The 10 Commandments of Community Organizing
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DjangoCon US 20177 / 48
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Scripting languageJava appletSoftware developerComputer programComa BerenicesMetropolitan area networkIdeal (ethics)Self-organizationCodeProcess (computing)Inheritance (object-oriented programming)Multiplication signTrajectorySoftware developerSocial classCodeComputer programmingMetropolitan area network1 (number)GodTwitterNumberCASE <Informatik>Maxima and minimaFeedbackSpacetimePosition operatorSoftware engineeringGradientGroup actionExecution unitMenu (computing)GenderMassLatent heatRevision controlBitEndliche ModelltheorieConnectivity (graph theory)Rule of inferenceSet (mathematics)Content (media)Cellular automatonElement (mathematics)Observational studyBoundary value problemEvent horizonRight angleWritingBasis <Mathematik>System callSubsetSeries (mathematics)Different (Kate Ryan album)Real numberProgrammer (hardware)Sign (mathematics)Hidden Markov modelComputer animation
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Task (computing)Office suitePhysical lawTask (computing)Control flowValidity (statistics)Process (computing)Form (programming)Focus (optics)EmailSpeech synthesisDataflow2 (number)Chaos (cosmogony)Sinc functionSoftware testingPlanningSelf-organizationCode refactoringProjective planeMultiplication signVideo gamePhysical systemTrailComputer programmingOffice suiteGodWordDependent and independent variablesLikelihood functionEvent horizonNumberData managementProduct (business)Expected valuePhysical lawTelecommunicationComplete metric spaceInstance (computer science)Thread (computing)ImplementationFeedbackGenderStapeldateiExpert systemExecution unitCuboidComputer animation
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DeciphermentSelf-organizationSoftware testingComputer networkEvent horizonSelf-organizationFamilyMultiplication signCountingWeb pageExterior algebraLattice (order)System callProcess (computing)Figurate numberInformationTelecommunicationMessage passingOpen setSound effectWindowVideo gameBitException handlingMereologyHypermediaGroup actionBuildingNumberSoftwareWhiteboardSocial classComputer configurationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)EmailEntire functionSpeech synthesisKey (cryptography)Limit (category theory)Type theoryReal numberPoint (geometry)Block (periodic table)Decision theoryGame theoryLine (geometry)Symbol tableSoftware developerRight angleSoftware engineeringGoodness of fitNatural numberCodeComputer programmingData conversionSlide ruleLevel (video gaming)WordContext awarenessPhysical systemOperator (mathematics)TrailTask (computing)GodIntegrated development environmentInstance (computer science)GoogolDependent and independent variablesService (economics)Thermal conductivitySoftware frameworkChemical equationMultitier architectureElectronic mailing listMultiplicationView (database)Shared memoryField (computer science)Data miningToken ring
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Expert systemSelf-organizationTime zoneFile formatInformationElectronic mailing listEvent horizonProcess (computing)Sound effectSelf-organizationTelecommunicationEvent horizonMessage passingGame controllerEndliche ModelltheorieDigital photographyNatural numberMachine visionAreaKey (cryptography)Process (computing)Level (video gaming)Wave packetLinearizationSoftware design patternExpert systemMetropolitan area networkPattern languageSoftwareChemical equationElectronic mailing listTime zoneMultiplication signRight angleCommitment schemeData managementFocus (optics)EmailWeb pageGroup actionInformationPlanningExpected valueFreewareWordNewsletterForm (programming)ChainLattice (order)Fault-tolerant systemQuicksortFile formatGraph coloringDisk read-and-write headDifferent (Kate Ryan album)1 (number)Direction (geometry)FeedbackPoint (geometry)Ideal (ethics)Descriptive statisticsContent (media)WritingObject (grammar)Dependent and independent variablesComputer programmingType theoryTask (computing)WorkloadTunisReading (process)Standard deviationCodeInheritance (object-oriented programming)Scheduling (computing)Mobile appScaling (geometry)Data storage deviceComputer-assisted translationComputer animation
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TelecommunicationEvent horizonBlogSocial softwareMereologyFocus (optics)InformationSoftware testingRouter (computing)Self-organizationOrder (biology)TelecommunicationMultiplication signBuildingInformationEvent horizonDependent and independent variablesGame controllerSoftware testingComputer-assisted translationWeb pageComputing platformEmailObservational studyBitLine (geometry)Projective planeMedical imagingToken ringRule of inferenceMereologyPlanningContent (media)FeedbackGoodness of fitMultilaterationScheduling (computing)QuicksortTheoryComputer scienceSpacetimeFrequencyWordCovering spaceOpen sourceMassKey (cryptography)outputRange (statistics)Video gameAreaSoftware developerNumberFitness functionAdditionExpected valueInternetworkingWebsiteData storage deviceData managementTwitterBlock (periodic table)Revision controlAddress spaceImage resolutionComputer programmingBlogStaff (military)Disk read-and-write headSound effectNeuroinformatikComputer animation
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Physical lawWeb pageEmailPoint (geometry)System identificationAutomationHypermediaProcess (computing)Chaos (cosmogony)Focus (optics)Library (computing)Game theoryPiCodeLatent heatTwitterFamilyCuboidLink (knot theory)Slide ruleDampingMathematicsReading (process)Right angleGoodness of fitComputer programmingContinuous trackProcess (computing)Point (geometry)Video gameSelf-organizationGroup actionUtility softwareSynchronizationTerm (mathematics)Flow separationTelecommunicationSoftware engineeringRouter (computing)EmailBitLevel (video gaming)Digital electronicsFocus (optics)View (database)Betti numberChaos (cosmogony)Software crackingPlanningHypermediaMachine visionMultiplication signDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Web pageLattice (order)Scheduling (computing)AutomationHash functionWhiteboardEvent horizonInformationChemical equationSoftware protection dongleFeedbackFeasibility studyNumberInheritance (object-oriented programming)Logical constantArithmetic meanCharacteristic polynomialAuthorizationProper mapContext awarenessPhysical lawParameter (computer programming)Moment (mathematics)Set (mathematics)BuildingInterrupt <Informatik>MereologyCommunications protocolDrop (liquid)Integrated development environmentIdentifiabilityNetiquetteSubject indexingSource code
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:01
Can you guys hear me okay? You ready for DjangoCon day two? Yeah. I would like to
00:28
start organizing events or B if you've ever got the question, oh this isn't your full-time job as an event organizer. A little bit about myself, I do work full-time as a software engineer but I also run a massive massive community and blow people's minds the fact that I do both at once.
00:43
So a lot of this talk content is gonna be about that, how to do it effectively, and a lot of things I wish I would've known four years ago when I started. So a little bit about me, you can follow me at like OMG it's Fetty on Twitter. Be warned I do watch The Bachelor, Bachelorette, and Bachelor in Paradise and we watch live Monday nights and I do live tweet. This is your
01:02
one warning. Like I said before, I'm a JavaScript developer, community organizer, and diversity advocate. Obviously as a woman in technology I've spent a lot of time being isolated or being the only woman which is why a lot of my community work is very focused on increasing diversity efforts and helping bring people up who may have a hard time. I want to kind of give you the
01:23
overview because if you're not from Kansas City you've probably not heard about the work I do. So many years ago I decided to found a nonprofit called Kansas City Women in Technology because I was sick of being the only damn woman and I launched this organization. We had this really big like kickoff event like 300 people attended and I don't know if I ran into a single
01:41
other female developer at this event. There were women who wanted to get into tech careers. There are educators wanting to know how to bring their code to the classrooms and I like to share this because it really kind of set the trajectory of our organization. So from there it became very clear that we couldn't just you know like put out one call to action and unite all the all the female engineers across the city. So we put in place a lot of
02:02
different programs based on community requests and requests we got from the feedback. The first one of those is our Coder Dojo chapter. Has anybody heard of Coder Dojo before? Okay I got a couple. So Coder Dojo is a global nonprofit that was founded over in Ireland with the idea of creating a code for kids to learn how to code. The really cool thing about it much like
02:22
Django Girls is they kind of packaged it branded it and made it very easy for other cities to pick up and lunch. More than happy to talk your ear off all day about Coder Dojo, tell you how to launch one in your own city, find me or tweet me. But our chapter serves both boys and girls kids K through 12 and our goal with this program is to create an idea of gender blindness. The concept that it's not weird to be a boy or girl writing code
02:42
just everybody's rocking out writing code having a good time. Another key element here is we don't teach kids how to code, we teach kids how to teach themselves how to code. Because what we want to do is create really viable skill sets for them to go and be the engineers of the future and create new rules and blow past any boundaries and do things that aren't
03:00
written in books simply because they haven't been done yet. So from there we launched a program called Coding in Cupcakes. Coding in Cupcakes came out of promoting Coder Dojo and I would get the programmer to be like oh my god this sounds awesome sign my daughter up. But I would get a very different reaction from a lot of mothers who would see Coder Dojo and say hmm I don't think my daughter would like that maybe I'll bring my son. And so already we're
03:23
fighting this kind of like disposition that parents have as against coding as an acceptable hobby or career path for girls. So what do we do? We brand it, we make it pink, we make it girly and all the sudden this program is sold out every month for the past three years we've been running it. So yeah we want to get them in, we want to get excited, we want them to get exposure to coding in a positive light. Midwest Dev Chat is a Slack channel I run for
03:44
developers all throughout the Midwest. Coding in Cocktails is our adult series for women because again one of those things that came out of our community were women saying you're a women in tech group why aren't you teaching me how to code? There are a ton of great organizations around the country, Girl Develop It, that do this but this is our own branded version specific to
04:02
Kansas City based on our needs in our community. And then of course we run a Django Girls workshop every year. I'm talking about a little more about that later in the presentation but if you haven't heard of Django Girls before I would encourage you to check it out. Again very easy implementable model to implement your own communities. The curriculum is is stellar and half the
04:20
half the problem around running a coding education program is writing curriculum. It sucks. Django Girls has done the work for you. Okay so why Ten Commandments? This actually came out of a joke in that Slack channel that I was talking about. We do have a group for community organizers in there and somebody was bitching about some problem that happened and I was like
04:40
thou shalt confirm with the venue thrice. And so it kind of became this running joke and just as as I've spent time running events and doing community organizing these kind of truths have started to pop up and happen that I wish I would have known about because I could have planned and executed better from the beginning. So that's the basis of this talk. So I'm going to give you a quick overview. Oh so I was raised Catholic. I'm not
05:01
religious anymore but the Ten Commandments thing is a joke. God you know sent rules down to Moses and he brought them down to the stones and the one stone had the three that were the most important Commandments and then the other seven still important but not like as big as those big three and so this is very very much the same way. These are your three big ones that absolutely take priority and then the other seven are definitely gonna
05:22
keep your sanity. So real quick thou shalt practice self-care. Commandment number one thou shalt become an expert communicator. Commandment number two thou shalt manage expectations. Number three thou shalt not neglect thy volunteers. Thou shalt plan as far in advance as calenderly
05:41
possible. Thou shalt confirm the venue thrice. Thou shalt arrive at least one hour before starting time. Thou shalt test the Wi-Fi. Thou shalt have a designated chaos lead and thou shalt focus on process improvement wherever possible. I would like to prioritize that that last one but that's a whole nother talk in and of itself. So let's talk about self-care. As an organizer in the
06:07
community it is so easy to get so excited and passionate because the world has so many problems we want to solve right but you can very very quickly bite off way more than you can chew and all of a sudden like starting off the calendar year is June you're already burned out you're like
06:20
crying yourself at sleep tonight because you're so stressed out with your million to do is oh and there's still your day job which is suffering madly so avoid burnout at all costs and we're gonna talk about ways to do this but I'm very big on self-preservation because your community will suffer if you do not prioritize your own self-care. Take on small tasks and improvements. This is really big because again you see all these
06:43
different problems you want to solve but if you want to be effective if you want to avoid burnout you want to break those down into very small pieces for instance we'll get feedback from all the programs we run and we'll take that feedback and we'll say okay here's a big picture item like let's say motivating the kids to take some new challenge how do we break that down into smaller pieces where it's not this huge implementation standpoint all at
07:01
once so we'll start planning we'll start documenting we'll start a process and then piece by piece and implementing that idea that we've come up with so breaking down tasks and small improvements and thinking what can I feasibly get done as a volunteer as somebody who does not do this full time and not hate my life. Give yourself office hours. This is huge
07:21
when it comes to responding to email because that's what gets me every time is email hit my inbox and I think I have to insert right away but then that totally breaks my flow of whatever like project I was working on at work with like this massive refactoring I was redoing so what I do is I give myself office hours where I say okay I'm gonna check and respond to email you know 6 a.m. go to the gym 7 a.m. get back at 8 a.m. answer emails for
07:43
another hour and then I start my workday and I do that 9 to 5 take a break for dinner and then I go back to my email answering for all those emails in between I love love love inbox by Gmail because it has a snooze feature which you can custom set your emails to alert you again it will save your life and you will look like such less of an asshole when it comes to
08:01
your email and communications nothing makes me feel worse than when I get that email from somebody being like hi I don't mean to bother you you didn't respond to my last email and I'm like oh my god I'm so sorry please nag me I am the worst I do care about you let me respond to that so inbox news feature highly recommend guard your time carefully your time is
08:22
the biggest asset you have to offer and sometimes that's gonna mean saying no sometimes that's gonna mean prioritizing something over something else if you're used to working on a product with features and you know the sales team comes to me they're like well I want a B and C and it has to be done tomorrow no no no no no maybe I can give you a I can get a start on
08:41
B but manage other people's expectations and guard your time because that is the most precious asset you have no is a complete sentence speaking of guarding time Jennifer's first law a person's incompetence and email is directly proportionate to the likelihood that they will massively
09:00
waste your time again this is four years of experience speaking that when somebody emails me about something and it's just like word vomit and I'll email back and I'm like I'm sorry can you please understand a what what the time of date for this thing that you want me to show up at B what your target demographic audience is so I can know the way I'm
09:21
presenting or what kind of thing and you know see some other question if they can't answer three simple direct questions and continue to bomb it at me for another three email threads I know this person if they can't communicate effectively in an email are going to waste my time I made this mistake I lost two hours of my workday volunteering to do this panel that
09:40
this woman was endlessly berating me about it was a poorly run event by time it was my turn to speak I had literally 30 seconds with four other people behind me and we were at the end mark of time where none of us were going to communicate what we were there to communicate because this event was so poorly managed so mishandled and there were only four people in the audience again one of those four people might have been valuable but me is my
10:03
me and my time are very valuable and I need to guard and protect because I am going to be more effective as a community organizer and a lead if I'm prioritizing where I'm spending my focus instead of edging towards burnout define your personal scope and don't go outside it as a diversity community
10:21
since day one of launching we received so many requests from the community and it's really really hard because you want to do everything and you want to solve everything and you want to be everything for everyone but that's not feasible that is not something you as a single human being can do so this is where you need to define your personal scope you're gonna say okay I'm gonna take on X amount of speaking engagements per quarter you know I'll
10:41
vet those whether it's a form based on validity or you know who needs it more whatever your personal preference is but understand that you can set a personal scope and then don't step a foot outside it that's how burnout happens find a task tracking system that works for you Trello is a big one very easy to use we're actually talking about this at
11:01
breakfast I get really bad anxiety sometimes when I have so much on my to do plate that I have found the most effective solution for me and yes this does great against me because I'm a software engineer right but I write it down on a piece of paper and I don't know what that step is but all of a sudden I feel so much clear and so much more coherent that I have this list on my desk of this is what I'm gonna get done Monday this is what I'm
11:22
gonna get done Tuesday I have to get this done by Thursday and so that's been really helpful for me again utilizing technical tools setting calendar to do is our crucial there are a lot of steps that I'm going to talk about a few slides from now in our kind of the way we run our program so we set calendar reminders to make sure we're always following up on these certain
11:40
details that we need own your calendar how many times have you like wanted to set up a meeting with somebody and there's like four back and forth emails of will this time work for you will this time work for you will that day oh no actually I'm gonna be a vacation anybody yeah okay I gift you Calendly so Calendly is a service where you can basically set up your own
12:03
personal calendar it syncs with your Google Calendar and so you can block off time slots like for instance I have my nine-to-five workday right I don't take meetings during that time except twice a week I'll have a 45 minute mentoring window open if somebody is trying to get mentoring in launching organizations like mine that's my one exception but then from there I have my morning meetings and my evening meetings so when we're interviewing new
12:23
team members for our organization I'll send them my account Calendly I can say hey excited to talk to you schedule something that works for you in my calendar done so there's no back and forth that way so much less of my time this is one of the best tools I've ever used it does have a free tier I use the paid one because it gives me multiple different time slot
12:41
options and it also has hidden options so my leadership team has access to like my hidden calendar availability but the general public only has this other view so this tool has saved my life fielding criticism I don't say this to scare you but if you do anything whether it's running an event getting you know in
13:02
front of the community as a leader speaking you will get criticized you will get criticized a lot some of it will be valid some of it will not be some of it will people will have no understanding of the limitations that you're up against but that will not stop it so I like to kind of brief people because I was not prepared for the amount of criticism I received when
13:22
I started running an organization especially if it's an organization supporting minorities that bullet on your back that target on your back for criticism is going to get that much bigger because what about white men sorry so the key here is learning to decipher the criticism it's incredibly hard when somebody criticizes your event your organization
13:43
something you is create you have created it's really hard to not take that as a criticism of yourself because you created it it was your decision it was your thought process it was you know these things that are tied to yourself that made it run that way and this is incredibly difficult to you know not devastate you and make you want to quit because you didn't do something
14:03
perfectly perfect is the enemy of good so the trick is learning to decipher it I love this quote by Hillary Clinton take criticism seriously but not personally if there's truth or merit in the criticism try to learn for it otherwise let it roll right off you story time we had a leader on
14:20
our team who came on she was very excited very energetic really wanted to do the role and this is what she told me repeatedly however she consistently didn't do her role didn't fulfill her task and responsibilities and would consistently no call no show our board meetings we're a very flexible organization a lot of the women involved with our organization have families and sometimes they can't get kid duties handled or
14:42
anything like that and so I'm very big on what I call work-life volunteer balance all we need is clear communication let us know what's going on and we're gonna figure out a way to help each other out and work as a team however this person was repeatedly not communicating with just no call no show this person would then post very passive-aggressive messages in our slack community pertaining to information that she a
15:02
missed at that meeting and B did not read in the meeting minutes that were sent to everybody else to follow up so this this was kind of happening and I this is back when I gave people more chances and lesson learned so I was interested in asking her to step down but one of my team members was like
15:22
oh she's going through a job transition give her a chance well this person then rage quit in the middle of our board meeting by sending the nastiest email about me to our entire leadership team that I have ever received four paragraphs of why I was a horrible human being why I was
15:41
just horrible and her trying to point fingers because she realized that people were realizing she wasn't doing her role however each block of criticism that she had against me I knew started from somewhere so it was my job to say okay a lot of this is unwarranted this is her venting this is her trying to point fingers and throw shade at me that being said what was the
16:00
trigger point for this comment what could I have done in my behavior or in the way I was communicating to trigger to get to that escalation and so that's the real spot you need to be at criticism is understanding when people are just being crazy but understanding your your part in the role and figuring out how you can communicate better I'm not saying that you were the one in the wrong I'm not saying that they're not completely wrong but it will save
16:24
you headaches down the line and you will feel better about yourself and the decisions you make when you kind of get this this clarity embrace the mockingjay I'm assuming everyone has seen Hunger Games yeah okay I very strongly identify with Katniss because she just set out to do like this this
16:42
one good thing right I just wanted to launch an organization for women developers but the thing that happened that I was not prepared to handle it was becoming this lightning rod becoming this symbol all of a sudden I was the token woman in tech in Kansas City and it was a lot of spotlight that I was not prepared for I remember our first kickoff event I had to get on off on stage and I'm literally just like slamming shots of
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because my hands are shaking and I'm terrified and I'm so scared of having that spotlight on me and people looking at me and I was not prepared for this and I struggled against it for a very long time but I realized as a community leader as an advocate people want something to look up to they want something to aim towards and so instead of letting my insecurities
17:21
take over I had to learn a way to kind of embrace the mockingjay embrace being that symbol and learn to operate in that world in a context of what people needed me to be build your network community organizing any leadership roles can be lonely because you have a certain level of
17:41
stature and way you need to present yourself and sometimes that means you're not gonna be able to talk to your team about certain issues you're gonna have rogue volunteers you're gonna have awkward difficult conversations codes of conduct the way we're being inclusive or exclusive these are conversations that warrant group think so the more you can find other community leaders to talk through your problems find a mentor mentor
18:02
other budding community leaders because you don't want to do this for the rest of your life and only be the only one we want that multiplier effect the more you can do this the better your network will be I really love connecting with other community leaders because I've been through crazy shit like some of the stories I have to tell blow people's minds but I want them to be prepared for that because we weren't prepared for that and at
18:22
Coder Dojo we had two dads almost get into a literal fistfight you don't get there's no class on community organizing and how to de-escalate two dads right so the more we can share stories and support each other and help figure out how to be very proactive about situations that might happen the stronger our groups will be mmm learn to delegate so when I
18:44
started my organization four years ago I went with a committee of women and it was like hurting angry bitchy cats everybody had a different idea everybody was going a different direction and there was a lack of unity there was a lack of vision and because it was a committee nobody had specific roles and
19:01
so a couple of the girls had marketing backgrounds and I'd say okay hey take this meeting time let's put up a social calendar that's going to outline our events for the next six months well they'd be there for two hours they'd come back to me and tell me well we need to change the logo so made a lot of mistakes along the way the point that we operate now as an organization is I write actual job descriptions yes we are a
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volunteer organization but if you come onto our team you have a job description you have responsibilities you have quarterly goals and objectives again keeping in mind this offers work-life volunteer balance and we make sure that all our workloads and our responsibilities are manageable from that time and if it gets to be too much well that's when we start recruiting more people to help but this is huge and delegating because
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some people you can't just like lob a general task list out and say do this sometimes you as a leader need to take it on yourself to better prioritize and delegate I love this photo this is from our Jenga girls event this year this is our second year on the first year I did almost everything myself everything from marketing to communicating and recruiting
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mentors to all the attendee communications to dealing with the vendors to get our food and dietary restrictions covered and it was a lot of work but this year I started early and recruited this amazing team and the fun thing about this was they took what I did the year before and they doubled it they did so much better than I as a single person could ever do alone they brought way more mentors in they got way more attendees and they
20:23
were on the news talking about this the amount of work this team put in blew my damn mind and it's the best feeling in the world that you can have as an organizer to do something and then have a team come together and do it way way better that's the multiplier effect that's how we grow and build sustainable communities is by bringing other people into the fold to then
20:41
supersede with everything we've done before so learning to delegate is huge if you're a type a neurotic control freak like me it's gonna take some some moves on some stress relief but documentation is clear key creating clear and defined roles and making it easy for people to step into this that being said a mistake I've been in the past is I am a mama lion I
21:03
like to protect my people I probably called up coddle way more than I should and so sometimes it's hurt me that I've not I've tried to like solve all the problems for everybody instead of giving my leadership team key opportunities to solve their own problems and then become you know efficient in that area so that's something to keep in mind is if you're
21:21
like me you might want to protect everybody and make it easy and like make sure everybody's lives are manageable but make sure you are not blocking their opportunities for growth and for leadership all right that was a big commandment that shall become an expert communicator communication I pretty sure is the problem behind every issue poor communication so this is
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something I really really harp on never assume people are as in tune to your organization as you are so I like to bring this up because when you're working full-time and when you're running something on the side it's so easy to get tunnel vision right because you're trying to implement
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you're trying to execute and it's easy to assume that everybody is on that same page everybody is operating on the same level of priority about your focus that you are and that's just not how the world works people are dealing with their own shit and so that's why communication is key to make sure that what you have prioritizes getting communicated to other people who might not have it as high on their list I have a lot of communication
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patterns just like you know design patterns and code that I use all the time for effectiveness I like to make things easy for people with lists and call out important information like I mentioned those word vomit emails earlier no do not word vomit at me it is so if it takes me two or three times to read your email to gain valid information from that you just
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wasted my time and reduce my willingness to work with you and so I hold myself to that same standard if I want to communicate to a group of people I am going to write craft reread and tweak this email until I know that they can glean all the information that they need necessary and it's not going to be a pain in the butt for them to digest one of the things I do that I
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like to call out is when I mention a date I do this certain date formatting I say the date of the week so like let's say Friday the actual date of the week let's say August 18th and the time and the time zone this is a little trick from my mentor who would tell me about trying to get people to follow up on things and if you didn't include the time zone it was very easy
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for people to be like oh well I thought you meant like six o'clock in the evening not six o'clock in the morning so these are kind of safeguards you can put in to let people know exactly what timeline you're communicating on especially if you're event planning and have to have certain things in place giving that sort of deadline that will easily stick in people's brains is great like if you were to just say you know August
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18th would you know off the top of your head what day of the week that was unless you had something else going on on Friday August 18th so this is just the tiniest little trick that can help you get other people on your same level of remembering when things are happening so this is probably hard to read but this is an example of the email I send out at the beginning of
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the month to my leadership team I've got about 23 people right now and they're all across our different programs that we run and so I kind of like to lay out again people get tunnel vision on what they're focusing on so here's where I call out everything that we're gonna have going on with the month with that date format overall updates any big sponsorship updates like if our
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marketing chair needs to know to put a new sponsor in the newsletter and any leadership members we might be interviewing I also always include an opportunity for one-on-one meetings in my calendar again with our leader that you know went nuclear and sent that email I think I could have been better about pulling up with her and saying hey if you have any concerns
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please let me know hey if you have any criticism or feedback me for me please let me know and instead of letting it just escalate to this point where she went a little apeshit okay um that shall manage expectations people are not psychic people are not psychic people are not psychic so this
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is a pitfall that hit me very early in my in my organizing career because if you're like me time is important and if I'm gonna go to an event I'm gonna read all the text on that Eventbrite page I'm gonna know where the venue is I'm gonna know exactly what's happening I'm gonna know exactly when schedule is of things and so I just assumed that everybody operates on this baseline I do of reading what event they're going to
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this does not happen a lot especially with parents and so they'll come in not having read and me having the expectation that they have read saying well I thought it was going to be this and that's where the contention happens that's when people get pissy that's when they get upset that that things weren't the way they were expecting so the more you can do to communicate effectively whether it's on Eventbrite descriptions or
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sending out emails or whatever works for organization to better manage people's expectations the less bullshit criticism and complaints are going to get oh you mean my real job so I mentioned this in the beginning of the talk get this question a lot there's this weird thing that happens with volunteer organizations that people just assume that you're not restricted to
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traditional business restraints that economies of scale don't apply to you because it's volunteer it's that same thing of like when you get an app for free in the App Store and you like expect way more than an app you'd pay a dollar for just because it's for free right they can do everything so this is something that's very easy to fall prey to because people don't understand sometimes you'll have to explain that I do kind of mention at least once a
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year at a lot of our events please be nice to our volunteers they give up their Saturday morning to help your kids code so please keep that in mind we're not paid to be here sometimes people need that reminder crazy is gonna cry this is a gift from the bachelor she is like possibly my favorite villain of all time I want to say that no matter how well you do in
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managing expectations and clearly communicating some people will never be pleased I'm running a little low on time but I love to share the story just because it's hysterical so I got a tweet when my Twitter account had to be private for a period of time with this dude reaching out about my my or
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Kansas City women technology he's like well I tried to email you your website is broken why don't you have a phone number in my head I'm like you're why we don't have a phone number listed but so I respond to him but my account is private so he couldn't see my tweet which I realized after the fact but we had a tech talk which are one of our general networking events that Wednesday night and we were doing it at this arcade bar and so the
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event had just started like I'm sitting facing the door and two girls had just walked in and they were sitting we were we were talking this crazy looking dude like his hair puffed out to here like walks eyes with me and b-lines and I'm like oh shit this can't be good and so he immediately begins laying into me about this the fact that his daughter is interested in
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computer science and goes to school like 45 minutes away and she doesn't have a mentor and her friends make fun of her for being interested in computer science and it's just reaming me about this and I'm you know de-escalate okay I'm sorry sir like we're still a small organization we haven't been able to expand out to colleges yet you know absolutely want to do everything we can to support but we're still small and growing and
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trying to build up none of this was satisfying him he was just reaming my ass and so finally I'm like you know I'm more than happy to give you my email address for your daughter like I understand what it was like to be your daughter I was definitely made fun of for my computer interest and he's like well I can't do that she won't listen to me anyway and so I was like oh okay you literally just came here to bitch me out there was no conflict resolution you were looking for you just wanted to yell at me crazy is
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gonna cry so another issue I've run into is being a good community partner because when you're launching an organization other organizations in town might want to partner with you and I firmly believe that you need to secure your organization's oxygen mask first before partnering with other
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organizations you need to get your house in order to be an effective community partner and it's okay to express that so get your house in order then you can build building begin building partnerships and helping others thou shall not neglect thy volunteers I knew this was a lot of
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do not make your volunteers heard cats I don't know if you've ever showed up to an event before where it wasn't real structured or real planning you show up and you're excited and ready to help and there's just a million things going on you can't get instructions for what to do like nobody really has a place and you feel like maybe your time was wasted if you want your volunteers to come back have everything structured and ready and set up for
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them don't ask them to go do all this insane problem-solving and cat herding it's not fun especially if you don't know what's going on you don't have contacts and you're not in control it's just stressful make things easier for your volunteers make parking and arrival instructions clear have an emergency contact number available have clear instructions duties and responsibilities for your volunteer and as much as possible keep your
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volunteers out of the line of fire of criticism see earlier crazy's gonna cry I don't like putting my people in the crossfire of people that I know will never ever be happy plan your events ahead of time give volunteers plenty of notice I really like sending out reminder emails and creating calendar invites the key here is to make sure that one person is in
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charge of communications and your volunteers aren't getting communicated with for multiple people that may have conflicting priorities again falls back to communication excellent communication is clear and keeping your community your volunteers and your mentors happy find ways to thank your volunteers solicit their feedback and act on it we hold retrospectives after every single one of our events and we ask the mentors for their feedback
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because we want to keep them coming back so we want to take their input and implement what we can to make their experience better offer leadership opportunities and so as we've grown instead of trying to be a control freak and handle everything we very much try and build our been our volunteers and our mentors up a lot of them to take on organization rules build the resumes get some leadership practice provide nice volunteer shirts I hate
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crappy shirts that don't fit and everybody else does too so please prioritize that plan appreciation dinners and parties after a big event sometimes it can be wise nice to wind down you know nice dinner in a cocktail so this is something we always prioritize actually thank you to rev sis for sponsoring our mentor appreciation party this year after our
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Django girls event it was quite lovely promote their efforts so developers especially women aren't always the first to step up to brag about themselves so brag for them this is just the teeniest tiniest thing that you can do to show how much you appreciate your volunteers they're working on an open source project tweet a little bit about that offer to
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feature them in a blog if you have more of a platform to offer them nominate them for awards I'm so excited my organization has needed to do this for like almost four years but we finally recruited a stellar PR chair and one of her roles is simply to take all the amazing women in our organization get information and submit them from awards again back to that me being the token woman in Tekken Kansas City problem we're very actively
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trying to dispel that by getting all these other women in the spotlight so if you can do that for your volunteers and your mentors you already know they're donating their time and are good people and doing great work so let's make sure they get recognized for that again this is going to take more time and more effort on your part but it will keep your volunteers coming back feeling happy and also recruiting other volunteers to come in
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and join your organization now shall plan as far in advance as calendar calendarly possible it was the worst word but it's effective okay moving on
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so if you plan your events in advance it'll be easier to book speakers
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volunteers and venues granted people have their own schedules so if you can get on their schedule earlier on that's key to do you've ever planned a wedding you have to book your venue at least a year in advance so keep that in mind if you have diversity goals make efforts sooner rather than later nothing drives me up the wall more than some organization putting on
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some event and then emailing me less than 24 hours for this event because they've suddenly realized they don't have any women on their panel and they might get chewed out for lack of diversity I'm like sorry dude if you really want to make a diversity effort I'm not going to be your token woman 24 hours in advance like do a better effort from the get-go mm-hmm thou shalt confirm the venue thrice cover your ass we've had
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events before we've had routine monthly events and then I've shown up like one month and knocked at the door nobody's there the spaces amass my attendees arriving who looks like the jackass here it's me it's not the vendor so anything you can do to keep your vendors and your venues on the same page with you the better you will look again more work on your part
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but you will you will have better feedback and you will have solid events if you make sure that you're notifying everybody and reminding them because they have more to focus on than just your event and here we go again with my okay follow up or look like a jackass this is something that I fell prey to early where I would you know take get feedback and be like well
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they should have just known or I'm a volunteer so you know they should know I only have five minutes left okay thou shalt arrive at least one hour before starting time setup will always take longer than you expect your team and speakers will be late your attendees will show up early first year we ran Django girls our attendees showed up two hours early our volunteer staff
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wasn't even there yet we were still getting off work and setting up the venue so it happens be aware be prepared for it that shall test the Wi-Fi and bring any supplies needed bad Wi-Fi will take your technical event in a heartbeat it's not fun there's no coming back from it that being said test and test ahead of time if you can and really key have the phone
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number of their contact information for the person who a no where's where the router is beacon unlock where the router is and three reset the router bring all the dongles I firmly believe that it's on speakers to bring their own equipment but again you're the one who's gonna look like a jackass so be prepared that shall have a designated chaos lead Murphy's law what can go
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wrong will go wrong no matter how well you plan an event there is something that will happen that you will not have planned for I'm assuming everybody seen this gift before there will always be problems you can't plan for
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the one thing you don't want to have is your leadership team that's already in charge of running event being those people running around to solve problems on the fly so have a designated chaos lead somebody who is there simply to deal with all the random things oh the toilet paper ran out of the bathroom we've got a random person to go make a Costco run to handle that that did happen in New York City Django girls event by the way it's like terrified me ever since I heard that story constant vigilance again I don't
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want to scare you from community organizing I just want to I like to send my troops into battle prepared right so I want I want you to know everything that can go wrong so you can hold effective events being aware of that thou shalt focus on process improvement wherever possible we do retrospectives after all our events we solicit feedback from our attendees from our mentors from our volunteers from the parents of our attendees and
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then we take this feedback we collect it in Doc's there's some big items that we can't tackle right away but there are some small things that we can tweak and add to our process improvement that's allowed us to run really great events over time over the past four years our retrospectives have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter and so and finally they got to the point where nobody had anything to say and I'm like all right what's our next big challenge innovate or die talk about what went well what didn't go well
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and what can we do better next time if you've never been to a retrospective before repeat emails if you get a lot of emails asking the same question those questions should be on your fax page they should be on bold in your fax page people will miss stuff on the fax page make it easy for them to read identify your pain points and work on those first again
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biting off what's feasible but definitely identifying what your leadership team is spending the most time on especially if it's monotonous and can be automated streamline your check-in process automate posts to social media wherever possible I'm a software engineer I suck at social media unless it's live tweeting The Bachelor I have a very amazing team who does that
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instead and they're so much better at it than I would ever be begin gathering data and feedback as soon as you can I'm getting these processes in place are the best thing you can do for continuing to improve and also going after sponsorship money you can say hey these these were the numbers we hit that's last year this is what we're doing this year this is projected for the next year that can really be great in your tool belt
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summary those are organizing if you follow me on Twitter I am working on a book that summarizes a lot of this and a lot more so if you want to get more information that will be a good place to look these slides are available on github at that link does anyone have any questions thanks for
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the great talk and the tips regarding a box by Google and Calendly my question is I have an 11 year old niece who lives in Jacksonville Florida and she has a 13 year old brother who has really embraced writing Python code with the pie game library what resources would you recommend that my niece can access online perhaps a specific resource on coder dojo or a
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book I can order for her to give her a fair opportunity to get excited about code so she's a little young right now but when she hits I think 18 months it's either 18 months or three years I can't remember is the code pillar by Fisher price which is this little caterpillar you can connect to do cool programming so that's good for her age as soon as she is capable of read
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that changes my answer then we start all our kiddos off on scratch which is the drag-and-drop UI developed by MIT that being said at a conference a
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couple weeks ago I just gave a talk on jewel box which is programmable jewelry founded by Sarah chips who's the co-founder of girl develop it and so those are programmable bracelets I mean it's basically a nicely packaged Arduino but they can sync via Bluetooth can connect with her friends have a really great community and utility library and docs around it so I'm interested in getting something like this set up in my community but I'm
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wondering how as a male do I get women to feel comfortable to come to things like that and believe I'm gonna respect them and all that kind of stuff yeah and I get this question a lot we've actually got a women take tech makers group in town which my buddy Kyle runs because he's something but if
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you start there if you're a lightning rod and create a group for women eventually women are gonna come that want to step in and join your leadership team so the best you like if you can just start if you can just like plow through that wall get things going and then help support the women who want to come up and lead it that's the best way to go so in
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terms of community organizing like the the processes that you're proposing here they definitely sound like really great and like you're gonna run really great events with them but they also sound like they take a lot of time like you were saying and I was wondering whether you find that like you were talking about work-life balance and are you able to still
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sustain like other hobbies or like how much of a life do you have if you're spending like three hours a day answering emails how does that work I totally got to play Halo like for four hours on a Friday night it was awesome no so this has been a lot of work from the get-go and this was so much time and this was so many like nights like crying on the phone like
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struggling but once I got to this point of getting all these processes in place and building up a leadership team I don't spend nearly that much time anymore like if I had better known how to set up leadership and roles and better delegate from the get-go which is why I give this talk I would have had a lot more time in the beginning so as far as the time I spent on this
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a week I mean between composing emails and like managing my leadership team and dealing with random like issues that come up it's probably gotten down to like maybe five hours a week like it's been low enough that I've been able to get back on the speaker circuit again and start doing talks around the country so just put in the hard work at first and then it'll level out I was just curious to hear a little bit more about I run an organization as well and
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I've started to delegate and the problem I'm having is kind of you talked about that email you send at the beginning of every month to kind of like level set I'd be curious to talk just to hear a little bit more about your experience once you delegated how you kind of started to see communication be useful to those people to make sure stuff didn't fall through the cracks to
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make sure the communication came up to you and back down and just how to manage that yeah I asked my team to CC me on everything just so I kind of have like a bird's-eye view again I'm trying not to be such a mama lion and give them opportunities there but so having them CC you in communications we have several different program teams that are running on their own schedules that I don't even attend those meetings I just ask that they're on
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the calendar and then meeting meeting notes from everything or added to Google Drive we do monthly board meetings where we do a recap of everything that's going on so people are aware I'm aware most of my team will approach me if there is an issue that I need to handle and then other than that we do quarterly objective meetings once a quarter that are for three hours that are really big like hash everything out like talk about big picture vision
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and so that's yeah all right I'm gonna actually ask the last question here while I've got the mic so I'm a community organizer as well how do you hold yourself accountable are there like support groups for this kind of thing no but I'm working on that okay yeah sorry I'm trying to organize a
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lamping retreat for women and tech organizers so we can go and talk about a lot of these issues but it's like communities are a great place to go to find other community leaders awesome if people have more questions afterwards can they find you on Twitter slack you can find me on Twitter like omg it's Betty you have me whatever I've got to catch my flight in like 20 minutes but you have until I make it out the shuttle door to ask me more
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questions awesome Thank You Jennifer