I've recently set up my own consultancy company and decided to sponsor my local UKGovCamp conference. That entitled me to a logo on the site, a shout-out during the conference, and place to put any promotional stickers. Everyone loves stickers! But I decided to bring along something different - promotional sweeties! I found a small business to print my logo with edible ink onto sweets and ordered some fizzy flying saucers, mint Mentos, and fruit Mentos. They all had my company logo and name…
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I'd recently given a talk at a conference and was gently basking in the glow of people telling me how fabulous I was, when some entitled prick came up to me and said... Great talk, mate! Really interesting stuff. But... "Oh great!" I thought. "Here it comes..." To play Devil's Advocate for a moment, have you... "No. Stop." I said. And, to my surprise, he did. "The Devil doesn't need any more advocates. Rephrase your question to be more positive." That stopped him in his tracks. Like…
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I'm lucky enough to get invited to speak at a variety of conferences around the world. After accepting a speaking invitation, and checking I'm not on an all-male line-up, I usually make one of the following requests to the organisers. Thanks for inviting me. Can you let me know if the venue is wheelchair accessible? So excited to be there. What are the crèche facilities going to be? Looking forward to speaking. Will you be providing a sign-language interpreter? Can't wait to see you. Please …
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(Because what the world needs is another CoC thinkpiece from a straight, white-passing, cis-gendered man.) This is a rambling blog post inspired by Cate Hudson's "Codes of Conduct and Worthless Manfeelings". You should read that first, it's pretty good. Don't worry, I'll wait. (In which I do my best not to insult all my friends and colleagues.) I go to lots of conferences. Fewer than I used to (we'll come on to that) - but I can honestly say that I've spoken on panels, attended…
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I was at a hackday recently. During one of the talks, a speaker from a small company made a fairly stinging criticism of a large tech firm. As it happened, one of the audience members was an employee of said behemoth and heckled the speaker. After the presenter told him to shut up, he spent the rest of the session snarkily subtweeting his objections to her arguments. Geeks are people who run on dissent. We see the world is broken, refuse to accept it, and try to fix things. Then other…
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Another year, another OpenTech. I found last year's OpenTech conference to be awe-inspiring. This year's was equally good. This is a quick rundown of the sessions I attended that I found particularly interesting. (more…) …
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On Sunday, I attended the Feminism in London 2009 conference. This Is What A Feminist Looks Like (AKA spot the odd one out) The conference was inspiring, depressing, uplifting and infuriating in equal measures. That's probably a good thing. I'll briefly discuss some of the sessions I attended and also what I think the organisers could do better next year. The Conference Kate Smurthwaite expertly chaired proceedings and kept the event running to time. Not an easy task with several hundred …
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