Find the others – that is what I tried to do when starting my job at a tech consulting firm three years ago. Being the only queer person in the room or even at work was nothing new to me, however this time I did not want to believe that it was true…
In this talk I will tell you about my journey of starting a thriving LGBTQIA+ community and share my learnings so you can “find the others” and build a safe community that extend beyond your company network.

The businesses and the products we all are working on have the potential to impact the lives of millions. It is essential to look at these millions of users not just as a number but to understand their intent, motivation, and challenges. We want the users not only to be seen but validated, uplifted, and thought of in the product design process. In this talk, I will share the basics of inclusive design, the methodology, and the tools we can and need to use to build impactful products. I will provide some examples and discuss the three main areas of product inclusivity: Belonging- Expanding what’s possible for everyone. Trust and safety- Ensuring our users’ psychological and physical safety during their journey. Crisis response- Supporting our users through critical moments. Hope you join and enjoy the conversation 🙂

Many of us are already familiar with the Human-Centric Design approach. It allows us to zoom-in on our customers, their problems, and needs to design the most desirable solutions. Today’s global issues urge us to simultaneously zoom-out on the societal and planetary challenges. We need to create solutions that do not only benefit a single customer but also create a positive impact on our society and environment.
This talk will focus on (1) what planet-centric design is, (2) the importance of thinking about innovation as a system and acting together rather than alone, (3) clear first steps on how anyone in a digital product environment could apply planet-centric design in their work.

Growing up being a skateboarder and it being the center of my universe I never had any queer rolemodels within the scene and even more the scene was very toxic and queerphobic. When the moment came to out myself, I more and more divided myself from the scene. Nowadays there are queer and even trans professional Skateboarders, but inside a skatepark there is still a lot of toxicity. That taught me a lot about the importance of representation through all layers and in a company through all career steps.

When we talk about gamification, we often act as if there is an inherent magic and power to game mechanics that, when implemented, act as human cheat codes that allow us to motivate (or manipulate) people. But this understanding of gamification presents a great risk to both effective and ethical design. We’ll explore how gamification is really system design, how it relates to your purpose and value, and what you need to do to keep your design ethical.

Some of the most important milestones in the life cycle of a venture-funded startup are financing rounds and often also the successful exit.
These are accompanied by due diligence processes and here more and more often: a tech due diligence. Making a good impression here is the key to success. Often founders and CTOs do not know what to expect.

In this workshop, we want to share the essentials of our experience from several hundred TechDDs and show what a company can do to go into this process top prepared:
– Which aspects are crucial?
– What are dos and don’ts?
– When and how to address problematic issues?

Also, there will be space for Q&A!

You will get a quick intro on how (impact) VCs think and which information they need to see to be more inclined to invest in your startup. This is followed by a 15 minutes Q&A, to answer your individual questions to make the session as practical as it gets.

For tech people interested to evolve into business functions, or specialising into one of them, I recommend looking at finance.
A traditionally neglected backoffice function, finance has become a critical success factor in most ventures and is in heavy demand for efficient, digitally guided processes. Also, most finance employees are not very tech-savvy, so that a coordinating function brings much value to the company as a whole, smoothes processes between finance and tech and makes sure finance requests are met in a technically sensible way.
This coordinating function could be called “Finance Technology”.

In this talk I will share the main things to think about when starting your own tech project to ensure it is ethical and accessible from the get-go, based on my own experience of starting Yourequal UG, a social-impact business that empowers and supports underrepresented and marginalised employees to identify safe places to work.
From shaping your strategy to choosing your legal entity, partners, and tech stack, this talk will walk you through how we built Yourequal UG around ethical and accessible values and our takeaways, so that you can start your own tech project around the values that matter to you!

Nearly 10 years ago, I was grateful to my employer for supporting my gender transition – despite the challenges I had to work through. I was just happy that I wasn’t fired for being trans. We’ll look at what went well and what didn’t go so well to give attendees a sense of how they can be strong allies to their transgender coworkers, or how they might approach transitioning at work themselves. But “not getting fired” is definitely not good enough. We’ll look at the progress since then as transgender employees today seek a true sense of belonging at work, not just tolerance.

In this interactive talk, freeQ co-founder Sarah Massey will share the freeQ #queerjoy story from the inspiration to create a new queer events platform during COVID to how the team got thousands of customers to buy events on their Minimal Viable Product (MVP).
freeQ offerings are landed in the queer cultural values of safety, inclusion, accessibility, reverence, and fun. Safety is paramount for a community that gets bullied, harassed, and censored on the top five social media sites. freeQ took from IRL safe spaces teachings and integrated that with privacy expertise to make a new type of online house or theater. Since founding, freeQ sold over 300 events that connect LGBTQ+ people around the world. Their monthly ritual is called the Queer Dance Naked Party.
How to imagine freeQ today? It’s like eventbrite and Zoom hooked up at the most outrageous Pride Party. Team freeQ’s future dream is to go where no one has gone before: #freeQ365, live, interactive, video events for the LGBTQ+ and sex-positive global communities.

Sarah Massey loves to engage her audiences, so be ready to actively participate in a Q+A type of talk. Here are some prompts to get you thinking:
Have you been to online events and what made them awesome?
What is most important to you when it comes to online privacy and security?
What would you include in your dream Queer Dance Naked Party?

In the past, sex products and SexTech has been designed for genitals. The industry assumed that if they designed products for genitalia then sexuality and gender expression doesn’t matter. They missed the memos about gender dysmorphia, genital diversity, and other more nuanced outlooks on the human condition. In this talk, Lex will discuss where companies miss the mark and highlight some companies doing a good job.