Call for Participation

Overview

In the third USENIX Women in Advanced Computing Summit (WiAC '14), we bring the technical community together to highlight technical women and their contributions to the computing profession. We encourage developers, security professionals, operations engineers, researchers, and makers and managers of all kinds who can speak on topics that would inspire, educate, or energize a diverse audience.

Topics

Topics can be technical in nature and may or may not touch on issues of gender and diversity. An evening of interactive workshops will follow the day of talks to allow attendees to share their tools for success as competent technical women in any of the predominantly male computing professions.

Talks and Panels

• Modern network challenges, storage, cloud deployments
• Large-scale design challenges
• Release engineering
• Security in complex environments
• Current research that moves the field forward
• How you inspired girls/women to pursue computing careers
• Service rollouts, recovery, resilience
• Failure management and productive postmortems
• Managing diverse teams, product rollouts, project workflow
• Making DevOps part of your culture

Workshops

• Encouraging other women: those interested in a career in computing, as well as your peers and coworkers
• Coaching/mentoring: from either side of the table
• Enabling a good life balance
• Navigating academic careers and industrial careers
• How to craft an effective technical résumé
• How to measure a company’s diversity culture before you accept a job there
• Negotiating: salary, benefits, flexible schedules, etc.

WiAC brings together women from various computing backgrounds, as well as those who are in support of technical women, in order to:

• Provide women with a venue to present leading-edge technical talks
• Identify issues facing women in computing today
• Encourage more women in the community to step forward and get recognition for their work
• Engage both genders in safe and helpful dialogue on the issues
• Provide tools and guidance to enable attendees to improve their value to industry

Logistics and Submission Instructions

This will be a one-day summit on June 18 with an optional informal networking event in the evening of June 17. Speakers should be prepared for interactive sessions with the audience. Workshop facilitators should be prepared to challenge the status quo and provide real-world examples and strategies to help attendees walk away with tools and ideas to improve their professional lives. Presentations should stimulate healthy discussion among the summit participants.

Submissions in the form of a brief proposal are welcome through March 31, 2014. Please submit your proposal via email to wiac14chairs@usenix.org; you can also reach the chairs via that email address with any questions or comments.

Notifications will go out to submitters of accepted proposals on April 14, 2014.