The 10 Commandments of Community Organizing by Jennifer Wadella

Thanks.

Speaker 1: Can you guys hear me okay? Alright, we hyped. We ready for Django Con day two? Yeah, you pumped! All right, so hopefully you're in this room if you A would like to 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. So a lot of this talk content is going to be about that, how to do it effectively, and a lot of things I wish I would have known four years ago when I started. So a little bit about me. You can follow me at Like Om G at SFedi 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 one warning.

Speaker 1: Uh like I said before, JavaScript developer, community organizer, and diversity advocate. Um 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 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 overview because 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 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 To a single 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.

Speaker 1: 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 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, 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 Django Girls, is they kind of packaged it, branded it, and made it very easy for other cities to pick up. and launch. 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.

Speaker 1: 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 a girl writing code. Just everybody's rocking out writing code, having a good time. Another key element here is we don't teach kids how to code. 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 written in books simply because they have Been done yet. So from there we launched a program called Coding and Cupcakes. Coding and Cupcakes came out of promoting Coder Dojo, and I would get the programmer dads and 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, Mm, I don't think my daughter would like that. Maybe I'll bring my son.

Speaker 1: And so already we're 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 of a sudden this program is sold out every month for the past three years we've been running it. So yay. We want to get them in, we want to get excited, we want them to To get exposure to coding in a positive light. Midwest DevChat is a Slack channel I run for developers all throughout the Midwest. Coding and 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 uh organizations around the country, Girl Develop It, um, that do this, but this is our own branded version specific to Kansas City based on our needs in our community. And then of course we run a Django Girls workshop every year.

Speaker 1: I'm talk 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 in your own communities. The curriculum is stellar and half the problem around running a coding education program is writing curriculum. It sucks. Django Rose has done the work for you. Okay. So Y10 commandments. This actually came out of a joke in that Slack channel that I was talking about. We do have um a A group for community organizers in there, and somebody was bitching about some problem that happened, and I was like, 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

Speaker 1: because I could have planned and executed better from the beginning. So that's the basis of this talk. So I'm gonna give you a quick overview. Oh, um so I was raised Catholic. I'm not religious anymore, but the Ten Commandments thing is a joke. Um God, you know, sent rules down to Moses and he brought them down on the stones and the ones stone had the three that were the most important commandments and then the other seven um still important but not like as big as those big three and so this is very s very much the same way these These are your three big ones that absolutely take priority. And then the other seven are definitely gonna uh keep your sanity. So, real quick, thou shalt practice self-care, community number one. Thou shalt become an expert. Expert communicator, commitment number two, thou shalt manage expectations, number three. Um, thou shalt not neglect thy volunteers, thou shalt plan uh

Speaker 1: As far in advance as calendarly 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 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, it's June, you're already burned out, you're like crying yourself out at sleep tonight because you're so stressed out with your million to-do's. Oh, and there's still your day job, which is suffering madly.

Speaker 1: Um so avoid burnout at all costs. And we're gonna talk about ways to do this, but um 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 tasks and improvements. This is really big because again, you see all these 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 once? So we'll start planning, we'll start documenting, we'll start a process, and then piece by piece implement That idea that we've come up with. So breaking down tasks and small improvements and thinking

Speaker 1: what can I feasibly get done as a volunteer, somebody who does not do this full-time and not hate my life. Give yourself office hours. Um this is huge when it comes to responding to email because that's what gets me every time is email will hit my inbox and I think I have to answer it 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 another hour, and then I start my work day and I do that nine to five, 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

Speaker 1: it will save your life and you will look like such less of an asshole when it comes to your email communications. Nothing makes me feel worse than when I get that email from somebody being like, hi, I don't 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 of that. So inbox news feature highly recommend. Guard your time carefully. Your time is 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 you and They're like, well, I want A, B, and C and it has to be done tomorrow. No, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe I can give you A, I can get a start on B, but manage other people's expectations and guard your time because that is the most precious asset you have

Speaker 1: No is a complete sentence. Speaking of guarding time, Jennifer's first law. A person's incompetence in email is directly proportionate to the likelihood that they will massively waste your Uh again, this is four years of experience speaking that when somebody emails me about something and 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 and 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 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 vomit at me for another three email threads, I know this person, if they can't communicate effectively in an email, are going to waste

Speaker 1: my time. I made this mistake. I lost two hours of my work day volunteering to do this panel that this woman was endlessly berating me about. It was a poorly run event by time um it was my turn to sp 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 gonna communicate what we were there to communicate because this event was so poorly managed, so mishandled and there were only four people in the office audience. Again, um one of those four people might have been valuable, but me is my 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

Speaker 1: 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 one, 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 speak speaking engagements per quarter. You know, I'll vet those whether it's a form based on validity or or um 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 were actually talking about this at breakfast. I get really bad anxiety sometimes when I have so much on my to-do

Speaker 1: plate that I 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 I feel so much clearer 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 gonna get done Tuesday. I have to get this done by Thursday. Um and so that's been really helpful for me. Um again, utilizing technical tools, setting calendar to-dos are 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 programs that we set calendar reminders to make sure we're always following up on these certain details that we need. On your calendar. Um, 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?

Speaker 1: 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 personal calendar. Sinks 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 team members for our organization, I'll send them my calendar calendarly link and say, hey, excited to talk to you, schedule something new that works for you in my calendar, done. So there's no back and forth. It wastes 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

Speaker 1: different slide time slot 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. Uh I don't say this to scare you, but if you do anything, whether it's running an event, um getting you know in 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 of the limitations that you're up against, but that will not stop it. So I I like to kind of brief people um because I was not prepared for the amount of criticism I received when I started running an organization Especially if it's an organization uh

Speaker 1: supporting minorities, that bullet on your back, that target on your back for criticism is gonna 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, something new is creating. 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 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

Speaker 1: but not personally. If there's truth or merit in the criticism, try to learn for it. Otherwise, let it roll right off you. Uh story time. We had a leader on 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 can't get kid duties handled or 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 going to 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.

Speaker 1: This person would then post very passive aggressive messages on our Slack community pertaining to information that she A 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 I was interested in asking her to step down, but when I was of my team members is like, 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 anti-feminist, like all this stuff. Ninety percent of it was just horrible

Speaker 1: and her trying to point fingers because she realized that people were realizing she was 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 put point fingers and throw shade at me. That being said, what was the 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 the They're not completely wrong, but it will save you headaches down the line and you will feel better about yourself and the decisions you make when you kind of get

Speaker 1: this clarity. Embrace the mocking Jay. Um 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 one good thing, right? I just wanted to launch 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 total Token woman in tech in Kansas City. And it was a lot of spotlight that I was not prepared for. Um, I remember our first kickoff event, I had to get on off on stage, and I'm literally just like slamming shots of bourbon 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.

Speaker 1: They want something to aim toward And so instead of letting my insecurities take over, I had to learn a way to kind of embrace the mocking J, embrace being that symbol, and learn to operate in that world in a context of what people needed me to be. Build your network. Um community organizing, any leadership roles can be lonely because you have a certain level of um stature and way you need to present yourself and sometimes that means you're not gonna be able to to talk to your team about certain issues. You're gonna have rogue volunteers, you're gonna have awkward, difficult conversations, um, codes of conduct, the way we're being inclusive or exclusive. These are um conversations that warrant group think. So the more you can find other community leaders to talk through your problems, find a mentor, mentor other budding community leaders because you don't want to do this for the rest of your life and only be the only one.

Speaker 1: 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 Coder Dojo we had two dads almost get into a literal fist fight. 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 how figure out how to be very proactive about situations that might happen, the stronger our groups will be. Learn to delegate. So when I started my organization four years ago, I went with a committee. of women and it was like herding angry bitchy cats.

Speaker 1: Um 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 had specific roles. And 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, um 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 volunteer organization, but 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.

Speaker 1: And if it gets to be too much, well, that's when we start recruiting more people to help. But this is huge in delegating because some people you can't just like lob a general task list out and say, do this. Sometimes you as a leader need to to take it on yourself to better prioritize and delegate. I love this photo. This is from our Django Girls event this year. This is our second year. The first year I did almost everything myself. Everything from marketing to communicating and recruiting 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 in, they were on the news talking about this.

Speaker 1: 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 supersede 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 loosen, some stress relief, uh, but documentation is cle key, creating clear and defined roles and um making it easy for for people to step into this. That being said, a mistake I've made in the past is I am a mama lion. I like to protect my people. I probably codd up coddle way more than I should. And so sometimes it's hurt me that I've not um

Speaker 1: I've tried to like solve all the problems for everyone. everybody instead of giving my leadership team key um 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 like me you might want to protect everybody 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 that was a big commandment. Thou shalt become an expert communicator. Communication, I 'm pretty sure, is the problem behind every issue. Poor communication. So this is 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 um

Speaker 1: 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 you're trying to implement and you're trying to execute. But and it's easy to assume that everybody is on that same page. Everybody's 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 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

Speaker 1: valid information from that, you just wasted my time and reduced my willingness to work with you. And so I hold myself to that same standard. If I want to communicate to you 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 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. 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.

Speaker 1: Um so these are kind of safeguards you can put in um 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 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 um 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 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

Speaker 1: 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 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 um our leader that you know went nuclear and sent that email, uh, I think I could have been better about following up with her and saying, hey, if you have any concerns, please let me know. Hey, if you have any criticism or feedback meet for me, please let me know. And instead of letting it just escalate to this uh 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.

Speaker 1: So this is a pitfall that hit me very early in my um 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 I'm gonna know where the venue is, I'm gonna know exactly what's happening, I'm gonna know exactly when the schedule is of things. And so I just assume that everybody operates on this baseline I do of reading what event they're going to 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 event by descriptions or sending out emails or whatever works for your organization to be

Speaker 1: better manage people's expectations, the less bullshit criticism and complaints are gonna get. Um oh you need my real job. So I mentioned this at the beginning of the talk, get this question a lot. There's this weird thing that happens with volunteer organizations that people People just ex assume that you're not restricted to traditional business restraints, that economies of scale don't apply to you because it's volunteer. Um 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 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.

Speaker 1: Crazy's gonna cry. This is a uh uh gift from The Bachelor. She is like possibly my favorite villain of all time. Um I wanna say that no matter how well you do in managing expectations and clearly communicating, some people will never be pleased. Um I'm running a little low on time but I love to share the story just because it's hysterical. Um so uh 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 Kansas City women technology and 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 um but so I respond to him but my account is private so he couldn't see my tweet um which I realized after the fact

Speaker 1: but we had um 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 event had just started like I'm sitting facing the door and two girls had just walked in um and they were sitting we were We were talking this crazy looking dude, like his hair's puffed out to here, like rock size with me in beelines, 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 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. science and is 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. Um, you know, absolutely want to do everything we can to support, but we're still small and growing and trying to build up. None of this was satisfying

Speaker 1: him. was just reaming my ass. And so finally I'm like, you know, I 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 's gonna cray Um 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 want to partner with you. And uh I firmly believe that you need to secure your organization's oxygen mask first before partnering with other oxygen. partnering with other organizations. You need to get your house in order to be an effective community partner, and it's okay to express that.

Speaker 1: So get your house in order, then you can build building begin building partnerships and helping others. Thou shalt not neglect thy volunteers. I knew this was a lot of content to get through. Okay. Do not make your volunteers herd cats. I don't know if you've ever showed up to an event before where it wasn't real structured or real planned and 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 You feel like maybe your time was wasted. Um if you want your volunteers to come back, have everything structured and ready and set up for 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

Speaker 1: your volunteer and as much as possible keep your volunteers out of the line of fire of criticism. See earlier, crazy's gonna cray. 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. Um I really like sending out reminder emails and creating calendar invites. Uh the key here is to make sure that one person is in charge of communications and that your volunteers aren't getting communicated with from 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. because we want to keep them coming back.

Speaker 1: 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 become a control free can handle everything. We very much try and build our event our volunteers and our mentors up, allow them to take on organization roles, build the resumes, get some leadership practice. Provide nice volunteer shirts. I hate crappy shirts 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 nice to wind down, you know, nice dinner in a cocktail. So this This is something we always prioritize. Actually, thank you to RevSys for sponsoring our mentor appreciation party this year after our 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.

Speaker 1: So brag for them. This is just the teeniest, tiniest thing that you can 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 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 does need to do 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 um all the amazing women in our organization, get information and submit them from awards. Again, back to that me being the token woman. In Tech in Kansas City problem, we're very actively 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 and join your organization.

Speaker 1: Now shall plan as far in advance as calendar calendarly possible. This is the worst word, but it's effective. Sorry, my slides. What are On earth. Okay, sorry about that. Okay, moving on. Um so if you plan your advance in advance, it'll be easier to book speakers, volunteers, and venues. Um granted, people have their own schedules, so if you can get on their schedule earlier, um that's key to do. If you've ever played

Speaker 1: You have to book your venue at least a year in advance, so keep that in mind. Um, if you have diversity goals, make efforts sooner rather than later. Nothing drives me up the wall more than some organization putting on 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 gonna be your token woman 24 hours in advance like do a better effort from the get-go thou shalt confirm the venue thrice uh cover your ass um We've had events before where we've had routine monthly events and then I've shown up like one month and knocked at the door Nobody's there the space is a mess my attendees arriving. Who looks like the jackass here? It's me, it's not the vendor.

Speaker 1: So anything you can do to um Keep your vendors and your venues on the same page with you, the better you will look. Again, more work on your part, 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 events. And here we go again with my okay. Uh follow up or look like a jackass. Um this is something that I fell prey to early where I would, you know, take get feedback and be like, well they should have just known, or I'm a volunteer, so you know So they should know. Um I only have five minutes left. Okay. Thou shall 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.

Speaker 1: Our our volunteer staff 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 tank your technical event in a heartbeat. It's not fun, there's no coming back from it. That being said, test in test ahead of time if you can. And really key, have the phone number or the contact information for the person who A knows where the router is, B can 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. Thou shalt have a designated chaos lead. Um Murphy's Law, what can go 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.

Speaker 1: I'm assuming everybody's seen this gift before. Um, there will always be problems you can't plan for. The one thing you don't want to have is your leadership team that's already in charge of running a being those people running around to solve problems on the fly. So have a designated chaos lead. Somebody who was 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. Uh that did happen in New York City Django Girls. Event, by the way. It's like terrified me ever since I heard that story. Um, constant vigilance. Um again, I don't want to scare you from community organizing. I just wanna I like to send my troops into battle prepared, right? So I wanna 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.

Speaker 1: We solicit feedback from our attendees, from our mentors, from our volunteers, from the parents of our attendees. And then we take this feedback, we collect it in docs. There's some big items that we can't tackle right away, but there's some small things that we can tweak and add to our process improvement that's allowed us to run really great events over time. Um 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, and what could we do better next time if you've never been into a retrospective before. Repeat emails. If you get a lot of emails asking the same question, those questions should be on your 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.

Speaker 1: Again, biting off what's feasible but definitely I identifying what your leadership team is spending the most time on especially if it's um 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 best bachelor. I have a very amazing team who does that instead and they're so much better at it than I would ever be. Begin gathering data and feedback as soon as you can getting these processes in place are the the best thing you can do for continuing to improve and also going after sponsorship money. You can say, hey, these will these were the numbers we hit that last year. This is what we're doing this year. This is projected for the next year. That can really be great your tool belt. Summary. Those are Ten Commandments of Community Organizing. If you follow me on Twitter, I am working on a book that summarizes a lot of this and a lot more.

Speaker 1: So if you want to get more information that way will be a good place to look. These slides are available on GitHub at that link. Does anyone have any questions?

Speaker 2: Thanks for the great talk and the tips uh regarding inbox by Google and Calendee. Uh my question is, I have an eleven-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 Pygame library. What resources would you recommend that my niece can access online? Perhaps a specific resource on Coder Dojo or a book I can order for her to give her a fair opportunity to get excited about code?

Speaker 1: Um so she's a little young right now, but um when she hits I think eighteen months or it's either eighteen months or three years. I can't remember. It's the Codapillar by Fisher Price, which is this little caterpillar you can connect to do do cool programming so that's good for her age. As soon as she is capable of read.

Speaker 2: Uh she's eleven years old. I might have said eleven months. Sorry about that.

Speaker 1: All right, that changes my answer then. Uh we start all our kiddos off on scratch, which is the drag and drop UI developed by MIT. That being said, um at a conference a couple weeks ago, I just gave a talk on jewelbox, which is programmable jewelry founded by Sarah Chips, who's the um 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, connect with her friends, have a really great community and utility library and docs around.

Speaker 3: So I'm interested in in getting something like this set up in my community, but I'm 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.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Um and I get this question a lot. Uh we've actually got a women take tech makers group in town, which my buddy Kyle runs, um, because he he's uh affiliated with the Google developer group and this is something but um if 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 labor leadership team so the best you can 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 and lead it that's the best way to go. Um yeah.

Speaker 4: Uh so in 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 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?

Speaker 1: I totally got to play Halo like for four hours on a Friday night. It was awesome. Um 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 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 spend on this a week. Um 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 1: 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.

Speaker 5: I was just curious to hear a little bit more about I I run an organization as well and 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 make sure the communication came up to you and back down and just how to manage that.

Speaker 1: Yeah um I asked my team to CC me on everything. Okay. 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 CCO 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 the calendar and then meeting meeting notes from everything are added to Google Drive. We do monthly board meetings where we do um 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 um big picture vision and so that's yeah

Speaker 6: all right uh I'm gonna actually ask the last question here while I've got the mic Uh so I'm a community organizer as well. Um how do you hold yourself accountable? Are there like support groups for this kind of thing?

Speaker 1: Uh no, but I'm working on that.

Speaker 6: Okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah, sorry, I'm I'm trying to organize a glamping retreat for women in tech organizers. So we can go and talk about a lot of these issues. But Slack communities are a great place to go to find other community leaders.

Speaker 6: Awesome. If people have more questions afterwards, can they find you on Twitter, Slack, Hall?

Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter, um like Omgi at Sveddy. whatever. I've got to catch my flight in like 20 minutes, but uh you have until I make it out the shuttle door to ask me more questions.

Speaker 6: Awesome. Thank you, Jennifer.