Some great community-oriented conferences & events
January 03, 2020
Some friends have asked me about diverse, non-corporate, & smaller scale tech conferences and events to go to. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list.
- Write/Speak/Code: Write/Speak Code is a conference for women, non-binary, and gender nonconforming technologists to work on their technical writing, speaking, and coding skills.
- Radical Networks: an arts festival + conference celebrating a free and open Internet and promotes artistic, grassroots activist, and experimental work in telecommunications.
- Hackers Next Door: going to this conference was actually what spurred me to write this list! HND is a new conference in the infosec space for community organizers, activists, and members of the public to learn from legal primers, know-your-rights trainings, privacy-oriented technical workshops. It is put on by the Tech Learning Collective, which has an ongoing series of classes & workshops.
- Afrotectopia: an annual festival & social institution fostering interdiscplinary innovation at the intersections of art, design, technology, Black culture and activism.
- !!Con: a conference consisting of two days of ten-minute talks that celebrate the joyous, exciting, and surprising moments in computing.
- Recurse Center: RC is a really great engineering retreat that also hosts a talk series called Localhost that is open to the public.
- School for Poetic Computation: SFPC is an artist-run school where students explore the intersections of code, design, hardware and theory. They have regular student showcases and events!
- Flawless Hacks: A Beyonce-themed hackathon. Say no more.
- New York Tech Zine Fair: Tech zines are getting prettttyyyyy amazing these days (some of my faves are from Julia Evans and Bubblesort Zines<3) and this is a place that celebrates that!