Announcing our Fairer Tech Grant recipients — Round 03

doteveryone

May 29, 2018

Responsible Innovation

Doteveryone is delighted to announce our third and final round of Fairer Tech Event Grant recipients!

You can read more about the events we supported in round 01 and 02 but here are our three recipients round 03:

Muslim Makers is made up of a diverse community of Muslims who are making and changing things. They host monthly meet-ups bringing together Muslims and non-Muslims working in tech to discuss, pitch and share ideas in an inclusive environment.

Muslim Makers recognise there’s long been a shortage of minority groups in (and particularly leading) the tech scene. There are barriers such as traditional upbringing, lack of opportunity, education and resource. But, more importantly, there are huge gaps in confidence. They have heard first hand from Muslims who have mentioned moments of feeling they don’t belong and fear not being accepted.

The events and meet-ups aim to change that.

Muslim Makers is also invested in helping to educate and up-skill their community, whether that be through coding clubs, open talk or workshops, to help prepare them for the future of work as well as lead the way to create change.

How will the grant help make Muslim Makers fairer?

Currently, the Muslim Makers events and meet-ups are London-centric. This excludes many people who are keen to come to the event from outside of London but can’t afford to do so.

The Fairer Tech event grant will help to subsidise travel for people wanting to attend the event from outside of London, resulting in muslims from beyond London to attend, learn, get inspired and find connections. This will help Muslim Makers to grow their thriving community of Muslims creating change.

Event details:

TBA — Muslim Makers site, Twitter and Facebook

Kelsey Mohamed

Kelsey Mohamed is the founder of Cradle Community, as well as being a facilitator for NEON’s Movement Builders programme, and a campaigner with groups like Sisters Uncut and Abolitionist Futures.

Kelsey founded Cradle Community to help organisations, especially in the tech world, be more diverse and thoughtful about identity, inclusion and belonging. She’s developing a training/learning package for organisations to use.

How will the grant help make the technology industry fairer?

This is a slightly different grant to the others, in that we are funding Kelsey as an individual, to spend some of her time making her thinking available open source for other technology event organisers to use.

At Doteveryone we often get asked by technology companies and event organisers whether we can do training with their staff around diversity and inclusion, and it’s not something that Doteveryone themselves is in a position to offer. There is demand though, and a need, and Kelsey is in a perfect position to advise and share her insights with the technology sector.

OggCamp 2018

OggCamp is an entirely free to attend unconference celebrating all things collaborative — free and open source software, hardware hacking, creative commons, digital rights and all other manner of collaborative cultural activities.

Since 2009 they have run annual events across the UK, from Wolverhampton to Oxford and Liverpool. OggCamp 2018 is taking place in Sheffield.

How will the grant help make OggCamp18 fairer?

OggCamp is already committed to making their event more inclusive and accessible. In 2017 they implemented a Code of Conduct for the first time. This was to help ensure a safe environment for everybody. OggCamp say this has helped to raise their profile as an inclusive event and 2017 included a presentation from a first-time speaker on her electronic fashion accessory designs.

However, the event isn’t as family-friendly as they want it to be because there is little else for people to do other than attend the talks.

They will therefore be using the grant to add an extra room at the event to run a Coder Dojo for teens and children. This additional space will provide a non-talk focused area where parents can bring school-aged children and teens. This will allow more families to attend the conference, instead of a single parent/carer.

Event details

Where: Charles Street Building, Sheffield Hallum University, Sheffield, S1 2ND

Date: August 18–19

Cost: free

A huge thank you to everyone who submitted an application and to everyone who shared the initiative.

Sadly we were unable to support all the events who applied but we are really encouraged to see so many tech events that are working hard to become fairer and more inclusive.

For anyone organising a tech events, conference, un-conference or meet-up or events and looking for support to make them fairer, we’ve included some links to other places that might consider funding you because they care about diversity and inclusion at the end of the post.

But as we previously wrote, this fund is also intended to act as a provocation for conveners across the UK. So if you’re organising an event we ask that you consider how many small things might be stopping people from participating in your tech event and what small changes or adjustments you could make to help us towards building a fairer digital society?

Announcing our Fairer Tech Grant recipients — Round 03 was originally published in Doteveryone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.