The overall statistics of 2019
One of the things we like to do at DDD East Midlands is to share the data we have and how we are using it. As part of running our first conference there were a few things we wanted to achieve or improve upon. We wanted:
- to encourage speakers of all experience levels to apply to the conference.
- for there to be talks available for all levels of attendee to vote upon.
- measure our gender balance of attendees so we could make efforts to improve each year.
In this post, we will share some of the stats we collected for 2019.
Talk Submission Stats
In 2019 we had a fantastic level of submission from all over the UK. There were submissions from a whole scope of topics from Security to UX and management school.
128 Submissions from 66 speakers
One piece of feedback we had is that some people did not submit as they were intimidated by the thought of doing an hour long talk. For 2020, there is the option to submit for hour long, 30 minute and 15 minute talks. We hope this will help improve on this already impressive rate of submission.
Subject tags
Talks submitted all had a least one tag attached about it’s subject area. This graph shows the number of submissions with each tag, which shows a definite trend towards process, architecture and hosting. We encourage talks in all areas of technology, so will try to see if we can make efforts to strengthen submissions in other areas as well.
Level of talk
Another area of focus was that there would be talks at all levels for people to vote on and attend. The majority of talks were focused at an introductory level, which is normally beneficial to a lot of the audience. It’s great that we had intermediate and advanced submissions as well, and would be great if we could get these proportions a bit higher.
Support requested
DDD East Midlands takes efforts to support it’s speakers, no matter how much previous experience they have. From mentorship through to workshops, we hope to provide help suitable for everyone. It looks like these efforts are worth continuing with, given the amount of speakers who are interested in getting support in some form.
Attendee Stats
One of the aims we wanted to achieve was to have a mix of both professions and gender at the conference. DDD East Midlands aims to be an enjoyable environment for everyone attending and we hope that our efforts to keep it a safe and welcoming environment will lead to an even greater range of people attending.
Job titles and Professions
As we expected the majority of our attendees were developers of some form or other. There was also a number of managers,Directors and Founders at the event.
There was quite a small percentage of designers, which may be expected with a number of the talks being technical.
Pronouns / Gender Identity
The information we have gathered on our attendees gender identification is not truly definitive, with us having more data on pronouns that gender identity. 55% of the attendees did not provide this information on their ticket submission so it is hard to get an accurate view even with that data. 12.2% of attendees put down She/Her or They/Them as their main pronoun. It would be great to push this stat up to at least 25% this year.
Overview
As mentioned, transparency is important to us. We are interested to see how the talk submissions and attendance changes in coming year, and would love to hear any suggestions on how to progress.
