The topic of diversity in the technology and software development industries has been important to The Ship Show co-hosts ever since our first episode. It’s also one we hope our audience is interested in as well or, at least, aware of.
In 2014, we announced our Ship Show Diversity Program.
It was an experiment to find a way to help improve the state of diversity within our industry. It focused on increasing the attendee diversity of the various tech conferences in the “build engineering, DevOps, release management, and everything in between”-space.
It was something new for us. We fumbled a bit. We made a few mistakes.
It didn’t quite work out the way any of us had envisioned, at least not entirely.
But we learned a lot.
And we were able to help some individuals attend tech conferences. So by at least that measure, we were somewhat successful.
But at the end of the year, when we looked back at what we’d intended and envisioned and what we were able to do, we didn’t feel we had done enough.
So the co-hosts discussed it and we decided The Ship Show should make up the difference by donating to various organizations.
These organizations all do really important, on-the-ground work to improve our industry’s diversity story; we were able to donate over $2,000 in total to:
In 2015, The Ship Show plans to continue working on trying to improve the state of diversity within our industry.
And we’ll continue refining the diversity program we started in 2014, trying to make it better serve the needs of our listeners, our community, and our industry.
This is our 2015 resolution.
(Our other resolution is to get a new podcast out; it’s on its way, we promise!)
Oh, and Happy New Year!