Speaking at a Cleanweb Event

Every month, we run a meetup, usually presenting a series of talks at a given venue in London, with a capacity of between 50 and 100 people.

Generally the talks tend to cover the intersection between cloud computing and cleantech, and applying the ideas inherent to the web in aid of sustainability.

These might cover websites to help people network around local food, building energy monitoring systems with internet facing APIs, or making the web itself greener, or developing online tools for sustainability.

The audience

This reality is much richer than this, but it can be helpful to think of the cleanweb meetup audiences as from two main camps:

  1. People who make a living designing systems or content for the web (i.e developers, designers, communications professionals and so on). Usually they have either an interest or previous background in sustainability, and want to see how to apply the principles in their day to day work.

  2. People with deep domain expertise in sustainablity, with interested in using the web to apply their expertise at a scale beyond their current practice.

There is a fair degree of overlap between these two camps, and many members are domain experts with a long history of working on the web.

It’s reasonable to expect a degree of tech savviness in the audience (they’d know what HTML and CSS mean), but code samples will lose enough of your audience to make them a bad idea.

Likewise, it’s safe to expect an understanding of what carbon and water footprints might be, but not using industry specific terms like Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

Talk length

If you’re thinking of giving a talk, please try to keep it between 15 and 20 minutes, and assume 5-10 minutes for questions. We tend to group two or more talks around a theme for an event.

Lightning Talks

If you don’t think you have a full 15 minute talk ready, another option would be putting forward a lightning talk - these are a maximum of 5 minutes long, around a single, well defined subject.

The focus of these is to encourage new speakers, or to let people try new ideas in front of a friendly audience before developing them further.

We tend to run 2-3 of these in place of a longer 15 minutes talk, depending on the theme of the event.

Sharing the talks

For those who can’t make the events, we try our best to record talks and share them on our youtube channel.

We also ask speakers to share their slides online afterwards where possible - we recommend using Slideshare and Speakerdeck for sharing them after the event.

Diversity

Inspired somewhat by the O’reilly conference diversity page, we’re actively seeking to increase the diversity of our attendees, speakers, and sponsors through our calls for proposals, and through dialogue with the larger communities our members make up.

That said, we’d appreciate your help in this process, and here are a few ways you can do so:

  • recommend speakers or potential organisers
  • forward our requests for speakers to relevant communities, letting them know we’re after more diverse speaker lineup
  • get in touch to suggest with any other ideas to help make for more diverse meetups

Still have any questions?

If you’re umming and ahing about volunteering for a talk, or thinking of doing one but don’t feel ready to give a talk yet, please don’t hesitate to get in touch - we’re happy to give pointers on content, or any advice to help get you the point where you can share something you’re interested with a friendly community in a safe atmosphere.

Just send an email to info@cleanweb.org.uk, and you’ll hear back from either James, Jack, Jason or Chris as soon as one of them is free to respond. Don’t be shy!