That’s a wrap for ShipItCon 2022!
On Friday September 2nd we welcomed 280 attendees into the Round Room at Mansion House for a day of talks, networking and unexpected reunions. This year’s event felt special. After a 3 year break due to Covid, there was a sense of relief amongst attendees to finally be in a room together.
Team Work
This year’s team members were Thomas Shaw, Ntsoaki Phakoe-McKevitt (CK), John Doran and Serena Fritsch. We also had an unofficial team member, Clare Brady, who prefers to work behind the scenes. Clare deserves a shout-out for the huge amount of work she did to ensure ShipItCon 2022 was a success.
Sponsors
Where would we be without our fantastic sponsors? Definitely not in such a beautiful venue. From early March 2022 our sponsors stepped forward and worked with us to ensure we could secure the venue early and every step of the way they have been fantastic. A huge thanks to NineDots Tech Recruitment, Workhuman, Tines, Teckro, Phorest, Intercom and Andorra Bookkeeping. These organisations stepped up and put their trust in us to deliver ShipItCon 2022. They also put their money where their mouth is and supported our goal of making the event accessible, diverse and inclusive. Each sponsor gifted tickets to local tech groups, community leaders and those who are typically underrepresented at traditional tech conferences.
Diversity
This year was a real eye opener in terms of attracting a diverse set of attendees. It became clear that relying on our local circle of friends and colleagues was not a good approach. We needed to work harder and expand our reach to a broader set of communities all over Ireland.
With the help of Vessy Tasheva (DEI Advisor) and support from Vicky Twomey-Lee we reached out to literally hundreds of communities all over Ireland to promote the event and help folks attend. Teckro provided Financial Assistance which we used this to gift tickets to community members all over Ireland. This is an area we are committed to improving on each year. We welcomed members of the GTA Black Women in Tech community, Women Who Code, PyLadies, TeenTurn, BelongTo, to name a few.
We also had a diverse set of age groups ranging from college students through to industry veterans and everyone in-between. One of the attendees described ShipItCon 2022 as the most diverse tech event they’d ever attended while another joked that this was the first time they’d seen a queue to the ladies restroom at a tech event.
Speakers
This year’s theme was “Resilience” and each of our speakers shared their lived experiences of resilience (and failure) across multiple different levels. Resilience at a human level, team level, organisational level and cultural level. A huge thanks to each of our speakers and a special shoutout to our keynote speaker Cian Ó Maidín, Founder and President of NearForm.
Giving Back
We are still in the process of paying vendors and seeing how much money is left over. We will be making donations to our 3 chosen great causes; TeenTurn, BelongTo and Cari in the coming weeks. More details about each of these causes can be found here : https://shipitcon.com/good-causes
What’s next?
It’s too early at this stage to confirm that ShipItCon 2023 will happen. With the right sponsors and help from the community we would love to start working on #sic2023 but the team are taking a well deserved break and we’ll meet in early January to decide. If you’ve made it this far and would like to register your interest in sponsoring #sic2023 the team can be reached at : [email protected]
For now we’ll leave you with some randomly selected attendee feedback 🙂
“The speakers, topics, venue, atmosphere, and community. It was the best conference I’ve attended hands down.”
Randomly selected attendee feedback
Thanks for reading.
Tom, John, CK and Serena (and Clare)