize and delegate. I love this photo, this is from our Jingle Girls event this year, this is our second year. The first year I did almost everything myself, everything from marketing to communicating and recruiting mentors to all the attendee communications, to dealing with the vendors to get our food and dietary restrictions covered. And it was a lot of work. But this year I started early and recruited this amazing team and the fun thing about this was they took what I did the year before and they doubled it. They did so much better than I as a single person could ever do alone. They brought way more mentors in, they got way more attendees in, they were on the news talking about this. The amount of work this team put in blew my damn mind and it's the best feeling in the world that you can have as an organizer to do something and then have a team come together and do it way, way better. That's the multiplier effect. That's how we grow and build sustainable communities is by bringing other people into the fold to then supersede everything we've done before. So learning to delegate is huge. If you're a type A neurotic control freak like me, it's gonna take some moves on, some stress relief. But documentation is key, creating clear and defined roles and making it easy for people to step into this. That being said, a mistake I've been in the past is I am a mom of lion. I like to protect my people. I probably call it a coddle way more than I should. And so sometimes it's hurt me that I've not, I've tried to solve all the problems for everybody instead of giving my leadership team key opportunities to solve their own problems and then become efficient in that area. So that's something to keep in mind is if you're like me, you might wanna protect everybody and make it easy and make sure everybody's lives are manageable, but make sure you are not blocking their opportunities for growth and for leadership. All right, that was a big commandment. That shall become an expert communicator. Communication, I'm pretty sure is the problem behind every issue, poor communication. So this is something I really, really harp on. Never assume people are as in tune to your organization as you are. So I like to bring this up because when you're working full time and when you're running something on the side, it's so easy to get tunnel vision, right? Because you're trying to implement and you're trying to execute. And it's easy to assume that everybody is on that same page. Everybody's operating on the same level of priority about your focus that you are. And that's just not how the world works. People are dealing with their own shit. And so that's why communication is key to make sure that what you have prioritized is getting communicated to other people who might not have it as high on their list. I have a lot of communication patterns, just like design patterns and code that I use all the time for effectiveness. I like to make things easy for people with lists and call out important information. Like I mentioned those word vomit emails earlier, no, do not word vomit at me. If it takes me two or three times to read your email to gain valid information from that, you just wasted my time and reduce my willingness to work with you. And so I hold myself to that same standard. If I want to communicate to a group of people I am going to write, craft, reread and tweak this email until I know that they can glean all the information that they need necessary and it's not gonna be a pain in the butt for them to digest. One of the things I do that I like to call out is when I mention a date, I do this certain date formatting. I say the date of the week, so like let's say Friday, the actual date of the week, let's say August 18th and the time zone. This is a little trick from my mentor who would tell me about trying to get people to follow up on things and if you didn't include the time zone, it was very easy for people to be like, oh, well I thought you meant like six o'clock in the evening, not six o'clock in the morning. So these are kind of safeguards you can put in to let people know exactly what timeline you're communicating on, especially if you're event planning and have to have certain things in place, giving that sort of deadline that will easily stick in people's brains is great. Like if you were to just say August 18th, would you know off the top of your head what day of the week that was unless you had something else going on on Friday, August 18th? So this is just the tiniest little trick that can help you get other people on your same level of remembering when things are happening. So this is probably hard to read, but this is an example of the email I sent out at the beginning of the month to my leadership team. I've got about 23 people right now and they're all across our different programs that we run. And so I kind of like to lay out, again, people get tunnel vision on what they're focusing on. So here's where I call out everything that we're gonna have going on with the month with that date format. Overall updates, any big sponsorship updates, like if our marketing chair needs to know to put a new sponsor in the newsletter and any leadership members we might be interviewing. I also always include an opportunity for one-on-one meetings in my calendar. Again, with our leader that went nuclear and sent that email, I think I could have been better about following up with her and saying, hey, if you have any concerns, please let me know. Hey, if you have any criticism or feedback for me, please let me know. And instead of letting it just escalate to this point where she went a little apeshit. Okay, that showed me an image expectations. People are not psychic. People are not psychic. People are not psychic. So this is a pitfall that hit me very early in my organizing career because if you're like me, time is important. And if I'm gonna go to an event, I'm gonna read all the texts on that event for my page. I'm gonna know where the venue is. I'm gonna know exactly what's happening. I'm gonna know exactly when the schedule is of things. And so I just assume that everybody operates on this baseline I do of reading what event they're going to. This does not happen a lot, especially with parents. And so they'll come in not having read and me having the expectation that they have read saying, well, I thought it was gonna be this. And that's where the contention happens. That's where people get pissy. That's when they get upset that things weren't the way they were expecting. So the more you can do to communicate effectively, whether it's on event descriptions or sending out emails or whatever works for your organization to better manage people's expectations, the less bullshit criticism and complaints you're gonna get. Oh, you need my real job. So I mentioned this at the beginning of the talk. This question a lot. There's this weird thing that happens with volunteer organizations that people just assume that you're not restricted to traditional business restraints. That economies of scale don't apply to you because it's volunteer. It's that same thing of like when you get an app for free in the app store and you expect way more than an app you'd pay a dollar for just because it's for free, right? They can do everything. So this is something that's very easy to fall prey to because people don't understand. Sometimes you'll have to explain that. I do kind of mention at least once a year at a lot of our events, please be nice to our volunteers. They give up their Saturday morning to help your kids code. So please keep that in mind. We're not paid to be here. Sometimes people need that reminder. Crazy's gonna cry. This is a gift from the bachelor. She is like possibly my favorite villain of all time. I wanna say that no matter how well you do in managing expectations and clearly communicating, some people will never be pleased. I'm running a little low on time but I love to share the story just because it's hysterical. So I got a tweet when my Twitter account had to be private for a period of time with this dude reaching out about my, or Kings the City Women Technology. He's like, well I tried to email you. Your website is broken. Why don't you have a phone number? In my head I'm like, you're why we don't have a phone number listed. But so I respond to him but my account is private so he couldn't see my tweet which I realized after the fact. But we had a tech talk which are one of our general networking events that Wednesday night and we were doing it at this arcade bar. And so the event had just started. Like I'm sitting facing the door and two girls had just walked in and they were sitting, we were talking. This crazy looking dude, like his hair puffed out to here. Like walk size with me and beeline. So I'm like, oh shit, this can't be good. And so he immediately begins laying into me about the fact that his daughter is interested in computer science and goes to school like 45 minutes away. And she doesn't have a mentor and her friends make fun of her for being interested in computer science and it's just reaming me about this. And I'm deescalating. Okay, I'm sorry sir, we're still a small organization. We haven't been able to expand out to colleges yet. Absolutely want to do everything we can to support but we're still small and growing and trying to build up. None of this was satisfying. I mean he was just reaming my ass. And so finally I'm like, you know, I'm more than happy to give you my email address for your daughter. Like I understand what it was like to be your daughter. I was definitely made fun of for my computer interests and he's like, well I can't do that. She won't listen to me anyway. And so I was like, oh okay, you literally just came here to bitch me out. There was no conflict resolution you were looking for. You just wanted to yell at me. Crazy's gonna cry. So another issue I've run into is being a good community partner because when you're launching an organization, other organizations in town might want to partner with you. And I firmly believe that you need to secure your organization's oxygen mask first before partnering with other organizations. You need to get your house in order to be an effective community partner and it's okay to express that. So get your house in order, then you can begin building partnerships and helping others. That shall not neglect the volunteers. I knew this was a lot of content to get there. Okay, do not make your volunteers herd cats. I don't know if you've ever showed up to an event before where it wasn't real structured or real planned and you show up and you're excited and ready to help. And there's just a million things going on. You can't get instructions for what to do. Like nobody really has a place and you feel like maybe your time was wasted. If you want your volunteers to come back, have everything structured and ready and set up for them. Don't ask them to go do all this insane problem solving and cat herding. It's not fun, especially if you don't know what's going on. You don't have contacts and you're not in control. It's just stressful. Make things easier for your volunteers. Make parking and arrival instructions clear. Have an emergency contact number available. Have clear instructions, duties and responsibilities for your volunteer. And as much as possible, keep your volunteers out of the line of fire of criticism. See earlier, crazy's gonna cray. I don't like putting my people in the crossfire of people that I know will never ever be happy. Plainier events ahead of time give volunteers plenty of notice. I really like sending out reminder emails and creating calendar invites. The key here is to make sure that one person is in charge of communications and your volunteers aren't getting communicated with for multiple people that may have conflicting priorities. Again, falls back to communication. Excellent communication is clear in keeping your community, your volunteers and your mentors happy. Find ways to thank your volunteers. Solicit their feedback and act on it. We hold retrospectives after every single one of our events and we ask the mentors for their feedback because we wanna keep them coming back. So we want to take their input and implement what we can to make their experience better. Offer leadership opportunities. And so as we've grown, instead of trying to be a control freak and handle everything, we very much try and build our volunteers and our mentors up, allow them to take on organization roles, build the resumes, get some leadership practice. Provide nice volunteer shirts. I hate crappy shirts that don't fit and everybody else does too, so please prioritize that. Plain appreciation dinners and parties. After a big event, sometimes it can be nice to wind down nice dinner and a cocktail. So this is something we always prioritize. Actually, thank you to RevSys for sponsoring our mentor appreciation party this year after our Django Girls event. It was quite lovely. Promote their efforts. So developers, especially women, aren't always the first to step up to brag about themselves. So brag for them. This is just the teeniest, tiniest thing that you can do to show how much you appreciate your volunteers. They're working on an open source project. Tweet a little bit about that. Offer to feature them in a blog if you have more of a platform to offer them. Nominate them for awards. I'm so excited. My organization has needed to do this for almost four years, but we finally recruited a stellar PR chair, and one of her roles is simply to take all the amazing women in our organization, get information, and submit them from awards. Again, back to that, me being the token woman in Tech and Kids of the City problem, we're very actively trying to dispel that by getting all these other women in the spotlight. So if you can do that for your volunteers and your mentors, you already know they're donating their time and they're good people and doing great work. So let's make sure they get recognized for that. Again, this is gonna take more time and more effort on your part, it will keep your volunteers coming back, feeling happy, and also recruiting other volunteers to come and join your organization. Now, shall plan as far in advance as calendarly possible. That was the worst word, but it's effective. Sorry, my slides are tripping out a little bit. Okay, moving on. So if you plan your advance in advance, it'll be easier to book speakers, volunteers, and venues. Granted, people have their own schedules, so if you can get on their schedule earlier, that's key to do. If you've ever planned a wedding, you have to book your venue at least a year in advance, so keep that in mind. If you have diversity goals, make efforts sooner rather than later. Nothing drives me up the wall more than some organization putting on some event and then emailing me, less than 24 hours for this event because they've suddenly realized they don't have any women on their panel and they might get chewed out for lack of diversity. Like, sorry dude, if you really wanna make a diversity effort, I'm not gonna be your token woman 24 hours in advance, like do a better effort from the get go. Thou shalt confirm the venue thrice. Cover your ass. We've had events before, we've had routine monthly events and then I've shown up like one month and knocked at the door, nobody's there, the space is a mess, my attendees arriving. Who looks like the jackass here? It's me, it's not the vendor. So anything you can do to keep your vendors and your venues on the same page with you, the better you will look. Again, more work on your part, but you will have better feedback and you will have solid events if you make sure that you're notifying everybody and reminding them because they have more to focus on than just your events. And here we go again with my, okay. Follow up or look like a jackass. This is something that I felt pretty too early where I would get feedback and be like, well they should have just known or I'm a volunteer so they should know. I only have five minutes left. Okay, thou shalt arrive at least one hour before starting time, the setup will always take longer than you expect. Your team and speakers will be late, your attendees will show up early. First year we ran Django Girls, our attendees showed up two hours early. Our volunteer staff wasn't even there yet. We were still getting off work and setting up the venue. So it happens, be aware, be prepared for it. That shalt test the Wi-Fi and bring any supplies needed. Bad Wi-Fi will tank your technical event in a heartbeat. It's not fun, there's no coming back from it. That being said, test ahead of time if you can and really key have the phone number of the contact information for the person who, A, know where the router is, B, can unlock where the router is and three, reset the router. Bring all the dongles. I firmly believe that it's on speakers to bring their own equipment but again, you're the one who's gonna look like a jackass so be prepared. Thou shalt have a designated chaos lead. Murphy's Law, what can go wrong will go wrong. No matter how well you plan an event, there is something that will happen that you will not have planned for. I'm assuming everybody's seen this gift before. There will always be problems you can't plan for. The one thing you don't wanna have is your leadership team that's already in charge of running an event, being those people running around to solve problems on the fly so have a designated chaos lead. Somebody who is there simply to deal with all the random things. Oh, the toilet paper ran out of the bathroom. We've got a random person to go make a Costco run to handle that. That did happen in the New York City Django Girls event, by the way. It's terrified me ever since I heard that story. Constant vigilance. Again, I don't wanna scare you from community organizing. I just wanna, I like to send my troops into battle prepared, right? So I want you to know everything that can go wrong so you can hold effective events, being aware of that. Thou shalt focus on process improvement wherever possible. We do retrospectives after all our events. We solicit feedback from our attendees, from our mentors, from our volunteers, from the parents of our attendees. And then we take this feedback, we collect it in docs. There's some big items that we can't tackle right away, but there's some small things that we can tweak and add to our process improvement that's allowed us to run really great events over time. Over the past four years, our retrospectives have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter and finally they got to the point where nobody had anything to say. And I'm like, all right, what's our next big challenge? Innovator die. Talk about what went well, what didn't go well, and what can we do better next time if you've never been to a retrospective before? Repeat emails. If you get a lot of emails asking the same question, those questions should be on your fax page. They should be on bold in your fax page. People will miss stuff on the fax page. Make it easy for them to read. Identify your pain points and work on those first. Again, biting off what's feasible, but definitely identifying what your leadership team is spending the most time on, especially if it's monotonous and can be automated. Streamline your check-in process. Automate posts to social media wherever possible. I'm a software engineer. I suck at social media unless it's live-tweeting the Bachelor. I have a very amazing team who does that instead and they're so much better at it than I would ever be. Begin gathering data and feedback as soon as you can. I'm getting these processes in place. Are the best thing you can do for continuing to improve, and also going after sponsorship money. You can say, hey, these were the numbers we hit last year. This is what we're doing this year. This is projected for the next year. That can really be great in your tool belt. Summary. Those are 10 commandments between you organizing. If you follow me on Twitter, I am working on a book that summarizes a lot of this and a lot more. So if you want to get more information, that will be a good place to look. These slides are available on GitHub at that link. Does anyone have any questions? Thank you. Thanks for the great talk and the tips regarding Inbox by Google and Calendee. My question is, I have an 11-year-old niece who lives in Jacksonville, Florida. And she has a 13-year-old brother who has really embraced writing Python code with the Pygame Library. What resources would you recommend that my niece can access online? Perhaps a specific resource on Coder Dojo, or a book I can order for her to give her a fair opportunity to get excited about code? So she's a little young right now, but when she hits, I think, 18 months, it's either 18 months or three years. I can't remember. It's a Codepillar by Fisher Price, which is this little caterpillar you can connect to do cool programming. So that's good for her age. As soon as she is capable of reading. She's 11 years old. I might have said 11 months old. Sorry about that. All right, that changes my answer then. We start all our kiddos off on Scratch, which is the drag-and-drop UI developed by MIT. That being said, at a conference a couple of weeks ago, I just gave a talk on Jewelbox, which is a programmable jewelry founded by Sarah Chips, who's the co-founder of Girl Develop It. And so those are programmable bracelets. I mean, it's basically a nicely packaged Arduino, but they can sync via Bluetooth, connect with her friends, have a really great community, and utility library and docs around it. So I'm interested in getting something like this set up in my community. But I'm wondering, how as a male do I get women to feel comfortable to come to things like that and believe I'm going to respect them and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, and I get this question a lot. We've actually got a Women Techmakers group in town, which my buddy Kyle runs, because he's affiliated with the Google Developer Group. This is something, but if you start there, if you're a lightning rod and create a group for women, eventually women are going to come that want to step in and join your leadership team. So if you can just start, if you can just plow through that wall, get things going, and then help support the women who want to come up and lead it, that's the best way to go. So in terms of community organizing, the processes that you're proposing here, they definitely sound really great, and you're going to run really great events with them, but they also sound like they take a lot of time, like you were saying. I was wondering whether you were talking about work-life balance, and are you able to still sustain other hobbies, or how much of a life do you have if you're spending three hours a day answering emails? How does that work? I totally got to play Halo for four hours on a Friday night. It was awesome. No, so this has been a lot of work from the get-go, and this was so much time, and this was so many nights, like crying on the phone, like struggling, but once I got to this point of getting all these processes in place and building up a leadership team, I don't spend nearly that much time anymore. Like if I had better known how to set up leadership and roles and better delegate from the get-go, which is why I give this talk, I would have had a lot more time in the beginning. So as far as the time I spent on this a week, I mean, between composing emails and managing my leadership team and dealing with random issues that come up, it's probably gotten down to maybe five hours a week. It's been low enough that I've been able to get back on the speaker circuit again and start doing talks around the country. So just put in the hard work at first, and then it'll level out. I was just curious to hear a little bit more about. I run an organization as well, and I've started to delegate, and the problem I'm having is kind of, you talked about that email you sent at the beginning of every month to kind of like level set. I'd be curious to talk just to hear a little bit more about your experience once you delegated how you kind of started to see communication be useful to those people, to make sure stuff didn't fall to the cracks, to make sure the communication came up to you and back down and just how to manage that. Yeah, I asked my team to CC me on everything, just so I kind of have like a bird's eye view. Again, I'm trying not to be such a mom a lion and give them opportunities there. But so having them CC you on communications, we have several different program teams that are running on their own schedules that I don't even attend those meetings. I just ask that they're on the calendar and then meeting notes from everything or add it to Google Drive. We do monthly board meetings where we do a recap of everything that's going on so people are aware, I'm aware. Most of my team will approach me if there is an issue that I need to handle. And then other than that, we do quarterly objective meetings once a quarter that are for three hours that are really big like hash everything out, like talk about big picture vision. And so that's, yeah. All right, I'm gonna actually ask the last question here while I've got the mic. So I'm a community organizer as well. How do you hold yourself accountable? Are there like support groups for this kind of thing? No, but I'm working on that. Okay. Sorry, I'm trying to organize a glamping retreat for women and tech organizers so we can go and talk about a lot of these issues. But Slack communities are a great place to go to find other community leaders. Awesome. If people have more questions afterwards, can they find you on Twitter, Slack, or? You can find me on Twitter, like omgitsvedi, DMU, whatever. I've gotta catch my flight in like 20 minutes, but you have until I make it out the shuttle door to ask me more questions. Awesome. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you.
or be if you've ever got the question, oh, this talk content is going to be about that, how to do Dojo, and I would get the programmer to answer okay, I'm gonna take on X amount of speaking event, I had to get off on stage and I'm fight. There's no class on community organizing and figure out how to be very proactive about have a job description, you have their opportunities for growth and for standard. If I want to communicate to a group of this at the beginning of the talk. This question don't have contacts and you're not in control. gonna take more time and more effort on your and you will have solid events if you make sure them because they have more to focus on than just fall to the cracks, to make sure the