Inclusive outreach in community events for the Docker Community
I want to wax poetic for a few minutes about my recent experience speaking at the DockerCon Organizer Summit in Seattle.* It was a wonderful opportunity to share with others success factors that has helped Women Who Code grow exponentially. You can find my deck here to go along with this piece.
I love Docker. I have to admit that my adoration is not as a regular user. What I admire about Docker is how it gets the entire dev and nondev communities constantly engaged. It’s a winning story of a developer-made open source product. But it’s not just the product. Instead, it’s a wonderful mille-feuille of brand love made from the people who built it, by those who use it, those who speak about it, and those who want it. And the Organizer Summit is a chance to check in with the community leads who are keeping the engagement engine running. These folks organize their local meetups, all around the world, curate content that’s relevant to their particular audience, and share feedback with headquarters.
My opening statement came out something like, we all know it’s false to even think now that “if you build it they will come.” I wanted to acknowledge to everyone in the room that the work they were already doing was hard, appreciated, and awesome. Growing community means engaging people. Working with people. Blood (maybe not so much), sweat (plenty), tears (buckets) to make authentic human connections; to reach out to everyone in our tech-centric community.
I talked about the following topics, referencing lessons learned from our Women Who Code community, and most recently from our 500+ sold out Connect 2016 Seattle tech conference:
- Make it everyone’s problem…to solve
- Have everyone accountable and make it a team goal, not a policing action
- Talk about it, loudly and frequently so it’s always a priority
- Celebrate and create fun moments to make it more welcoming
- Nominate someone not white, not male, to speak and represent the community (this one I fully credited to Jan for suggesting it during our chat in Berlin a few days earlier).
- Focus on mentoring and training to create diverse leaders
- Create more beginner’s courses (suggested from a community organizer)
- Do more partner outreach (like with Women Who Code) to increase your support network because it’s not easy to implement diversity all of sudden, all at once
And finally, document an inclusive outreach plan to share with everyone on your team. This should include guidance on delivering thoughtful responses when issues arise. Be honest and be prepared for uncomfortable moments because having diversity in your community means accepting differing points of views. Having a plan is essential to successfully navigate those awkward moments to positive outcomes.
So, there it is. It was short, passionate, and we all knew more needed to be said. The organizers were not only interested in talking about diversity, but eager to share with each other their challenges and success.
Again, I know that this is just the beginning. Of course, I don’t have all the answers, and I’m probably leaving out some great ones, too. Help me out and share your thoughts below in comments on how we can do better to activate diversity and inclusion as part of our developer engagement and community growth plan!
*Many thanks to Karen Bajza (organizer of DockerCon Summit) and Ashlynn Polini (producer of DockerCon) for inviting me
