find your voice
Friday, Ravenna, 1300
Jennifer Davis (@sigje)
This panel was different than many of the open sessions. At the beginning, we organized into a circle and introduced ourselves and voiced our expectations for the session. Based on the summary of expectations, we organized around the following themes:
- Idea generation - Ideas we've thought about talking about and gauge interest of others.
- Challenges - Blockers that prevent us from speaking out.
- Suggestions - Based on challenges, thoughts and ideas around helping people overcome challenges.
Rules of "The Round"
- Each individual gets a turn to speak
- On each turn individual could "pass" to give up turn
- Regular interval (full circle), gauge extending the subject or going on to the next topic.
Specific to idea generation round we didn't allow discussion to prevent the nay-isms.
Our first topic was on idea generation. You are welcome to write/speak on any of these topics.
- 3 Ways to Tap into your Inner Ability to be Genuine
- Beginning Contributing to Community
- Being a Good Customer
- Being Smart Without Being Mean
- Being Supportive when it may not be in your Self Interest
- Best Practices for Using Virtual Machines without Trusting Them
- Blameless Postmortems
- Civil Engineering and Public Systems Disasters that can Inform and Educate Devops
- Civility Engineering
- Creating Communities that Respect Each and Every Person
- Delicate Balance of Evangelism and Preaching
- Design Patterns for DevOps Automation
- Developing Self Confidence and Recognizing the Value of Your Contribution
- Explaining IT Security to Your Children
- Feel the Fear and Do it Anyways
- Healing Relationships with Systems
- How do you deal with People who Attack - Impact from Community
- How the Internet Works for Absolutely Anyone
- Intro to Github
- Kindness as a Service
- Learning Outside of a Formal Context
- Legibility of Systems
- Seeding Conversations
- Selecting and Presenting Ideas through Contribution not Selling
- Strategic Responses to Personal DDOS
- Teaching Others How to Treat You
- Truly Work Life Balance
- Why DevOps needs a Political Theory
- Writing from Position of Privilege - Are those angry commenters 4Chan, or oppressed people?
This part of the session had a lot of depth and specific to the participants. It seemed helpful to have the opportunity to voice personal challenges and understand that we have common fears and concerns.
This final part of the session could have been a topic all on its own and we ran out of time talking about this subject.
- Don't let a personal need stop you from speaking. Ask organizers for help.
- Do what is right for you when something uncomfortable happens. Ignore the "You should have".
- You don't have to be the same all the time.
- You don't have to be interested in tech all of the time.
- Try to find your authentic self, make space for that person.
- Sometimes leaving is necessary.
- Be courageous and say no to the things that aren't working for you.
- Ada Initiative has an exercise for Impostor Syndrome.
- If you are uncomfortable meeting eyes with people, look at the bridge of the nose.
- Speaking is your artwork, you are delivering your art and it is your story.
- It's ok to choose the thing that you are good at. Choose mediums that work for you (blogging/speaking/podcasts).
- Helpful in overcoming fears and limits "Radical Acceptance" Tara Brach (book and weekly podcast)