How do we pick cities?

She’s Geeky is an unConference Event that lives in-between a “traditional” once a year conference and an open source camp style event that anyone can do anywhere.

Hosting and putting on an unConference is not a trivial matter and to do it well and with consistent quality requires a certain level of professionalism and expertise. Our intention is for She’s Geeky to gain and grow a reputation for having a diversity of participants  including the highly skilled/placed attend such as CTO’s of fortune 500 companies.

Women working in the tech industry and STEM fields are some of the busiest ever.  Given this we do not expect that a volunteer team alone to put on a high quality event since they don’t have the time this may not be their area of expertise. So, we have a core paid staff Event Coordinator that works with local coordinating/outreach team made up of women in the STEM fields. There is power in linking the conferences together via a consistent coordinating core.  While She’s Geeky is not a membership group with local chapters we intentionally work with other existing groups supporting women in STEM fields

The process works like this:

Women approach us asking if we would consider bringing She’s Geeky to their city. We go through an evaluation with them about whether there city is a good match for us.  This process includes identifying; key industries, potential sponsoring  companies, good venue options as well as a core local organizing team that has some time to put into activating their networks. We have found that it works best if at least a few of the women have already attended a She’s Geeky event in another city because having a firsthand experience of an unConference makes it much easier to help in organizing one.