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.

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.

Audience Experience: The “WHY” of Content Management

AX: where strategy becomes narrative.

In this content strategy session, we talk about Audience Experience — the intersection of content strategy and content management — and how to enable your clients (or yourself!) to
- Create content strategy,
- Produce “good content,” and
- Get the most out of the technical framework you give them with your CMS.

Better content management and better content strategy both lead to better Audience Experiences. You’re the experts on making your CMS sing :-) … so let’s talk about purpose-driven content.

Content is at the center of the audience experience. No content, no experience, right?

Every website we build has a purpose: to communicate with our intended audience, offer them the chance to connect with us, and take an action we suggest. The better the experience, the more likely it is for us to find the people who want and appreciate what we have to offer.

If you accept this premise, all our decisions and efforts should be put through the lens of “How does this improve the Audience Experience?”

Takeaways + Questions Answered include
- Improve the Audience Experiences you deliver
- How do we define “good content”?
- How does a team achieve good content?
- How does your CMS/project support content strategy?
- Who is responsible for good experiences? (Divide and conquer!)
- How can you support your clients and teams in their mission to deliver good content?

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##Synopsis
Get the most out of your tech stack for yourself and your clients working at the intersection of content strategy and content management—Audience Experience! Learn how to create content strategy, produce “good content,” and get the most out of your CMS.

##Learning objectives: After this session, attendees will be able to:
1. Apply objective criteria to improve Audience Experience through a structured approach to content creation and content quality.
2. Assess and improve your CMS implementation to support Content Strategy and Audience Experience.
3. Collaborate across Marketing/Communications and Developer teams to improve Audience Experience as a team.

##Content focus area
Content & Marketing

##Target audience
Agency leads, client advocates, project managers, marcomms roles, and those involved in planning and executing websites, portals, and publishing platforms.

##Prerequisites
Do you plan and create marketing and communications? Do you plan sites to help the marketers? This session is for you!

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 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 explores FOSS 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 and 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.

**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.

Garbage in, garbage out: Content strategy and writing in the age of AI

If you are asking yourself:
- What is AI good for right now in content creation?
- Should I be using AI to replace my MarComms team?

This talk can help find the answers!

We update this short talk to the current state of play, -tech, and the market every time we present it. The last version presented in public was compiled in mid-December 2023.

Using up-to-date information and examples, we cover:
- The current state of AI and its impact on content
- Why content strategy is essential to content success
- Why good, long-form, opinionated content is so important now
- How to do content strategy in the age of AI
- How to create good content in the age of AI

**Spoiler alert: As of early 2024,
- AI can be helpful, but it is not the answer to all things content.
add some value and efficiency to your processes.
- AI cannot replace human diversity, creativity, experience, or insight.
- Use AI when and where it makes sense.
- AI requires guided input and human creativity to produce valuable output.

This session is quick and informative, with room to expand and go into detail, so it could be anything from a 10-minute lightning talk to a 40-minute presentation. We've gotten great responses to it. And the slides are fun!