Pay to Speak and Why Non-Profit Does Not Mean What You Think

Four years ago, I started a conference as an experiment in figuring out how a tech conference could be more fair to speakers. I had experienced many sleepless nights trying to figure out what were my values as a mother of two in allocating the family money to Pay to Speak at conferences, just because it was something I personally aspired for.

Looking at the way I felt about my immediate choices I had to make within my family, and the greater scheme of things in the community, I started actively looking at a theme I plugged #PayToSpeak. It was an observation that while conferences sell the possibility to come hear speakers teach what  they had learned, I found myself short of money as showing up at conferences was something where I was expected to pay my travel and accommodation. I paid, just like everyone else, building barely enough name to get to a point I could have a choice.

In the greater scheme of things, people like myself of with less privilege than what I had as a single mother of two, suffer more from #PayToSpeak. Also, where you work matters - some companies seek the visibility in your conferences and are willing to pick up the travel bill, while I personally have chosen to work in product companies that would choose to invest their visibility euros in other conferences than the ones I want to speak at.

So I created a sheet, and very recently upped it to a web site with a link to the sheet. It will move forward when I feel I have time and energy. But it serves a purpose already as it is. You can check out http://paytospeak.org to learn about the theme.

Fairly regularly, I get conference representatives asking me to present them in a more positive light. CAST chairperson Maria Kedemo asking for improvements in the documents is not unusual.

I really would appreciate if it was mentioned in the document that CAST is driven by AST which is a non profit organisation. Puts some context to the conference as well.

— Maria Kedemo (@mariakedemo) November 27, 2018

However, I have not yet found a way of presenting information like this. As you may guess from the title of my post, being a non-profit is not as obvious tick box as you might think.

The difference of a non-profit and company as organizer is hard to describe. Both can organize the same conference. Both can organize it for the same price for participant. Both can choose to use most of the money to pay salaries for the organizers, and all expenses for the speakers. Both can choose to be #PayToSpeak. The only real difference is in what they can choose to do with the profits.

Remember, profit is what is left after all the costs. Salaries are costs. So even for a company, you don't have to end up making profit.

What non-profit do with the profit they raise is that  they run their cause. The cause for AST is admirable. They use the money they make in conferences in financially supporting small testing communities that need that money to bring in speakers, pay event organizing costs, start new events. AST played a core role in financially supporting my conference on year one, saving me from some of the financial stress taking a risk of going into organizing with them, rather than all by myself.

My conference uses the profits on supporting new speakers traveling to other #PayToSpeak conferences, and enabling people who aspire to speak to experience a conference they can't pay for. With the cost structure of always paying the speakers expenses and being uncertain about number of paying participants, the profits from the conference to use on the cause have not been very large.

Instead, my conference has served as an experimentation platform. I can now say that  while speakers are important, the sales and marketing effort is more important in a conference's success. I have found new respect for people who manage to run series of conferences with volunteers only, and for conferences that pay their organizers. The choices of what work / costs are worth paying from the conference budget are not easy, and will be versatile and hard to describe.

So I choose to only describe in my sheet the immediate impact for the speaker - what money out of pocket are they expected to find or what financial support they can expect to see, should they volunteer as speakers.

I dream of a world we we'd also have the money to compensate for used time for the speakers. That means that the audience - all of us - needs to have money to pay for those services. The world is more than half-full of people for whom their companies never paid a single tech conference. They might never get to go, or if they go, it is personal time off.

New Speakers, New Stories - Agile Testing Days USA SpeakEasy Track

Yesterday at TestBash USA, one of people I've mentored behind the scenes delivered a talk. I woke up today to a delightful message: "...had people saying I was their favorite talk. I wouldn't have reached this point without your help, I can't thank you enough."

Today, at Belgrade Testing Days, lovely people on Twitter delivered me news that another people I have mentored had a full house and got 4.93/5 in immediate app feedback for her first ever talk.

There is something in common. These people did awesome with their talks. They invited help. But what that really shows is that they have always been awesome, and inviting help was just small part of them putting effort into making their messages accessible for others. It has been my pleasure to be a small part on their journey, and get privately insights into what they are teaching - me and others.

I believe we all have worthwhile lessons to share. And we are ourselves our worst enemies talking down to ourselves. There is something you've done. There is something you care for. Your approach, when shared, could help someone else figure out their approach. It could be the same as yours. It could be completely opposite, yet inspired by you. The conference stages are for us learning together, and we need different perspectives and stories on those stages.

You - yes, YOU - have this in you. And you don't have to take that step of becoming a speaker alone. That is why there is SpeakEasy, a community initiative of building productive relationships between speakers, mentors and conferences. I believe in this so much that I've formed a leadership team with 3 lovely colleagues to take the initiative forward from 2018 on. I believe in this so much that I have mentored dozens of people, and keep my calendar open for giving time to support people on their speaking journeys.

Right now, I am volunteering with SpeakEasy that works in collaboration of one of the lovely conferences: Agile Testing Days USA. We have a full SpeakEasy track we are building to get stories to learn from that wouldn't be available otherwise. We seek for 6 talks, 2 workshops and 1 keynote. The talks are from new speakers. The workshops would be new speakers pairing with more seasoned speakers. And the keynote would be a seasoned speaker who has not had their changes of kicking into the keynoting regular circles yet.

You have one more week to join this. To join as a new speaker, you need to schedule yourself into my calendar for 15 minute discussion. We'll figure out what your early idea could look like, and consider it as something that you'll build with support from a mentor if it is the right match for a balanced program. Schedule your session now. If nothing else, you'll get a chance to talk your experiences through with me, and hear my ideas of how you could frame that for other stages.

If you get selected, Agile Testing Days USA pays the travel (with specified limits) and accommodation, and you get to enjoy the other sessions in the conference too. It's a lot of work to prep a talk, but it is also rewarding to structure your thoughts so that others are able to follow. It is a skill, I find, that makes a difference in your career.

You are awesome. And I want to talk with you. I need you to take the first step. I can't find you when you've not taken that stage yet.

Code of Conducts and Stopping Bad Behavior

This post is inspired by two tweets that just run past me on my timeline.

First one was a suggestion that Code of Conduct exists to make underrepresented minorities more comfortable, sharing an example of rude mansplaining and dismissal of technical abilities.

Second one was an experience in unwanted male attention in a meetup making a woman not return. And pointing out there was no code of conduct, as well as sharing another experience of introducing contracts of not using mentorship relations in another meetup as a means of meeting people in romantic sense.

This stuff is all around. It is structural and perpetuated by all genders to an extent. Women are almost as bad at assuming that your programming skills vanish to think air now that you became a manager when the opposite could just as well be true. We hold a belief, strongly, that for our careers sake we should not be actively sharing stuff around minority discrimination. And we really don't understand that because all of this is structural, it is not intentional that I am a racist, but I need to really pay attention to the belief systems that sometimes make people who feel really safe with me to point out my misbehaviors.

The tech world tries to solve some of these issues by code of conducts, which could be a mechanism of informing and creating agreements on what is appropriate and what not. To protect  the underrepresented, sometime it feels like oppression to the majority view. But hateful, mean comments close folks out. Keeping that shit to yourself may close you out, but that is then your choice.

What I wanted to write about though was a conference I was involved in, one that tries hard to make it a safe place. They've been very successful in the step 1 of making it safe: equal representation of interpreted binary gender. Their speaker roster models what gender and often also race in this industry should look like. They are a tech conference where the feel of it is that binary genders are equally represented. And that comes with hard work they should feel proud of.

Equal representation as step 1 is important in the sense that there majority of people play nice together. The parties are fun, and I don't sense a need of being overly careful. Atmosphere is normal, everyone feels to be on generally good behavior. People mix, people talk. And sometimes people consensually hook up.

The conference has had a code of conduct for a while, and last year they also introduced extra mechanisms of enforcing it. That is where I got involved. And it turned out to be an awful experience for me.

It started off with someone pointing out that a talk title made them uncomfortable. I had volunteered to represent, so I looked into it. I talked to the speaker. I knew the contents were ok. But my judgement was that the title should not have been accepted to protect minorities I did not identify myself with. Nothing changed, except that I gave up on my extra responsibilities because they violated my sense of justice with "can't fix a mistake at this point".

Even without the extra duties, people would now consider me someone to escalate issues to. In the middle of the night, I find myself pinging the conference organizers to sort out their own stuff, with little success. The incident this time is some ass grabbing triggering bad old stuff, and having to deliver the message to the person that while they might think they did not do anything, I'm saying that none of this stuff can happen no more and that I will not be telling them who reported them. Not the most joyous of my nights.

The reason I write about this is to say that even in the best of conferences, stuff happens. Code of conducts are only as good as the people enforcing them. People enforcing them need to take deep looks inside their value systems, learn to look empathetically at underrepresented groups they are not part of, and bravely address issues as they come. Questioning people's negative experience has a term: victim blaming.

So for my own conference, I ask people to be kind and considerate. And while I do have a code of conduct, I know that my enforcement of it matters. I've needed to tell a dear friend that their jokes are inappropriate when they perpetuate the programmer - tester divide. I've needed to tell a speaker that many of their references are known assaulters, that they're all men and that the only woman in the whole slide deck was presented as a laughing stock, and that they used ableist language discussing autism. The stuff I do is educational, but they are also unintentional violations of the spirit. I remember the moment of having to tell this to a speaker. I remember their surprise. I remember them exclaiming how we were the first to ever tell him this even if thousands of people have seen the talk. Even if I had seen the talk before. And I remember the thank you.

We all need to learn more about this stuff. And when we see things happening, when we are in position of privilege, we can step in and help.

Diversity of thought requires background differences

I care about diversity and inclusion. When I say that, I mean that I want to see tech and testing in particular to reflect the general population in its variety and conferences lead the forefront of the change in that equal opportunity. Looking from within my bubble, testing is already the area where there are a lot of women and seeing testing conferences that struggle with finding one woman worth giving stage (as some of them phrase it) is just lazy.

The diversity and inclusion means more than (white) women like me. I want to learn from people who are not like me or the men I've been strongly guided to learn most from through other people's choices. When people are different, their backgrounds and experiences are different, what is easy and hard is different and they end up learning new insightful ways of teaching from the platform they have created for themselves.

Some people seem to like saying they want to see diversity of thought in conferences as a way of emphasizing that they don't want to care of diversity and inclusion in the way I look at it, recognizing that the platform you are teaching from, the person you've become through your experiences is an essential part of being able to really have diverse perspectives.

Diversity of thought could mean:

• I want conference talks where people tell me that the foundation of my beliefs is off even if it isn't so that I think about it.
• I want talks of topics I have not yet heard, or really insightful ways of delivering a message I feel is important enough so that I could learn from how that message gets passed on
• I want people who I feel can add something to what I know (even if usually it happens 1:1 discussing) 

I find real diversity and having a representative crowd of speakers worth focusing in conference design. Given any deeply technical or insightfully hard human topic where you can name a man, I can name a woman or a non-binary speaker who can deliver the talk with experiences the men can never speak of. I have a lot of work on recognizing the people of color due to my limited exposure, but I'm working on it. And I still work on being able to for any given international expert name a local expert.  

Representation matters. You need to see someone you identify with to believe you can go there. To get the general population of talent into the software development world, it is not enough to share the white men talking heads, but actively show a representation of what the world needs to look like.

It shouldn't be hard to have top-notch speakers for 10 slots in a conference when selecting from a pool of millions of candidates. Yes, there's a lot of people out there who feel they need to work twice as hard to get half the results. How about conference organizers working twice as hard identifying them and supporting places (like SpeakEasy for testing) that support those people starting off on a fast track to awesome speaking.

Finally, back to diversity of thought I wanted to add that I find that is a catchphrase not founded on reality. In the last three years of conference organizing, I have spoken through 200 proposals a year, totaling now at 500 since I'm half way through this year. There is no diversity of thought as such that I can see. There's diversity of topics and experiences, a lot of insistence of using the right words but overall we mostly share a vision of what good testing looks like from perspectives of testers and developers. Every one of those stories is worth a stage. But some of those stories are refused a stage because they require work before they are ready, others because there's someone who can deliver similar story with a different background, and others just because there is not enough space period.

In the same timeframe, I've spoken in tens of conferences a year and used the conferences in hearing other people talk. So I can probably add 15 a year, with 10 talks each - 450 more samples.

In addition, I volunteer for various other conferences that do traditional call for proposals as a reviewer. That adds more.

The datapoint that I have are the people who submit. I'm personally a datapoint that does not submit. I have given stage to many many people who did not submit - some that never did a talk before. I found them amongst participants. That's where the real stories I need to get out there are. 

Pay To Speak - why care and other collected thoughts

I hold a strong belief that the world of conferences needs to change so that it is not #PayToSpeak. This means that while you are not necessarily making money for speaking (that should happen too), you are not paying money out of pocket for speaking.

Recently I spoke at a big conference that has no call for proposals but invites all speakers and says to pay their travel, including the following weekend's hotel nights to enjoy the beautiful city the conference is at. They have a policy of checking in with them on bookings or them doing bookings for you. So when they did my bookings for flights, they had me leave home 3:30 AM and return home 2:00 AM. That meant no public transport available to the airport. I could drive and park there, or I could take taxi. I chose the latter as cheaper option. When I arrived after 8 hours of being stuck on travel for something that would be a 2 hour direct flight, I had a taxi pick me up. However as I needed to get out immediately after my scheduled talk to still almost miss my flight, I had to find (and pay) the taxi myself. The flight tickets did not include any luggage, so I ended up paying 80 euros just to bring my stuff with me. Packing so that I can take it all inside means compromises on cosmetics I would rather not do while having to feel presentable. That's one of the women's problems, I guess.

The extra costs totaled to 180 dollars, which was more than the cheap flight they found me. Their view was that they wouldn't pay and that was yet another nail in the coffin killing my speaking willingness. Now it looks like they might pay, but I believe when the money is on my account.

So being against #PayToSpeak means that I believe that while it is reasonable to ask speakers to be considerate of costs (no business travel), it is not reasonable to optimize in ways where you just transfer the costs to them.

To be clear, many conferences are #PayToSpeak. Most in fact in the field of testing. A little less in the field of programming. A little less in the field of testing now that we are getting to a point of being respectable industry (including automation).

Why should the conferences care?

We've seen examples like Selenium Conference moving away from #PayToSpeak. The results they report are amazing.

• 238 % increase in number of submissions - there are a lot of people with great content that cannot afford to teach in conferences that are pay to speak
• new subjects, new speakers, new nationalities and new perspectives - all valuable for us learning in the field
• percentage of women submitting growing from 10% to 40% - showing that the pay to speak might disproportionately impact underrepresented groups ability to teach in conferences

Surely you don't mean that we should pay newbie speakers?

I find that #PayToSpeak conferences present their audiences three groups of speakers:

• Those so privileged financially that paying isn't an issue
• Those with something to sell so that their companies pay them to deliver a sales pitch in disguise. Some better disguised than others. 
• Those dreaming of public speaking experience finding no other options but paying their woes, sometimes delivering great talks. Believing paying is temporary. 

I believe that people in first category can opt out of payments in a conference that pays the expenses. In my experience they rarely do opt out on the out of pocket money, but many have opted out on profit sharing to leave money behind to support new speakers. People in the second category might become sponsors and pay more than just expenses to attend, and have their sessions branded as "industry practice / tool talks" which is often a way of saying it's selling a service or a tool. 

The third category is what makes me sad. 

As a very inexperienced and young speaker I feel like I’m stuck doing #PayToSpeak in order to get opportunities

— Andrea Fox (@TestFox26) July 17, 2018

This should not be the case. We should pay these speakers expenses. Our audiences deserve to learn from them.

As conference organizer, the thing I'm selling is good lessons from a (insert your favorite positive adjective) group of speakers. There are other ways of managing the risk of bad speakers than making sure your audience only gets to listen to the financially-well-off-and-privileged segment.

You could ensure the speakers with less of reputation get support and mentoring. With things like Speak Easy and folks like myself and Mark Dalgarno always popping up to volunteer in twitter, this is a real opportunity for conferences as well as individuals.

For Profit and Not For Profit

Finally, these words don't mean what you think they mean around conferences. You can have a not for profit conference with really expensive tickets and they can pay the speakers (this is the vision I build European Testing Conference towards - making real money to pay real money to speakers within a not for profit organization using profits to pay other conferences speaker's travel). You can have a for profit conference with ridiculously small cost and they still pay the speakers (Code Europe was one like this - they made their money out of selling participants to sponsors in various ways in my perspective).

Speaker's choices of where they show up with great material matters. But most of all, participants using money on the conferences matter most. Pay for the good players. Be a part of a better world of conferences.

Feeling Pressured to An Opinion

It was one of those 40 collaboration calls I've been on to figure out what is people's contents that was special because of the way it ended up being set up. The discussion was as usual. There were a few of us having a discussion on an intriguing topic. The original topic was way too big for a single talk, and we collaborated on what would the pieces of focus look like that we would consider. 30 minute talks about everything between life and death don't do so well and don't end up selected, so we always seek something in a call that really has a fighting chance.

As I ended the call, a friend in the room expressed they had been listening in saying "You can't seriously consider you'd take *that* into the conference program".

I was taken back but was stupid enough to budge under pressure to confirm that I wasn't seriously thinking of it. Even though I actually am. I always am.

Because of my failure to - again - stick up to what I believe and let a verbal bully run over me, I felt like I wasn't true to my values. But I also learned that while in the moment I may be run over, I always come back to fix what I did wrong. So a few hours later, I expressed my annoyance of the style of communication, and recognizing the added bias of this negative interaction, I'm more carefully taking the advice of the two other excited co-organizers I had on that call.

Looking at the interaction a little more was funny in the light of a discussion a few hours later on how  awesome visual thinking strategies (a lesson by Lisa Crispin) are in identifying when you're doing an observation and when you're doing an inference.

Observations are the facts. The exact words the person would use in a call. What you can visually verify. What you can sense with your senses without adding judgment.

Inferences are not facts. They are your observations mixed with your experiences. They are your biases at play. And the reason we teach the difference in testing (and try to practice it), is to recognize the difference and seek fairness.

What the friend didn't see fit in the conference program was only unfit through their biases and experiences of when people are collaborative and when they are pushy. There's room for pushy people like them pressuring me to opinions I need to come back defending, so I'm sure there's room for all sorts of people.

Software is easy but people are hard. And combination of the two is fascinating.

When Your Mind Fails You

I walked down from my room, through the long corridor to get to the conference venue in a big American hotel. I felt great and was looking forward to meeting people. I walked to the registration desk, and while I know many of the conference organizers, I did not know anyone there. I walked around a bit, seeing lots of people but no familiar faces. And I recognized the feeling of anxiety. I was uncomfortable, turned around and walked back to my room, just in time to collapse in a massive panic attack.

I don't know what panic attacks look like for others, but I know they are scary as hell for me. I hyperventilate, lose feel of first my fingers and then feet so that I cannot stand up. My face tingles, like it was waking up from being numb without it having been numb. And the only way out of it is to find a way to calm down. Hugging a pillow helps. Being angry at people close to me doesn't. But blaming some of the uncontrollable emotion on others feels like a plausible explanation, until it happens enough to realize it is something where my mind just plays tricks on me.

The trigger to my anxiety seems right now seems to be conferences, particularly large ones with lots of people I don't know or things not flowing as I imagined. The first one I remember I got from the very first developer conference I ever volunteered to speak at. For the last two years, panic attacks have been a frequent companion to every developer conference, but lately also creeping into testing conferences.

Conferences are too rough on me, so I will be taking a break. Not only because I can't deal with my mind, but also because my presence is needed at home.

I used to be afraid of public speaking, and I trained myself out of it by taking a job that required regular speaking: teaching at university. I still remember what drove me into starting the practice: physically not being able to stand in front of a crowd just to introduce myself. It was crippling.

The panic attacks are more frightening, but also feel harder to control than the good-old fear of public speaking. Over time, I'll figure out a way of working this out. Time teaches things we can't expect or see. It always has.

So, you're a consultant?

I had just finished teaching a half-day training on Exploratory Testing at StarEast. The group was lovely and focused, 18 individuals with different backgrounds and experiences.

Group on my StarEast Tutorial

We were just about to start a speed meeting event, and I talked with someone I had not met before. They saw that I had a speaker badge, and asked immediately: "So, you're a consultant?". I looked puzzled for a moment before I explained, like so many times before that I was a tester in a team, that majority of my working days went into testing with a wonderful team and delivering features to production on pretty much a continuous cadence. 

The question, however, crossed a personal threshold. It was that one too many to think that I wasn't out of place and fighting against the stream. The default setting was to be a consultant, not an employee in a product development company. It was yet another one of those things that made me happy that I had decided to stop speaking at conferences for now. 

Being a consultant is a great thing. But consultants are a different species. They are more self-certain. They're ok being always on the road. They often live off their analysis of other people's work. They carry a risk that I can only admire they cope with, believing there will be more clients. They get different value out of doing (usually an unpaid) talk at a conference because they have something to sell.

I'm here because I have a strong need to sharing what I have learned, in hopes of finding people who can help me accelerate my learning. I'm not a consultant, but I care. And I'm particularly lucky in being non-consultant with an employer who truly supports me doing this as long as I want to do it. It's just that I no longer really want the travel. Maybe again when my kids are past their teenage years. Meanwhile, my helping presence is online, not in conferences. 

Conferences as a change tool

European Testing Conference 2018 is now behind us, except for the closing activities. And it was the best of three we’ve done so far. We closed the 2018 edition saying thank you and guiding people forward. Forward in this case was a call for action to look into TestBash Netherlands, which is in just two months in Utrecht. I will personally attend as a speaker, and having been to various TestBashes, I’m excited about the opportunity to share and learn with fellow test enthusiasts. 

This promotion of other conferences is yet another thing where we are different. We don’t promote the other conferences because they ask us to. We don’t promote them because they pay us to. We promote them because we’ve learned something before we started organizing our own conference: we all do better when we all do better. 

In TestBash New York, Helena Jeret-Mae delivered a brilliant talk about career growth, with one powerful and sticky message: in her career, while she stayed in the office and focused on excellence at work, nothing special happened. But when she went for conferences, met people and networked, things started happening. She summed it up as “Nothing happens when nothing happens”. There’s side effects to growing yourself in conferences, learning and networking, that create a network impact of making a change relevant in advancing your personal career. This resonated. 

At European Testing Conference 2018, there was a group of people in different roles in a company. There was the manager, and there was the person the manager would manage. Telling the person to do something differently had not resulted in a change. Sending the person to a place where people enthusiastically talked about doing the thing differently made the person come to manager with a great idea: there’s this thing I’m not doing now, I want to do more of it. Ownership shifted. A change started. The threshold of thinking “all cool kids are doing this” was exceeded. Power of the crowds made a difference. 

While we would love to see you at European Testing Conference 2019, the software industry is growing at a pace where we are realistically seeing that the need of awesome testing and programming education (tech excellence) is needed. We need to grow as professional ourselves, but also make sure our colleagues get to grow. We all do better when we all do better. We suggest you find a local meetup, learn and network. Go to any conferences, go to great conferences. Go and be inspired. The talks can give you nudges with ideas, the skills you acquire by practice. Sample over time, always look for new ideas. 

The short list of conferences I pay attention to mentioning are ones I recognize for being inclusive and welcoming, and treating the speakers right (paying their expenses and including new voices amongst seasoned ones). I want to share my love and appreciation for TestBashes (all of them, they are all around), Agile Testing Days (in USA and Germany), CAST (USA, since latest editions)  and Nordic Testing Days. The last one is a fairly recent addition to my list now that they’ve grown into a solid success that can treat the speakers right. 

I enjoy most of the conferences I’ve been to, and would recommend you to go to any of them. I have a list of my speaking engagements in http://maaretp.com and the places I’ve experienced is growing. 

What’s the conference you will be at this year? Make sure there is one. Nothing happens when nothing happens. Make things happen for you. 

I'm an awesome tester who also happens to be woman

At a test automation conference, I started talking with another participant. We exchanged details of the craft through name dropping and content appreciations. We talked about his upcoming talk, and I shared some ideas on the same topic. Excited on the discussion we were having, he decided to suggest I could do a lightning talk in the evening.

It was great that he suggested - I was not aware there was one, let alone that I could still get listed and that the voting was going on throughout the day. I immediately made up my mind.

But he continued: "we need women speaking".

I said nothing, more like shrugged. But decided to address it when speaking.

I introduced myself. I shared that I was here doing a lightning talk because another participant encouraged me to so that there would be women speaking. Needless to say, I was the only woman on the lightning talks round. I also mentioned that while it feels that my main reason to be here would be my gender, I'm here just as a person with credentials: that this is talk number 353 that I'm delivering, and that Kent Beck said yesterday he loved my book. I made a joke about it, because it was a better option for feeling uncomfortable than being silent about it.

After the talks, I talked again with the other participant. He apologized and invited ideas of how he could have better expressed his excitement on what I had potential on sharing. I suggested that reminding me on my gender (any woman on their gender) could be a pattern to avoid. They're already painfully aware.

The conference had no women in organizing committee.
There was one woman speaker out of 9 talks.
There were LOTS of women in the audience.

There's no absolute "best" in speakers. Speakers tell stories that are based on the life lived. We need diverse voices. What I said today to open my lightning talk was something that just happened to me: all three details on my 'credentials'. I bet no one encouraged any of the men in a gender-based fashion.

I make lists of awesome testers. Notice the list never mentions "awesome women testers". Because the qualifier of gender isn't relevant. They are awesome, just as they are. Yet looks like no one can share and promote that list without mentioning gender.

But women did not submit

Sometimes some women have energy to go and mention in twitter when they see conferences with all male keynotes or all male lineup. Most of the time, we notice but choose not to go into the attacks that result from pointing it out.

I'm feeling selectively energetic, and thus I'm not addressing directly the particular conference that triggered me in writing, but the underlying issue of how the conferences tend to respond.

The most common response is: they tried, but women did not submit.

I don't think they tried enough.

Looked through yet another all male conference lineup, realizing I can name a woman who would deliver an awesome expert talk for each topic. For most, I could even name a local woman. Do better.

— Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp) December 16, 2017

I believe we should, in conferences, model the world as we want it. We should have half women half men. And with a lineups usually going up to 100 people, it is not hard to find 50 awesome women a year to speak on relevant topics. The audience would get amazing experience and learning. The one threatened by this proposal is the 40 men that in current setup get to speak, and with my proposal have to queue in to another event.

Instead of calling for proposals and choosing thinking of equality, perhaps we should be choosing based on equity. And if we did, perhaps we did not have to "fake it" long before we "make it.

The pool of awesome women speakers, in my experience, grows when potential women participating in conferences see people they can relate to and they feel they can do it too. We've done a lot in this respect, with SpeakEasy adding support after initial spark, in the last few years and it shows on some conferences. 

Here's a thought experiment I played through for the time when women are still not equally available. Let's assume I want to speak and I can invest 100 work units into speaking. I can invest this time in different ways:

Respond to CFPs trying to vary contents.

Each CFP process takes 10 units of work, and each talk takes 20 units of work. Varying the contents so that my talk would fit an invisible hole in  the program is a lot of work: if my talk is on How use of Amazon Lambdas Changes Testing, there could be 10 others with the same fashionable topic. If my talk is on Security Testing, maybe this is too much of a niche to be given space for at this conference. If my talk is on the hands-on experiences in testing machine learning systems, maybe the keynote speaker already fills the slot for discussing machine learning. 

So let's assume I approach this as equal player in the field, and I want to get to the conferences. I want my voice out there. It's embarrassing to have to say no when you get accepted, so I might choose to play my chances so that I could have a chance for two (saving 2*20 units of work) and thus I get to submit to 6 conferences.

Wait to be invited

If someone else carries the load of 10 work units and finds you, invites you and negotiates on exactly the topic that would fit the program, you save a lot of work. The 100 units allow for 5 talks instead of 2, making this person more available in conferences. This is the way to create equity while we need it. 

So, when conferences say that women did not submit, they're actually saying:

• the women who submitted did not choose to bet their time on us but went elsewhere
• we did not do enough to get women to be considered for the program
• we believe in treating everyone the same (equality), regardless if it being an approach that enforces status quo

Having good proportion of women is good business too. The contents are more representative, and speak to a wider audience. 

And, on towards intersectionality. It's easy to count this on binary gender, but that is not the diversity we look for. We want to see diversity of ethnicity, the whole spectrum of gender and whatever minorities we are not getting the changes to learn from. 

Becoming a Feedback Fairy

Late in the evening of a speakers' dinner at CraftConf 2017, I met a new person. He was a speaker, just like me, except that when he asked on what I would speak on, he used the words: "Explain it to me like I am not in this field, and I don't understand all the lingo".

I remember not having the words. But this little encounter with a man I can't even name made it into my talk the next day when I first time introduced myself in a new way:

"I'm Maaret and I'm a feedback fairy. It means that I use my magical powers (testing skills) to bring around the gift of deep and thoughtful feedback on the applications we build and the ways we build them. I do this on time for us to react, and with a smile on my face."

That little encounter coined something I had already been coming to from other ends. There were two other, prior events that had also their impact.

At DevOxx conference some time ago, I did a talk about Learning Programming. Someone in the audience gave me feedback, explaining that they liked my talk. The positive feedback as it was phrased made an impact, as they expressed that they'd ask me to be their godmother, unless that place was already up for grabs for J.K. Rowlings. As a dedicated Harry Potter fan, being next on anything from J.K. Rowlings is probably the nicest thing anyone can say.

As I received this feedback, I shared it with the women in testing group, and a new friend in the group picked it up. As I was doing my first ever open conference international keynote, she brought me a gift you can nowadays see in my twitter background: a fairy godmother doll, to remind me of my true powers.

For the Ministry of Testing Masterclass this week, I again introduced myself as a feedback fairy.

I’d love to be a Feedback Fairy like @maaretp 💜👩🏻‍💻 @ministryoftest @Singsalad

— Deborah Lee (@DeborahLee89) December 5, 2017

You can be a feedback fairy too, or whatever helps you communicate what you do. There's an upside on being a magical creature: I don't have to live to the rules set by the mortals. 

Sustainability and Causes of Conferences

Tonight is one of those where I think I've created a monster. I created #PayToSpeak discussion, or better framed, brought the discussion that was already out there outside our testing bubble inside it and gave it a hashtag.

The reason why I think it is a monster is that most people pitching into the conversation have very limited experience in the problem that it is a part of.

My bias prior to experience

Before I started organizing European Testing Conference, I was a conference speaker and a local (free) conference organizer. I believed strongly that the speakers make the conference.

I discounted two things as I had no experience of then:

1. Value of organizer work (in particular marketing) in bringing in the people
2. Conference longevity / sustainability

Both of these things mean that the conference organizers need to make revenue to pay expenses while the conference itself is not ongoing. 

Choices in different conferences

My favorite pick on #PayToSpeak Conferences is EuroSTAR, so let's take a more detailed look at them.

• A big commercial organization, paying salary of a full team throughout the year
• Building a community for marketing purposes (and to benefit us all while at it) is core activity invested in
• Pays honorarium + travel to keynote speakers
• Pays nothing for a common speaker, but gives an entry ticket to the conference
• Is able to accept speakers without considering where they are from as all common speakers cost the same
• Significant money for a participant to get into the conference, lots of sponsors seeking contacts with the participants

I suspect but don't really know that they might still have revenue of the conference after using some of the income on running the organization for a full year. But I don't really know. I know their choice is not to invest in the common speaker and believe it lowers the quality of talks they are able to provide. 

Another example to pick on would be Tampere Goes Agile - an Agile conference in Finland I used to organize. 

• A virtual project organization within a non-profit, set up for running each year
• No activity outside the conference except planning & preparation of the conference
• Pays travel to all speakers, can't pay special honorarium to keynote speakers
• Runs on sponsors money and stops when no one sponsors
• Is not able to get big established speaker names, as they don't pay the speakers
• Requires almost zero marketing effort, straightforward to organize
• Free to attend to all participants

Bottom line

PayToSpeak is not about conferences trying to rip us speakers off when they ask us to cover our expenses. Conferences make different choices on the ticket price (availability to participants with amount of sponsor activities) and investment / risk allocations.

Deciding to pay the speakers is a huge financial risk if paying people don't show up.
Paying speakers travel conditionally (if people show up) does not work out.
Big name keynote speakers expect typically 5-15k of guaranteed compensation in addition to their travel expenses being covered.

Conferences decide where they put their money: participants (low ticket prices), speakers (higher ticket prices with arguably better quality content), keynote speakers (who wouldn't show up without the money) or organizers (real work that deserves to be paid or will not continue long).

#PayToSpeak speaks from a speakers perspective. We can make choices of being able to afford particular conferences due to speaker-friendly choices they make.

Options

If we understand that there are two problems #PayToSpeak mixes up, we may find ideas of how to improve the current state:

1. Commonly appearing (but not famous) speakers need not to Pay to Speak to afford speaking.
2. New voices with low financial possibilities need not to Pay to Speak to afford speaking. 

If some conference does relevant work for 2, as a representative of 1 I would consider paying to speak. But I would have to choose like one per year, because that is not out of my company's pocket, but my own. 

If some conference collects money for a cause in a transparent way, I again would consider paying to speak, capping the number I can do in a year. 

There are options to removing Pay to Speak:

• Seek local speakers (build a local community that grows awesome speakers), and paying the expenses is not a blocker as the costs are small
• Commit to paying speaker expenses, but actively invite companies they work for to pay if possible to support your cause. See what that does. 
• Set one track to experiment with paying expenses and compare submission to that track to others, with e.g. attendee numbers and scores. 
• Say you pay travel costs on request, and collect the info of who requests it with call for proposals
• Team up with some non-profit on this cause and give them money for scholarships for some speakers. 

You can probably think some more. 

Conferences, none of them are inherently evil. Some of them are out of my reach as they are #PayToSpeak. And I'm not a consultant, nor work for a company that finds testers their marketing group. If I have to #PayToSpeak, I can't. I will remain local, and online. 

There's people like me, better than me, who have not started off by paying their dues of getting a little bit of name in some #PayToSpeak conference. I want to promote them the options of not having to #PayToSpeak. 

Why Do I Go to Conferences?

I find myself asking this question more often these days: why do I go to conferences? And in particular, why do I speak at conferences? And my answers vary, as I really don't know.

This week I spoke at Oredev, a developer conference, and felt totally disconnected and invisible. I did not talk to any new people. And new people did not talk to me. At first, I was quick to blame it on a tester identity, but it isn't that as I also identify as a polyglot programmer. I just did not have the chances for a discussion without first being active on it and even when I did, topics changed from tech to life. I listened to many sessions, some really great and others not so much, and came back with a decision on cutting down on conferences.

I used to get learning from conferences, but now my "being aware of techniques" learning quota feels full. Knowing of AWS, SAM, lambdas and step functions takes me somewhere, but the real application of those ideas takes me a lot further. And conferencing is threatening my time for practice.

My situation with this is not quite the usual one. I've been collecting the number of talks I do per year, and I already decided to cut down a year ago. Yet, looking at where I ended up isn't exactly showing the commitment: I have 27 sessions in 2017. 30 each year for 2016 and 2015. At this point of my life, talks emerge from my need of organizing my thoughts and driving my learning, and there are smaller time investments that would give me the same value.

So I wonder if people are finding pieces of joy, enlightenment, thoughts from whatever I end up sharing. Maybe that is worth the investment? There was one women I can thank for from Oredev that really made my day, coming to say one thing to me after my talk: "Thank you for speaking. It is so wonderful seeing women in tech conference stages." Most people say nothing, and pondering on this made me realize one of my speaking motivations is that that I crave for acceptance and acknowledgement.

Thinking a little further, I was thinking of the test conferences I find the most valuable for me: TestBashes. I've come back from those with new colleagues in the community to learn with, even friends. People I get to meet elsewhere, who bring so much joy into my life. But in particular, I remembered there is one accomplishment from each test bash that fills my heart with joy: I came back with a connection that created a new speaker.

Thank you Gita Malinovska, Bhagya Perera and Kate Paulk for making me feel like I had a role to play in the world seeing how awesome speakers you are. Gita and Bhagya I mentored in speaking after TestBashes brought us together, and they never really needed me but I needed them. Kate blew my mind with the discussions we had in TestBash Philly a year ago, when she seemed shy to take the stage, and I feel so proud seeing she delivered awesome in TestBash Philly this year.

There's a lot more names that I could drop that make me feel like I've served a purpose. But these three remind me that without going to conferences, our paths might not have crossed.

So I go to conferences for:

• Collecting ideas that I need time to turn to actions at work
• Making friends and maintaining our relationship
• Encouraging awesome people to be the inspiration on stage they are off stage

I speak to make it cheaper to go. I speak in hope of recognition. I speak in hope of connection, as I have hard time initiating discussions. But most of all, I speak to sort out my own thoughts. 

What are your reasons? 

How is European Testing Conference Different?

One sunny afternoon in San Diego over three years ago, I took a call with Adi Bolboaca. That call has since it happened defined a lot of what my "hobbies" are since (conference organizing) but also set an example of how I deal with things in general. From idea to schedule that call was all it took. We decided to start a conference.

The Conference was named European Testing Conference to reflect its vision: we were building the go-to testing conference in Europe and we'd take on the challenge of having the conference travel. In the three edition so far, we work with Bucharest (Romania), Helsinki (Finland) and Amsterdam (Netherlands).

As the Amsterdam Edition is well on its way to take place in February 19-20th 2018, someone asked how we position ourselves - how is European Testing Conference different?

Testing, not testers

Our organizers are an equal mix of people who identify as tester and programmers. What brings us together is the interest to testing. The conference looks at testing as different roles do it and seeks to emphasize the collaboration of different perspectives in making awesome products. We like to think of testing as Elisabeth Hendrickson said it: it is too important to be left just for the specialized testers. Our abilities to solve the puzzles around feedback make a difference for quality, speed of delivery and long-term satisfaction for those of us who build the software.

Practical focus

We seek to make space for sessions that are practical, meaning they are more on the what and how as opposed to why, and they are more on the patterns and practices. We start with the idea that testing is important and necessary, and seek to raise the bar in how testing is done.

Enabling peer learning

We know that best sessions in conferences with regards to learning often happen in the hallway track where people are in control of the discussions they engage in. Many conferences formalize hallway track to happen on the side. We formalize hallway track sessions to be a part of the program so that we increase the chances of everyone going home with a great, actionable learning from peers.

Peer learning happens with interactive sessions that have just enough structure so that you don't have to be a superb networker, you can just go with the flow. As a matter of fact, we don't give you choice of passively sitting listening to a talk when you could learn from your peers in an interactive format, so these session are always conference wide.

The do three different kinds of interactive sessions:

• Speed Meet makes you go through people while giving the structure to ensure that it's not the usual chit chat of me introducing myself, it is learner driven what the introducer gets to share. Each participant creates a mind map, and the person you get to know will drive the discussion based on what they select on your map. 
• Lean Coffee is a a chance of discussing testing topics of the whole group's choice. Regardless of its name, it is more about discussions and less about coffee. We invite our speakers to facilitate tables of discussions, so this is also your chance of digging in deeper to any of the topics close to heart of our speakers. 
• Open Space makes everyone a speaker. A good way to prepare for this is to think about what kinds of topics you'd love to discuss or what knowledge you'd like to share. You get to propose sessions, and they could also be on topics you know little of but want to learn more about. 

Lean Coffee and Open Space are regular sessions in conferences, but we have not seen anyone else do them as part of the day program, whole conference wide. You will meet people in this conference, not just listen to the speakers we selected.

Schedule by session types

Interactive sessions have no talk sessions to listen to passively at the same time. Similarly, when talk sessions take place, we have four of them scheduled on tracks. We also have in-conference workshops, and again when it's time to workshop, there's no talk sessions available simultaneously. This is to encourage a mix of ways of learning. It's hard enough to select which topic to go for, and if the session type is also a variable, it just gets harder to get the learning mix right.

Speakers selected on speaking their stories

All speakers we have selected have been through a collaborative selection process. This means that we did not select them based on what they wrote and promised they could talk on, we had a chat with each and every speaker and know how they speak. We're hyped about the contents they have to share as part of our great program.

Some of the talks are not ones the speakers submitted. When collaborating with a speaker, sometimes you learn that they have something great to share that they did not themselves realize they should have submitted.

Track speakers are keynote quality

We take pride in treating our speakers fair, meaning we guarantee them that they don't have to pay to speak but we compensate the direct costs of joining our conference. We go a bit further, sharing profits with the speakers. This means that the speakers are awesome. They are not traveling to speak with the vendor marketing budget to sell a tool or service, but are practitioners and great speakers.

Enabling paired sessions

Our program has sessions with two speakers, and when we select a session like that, we pay the expenses of both the speakers. While we strongly believe that a two person talk is not a talk where two people take turns on delivering a talk one could deliver, we actively identify lessons that require two people. We pair in software development, we should be able to pair with our talks too.

Organized by testing practitioners

Our big fancy team is a team of practitioners doing the conference as a hobby. We love learning together, creating together and making a great program of testing available together. We spend our days testing and programming. We know what the day to day challenges are and what we need to learn. Our practitioner background is a foundation for our ability to select the right contents.

Traveling around Europe

Europe is diverse area, and we travel around to connect with many local communities. It sometimes feels ambitious of us, as every year we have a new community to find and connect with to sell our tickets. Yet, going to places and taking awesome content to places is what builds as forward as a bigger community. 

We love other testing conferences

We don't believe that the field of testing conferences is full - there's so many people to reach and enable to join the learning in conferences. If your content and schedules are not right for you, we encourage you to look at the other. We love in particular conferences that enable speakers without commercial interest by paying their expenses and often give a shout out to TestBashes (all of them!), Agile Testing Days (both Germany and USA), and are delighted to be able to mention also Nordic Testing Days, Copenhagen Context and Romanian Testing Conference. 

Sharing while minding the price of shame

Some weeks ago, I was sitting at the London Heathrow airport, with a little post-it note in front of me saying "review, write, finalize". I had three separate writing assignments waiting for dealing with, and what would be a better place to deal with writing than being stuck at airport or a plane. I started with the review, to an article that is now posted and still causing buzz on my twitter feed: Cassandra Leung's account of power misuse in the testing community by Mr Creep.

Reading it made me immediately realize I knew who Mr Creep was, and that I had tolerated his inappropriateness in a different scale just so that I could speak at his conferences. I knew that with who I was now, I was safe. I had the privilege of thinking his behavior was disgusting and yet tolerating it. Reading the experience through the eyes of someone with less privilege was painful.

I could do something. So I talked to this Mr Creep's boss. They did all the rest. Shortly after, I saw this Mr Creep changing his status for in LinkedIn to Looking for new opportunities. I can only hope that the consequences of his own actions would make him realize how inappropriate they were. And that he would learn new ways of thinking and acting. At least, he no longer is in this position of power. He's still an international speaker. Hopefully he is no longer the person who thinks this slide is funny:

This slide happened years ago. We did not realize what it could mean for the women in the community. While the source of this is this Mr Creep, there's other creepy "funny" slides with exclusive impact. Don't be Mr Creep when you present. 

The article that started this for me came out later. At time of publishing, the proper reaction from the conference was already a fact, making this article very special amongst all the accounts of creepy behavior. This Mr Creep remains unnamed. And I believe that is how it should be. In the era where a lot of our easy access to power comes through social media, there are kinder forms of displaying power and expressing inappropriateness. Bullying the bully or harassing the harasser are not real options. For a powerful message on the price of shame, listen to a TED talk by Monica Lewinsky.

Calls like this are also common:

I find that more and more I feel that MrCreep should be fully outed. I do at the same time understand many good reasons why not to.

— Ron Jeffries (@RonJeffries) October 19, 2017

Outing him could be necessary if we didn't know he was already addressed. But all too late.

There's been a number of women who have also come forward (naming in private) with their own experiences with Mr Creep in the testing community, some with exact same pattern. Others shared how they always said no to conference speaking in places associated with him. And the message of how unsafe even one Mr Creep could make things for women became more pronounced.

In the last days of me thinking of writing this article, my motives were questioned: maybe I just want to claim the credit for action? But there is a bigger reason that won't leave me alone before I write this:

I need to let other women know that they have the power to make a difference. When it appears that organizations will prioritize their own, sometimes they prioritize their community. They need someone to come forward. If you've been the victim, you don't need to come forward alone. Coming forward via proxy is what we started with here. And after creating the feeling of safety, we brought down the proxy structure giving power where it belongs - back with the victim.

I need to let other women know that the conference we've talked about in hushed voices has chances of again being a safe place for us to speak at.

I need to let the everyone know that seeing all male lineups may mean that all the women chose to stay safe and not go.

I was in a position of privilege to take the message forward. I was an invited international speaker, with an open invitation to future conferences I was ready to drop. I had a platform that gave me power I don't always have. But most of all, I couldn't let this be. I had to see our options.

While what I did was one discussion of someone else's experience, it drained me. It left me in a place where I couldn't speak of my experience as part of this. It left me with guilt, second guessing if other people's choices of boycotting would really have been an option. It left me with fear that Mr Creep targets his upset on me (haven't seen that so far). But most of all, it fill me with regrets as I now know that I could have made choices of addressing the problem a lot earlier.

Mr Creep had to hurt one more person before I was ready to step up. Mr Creep got to exist while I had something I could personally lose on outing him or confronting him on any of his behaviors.

I need to write this article to move forward, and start my own recovery. This Mr Creep is one person, and there's many more like that around. Let's just calling out inappropriateness while considering the appropriate channels. 

Innocent until proven guilty

I read a post Four Episodes of Sexism at Tech Community Events, and How I Came Out of the (Eventually) Positive and while all the accounts are all too familiar, there is one aspect that I feel strongly about. Story #3 recounts:

It takes me two years to muster the confidence to go to another tech event.

The lesson here is that it is ok to remove yourself from situations where you don't feel comfortable. There is a very real option for many people that we don't show up because someone can make us feel uncomfortable in ways that matter.

I hate the ways people report being made feel uncomfortable. And I particularly hate when someone reports a case where they were made uncomfortable being dismissed or belittled by the organizers of conferences because there is a belief that the "offenses" are universally comparable. That alleged perpetrators are always innocent until proven guilty. This idea is what makes people, word against word in positions of unequal power, allow for the bad behaviors to continue.

There will not be clear cut rules of what you can and cannot do in conferences to keep the space safe. Generally speaking, it is usually better to err on the side of safe. So if you meet someone you like beyond professional interests in a professional conference, not expressing the interest is on the safe side.

Some years ago, I was in a conference where someone left half-way though the conference for someone else's bad behavior. I have no clue what the bad behavior was, and yet I side with the victim. For me, it is better to err on the side of safe again, and in professional context reports like this don't get made lightly. Making false claims is not the common way of getting rid of people, even if that gets recounted with innocent until proven guilty.

We will need to figure out good ways of mediating issues. Should a sexist remark cost you a place in the conference you've paid for - I think yes. Should a private conversation making others overhearing it cost you a place in the conference you've paid for - I think yes. On some occasions, an apology could be enough of a remediation, but sometimes protecting the person who was made feel unsafe takes priority and people misbehaving don't have the automatic access to knowing who to get back to for potential retaliation. It's a hard balance.

The shit people say leave their marks. I try not to actively think of my experiences, even forget them. I don't want to remember how often saying no to a personal advance has meant losing access to a professional resource. I don't want to remember how I've been advised on clothing to wear while speaking in public. I don't want to remember how my mistakes have been attributed to whole of my gender. There's just so much I don't want to remember.

Consequences of bad behaviors can be severe. Maybe you get kicked out of 2000 euro conference. Maybe you get fired from the job. Maybe you get publicly shamed. Maybe you lose a bunch of customers.

Maybe you learn and change. And if you do, hopefully people acknowledge the growth and change.

If you don't learn and change, perhaps excluding one to not exclude others is the right thing to do.

In professional settings we don't usually address litigation, just consequences of actions and actions to create safer spaces. Maybe that means taking the person stepping forward feeling offended seriously, even when there is no proof of guilt.

I don't want people reporting years of mustering the confidence to join the communities again. And even worse, many people reporting they never joined the communities again, leaving the whole industry. I find myself regularly in the verge of that. Choosing self-protection. Choosing the right to feel comfortable instead of being continuously attacked. And I'm a fighter. 

Announcing an Awesome Conference - European Testing Conference 2018

TL;DR: European Testing Conference 2018 in Amsterdam February 19-20. Be there! 

Two months of Skype calls with 120 people submitting to European Testing Conference 2018 in Amsterdam has now transformed into a program. We're delighted to announce people you get to hear from, and topics you get to learn in the 2018 conference edition! Each one of these have been hand-picked for practical applicability and diversity of topics and experiences in a process of pair-interview. Thank you for the awesome selection team of 2018: Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Franziska Sauerwein, Julia Duran and Llewellyn Falco.

We have four keynotes for you balancing testing as testers and programmers know it, cultivating cross-learning:

• Gojko Adzic will share on Painless Visual Testing
• Lanette Creamer teaches us on how to Test Like a Cat
• Jessica Kerr gives the programmer perspective with Coding is the easy part - Software Development is Mostly Testing
• Zeger van Hese Power of Doubt - Becoming a Software Sceptic

With practical lessons in mind, we reserve 90 minute sessions for the following hands-on workshops you get to choose to participate two, as we repeat the sessions twice during the conference:

• Lisa Crispin and Abby Bangser teach on Pipelines as Products Path to Production
• Seb Rose and Gaspar Nagy teach  on Writing Better BDD Scenarios
• Amber Race teaches on Exploratory Testing of REST APIs
• Vernon Richards teaches on Scripted and Non-Scripted Testing
• Alina Ionescu and Camil Braden teach on Use of Docker Containers

While workshops get your hands into learning, demo talks give you a view into looking someone experienced in doing something you would want to mimic. We wanted to do three of these side by side, but added an organizer bonus talk on something we felt strongly on. Our selection of Demo talks is:

• Alexandra Schladebeck lets you see Exploratory Testing in Action
• Dan Gilkerson shows you how to use Glance in making your GUI test code simpler and cleaner
• Matthew Butt shows how to Unit/Integration Test Things that Seem Hard to Test
• Llewellyn Falco builds a bridge for more complicated test oracles sharing on Property-Based Testing

Each of our normal talks introduces an actionable idea you can take back to your work. Our selection of these is:

• Lynoure Braakman shared on Test Driven Development with Art of Minimal Test
• Lisi Hocke and Toyer Mamoojee share on Finding a Learning Partner in Borderless Test Community
• Desmond Delissen shares on a growth story of Two Rounds of Test Automation Frameworks
• Linda Roy shares on API Testing Heuristics to teach Developers Better Testing
• Pooja Shah introduces Building Alice, a Chat Bot and a Test Team mate
• Amit Wertheimer teaches Structure of Test Automation Beyond just Page-Objects
• Emily Bache shares on Testing on a Microservices Architecture
• Ron Werner gets you into Mobile Crowdsourcing Experience
• Mirjana Kolarov shares on Monitoring in Production 
• Maaret Pyhäjärvi teaches How to Test A Text Field

In addition to all this, there's three collaborative sessions where everyone is a speaker. First there's a Speed Meet, where you  get to pick up topics of interest from others in fast rotation and make connections already before the first lunch. Later, there is a Lean Coffee which gives you a chance for deep discussions on testing and development topics of interest to the group you're discussing with. Finally, there's an Open Space where literally everyone can be a speaker, and bring out the topics and sessions we did not include in the program or where you want to deepen your understanding.

European Testing Conference is different. Don't miss out on the experience. Get your tickets now from http:/europeantestingconference.eu 

Talking to 120 people just for a conference

I'm doing the last two days of intensive discussions with people all around the world. Intensive in the sense that I hate small talk. These people are mostly people I have never met. It could be my worst nightmare. But it isn't. It's the best form of socializing I can personally think of.

We had 120 people submit for European Testing Conference 2018. Instead of spending time reading their abstracts, we spend time talking to the people, to hear not just their pitch but their stories and lessons. Each one gets 15 minutes. In this 15 minutes, they both introduce all their topics, but also, get feedback on what we heard (and read during the session), and as an end result, we walk out with one more connection. 

Entering the call, some people are confused on why we care so little on introduction and professional history. We assume awesome. We assume relevance. And we are right to assume that, since each and every one of us has unique perspectives worth sharing. Connection is a basic human need, and volunteering to speak on something that matters to you makes you worthy.

The discussion is then centered around what ever topic the one with a proposal brought into the discussion. It's not about small talk, but about sharing specific experiences and finding the best voice and story within those experiences to consider for the conference.

When I tell people about the way we do things for the call of collaboration, the first question tends to be around use of time. 120 people, 15 minutes, that is 30 hours! And not just that, we pair on the discussions, making it even a bigger investment. But it is so worth it.

The investment gives the conference a real idea of what the person will bring and teach, and enables us to help in avoiding overlap and build a fuller picture of what testing is about. Similarly, it gives us the best speakers, because we choose based on speaking not writing. It brings forth unique aspects of diverse perspectives that enable us to balance our selection. The conference gets an awesome program and I do not know any other mechanism to build a program like this.

The investment gives the people collaborating with us a piece of feedback they usually never get. They get to talk to organizers, hear how their talks and topics balance with the current topics people are sharing. Many people come in with one topic, and walk out with several potential talk topics. And even if they get nothing else, they get to meet new people who love testing from some angle just as much as they do. 

The investment gives most to me personally. With only 30 hours, I get to meet some of the most awesome people in the world. I get private teaching, specifically answering questions I raise on the topics we talk on. I get to see what people who want to speak share as experiences, and I get to recognize what is unique. I become yet better at being a source of all things testing, who can point out where to go for the deeper information. It improves my ability to google, and to connect things I hear into a view of world of all things testing. 

I've met awesome developers, who enforce my restored belief in the positive future of our industry. I've met testers and test managers, who work the trenches getting awesome value delivered. I've met designers and UX specialists, who want to bridge the gaps we have between professions and share great stuff. Some stories teach stuff I know with a personal slant. Some bring in perspectives I wasn't aware of. 

It's been a privilege to talk to all these people. I see a connection from what we do for collaboration calls to what we do with our speed meet session. We give every one of our participants a change to glimpse into stuff the other knows without small talk. A connection made can turn into a lifetime of mutual learning. 

Making a conference talk practical (for me)

I've again had the annual pleasure of talking *amazing* people from around the world, both seasoned speakers and new, and get inspired by their stories. It pains me to know that a small percentage of all the awesome people can be selected, and that our specific selection criteria of practical relevance makes it even harder for many people. Simultaneously, I'm delighted to realize that while I may say no on behalf of European Testing Conference 2018, I could help those people make their proposals stronger for other conferences.

Today, however, I wanted to write down my thoughts on what is a talk that is practical, to me.

I've had the pleasure of listening to lots of presenters on lots of topics, and over time, I've started recognizing patterns. There's one typical talk type, usually around themes such as security testing, performance testing, test automation and shifting work left that I've categorized into a talk about importance of a thing. This is one where the core message is selling an idea: "bringing testers into the whole lifecycle in agile is important". "Test automation is hard and important". "Performance testing continuously is important".

I get this. Important. But I know this. My question is, if it is important, what do I do. So here are stories I'd rather hear that make this practical.

1) I sort of knew X was important,  but we did not do it. We failed this way. And after we failed, we learned. This is specifically what we learned and how we approached solving the problem. So, learn from my mistakes and make your own.

2) I'm an expert in X, and you may be an expert or a novice. But if you try doing X, you could try doing this specific thing in X in this way, because I find that it has been helpful.  This answers your questions of how after quickly introducing what and enables you to leave this conference knowing what you can do, not just that you will need to do something.

3) Here's a concept I run into. Here's how I applied it in my project, and here's what changed. Here's some other concepts we're thinking of trying out next.

Assume important or necessary is a prerequisite. What would you say in your talk then?