DevOps Represent
DevOps Girls started 5 years ago with a small group of people seeking to teach skills to women in technology who sought it out. We have had hundreds of attendees consume our workshop content in Australia, China and Brazil. This is something the core organisers group is incredibly proud of. Fast forward to 2022 and the world looks a little different and we now reflect on our community and see an opportunity for a big positive change.
‘DevOps Girls’ will be rebranding/relaunching as ‘DevOps Represent’.
Who are ‘DevOps Represent’?
We aim to provide the same great content of technical training and community, but we want to open this up to all marginalised genders. Marginalised genders refers to all genders under represented in technology such as women, non-binary folks, transgender men, people who are gender queer. This is what marginalised genders means for us at this point, but keep in mind the language in this space is continually evolving.
At this stage, we still have the same 4 core organisers, but hope to re-introduce ourselves — it’s probably been a while and we’ve changed a lot too. We would love to inject some fresh blood and hopefully broadening our scope will give us more opportunity for this. We are always looking.
So, same content, same organisers, broadened scope/reach.
Why the name change?
In order to make our community welcoming to people of marginalised genders, we cannot continue to use a ‘feminine-coded’ name that would leave people like transgender men or some non-binary folks feeling unwelcome or out-of-place. We think this name change will be really important to provide space for people we haven’t been able to in the past.
We believe DevOps Represent resonates with us more and our intent moving forward. This also allows us to partner with other fantastic communities supporting other marginalised groups in technology.
Beyond the name change
It’s one thing to slap a new label onto something and its another thing to ensure that we demonstrate the intent of that label through our actions and what we’d like to offer this new community.
So, what are we planning to do?
- New logo that will align with our name change
- New set of community standards and practices that will be created with the input from the community
- We are seeking fresh blood in our organisers group (get in touch if you’re interested!)
- We want to mentor more people who would like to contribute
- As organisers, we will self-educate and listen to the voices of this community to ensure we’re providing content in an inclusive way
Next Steps
You’ll notice changes being made across all of our online presence, there’s a lot of work to do. As this is not our paid job, this will take time and we will have a ‘transition period’ with inconsistent naming. We will aim to minimise this crossover time to reduce confusion.
Big thanks to SEEK who will be funding our new logo to go along with our rebrand.
We can’t wait to be running our first event under our new name to a fresh audience. We will be learning a few new things along the way and won’t claim to have a perfect approach. We will always aim to be respectful and inclusive in everything we do.
Looking forward to meeting some new faces.
Much love from your DevOps Represent organisers: Theresa, JC, Javier and Franca.
