Women in Agile 2018

The #WomenInAgile workshop is back at Agile2018 for its third year! This year’s half-day event strives to expand our reach as a community and continue supporting, cooperating, and compassionately including all underrepresented groups in the agile community. Let’s continue driving change and inclusively supporting new ideas!

We will start with a keynote by April Wensel, an international speaker and the founder of Compassionate Coding, a social enterprise that’s bringing emotional intelligence and social consciousness to the software industry through training and coaching. She has spent the past decade in software engineering and technical leadership roles at various Silicon Valley startups, building products in fields like education, healthcare, and bioinformatics. She also mentors widely and volunteers with organizations like Black Girls Code to advance the cause of diversity and inclusion in the software industry. When not coding or coaching, she enjoys writing, running ultramarathons, and cooking vegan food.

April will be speaking on: Expanding Your Circle of Compassion for Greater Impact:

“Traditional professional advice emphasizing competition and ambition over cooperation and compassion has become obsolete. In the modern business landscape, caring deeply for others is not a weakness, but rather a source of incredible strength. Only by connecting to our core values and focusing on the human beings we’re serving through our work—our customers, collaborators, and the community at large—can we unlock the motivation and resilience required to speak up, take risks, and create positive change in our industry and beyond.”

The remainder of the program will create an avenue empowering attendees to take individual and group action through collaborative workshops, and targeted networking. These activities will provide a sustainable learning environment with actionable outcomes able to be implemented immediately to further expand our community.

Finally, we’ll end our time together with another set of short talks by our Launching New Voices (mirroring last year) program. We pair new speakers with mentors and they get their first speaking experience to get their foot in the door for the future.  We have three great mentors giving their time to guide our new voices this year: Faye Thompson, Llewellyn Falco, and Cheryl Hammond. Our new voices have some great topics to share with everyone: Farzaneh Orak – What is in Your Mind is Going to be in Your Hands, Qarina Mannaf – How to Develop Communities of Practice for Female Leadership in the Agile Community and Susan Webber – Collaborative Problem Solving in the Workplace.

A networking happy hour at the hotel bar will follow the event! We hope to see you there!