Introductions
We begin each day of the conference with women attending introducing themselves with their names and by completing the sentence “I’m Geeky because….”
Agenda
At the beginning of the day, we create the agenda. Everyone meets in one room and posts topics they would like to present, see or discuss. We start with a blank wall and, in less than an hour, through a highly participative process, create a full day, multi-track conference agenda that is relevant and inspiring to everyone there. This creates a rich assortment of agenda items and makes for an exciting day of learning.
From there, we go to separate areas or rooms assigned to each topic. The session formats can be a presentation, inquiry about a question or discussion about an issue or technical field. We ask for one participant volunteers to record the proceedings.
Sessions
The sessions are put forward by the women who attend the event – and are diverse. They include expert topics about their particular expertise, hosting conversations about issues of interest both technical and personal (like how to balance work and family), exploring start-up ideas, introductions or deep dives to different programming languages or frameworks, sharing stories about what it was like to work in the early days of the industry, introduction to public speaking and many others.
Access to Notes
The notes from each session are collected in the newsroom, then a book is compiled with all the notes from the conference and distributed to everyone who attended.
Day Closing
At the end of each day we review briefly highlights from all the sessions hosted during the day and then usually invite attendees to complete the following sentence “As a result of today…” you can see what women shared in this closing exercise from our DC unconfernece here.
