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Increasing Participation of Women at DrupalCon Nashville 2018

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DrupalCon is the largest Drupal event of the year. It’s where the Drupal community comes together, where ideas and experiences are shared with one another, and where business connections and friendships are developed.

You get to hear keynotes, attend trainings and sessions, attend BOFs and sprints, and of course, attend the fun after parties! Oh and I can’t forget, it’s a chance to hear from the person who started Drupal itself - Dries Buytaert!

Female Graduates Representing at DrupalCon

While Debug Academy did offer a sold out training on ReactJS at DrupalCon, what we are most proud of are the four alumni (all female) who each attended DrupalCon not only as attendees, but as presenters and trainers sharing their expertise with the wider Drupal community! They were:

  • Amani Mansour (my little sister!)
    • Software Engineer at Beaconfire Red
    • Session: Crazy Tricks With Views
  • Farah Sabbagh
    • Drupal Developer at Booz Allen Hamilton
    • Session: Extending The Abstract Class Of Privilege: Outcomes And Lessons Learned
  • Kirsten Burgard
    • Web Developer at U.S. Dept. of State
    • Sessions(!):
      • Community Convos: Camp Organizing
      • Enforcing Your Code of Conduct
      • How Women Spearheaded Drupal Adoption In Government
  • ​​Lisa McCray
    • ​Co-trainer at DA's DrupalCon ReactJS training
    • Led multiple BoF's at DrupalCon
    • Drupal Developer at Bixal

We are especially pleased that we were in a position to help contribute to create a diverse group of speakers. All four of our Alumni that presented at the most recent DrupalCon are female, and two had not even heard of Drupal before enrolling in our course! On top of that, two were scholarship recipients to courses of ours. And look at how far they’ve come!

As evidenced by their selection as speakers at the largest Drupal event of the year, increasing diversity within Drupal is within reach.

Check out their sessions:

  • Crazy Tricks With Views
    • Speakers:
      • Amani Mansour (DA alumna and Software Engineer at Beaconfire RED)
      • Krystee Dryer (Technical Lead at Beaconfire RED)
    • Description: Dive into the more complex ways the Views module can be used to create content lists with robust functionality. Amani and Krystee showed attendees the creative techniques they used to blow through the limitations of Drupal 8 Views.
    • Click here to see the full video.
  • Extending The Abstract Class Of Privilege: Outcomes And Lessons Learned
    • Speakers:
      • Ashraf Abed (DA Founder)
      • Farah Sabbagh (DA alumna and Drupal Developer at Booz Allen Hamilton)
      • Description: Drupal has the power to be a tool for pulling people out of poverty and into a better life. Where does Drupal succeed / fail at being accessible to all backgrounds? How can we do better? Is this based on logic or some bias that needs to be overcome? Crucially, not everything is a technical problem.
      • Click here to see the full video.
  • How Women Spearheaded Drupal Adoption In Government
    • Speakers:
      • Kirsten Burgard (DA alumna and Web Developer at U.S. Dept. of State)
      • Jessica Dearie (IT Specialist with the EPA)
      • Nneka Hector (Director of Web Development at DSFederal)
      • Virginia Nguyen (Senior Director - Product Operations at Akamai Technologies)
    • Description: [..] what you probably didn’'t know, is that a group of women have been at that bleeding edge of [Government Open Source] adoption while staying mostly under the radar. Who are these women? They’'re some of the women behind Drupal4Gov.
    • Click here to see the full video.
  • Enforcing Your Code Of Conduct
    • Speaker:
      • Kirsten Burgard (DA alumna and Web Developer at U.S. Dept. of State)
    • Description: Over the years of building the Drupal4Gov community I've seen the DrupalDrama and invariably, it has come from tolerance of the intolerable and our inability to communicate what does seem paradoxical. [..] Drupal4Gov writes, re-writes, communicates and enforces a Code of Conduct for all of our events. There have been a few violations and in this session, Kirsten discusses how we communicate and enforce our Code of Conduct at all our events.
    • Click here to see the full video.
  • Community Convos: Camp Organizing
    • Speakers:
      • Kirsten Burgard (DA alumna and Web Developer at U.S. Dept. of State)
      • Avi Schwab (Senior Engineer and Project Lead at Palantir.net)
      • Kaleem Clarkson (Director of and Strategic Initiatives Kennesaw State University)
      • April Sides (Lead Drupal Architect at Mediacurrent)
    • Description: A community conversation is a space for community initiatives to discuss what they're working on with the community.
    • Click here to see the full video.
  • DA's full-day ReactJS for Drupal Class
    • Trainers:
      • Ashraf Abed (DA Founder)
      • Lisa McCray (DA alumna and Drupal Developer Bixal)
      • Farah Sabbagh (DA alumna and Drupal Developer at Booz Allen Hamilton)
    • Description: Attendees were able to create & launch a React app to display data  & POST data to a Drupal 8 website. We only decouple select pages and functionality so we retain the benefits that Drupal core and contrib provide.

We are so proud of all of our alumnae for sharing their expertise at DrupalConNA! And we are excited about our role in shaping what the Drupal community looks like. To ensure they could all attend, we provided DrupalCon tickets to two of the attendees. Additionally, two of the presenters were scholarship recipients to our Drupal course, and now they're presenters at DrupalCon - how cool!

If you're interested in web development, our welcoming and diverse classrooms are a great place to start or grow your careers. The next part-time 3 month Drupal 8 Web Developer course starts on June 3rd! We also teach ReactJS for Drupal. View our course offerings.

Not sure? Feel free to reach out to us via our contact page. We will candidly discuss whether our courses are in-line with your goals.

Want to help increase diversity in Drupal? Look no further than hiring talented individuals from diverse backgrounds. We can help with that, too.

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