How-to: build thriving cultures through positive communication

In this session, we will take you through repeatable, actionable concepts that can make your company, community, or team a truly supportive, positive, (and productive!) place.

Organizations and communities with human-first, inclusive, supportive cultures thrive compared to those with toxic cultures. Positive and constructive communication is essential to creating, expressing, and sustaining positive culture.

Creating and fostering a thriving, collaborative culture is one of our critical responsibilities as leaders, whether in open source or elsewhere.

Come along to learn how you can apply empathy to achieve clarity and build trust, community (and teams, client relationships, and more) at the intersection of (positive) culture and communications.

We will share our experience and notes on creating human-first, strategic content for tech companies, agencies, and open source projects while building a tightly-knit team to deliver it ... and making our days more pleasant along the way.

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##Synopsis
A short, action-packed introduction to creating positive, supportive culture through constructive communication.

##Learning objectives:
Attendees will leave this session able to:
- Apply basic constructive communication practices, and have resources to learn more.
- Strengthen their writing and editing through transparent guidelines and principles.
- Make moral and ethical choices in their communications.

##Content focus area
Leadership, Management & Business

##Target audience
Leadership, managers, team leads, and anyone looking to increase their awareness of the power of mindful communication.

##Prerequisites
You'll get the most out of this session if you're keen to make your immediate reality a better place and help those around you.

Grow your Agency: A Content Model that Connects

Build trust, sell easier, help potential customers self-qualify (or disqualify) all before they ever contact you! Come to this session to learn an actionable, straightforward content for your website. Building trust first makes selling easier.

The “Agency House” is a six-part content architecture model for making your website your best sales tool. If you are a small agency or freelancer, your house can help you spend less of your precious time selling and more time delivering the work your clients love. Whatever the size of your company, if you want to shorten your sales cycles, building trust and long-term relationships, the Agency House is there for you, too!

In this session, we’ll show you what content you need and how to structure it to make a positive impact on your business:

- Improve Sales Flow: Back up any pitch or conversation with resources on your website. Help prospects self-qualify and be closer to closing when they get in touch.

- Improved Search Results: Google explicitly says content quality matters, and that they define quality content based on expertise, authority, and trust.

- Connect with Leads: People looking for an agency partner are looking to solve a challenge or a problem. Make sure your expert help is there for them when they come looking.

You’ll leave this session with a structure and methodology to help see your site in a new light.

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##Synopsis
The right content, in the right places on your website can build trust with your future customers today.

##Learning objectives
- Create content architecture and content to reduce your time-to-close by building trust with potential customers.
- Improve your search rankings and expert brand-awareness by creating high quality content relevant to you and your audiences.
- Connect with people looking for help with the problems you solve.

##Content focus area
Content & Marketing

##Target audience
Agency leads, marketing and communications professionals — or anyone who has to wear these hats alongside other responsibilities.

##Prerequisites
The information in the session is aimed more at agency businesses, but is relevant to many communication challenges.

Defend FOSS: From innovation to positive change, we need to remind the world what we're about.

Open Source technology, practices, and thinking have revolutionized how we innovate, collaborate, and do business. The impact goes beyond our daily work and paying our rent. Open source is everywhere; we won! But there's a downside.

We have been so busy with our success that we have forgotten to tell people what makes us and Open Source different. We must remember how radical and important Open Source is. It is extraordinary that we build international communities of experts sharing our best ideas, building businesses, and creating value.

Open Source — and we — have the potential to create more positive change in the world. And we need to tell the world ... again.

Right now, proprietary systems and vendors are winning pitches in government and elsewhere that should be no-brainers for Open Source solutions.

What comes next, and what do we have to do to make sure we can continue to make a positive difference with Open Source in the future?

This session will explore open source at different scales, from small but meaningful, to vast and vital to our future. What has open source made possible? What have we done with it in the last 24 years?

A look back at our origins, the changes and opportunities open source has enabled from small and personal to large. What could applying open source philosophy and practices — "thinking open source" — bring to society, the world, and the future beyond our daily work and business, from promoting peaceful and democratic societies to providing international development aid?

This is a keynote-style talk, meant to remind us of how special and important Open Source is and how lucky we are to be part of our international communities. But also that we should not be complacent or think that we have "won."

This is an inspiring Call to Action to Open Source communities everywhere, a great keynote for your event :-)

Turning Technical Truth into Effective Communications: Applying DIKW to Product/Service Marketing

Communicating the value of complex technology can be as challenging as building it. In this session, we will show you a practical application of the "DIKW Pyramid" — Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom — to capture the technical truth of your product or service offering and turn it into compelling content and effective communication strategy.

We'll go into actionable detail about applying DIKW to content:

1. DATA: Observe and collect an accurate library of product features.

2. INFORMATION: Connect the features, for example, in logical-functional groups, and describe their value to your target audience.

3. KNOWLEDGE: Add experience and expertise to the mix to distill the information into product positioning, messaging, and a base for content marketing planning.

4. WISDOM: Apply what you have learned to make decisions, answer questions about your product, or refine your roadmap. Prioritize topics, personas, and campaigns. Generate content ideas.

Join us for this informative session to learn how to create clear, compelling product communications that will resonate with your audience and lead to successful product adoption.

If you have a product or service offering or want one, come along! We can save you time and false starts, giving you a process to capture your offering's essence and turn it into great content and communication strategy.

DIKW fans and anyone interested in how data meets content planning and creation are welcome!

**Content Focus Area: Strategy, Content, and Marketing

**Target Audience: Product owners, founders, and anyone who needs to capture the value of a complex technical offering in communications.