January 28th 2021
Ah, yes. There’s nothing like being the poor soul who sits with the list of employees and has to decide who gets to go to a conference; compromising by promising the next conference tickets to the people who weren’t lucky enough this time. It’s like having to choose your favourite kid, there’s no right answer.
That’s why we’re talking about internal tech conferences. Conferences where the people who really know their shit get to share insights, experience and knowledge with the whole organisation.
The pace of change in IT means that cross-department learning is essential, and many organisations have found that an internal tech conference is an excellent way to achieve this. Internal tech conferences democratise information and skills within the company. It removes the BS that stops people from attending conferences like ticket prices and having too many people out of office. We pulled some strings and we’ve got Matthew Skelton and Victoria Morgan-Smith, co-authors of the book Internal Tech Conferences: Accelerate Multi-team Learning, dropping some essential insights and knowledge on this for us. You in?
Takeaways
- Understanding the value of internal tech conferences
- Beginning steps on how to host them
- Crucial, essential, rare industry gossip
Who is this video for?
- Managers directly involved in tech - CIO, CTO, Head of Engineering, IT Operations Manager, etc.
- Team leaders, senior engineers, and people who like to lead by example.
- (Honestly, it’s a good one for everyone to attend. We’re still dropping industry gossip, hooking you up with insights and access to all sorts of people and skill sets. WTF’s not to love?)
Cool story. Who am I listening to?
Conference badass and co-author of Team Topologies: Organising Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flo, Matthew Skelton. Head of Consulting at Conflux, he 
specialises in Continuous Delivery, operability and organisation dynamics for software in manufacturing, e-commerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software. Recognised by TechBeacon in 2018 and 2019 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, Matthew curates the well-known DevOps topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is co-author of the books Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET (O’Reilly, 2016) and Team Guide to Software Operability (Skelton Thatcher Publications, 2016), along with several key reports on SRE. He is also founder at Conflux Books, which publishes books for technologists by technologists.
If Chief Changemaker was a title, Victoria Morgan-Smith, would have it. 
Officially, she’s the Director of Delivery for Internal Products at the Financial Times, where she’s been helping teams succeed since 2009. Before this she was a developer for 9 years, a background that fuels her interest in finding fun ways to coach, energise and motivate teams into self-organising units. She gives a damn about collaboration beyond the team, adopting agile principles to get under the skin of what will deliver real, deep change for the organisation.
Jamie Dobson is co-founder and CEO of Container Solutions, a professional services 
company that specialises in Cloud Native transformation. With clients like Shell, Adidas, and other large enterprises, CS helps organisations navigate not only technology solutions but also adapt their internal culture and set business strategy. Jamie is the co-author of the new book Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation, (O'Reilly Media, 2020). A veteran software engineer, he specialises in leadership and organisational strategy, and is a frequent presenter at conferences.
