Some thoughts on GDevCon#2

[swatts]

Good-day Graphical Programming Gods and Godesses,

My first job after a week of recuperation is to pen a few words on GDevCon#2, I'd like to thank everyone involved for making such a lovely event possible...(Organisers, Presenters, Sponsors and Attendees, also I would like to thank UVB and the city of Birmingham).

James Mac says it best in his Review but I really think we found our voice for #2, so rather than being a mini-CLA Summit we became something unique, inclusive and valuable. This is pretty much what I dreamt of it being. Let's not pretend that this event was not a huge risk, it's a really bad time to be running international events with companies sitting on their travel and training budgets. A huge thankyou to all of our sponsors, you really were central to us putting such a good quality event.

NI choosing our event to announce the community edition of LabVIEW was another huge moment for us. Think of it, you can use this version of LabVIEW for private projects, community  training and demonstration. This will change LabVIEW forever. It was great to see so many NI product managers and also how sensitive NI was to our independence.

So what was the thing I was most proud of?

Many moons ago I wrote an article titled The Trouble With Women in Engineering which discussed the frustrations I had with getting my daughters interested in engineering. These conversations in some way led to my input to Fabs great article here Our Giants Are Female. For GDevCon#1 we requested our presenters consider putting in a slide like this (mine from this year).

For GDevCon#2 we didn't ask and yet it had a life of it's own. The thing was to celebrate the women who advanced us rather than whine about their absence.

On top of that our female attendance hit 12% which is above the average I've observed at similar events. I know it's a long way from the 50% it should be but I'll take any small victory these days!.

My belief is that an inclusive event leads to an atmosphere of collaboration and mentor-ship and pushes back on some of the macho-competitiveness I've observed in some corners of the engineering world.

On the subject of mentor-ship we did our first DSH workshop and I think it was a great success (punters and presenters seemed to come away happy, which is nice). Got some brilliant feedback and a fair few ah-ha! moments and l loved the feedback post-its. More will be revealed here I would imagine. I'd like to thank Fab and Joerg for taking this risk with me, it's been great fun so far! Having teams from CERN, Dyson, Renishaw, iNDTact, Intersoft was really useful as we think it works best for a team to learn together. Thanks to all our attendees, you all made it an event we'll remember for a long time.

So if you want a day or 2 with us let's talk. We have plans to put on one in Munich in November.

Great things are coming....

Lots of love

Steve