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J On The Beach is an international rendezvous for developers and DevOps around big data technologies.

It is a pure technical conference with workshops, a hackathon and technical talks where top speakers will share the latest trends in technologies related to Big Data. From data collection and stream processing to architectures, microservices, container systems, etc.

Embracing Diversity at a Tech Conference: 3 years of experience from J On The Beach

As of today, part of our fundamental philosophy at J On The Beach is diversity. 3 years ago we started the conference, and since then we have learned our fair share on how to embrace and promote diversity at the event. Hopefully this blog will help other event organizers avoid our (sometimes painfully obvious) mistakes and you can learn from our successes. It is also worth mentioning that we do know that there are still many things we can do to improve our event in terms of diversity and equality, so if you have any stories or suggestions, we are all ears. Here we go!   Ctr C + Ctr V equals COC – 2016 Edition So let’s go back to the end of 2015 when J On The Beach was a bright eyed baby. The event was the brainchild of several communities in Malaga, Spain (MalagaJUG, MalagaScalaDevelopers, DatabeersMLG and Yes We Tech) and with the economic support of Valo, a big data project owned by ITRS, we were able to get the thing off the ground! As newbies, in our first edition of the event we did not consider the importance of making a serious point of having a minimum number of women on our panel of speakers, or even among our attendees for that matter. We were mostly focused on finding interesting topics and names so that we could offer a good event. Diversity was not prioritized the way it should have been. For example, we knew we needed a code of conduct, so we joined the Berlin Code of Conduct which we think is great, and is the minimum a conference should have. But that’s the problem. It is the minimum. Looking back, that decision now feels just like throwing a sticker on a laptop, wearing a protest t-shirt or just adding another section to fill our website. It was a very passive bandaid. Joining a code of conduct feels more like a commitment of good behaviour and political correctness rather than an active attitude, something that we want to ensure in this years’ event. That first year, we also created a video inviting all women in IT to join the event.  We even contacted Women In Tech communities via social networks, but in the end it was more of a whisper in the wind than a practical and effective strategy. There were also different meetups organised by the different organising communities and one of them was one of our founding communities: Yes We Tech. Their meetup was centered on building an open space to talk about the situation of Women in Tech in different societies. This ended up being one of the most useful things we did and it was quite helpful to hear the opinions from many women speakers from different countries sharing their thoughts and experiences about the topic. What is the difference from this success to our other failures? Active participation of influential and diverse voices. The results of our first year for gender diversity were the following: Women speakers: 10.4% Women attendees: 13% For a tech conference (a community rife with its own diversity issues) we considered this a success for our first year, though we knew there was more to be done. Especially because gender diversity is not the end-all-be-all. We actually found ourselves in another unexpected, and to be honest embarrassing, situation that first year. We had two deaf-mute attendees that we could not accommodate properly. We failed to consider this and it put us in a seriously awkward place. We tried our best to scramble a solution. We contacted several organisations to ask them for support with no success as well as contacting few sign translators. However, it was impossible for us to find 2-3 sign translators for the event from English to Sign Language in Malaga (Spain). What is worse, those two people only asked for one thing in advance: the slides of the talks so they could follow them.  To our horror, this was also impossible due to a time-honored practice of speakers in most events not sending material in advance. This reminds me the following tweets from some speakers on twitter:     When they ask you for your slides in advance of your talk: pic.twitter.com/Ou0PqLBXNm — Damon Jones (@nomadj1s) 3 de abril de 2018 I get a good chuckle when organizers ask for slides weeks before a conference. Like, unless it's an old talk, it's just not gonna happen. I can send you _something_ but there is zero guarantee it'll in any way resemble the final talk. pic.twitter.com/JbicYCzgYV — Emily Freeman (@editingemily) 30 de marzo de 2018   But really, we cannot blame anyone but ourselves. The event needs to be able to accommodate stuff like this without a problem, and that falls on the organizers. So this year, if we ask our speakers to send slides in advance, know it is because someone else might really need them.   Some baby steps – 2017 Edition The next year we were eager to do better. We are a tech event, iterations and bug fixes are our thing. With more experience, we were feeling confident we could improve the ratio of women speakers at the event. This time around we created an organizing committee with representatives from all different communities as well as some speakers from the first event who offered their help. There was not a specific target number to reach but we all tried to get as many women as possible and we tried to give them as much visibility as we could with great cooperation all around.   My Crew pic.twitter.com/Z9z5oK6Bvn — Caitie McCaffrey (@caitie) 6 de marzo de 2017   With much more time than the previous edition, we were able to properly execute a diffusion strategy with Women in IT communities on social networks. Instead of whispering into the wind, this time we were getting relevant. We were able to get a few to promote our event and encourage women to send papers to our CFP. But here is what happened. Our gender diversity results actually didn’t change significantly. The ratio of women speakers was 27% (up from 10.4% the previous year), but our attendee ratio fell. In 2016 we pulled in 13% female attendees, but this year we only scraped by with 9.8%. Ouch. So what went wrong? We did the only thing we could do: go to the data. We had another meetup called “Who is J? ” organised by Yes We Tech where Carmel Hassan analysed the data collected at J On The Beach. After that, we discovered that we crucially needed to get not only our sponsors’ involvement, but also company participation when it comes to promoting gender diversity at the conference to get more female attendees. So what’s up next?   Taking it seriously – 2018 Edition This year the event changed dramatically in terms of organization and communities. The organisation of this year’s event is mainly run by Yes We Tech (are you surprised? we aren’t). This shift in putting a diversity-driven community in charge means that we can take a distinctive approach from the top down to make the participation of women and other minorities in the event more prominent and meaningful. The first thing we did was to focus on ONLY bringing in some of the best women speakers and talent we could get our hands on within the first month. This month was totally involved. We spent 30 days sending emails to more than 30 women that were spot on for our event. Interestingly enough we learned that it is usually much more difficult to get answers from women than men speakers - since they seem to be busier and carry more responsibilities as per their responses - so the task was pretty challenging. After a month we were a bit disappointed from the low response from women speakers so we decided to extend our focused effort to another month and half. At the same time we received some interest from male speakers that we accepted but that did not stop us from continuing to seek more women. Our goal was to have a 50-50 split on gender diversity with our speakers. Still, we did not give up inviting more women and we also contacted new women communities from other countries that sent us applications to speak in our event. Interestingly, women networks gave us a great chance to find potential speakers:   Julia is a wizard with a lot of things, including sharing her shine with others!!! she helped me get a speaking slot at @JOTB2018 because I told her I wanted to speak more. this is legitπŸ‘‡πŸ‘‡πŸ‘‡ https://t.co/h8Ij8D00FG — amy nguyen (@amyngyn) 6 de febrero de 2018   Yes, it has been very difficult but we have raised the number of speakers from 27% to 39%. Though not the 50% we hoped for, we are still pleased with the increase in ratio. And remember that code of conduct? Well, we decided we need our own. So Yes We Tech took the initiative to create one that encompasses everything we are trying to accomplish at J On The Beach. This year all volunteers, organizations, and sponsors have committed to follow this code of conduct. We also made it a point to require all attendees to follow the Yes We Tech Code of Conduct at the time of purchasing their tickets. And we even decided to run our own diversity programme! We also contacted Kyle Kingsbury and asked him if he wouldn’t be ruined by us referring his diversity programme https://aphyr.com/diversity but his budget was already too low for this year. However he encouraged us to have our own programme and he said he was going to add J On the Beach to his page… Hey Kyle, we are still waiting ;) In addition, we didn’t want to make the same mistake as last year thinking that attendee numbers would sort themselves out. This time we actively decided to improve the numbers by (sternly & unyieldingly) encouraging our sponsors to provide at least 30% of their tickets to their women employees. The results? 13.23%. It is better than last year, but it is still a disappointing number. We know we can still do more and better things for people with functional diversity and other minorities as well as increasing our CFP policy and rate of approval. Some of our speakers have already shared suggestions that we can use for future conferences. Focusing on diversity in the organisation committee has made us think and react to something that is mandatory for these kind of events: care about diversity and what equality really means. This goal is part of JOTB identity already, and we’ll continue making all our efforts to bring the most diverse people with the most diverse experiences to the most diverse industry. J On The Beach Organising Committee
Created by J On The Beach Organising Committee
2018-05-10

J On The Beach 2018, Surviving the sabotage!

Hi! I am José Antonio, this year I have proudly been part of the team of organizers of J On The Beach, an international event for developers and DevOps around Big Data technologies that recently took place in Málaga (Spain) for third year in a row.   JOTB was born with the purpose of being a fun conference to learn and share the latest experiences, tips related to Big Data technologies and to make the rest of the world aware of the interesting developments taking place in the South of Spain and attract talent to the area.   Moreover, this year we were committed to achieve an extra purpose, embracing diversity raising the number of speakers from 27% to 39% on the congress and we’ll continue making all our efforts to increase that number.   The aim of this post is to share my experience on this edition, and because of my role in marketing I can’t help to start by showing you some numbers, so here I go!   400 attendees from 26 countries 🌎 56 speakers among talks, workshops and hackathon 15 female speakers 29 job offers published 25 volunteers 15 sponsors 8 workshops 2 heavy machinery helping for acoustic atmosphere πŸ”‡ 0 infractions of the Code Of Conduct, that’s great!   What our speakers said about the event   Needless to say, most of our speakers commented on how delighted they were to spend time in Málaga, exploring the beautiful city and surroundings. Their feedback was also extremely positive about the event and the organization.   Had a great time speaking at the J on the Beach conference. Thank you @JOTB2018 for inviting. It was a pleasure meeting developers from Málaga and rest of the world. — Venkat Subramaniam (@venkat_s) 24 de mayo de 2018 Arrived @JOTB2018, and no surprise, it's on a beach! πŸ–οΈ pic.twitter.com/B7yiK4gu6d— Markus Tacker πŸ‡³πŸ‡΄ (@coderbyheart) 24 de mayo de 2018   From individual conversations with them, they say that J On The Beach is perfect to have closer contact with the audience and it is easier to do networking than similar conferences with thousands of attendees (actually I heard the same thing from many of our attendees) We hope to see them again back on JOTB 2019.   Amazing few days of cycling in Andalusia - lovely way to round off our @JOTB2018 trip! #jotb2018 pic.twitter.com/N1wfiC6yCg — Liz Rice (@lizrice) May 28, 2018   What our attendees said about the event   Despite being the year with the highest multiculturalism and gathered know-how of the three editions up to now, from the organization of JOTB we regret all the inconveniences caused by the venue before and during the execution of the event such as construction works, noise, vibrations and multiple limitations not dealt in advance. Unfortunately, they wasn’t able to recognize the worth of embracing an international event and the direct added value that this brings to our region and our professionals.   However, following the event, we sent a survey to all of the attendees and we are delighted to see that the general tone has been putting themselves into the organizers shoes, so we are really thankful.   On the other hand, we have been taking note of all your suggestions for the next year (more water, more water πŸ˜…) and we will take this experience and turn it into a new opportunity in order to get the greatest Big Data event that you deserve.   And now find below more numbers (I love it 😜) with the results of the survey: (General event ratings (1 to 10 with 10 being most positive response))   Overall, how satisfied were you with the event?   7.1 How would you rate the venue? 7.3 How would you rate the staff? 9.1 How would you rate the food? 7.8 How likely is it that you would recommend it to a friend or colleague? 7.6 How well did the event meet your expectations?(0 to 4 with 4 being most positive response) : 3   One important change, has been the food, most of you have rated as excellent this year food, maybe too fancy some people said.   As for speakers and talk topics, below are the Top 4 ranking talks in regards to the feedback received: Joe Armstrong: Good ideas that we forgot. Venkat Subramaniam: Exploring Java 9 Mario Fusco: Lazy Java Jonas Boner: Designing Events-first Microservices   Besides these talks we also need to point out the high marks of the Yes We Tech Meetup, with Gloria Passarello, Victoria Caparrós and Marta Gómez.   And we end up the day with a family photo with all attendees to the @yeswetech_ meetup! pic.twitter.com/XG022jWUMt — J On The Beach (@JOTB2018) May 24, 2018   Thank you also for suggesting some new speakers  for the 2019 line-up, such us Trisha Gee, Heinz Kabutz or Dharma Shukla amoung many others.   In conclusion, we are very proud of the job done and extremely happy to receive lots of great feedback in the comments provided, including:   ‘You guys did an awesome work. We're so lucky to have this event here in Málaga. I hope you keep doing this many more years. Congratulations!!’, ‘Having an event like JOTB in Malaga is great! Thanks for making it possible once more!’ ‘Thanks to everyone making this an awesome place to meet and enjoy. I will definitely come back.’   We learn a lot from your feedback it helps us to improve and to know where to focus. Be assured that we have taken note of all, we are looking forward to seeing you again on 2019.       Till them, let me wait on the beach 😎🌴   P.S: BTW, did you realize that we have some unicorns between us? πŸ¦„   The only developer event with real unicorns is @JOTB2018 πŸ¦„ pic.twitter.com/xOYKZnbPa5 — J On The Beach (@JOTB2018) May 24, 2018  
Created by JosΓ© Antonio Donda
2018-06-08

Location


Palacio de Congresos de Marbella,
Calle JosΓ© MeliΓ‘, 2,
29601
Marbella, Spain
15TH - 17TH MAY 2019

Take a look to previous editions