#foocafe

Around eight months ago I wrote about the lack of diversity amongst speakers at events under the Foo Cafe umbrella. One suggestion to tackle the problem included adopting a code of conduct. Another to increase outreach, actively inviting a diverse set of speakers at the events. So what has happened since?

The good news, Foo Cafe introduced a code of conduct. They have hosted many many more events. And they have expanded their team.

The bad news, diversity numbers hasn't improved.

5 women, 3 unknown, and 58 men speaking at a total of 50 events.

All "Code", "Innovation", and "Cutting Edge" events that FooCafe hosted since August 18, 2014 through February 28, 2015 are included and I counted the number of men and women speaking at each event (determined by speakers' names*, sometimes by googling).

In total I included 50 events during the time period. Those events that were marked cancelled and those that fell in the category "get together to hack" I excluded. One event had speakers of both genders. I also opted to exclude the conference Beauty in Code (which, by the way, had 100% male speakers). In three cases I was unable to determine who the speaker(s) was.

In the last measurement I counted 5 women, 11 unknown, and 41 men in 46 events.

To be concrete: that's no improvement at all.

Critics pointed out that simply introducing a code of conduct isn't going to solve any problems. They are right, and the numbers above confirm that.

Critics also pointed out that Foo Cafe may have other priorities, like finding a sustainable business model. They may also be right.

And finally, a few were quick to point out that speakers may not reflect attendance numbers. I have no insight on that and I'm unsure if Foo Cafe tracks this.

What shall we do?

I'm not sure. I think DemoDag and StartupDojo are two of the better recurring events hosted at Foo Cafe. The co-organisers Björn Söderqvist, Erik Starck, et al manage to, as far as I can tell, encourage a welcoming environment and culture where everyone can speak without being questioned. Perhaps other organisers can learn from them?

Paulina (@pauspling) has a great number of suggestions in her post "How to get great women to tech and startup events" which I strongly recommend reading.

Foo Cafe, what's next?

Photos from Susanne Ekelund's talk at Creative Mornings Malmö about the theme ‘Color’ are now up on flickr.

Last week Foo Café made two significant announcements: the implementation of a Code of Conduct, and a manifest detailing what Foo Café is and stands for.

In the midst of a growing Swedish, and international, focus on diversity and sexism in tech, Foo Café is setting an excellent example for other organisers (hint: #sthlmtechfest) to follow. Their getting noticed and the speaker list for this autumn is already looking better compared the spring's.

Thomas Frostberg, business journalist and creator of #tackanej, highlighted Foo Café's ability to listen to criticism in his latest column (in English).

Rakt motsatt attityd har Malmöföretagaren Michael Tiberg visat efter att ha fått kritik för att hans arrangemang Foo Café haft kraftig övervikt av män bland presentatörerna. Han arrangerar tillsammans med andra företag och organisationer återkommande träffar för personer i IT- och webbindustrin och kommer nu att arbeta för att nå större mångfald i arrangemangen.

And listening is tough. Often I stubbornly refuse an idea in my head only to later realise that a certain ego is just standing in the way. In many cases, it is because I haven't fully understood the perspective or motivation of the other person's opinion.

"You can learn from anyone as long as you dare to listen. But listening is really really hard sometimes." @michaeltiberg @_FooCafe_

— Marcus Ljungblad (@mljungblad) August 27, 2014

So while the code of conduct provides a foundation for a safe environment, which is crucial for learning, the manifest addresses the more abstract, the culture if you like, of Foo Café. It establishes common values among participants and organisers of the events. It helps us understand why we attend and come back.

A section that I particularly like in the manifesto is "Everybody matters". To me, it captures the essence of Foo Café's existence.

You can learn from everyone, we have all different experience that we can share and teach.

Today Foo Cafe hosts the last two events of the season before taking a summer break. Since January the umbrella organisation for basically all tech events in Malmö have hosted 46 tech events* with at least 57 speakers. Of those speakers, 41 are men, 5 are women, and 11 are unknown. That’s a stunning 9% of women speakers. NINE percent! We can obviously do much better than this next season. Here are some ideas what Foo Cafe, its partners and you can do to help improve the situation.

For those who don't know about Foo Cafe, they partner with companies, user groups, organisations and individuals to bring the tech community in Malmö together. The events are almost always free for attendees, there is usually drinks and food served, and everything is financed by the companies Foo Cafe partner with.

Foo Cafe is THE place for meetings of all sizes, interests and levels of expertise within the media and technology arena. Planned or spontaneous, it’s up to you.

Clear paths and actions for improving diversity will allow Foo Cafe, its events, and the Malmö tech community to reach new levels of awesomeness!

Why do we need diversity?

Out of all the events I have attended this year, I can count the number of female participants across all those events on two hands. Often it is the same people attending too. Diversity is more complex than just bringing in more women, and we shouldn’t do it just for the sake of having more women attend. The statistics above only call out the ratio between men and women as that is what I could somewhat reliably count.

When you don’t really understand why having more women in technology is important, you don’t extrapolate and realize that having more of every underrepresented minority group is the true goal. — Kat Li, Why are you supporting women in tech

Increasing diversity amongst speakers will, I’m convinced, bring diversity amongst participants. It’ll bring new ideas to our community, and those ideas will be gauged by a broad and diverse set of minds. It will increase the talent pool that companies, many who are sponsors of Foo Cafe, can recruit from. And, I believe, we’ll have a lot more fun and learn way more than today.

Detta gör mitt liv lite tråkigare: Alla techtalks (oftast av män) som alltid _ALLTID_ alltid refererar till utvecklare som män.

— Olgatron (@olgastern) 22 april 2014

What can Foo Cafe do?

Foo Cafe should adopt, and enforce, a code of conduct. All events hosted at Foo Cafe must adhere to it. Adopting a code of conduct is a statement that abusive behaviour is not OK. It lays the foundation to “be excellent towards each other” as Ana succinctly put it, and provides the organisers a clear mandate to address inappropriate behaviour, as well as a way to tell people to get lost if they don’t behave. The goal is to create a safe environment for everybody. Here’s what an organiser of !!Con had to say about PyCon’s code of conduct.

@mljungblad @b0rk @lindsey @lfranchi It’s easy to enforce, covers most of the bases, is simple and clear, and has been used to great effect

— Alex Clemmer (@hausdorff_space) 22 maj 2014

Foo Cafe should actively and continuously invite speakers with diverse backgrounds. Without doubt, Foo Cafe has a tremendous network. It is not enough to just want a diverse group of speakers, you have to actively encourage it. Specifically ask people if they’d like to talk about their latest passion.

OH: @zmagg: oh my gosh. outreach works.

— Julia Evans (@b0rk) 16 april 2014

Foo Cafe can seek help from the community and experts. Foo Cafe, as we know it, only exists in Malmö. They’ve done wonders for the tech scene here and rumour has it that Stockholm is dying to have a Foo Cafe too. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help.

What can sponsors of Foo Cafe do?

Sponsor only events which have a code of conduct in place. Consider to pull your company’s sponsorship of Foo Cafe if they don’t establish a code of conduct. This implies that your organisation understands why a code of conduct is needed. If not, perhaps an internal review is in place too? I first saw this suggestion in a post called What Can Men Do by Shanley.

Get your company to only sponsor events with a code of conduct. These policies help to build events where women and other underrepresented groups are safe and welcome.

Educate your employees about diversity. There are several consultants and resources for companies that want to improve. A quick search gave me these: GenderPerformance, Eductus, AllCompetence, and Rättviseförmedlingen. There are surely more!

Encourage women to speak at events. Even if it is at other events than Foo Cafe! Another way is to suggest that women add their names to one of Rättviseförmedlingen’s many lists, like Apputvecklare, Civil engineers, Programmers, or Web Developers.

What can you do?

Help Foo Cafe by recommending speakers. Despite their magnificent network, they do not know everyone and obviously the current set of attendees consists a pretty homogenic group. Widen their net by reaching out in your own networks. See a colleague at work doing something awesome? Ask if she would like to present it in a user group or other event at Foo Cafe.

Give Foo Cafe feedback after EVERY event. Improvement comes through continuous constructive feedback, and it is our responsibility as participants to provide this feedback. If you don’t like beer and pizza at every event, tell them! If you think the times suck, tell them! If there are too few female speakers, tell them!

Summing up

Changing the situation described above requires some effort from all of us. Even though I’ve been aware of the problem for some time I haven’t had a clear idea of what to do about it. We (men) need to start talking about the problem and the actions we can take to improve the situation.

Lets help Foo Cafe and ourselves for next season of tech events! I’ll promise to start doing more of the above and I’ll do a follow-up post later this year to see how we have improved. Foo Cafe appears willing to improve too.

@mljungblad great question. We are trying to get more female attendees at our tech events. Ideas are more than welcomed.

— Foo Café (@_FooCafe_) May 27, 2014

Give them your best ideas!

Thanks to Olga, Joakim, Per, Erisa, and Maria for reviewing early drafts of this post.

* I selected all the events tagged “Code” and “Cutting Edge” as these are, primarily, the type of events I attend. It would be interesting to check the other types of events too. Also, speakers are counted for each appearance they made. That, unfortunately, makes it a total of four women presenting at one or more of the 46 events.

There is something like HackerSchool's Thursday presentations in Malmö and I only just found out about it! @bjorn_js started* something close to it called DemoDag and tonight was the third time it ran featuring several great hacks from people in and around Malmö!

Enrique presented iColorama, an impressive photo editing app for iPad with hundreds of brushes. He built the entire app himself and has more than 20 super-active beta testers that he trusts as "product owners". They tell him what to do and he'll do it.

Vesta built a cobra using only steel wire! I still don't understand how her fingers survived that. Less (no?) programming involved, but it's always great to find inspiration from vastly different areas. She also announced her own portfolio website.

Marco demonstrated a build tool for web projects that he's been building called PoliteJS workspace. It looks impressive and his goal is to make web development even faster and easier.

Jeremy showed a visualisation of where music artists play the most around the world called Music Globe.

Babak got tired of searching job posting on various aggregate sites and often finding duplicates. With his background in machine learning he hacked a career-matching application called Careerwi.se.

Dharam wanted to explore the new APIs in HTML5, especially the web audio API, and built Clicksonified, an app that plays popular content on the Internet. Fun way to generate music (quality will depend on popularity)!

What I enjoyed about DemoDag is that you could demo anything, as long as you built it. It's a place to show stuff that works and things that you've learned.

Next time I feel that we (as a community) can be more open to incomplete hacks and leave things like "have you considered making it a product" to other great events such as StartupDojo. The value is in sharing, learning, and celebrating the joy of building things. Also, I should have prepared a demo of something!

* Björn will point out that it started in Copenhagen and he merely forked the concept and brought it across the bridge.

On January 14th I will be giving a talk on Servo, the experimental browser engine from Mozilla Research, at Foo Café. This is the second meet-up of the Øresund Rust user group and after the first one having been a great introduction to Rust by Jens Nockert, taking a look at the guinea pig project for the language seems like a natural second step.

Now, the tricky bit is that I actually don't know that much about Servo at all! So some of my next 3 weeks will be spent reading the code and hopefully hacking on it to gain a sufficiently thorough understanding of it to give a good talk!

The plan is to also have a hacking session after the talk, like we did at the first meet-up in December, where we'll try to build very small projects of similar nature to Servo, that is, in which an application's objective can be split into many independent heterogeneous tasks, communicating via message passing, to take advantage of multi-core processors.