AdaCamp Berlin report

If you haven't been to an AdaCamp yourself, you might wonder what we do at
one! Keep reading for lots of quotes and survey results from women in open
technology and culture who attended. And thank you to all the Ada Initiative
donors who made AdaCamp possible - we literally couldn't run AdaCamp without
your support.

"Thanks to all of you! it was a great experience that all women in tech and
open culture should live." - Anonymous AdaCamper

AdaCamp is an unconference for women in open technology and culture and the
people who support them. AdaCamp brings women together to build community,
discuss issues women have in common across open technology and culture
fields, and find ways to address them. AdaCamp is organized by the Ada
Initiative, a non-profit devoted to increasing the participation and status
of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software,
Wikipedia and related projects, fan fiction, and more.

57 people who identified as women attended AdaCamp Berlin, held on October
11-12, 2014 at the office of Wikimedia Deutschland.

A huge thank you to all of our sponsors who made AdaCamp Berlin
possible:Google, Puppet Labs, Ada Initiative donors, Automattic, Mozilla, Red
Hat, Web We Want, Wikimedia Foundation, Simple, New Relic, Wikimedia
Deutschland, Linux Foundation, NetApp, Rackspace, Spotify, Stripe, Wikimedia
UK, Gitlab, OCLC, O'Reilly, Pinboard, and Python Software Foundation.

Impact of AdaCamp Berlin

"Talking to feminist women who work in tech and don't do exactly the same
things I do gave me the possibility of looking at my position from other
points of view and this was very empowering." - Anonymous AdaCamper

Our post-event survey (24% response rate) indicated that 83% respondents had
improved their professional networks and feel more committed to participating
in open technology and culture as a result of AdaCamp, two of the primary
goals of the event. 66% of respondents felt more part of a community of women
in open technology and culture and 58% agreed that AdaCamp increased their
awareness of issues facing women in open technology and culture.

"I got back to editing Wikipedia after being dormant for 3 years." - Ednah
Kiome

62% of respondents also said that they learned new skills to participate in
open technology and culture. Overall, survey respondents liked the
unconference format for its attendee-driven content and collaborative nature.
Many participants specifically praised AdaCamp's role cards that are used for
all sessions to help keep the session focused, on topic, and productive.

About the attendees

"She believed, she could, so she did." - Greta Doci

57 people attended AdaCamp Berlin. The attendees came from 19 countries. 35%
of attendees were from Germany and 13% were from the United Kingdom. Other
countries represented include Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil,
the Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia,
Sweden, Turkey and the United States of America.

We worked hard to make AdaCamp Berlin diverse in many different ways. Some
statistics from our post-conference survey (24% response rate):

* 9% listed their race or ethnicity as other than white or Caucasian
(compared to 23% in the Adacamp Portland survey, 30% in the AdaCamp San
Francisco survey and 25% in the AdaCamp DC survey)
* 100% were born outside the United States (11% AdaCamp Portland, 18% AdaCamp
San Francisco, 28% AdaCamp DC)
* 50% were not employed as programmers or IT specialists (42% AdaCamp
Portland, 41% AdaCamp San Francisco, 49% AdaCamp DC)

Travel scholarships

"Inclusivity was a founding cornerstone of the event." - Zara Rahman

To make AdaCamp more accessible to students, non-profit employees and others
living outside of Berlin, and to increase the diversity of our attendees, we
offered 6 travel scholarships to AdaCamp Berlin. Two of the travel grants
were awarded to AdaCampers from Albania, and the others were awarded to
AdaCampers from Belgium, France, Kenya and Slovenia. An additional 5 travel
grants were provided by Wikimedia UK for UK based attendees. These five
AdaCampers came from the United Kingdom and from Ireland.

What we did

AdaCamp Berlin was primarily structured as an unconference, with
attendee-organized and facilitated sessions around issues facing women in
open technology and culture. Based on feedback from the previous four
AdaCamps, we added some more structure to the beginning and end of the
schedule.

"I loved that AdaCamp allowed us to talk about [the connections between basic
rights for women, and empowerment through technology] in their interlinked
realities, unlike the slew of women's events that seem to do little more than
feed corporate ambitions." - Jane Ruffino

For most attendees, the first session of AdaCamp was an Impostor Syndrome
workshop. Women's socialization is often less confident and competitive than
men's, and women are therefore especially vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome -
the belief that one's work is inferior and one's achievements and recognition
are fraudulent - in open technology and culture endeavors where public
scrutiny of their work is routine. As at AdaCamp San Francisco, the opening
session was a large-group Impostor Syndrome workshop facilitated by AdaCamp
Berlin and Bangalore lead Alex Bayley. The Impostor Syndrome workshop was
followed by introductory sessions on areas of open technology and culture
that might be new to participants; including everything from electronic
security and privacy, to feminist activism.

Two sessions in the afternoon were the first free-form sessions: the first
focusing on what problems and barriers face women in open source technology
and culture; and the second discussing existing solutions in a variety of
communities. On Sunday the morning sessions were also free-form, with a focus
on generating new and creative ways to address the problems and barriers
facing women in open source technology and culture.

On Sunday afternoon, attendee-organized sessions moved towards skill-sharing
and creation, with a multitude of workshops, make-a-thons, edit-a-thons,
hack-a-thons, and tutorials that ranged from a security and cryptography
workshop, through group programming working on software as a craft, to a
meta-workshop on how to run workshops!

AdaCampers reported learning a variety of new skills including but not
limited to the usage of crypto tools, privacy, approaches to feminism, how to
contribute to open source, how to better organize events, creating safer
spaces, making events inclusive, fan culture, security and what one AdaCamper
described as "A deeper understanding of why security is particularly
important for women."

Lightning talks were held on both days of the main track. Any AdaCamper that
wanted to share their knowledge, experience or passion - on a topic either in
open technology and culture or not - was given the stage for 90 seconds.
AdaCampers talked about subjects from useful hand signals for group
communication, to online language barriers, to Wikipedia projects. For many
lightning talk speakers, this was their first experience of public speaking.

Social events

On the evening of Friday October 10, Wikimedia UK and Web We Want sponsored a
reception at Wikimedia Deutschland. Thank you to Wikimedia UK and Web We Want
for hosting a reception that allowed a wider group to get together and
socialise in a positive, feminist atmosphere.
social

Following the tradition established at AdaCamps DC, San Francisco, and
Portland; instead of a large social event on Saturday night, attendees had
dinner in small groups at restaurants around Berlin. Attendees were invited
to host dinners on behalf of their employers. Thank you to Puppet Labs and
Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and their representatives, for hosting dinners.

"The greatest moments [of AdaCamp] were the session on women who don't code
and the Saturday night dinner, developing a discussion on codes of conduct at
feminist events we'd begun during the afternoon with some of the women who
attended it and luckily were also at the dinner." - Anonymous AdaCamper

Reports from AdaCampers

"I went to AdaCamp and all I got was a very good time!" - Helga Hansen

Several AdaCampers wrote publicly about their experiences at the event, in a
variety of languages! You can read some of those blogs posts here:

* Greta Doci: WikiAkademia and AdaCamp in Berlin! (in German)
http://wikiakademia.openlabs.cc/blog/wikiakademia-adacamp...
* Helga Hansen: Bericht vom AdaCamp: Wider das Impostor-Syndrom! (in German)
https://hanhaiwen.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/bericht-vom-ad...
* Zara Rahman: AdaCamp: spending time with women in open source and
technology (in English)
http://zararah.net/post/99934187247/adacamp-spending-time...
* Sanja Dibra: Open Labs ne AdaCamp Berlin 2014 (in Albanian)
http://openlabs.cc/open-labs-ne-adacamp-berlin-2014/
* Rhonda D'Vine: Feminist Year (in English)
http://rhonda.deb.at/blog/personal/feminist-year.html
* Ali King: AdaCamp (in English) http://koshatnik.com/blog/adacamp-berlin/

Conference resources

Each AdaCamp we strive to improve the event. After each AdaCamp, we publish
any resources we developed and license them CC BY-SA for use by the
community. We're presently working on a photography usage policy, which we
look forward to releasing publicly in the new year!

* At AdaCamp DC, we released our conference booklet and associated materials
to help build safe events for women.
* Following AdaCamp San Francisco, we released some accessibility techniques
we used to make the conference more accessible to wheelchair users and people
with visual impairments, together with further discussion of photography
policies for conferences. These included WordPress' new plugin making
dropdown menus more accessible, our revised photography policy, and our role
cards for session participants to help make each session stays on-topic and
inclusive of all participants.
* This year at AdaCamp Portland, we created new lanyards to signify a
person's preference for photography that are accessible to those that have
impaired color vision and a scent and smoking policy.

Future AdaCamps

We're thrilled with the increasing success of AdaCamp at bringing women
together and developing the current and next generation of women leaders in
open technology and culture. AdaCamp is one of the key events of the Ada
Initiative, with huge impact on its attendees and the communities they are
involved in. Our 2014 AdaCamps in Portland, Oregon, USA; Berlin, Germany; and
Bangalore, India, are part of our strategy to reach a wider range of women by
holding more frequent but smaller AdaCamps around the world. We are
developing plans for AdaCamps in 2015 and 2016 now. If you'd like to be
notified of the next AdaCamp, sign up to our announcement mailing list or
follow us on Twitter.

Thank you to all of the AdaCamp Berlin attendees and AdaCamp sponsors for
giving us the support we needed to run this event and make it what it is. You
are what makes AdaCamp a success!

Your organization has the opportunity to sponsor AdaCamps in 2015 and reach
women leaders in open technology and culture. Contact us at
sponsors@adainitiative.org for more information about becoming a sponsor.

Thank you again to the AdaCamp 2014 platinum sponsors Google and Puppet Labs,
gold sponsors Automattic, Red Hat, Mozilla, Web We Want, and Wikimedia
Foundation; and silver sponsors New Relic, Simple and Wikimedia Deutschland.

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