The SIGiST Summer 2024 Conference was a great success. The British Computer Society hosted the conference at its London office. We had nearly 200 delegates, which is more than at previous conferences. Over twenty speakers gave interesting and inspiring talks. It was great to have speakers for whom this was their first experience of speaking at a conference. We all learned from each other and had a great time! This year we also made some improvements to the conference:
- To help drive out fear and create psychological safety we created a Code of Conduct
- At the conference, there was a Prayer Room/Quiet Room
- We hired artists to illustrate the conference
- We had a panel discussion with Women In Test
SIGiST is part of the British Computer Society, which is a not-for-profit. Our committee members are all volunteers.
The committee is a self-organising team. Instead of the organisation of the conference moving “sequentially from phase to phase” it was “ born out of the team members’ interplay”[1]. We each took initiatives and supported each other’s work. A self-organising team, like the SIGiST Committee, works using a “‘holistic method – as in rugby, the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field” [1]. This approach does not only work for organising conferences. When I was part of an engineering management team in a start-up that made a successful exit, we worked in a similar way.
To be a self-organising team we created “processes, procedures, routines and norms that enable people to do their work easily and well”[2], this made good “social circuitry” [2] for the committee. Our ‘social circuitry’ consists of monthly committee meetings, WhatsApp conversations, regular Zoom catch-ups and using Basecamp for scheduling and sharing resources.
I would like to thank SIGiST committee members for their work, the conference speakers for giving inspiring presentations, the conference attendees for their great questions and conversations, Kerry Wear for supporting the work of the committee, Rae and Aysha for illustrating the conference and the staff at the BCS London office for their work on the day.
It would be great if you joined the British Computer Society and helped us make It good for society: https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/become-a-member/
References
[1] The New New Product Development Game by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka (Harvard Business Review 1986)
[2] Wiring the Winning Organization by Gene Kim and Steven Spear (2024, Preface)
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