Diversity
The Ship Show has covered technology industry diversity on the podcast, as well as referenced relevant resources in discussions we have when these topics come up.
Taking a page from Kyle Kingsbury and his Diversity pledge, we wanted to do more than just talk about these issues.
To that end, we want to help members of groups that are under-represented in tech make it to conferences and increase the audience diversity.
How We’re Trying to Help
Every podcast, we announce upcoming DevOps and technology-related conferences.
For some of those conferences, we work together with the organizers to get a spot for those who are often under-represented in the industry to also be able to attend the conference.
We also announce these on the podcast, and on Twitter.
We ask for people to send us a short email with some information on their background and why they’d like to attend the conference. Nothing huge and involved: a couple of paragraphs are fine.
In the past, entries have described tracks in the conference they’re excited about, how the conference relates to the work they do, what they’re looking forward to learning from the conference, and what they want to take back to their local communities after the conference.
To select an entry, all information is anonymized and sent to a committee. We then notify the entrant.
More Than the Conference
We know that there can be hurdles getting to a conference that you want to go to; to help out with this, if the person selected by the committee lives outside the area in which the conference is being held, we will offer funds to offset the cost of travel to the conference and hotel accommodations.
Current Conferences
Here’s a list of the current conferences, the date, along with the entry form and deadline.
- We’re currently working on conferences for 2015!