Dear Naomi,
I’m Chiara Russo, Codemotion’s CEO and co-founder with Mara Marzocchi.
First of all, I would like to thank you for your detailed feedback, that will for sure be an important and valuable starting point to do better in the future.
I’m really sorry that we didn’t find the right way to collaborate.
I’m a woman, a software engineer and I was a developer, until Codemotion was started as a company.
Codemotion was born as a hobby, from a great passion for software development and technology.
THE STORY SO FAR
Mara and I started organizing the Java Day in Rome, a community event entirely dedicated to Java technology, ten years ago.
Why? Because we strongly believe in the importance of communities and of sharing knowledge.
After three years, we decided to open our event to all languages and technologies and this is how Codemotion was born.
During our second edition, we already started receiving proposals to organize Codemotion abroad and, at that time, nights and weekends weren’t enough. So we decided to leave our jobs and open the startup. Now we are working in 7 countries, managed by a team of 30 people, of whom over 80% are women.
The passion and enthusiasm, with which we organized our first conference, is the same that we put in today, in all our Codemotions around the world!
OUR EXPERIENCE WITH WOMEN & DIVERSITY
As a woman, developer and now entrepreneur, I constantly faced the diversity problem: when I was at University, there only were 2 women out of 250 students; during my job as an engineer, I was sometimes totally ignored at meetings; and I was always the only woman attending tech events and conferences
Your challenge to bring more women to the technological scene is exactly what we are also trying to do with Codemotion: in Italy, we organize, for example, many hackathons and courses for girls in tech, we also speak in many conferences about the diversity issue.
All of this just to say how the diversity topic is, for us, fundamental. We try to do our best to build a really inclusive conference. Usually we have more women speakers than the average of other similar tech conferences
We received a lot of positive feedbacks regarding our commitment on the diversity issue, here is an example from the voice of Leslie Hawthorn closing her keynote speech during Codemotion Amsterdam
COMMUNITIES ARE THE BEATING HEART OF CODEMOTION
Codemotion has always been a strongly community driven conference.
Communities’ feedbacks are for us very important.
Communities can always find, at Codemotion, a free space to show their activities.
In the countries where we have been organizing Codemotion for many years, communities actively contribute to the agenda’s creation.
In every new country our first goal is to create a strong and valuable relationship with local communities!
WHAT HAPPENED IN DUBLIN
We decided to go online with a partial agenda, to give visibility to the speakers involved until now and we never stopped inviting women speakers.
We also started a “women initiative” to rise the number of women attendees
To involve and engage with local communities, we chose an experienced and passionate person like you, with a strong connection with local communities.
Regarding the privacy feedback, we immediately (after receiving your feedback) reduced the registration fields. However, according to the Italian law, we are obliged to follow certain rules, such as requesting the tax code, since an invoice has to be issued for each sold ticket.
We didn’t receive other feedbacks (not because you didn’t give them!)
I admit we had communication and coordination problems (on our side) that we weren’t able to manage correctly to create an effective feedback loop.
What really makes me sorry is we didn’t manage to transmit to you and to all the local team, the passion, enthusiasm and values that stand behind Codemotion.
AND NOW?
We learnt a lot from this situation and I’m sure we can organize a super Codemotion in Dublin, having more time to solve our organizational problems and to find the best way to collaborate with the local communities.
For these reasons we have decided to shift the conference to 2017 (we are working to fix the new date)
I’m sure we’ll do a great job with the support of all of you! We would be more than happy to collaborate with whoever is interested and would like to support us in this new adventure!
See you soon in Dublin
Chiara
