If you're planning an event, put together a simple email that says something like this:
Hi, there!
I'm one of the organizers of {{CONF_NAME}}, and we're looking for speakers. We wanted to reach out to your community directly to let you know the call for proposals is open at {{CFP_LINK}}. We think the members of your group could offer a lot to our attendees, and we'd like to invite them all to submit ideas.
You can find out more about the conference at {{CONF_LINK}}, or reach out to me directly with any questions.
If you're comfortable with it, we'd really appreciate it if you'd share the CFP with your community.
Thanks!
{{YOUR_NAME}}
You can send this email to every group at once, if you'd like — though it'd probably pay dividends to personalize it a bit — and this ensures that your CFP is seen in as many communities as possible, encouraging submissions from a diverse group of developers and driving up the quality of the talks at your event.
Groups are in alphabetical order. Want to add your group? Here's how!
- BeVisible: site · email
- Black Girls Code: site · contact
- Blacks in Technology (BIT): site · email
- ChickTech: site · email
- Code2040: site · email
- Enby Tech Speakers List: site
- Geek Girls Carrots: site · email
- Girl Develop It: site · email
- Girls Who Code: site · contact
- Kansas City Women in Technology: site · email
- Lesbians Who Tech: site · email
- MotherCoders: site · email
- Open Source Diversity: site
- ResilientCoders: site · email
- ShePlusPlus: site · email
- Speakerinnen: site · contact
- Spectra: site · email
- Technolochicas: site · email
- Techqueria: site · email
- Techy Girls Foundation: site · email
- Trans*H4CK: site · email
- Women Who Code: site · contact
- YesWeCode: site · email
The only criteria for adding your group to this list is that your group consists of people in the development/tech/web space.
Please edit this file to add your group with the following format:
- Group Name: [site](http://example.com) · [email](mailto:contact@example.com)
Recently, I got into a debate about diversity on Reddit, and it bummed me out.
The ElectronConf roster was 100% men, despite a blind review process. This points to a big issue: there wasn't any diversity in the proposals to begin with, so the roster was doomed to be skewed. Personally, I don't believe any of this was due to malice or ill intent, but an oversight on the part of the conference organizers to welcome proposals from a more diverse group of developers.
We can make this easier for conferences everywhere: this is a (far from exhaustive) list of developer groups we can reach out to during calls for proposals to make sure we're welcoming everyone in tech at our conferences.
Inviting a broader group of developers to submit proposals means more proposals, better conferences, more value for attendees, and a strong message to the tech community: you are welcome here.