The MiXiT conference – ethics and diversity in tech – A.Neveu, G.Alexandre

The history of the MiXiT conference

Walid : welcome to all of you for this new episode of Projet Libre. Today we’re going to, and it’s a first, I haven’t done it yet, but it’s a project I’ve wanted to do for a long time, we’re going to start talking about conferences.

Conferences are something important, at least for me. It’s something important because that’s where I get most of my inspiration for the episodes. There is a conference that I must admit I didn’t know too much before interviewing Agnes Crépet in her episode on Fairphone, it’s MiXiT. I wasn’t able to go to this edition, but on the other hand I have with me two guests who are part of the organization and who will be able to talk to us about it. So here is MiXiT, it’s a conference that is being held in Lyon and that was held a few days ago.

So with me I have Audrey Neveu and Grégory Alexandre, whom I greet and who will, that’s it, who will talk with me to explain to us a little in depth where MiXiT comes from, how it is organized, why they are doing this, what they want to do in the future. Audrey, Grégory, thank you for being here, I hope you are well and welcome to the Projet Libre podcast.

Audrey : Thank you.

Gregory : Thank you very much.

Audrey : Thank you for the invitation.

Presentation of Audrey and Grégory

Walid : First question, a bit of a ritual, to introduce you to Audrey if you would like to start by presenting, explaining to us a little bit who you are and how you discovered free software?

Audrey : So I’m a developer on the Spring project, more specifically on the Spring Cloud part. I can’t tell you that I don’t have any memories anymore actually. I feel like free software has always been a part of my life. Because you see already when I was a kid I used free software, so for me it’s natural.

Walid : Are you a technical person?

Audrey : yes, I’m a dev, that’s it. I’m a Java dev, to be precise.

Walid : What did you study, just to know?

Audrey : I haven’t done any. I have a slightly special background, I made a reconversion long before it was fashionable. So it was a bit complicated, you know, it was 15 years ago. I went through the AFPA, it was rock’n’roll, but I survived.

You know, a bit typical of a girl of my generation, I wasn’t pushed into it at all. While I was spending my time on my computer, you know. But in fact, it’s even worse than that. I had taken the computer science option in second grade. Either you did science-economics, or you did computer science. I had taken computer science, I had courses in typing, Word and Excel – I type very very well – that’s it. That was the big disappointment. And in fact, I didn’t have people in my entourage to guide me. Well, you see, the typical career path for guys in the profession is that dad brought home a computer, I didn’t have that, my parents were in transport, you know, so I didn’t have access to that.

So it’s a little later, after a lot of wandering, when I said “I’m fed up, I want to do something I like”, I did a skills assessment and when I did the skills assessment, I discovered the job of a dev and then I said “hey, do we get paid to make Legos? but I’m going to do that!”

Walid : ok, so good, I think it’s great. And you, Gregory?

Gregory : I’m a former dev, today I do more orga support, all agility subjects, all that. I’m a former dev and for the free world I admit that I discovered it late, I’m a former .NET C# developer, so the ibre, we’ll come back. But so I discovered it late, rather driven by research, to look for more ethical solutions with all the Frama(soft) solutions, less in my job as a coder. But it’s true, I didn’t have my job as a coder for that long, I also did Product Ownership and other project management jobs, so more in the tools to be used than in practice, now it’s the practice of dev.

Walid : How did you discover MiXiT and how long have you been there?

Audrey : So I discovered Mixit at the very first edition. I did all the editions until there was the lottery. After that, I had to do one or two more as a speaker.

There you go, I’ve been a big lover of Mixit since day one. There you go.

Walid : great, we’ll talk about it right after, from the first day precisely. And you, Gregory?

Gregory : I must have discovered Mixit in 2012, something like that. I wanted to be a speaker there and I wasn’t taken.

So I moved to Lyon. And I got into the organization, it seemed to me to be the easiest solution to be able to go to this conference. And so yes, I think my first one… I arrived in Lyon around 2014, I come from the Paris region. And I did my first edition in 2015 as an organization.

Walid : ok, so you’re both in the Lyon region?

Audrey : Not at all, I’m in Montpellier.

Walid : Oh okay, ok.

Audrey : I have had very, very strong links with Mixit since the beginning. At one point Agnès told me “no, but it’s okay, stop your coderies, you come”. I have a problem, it’s that I don’t know how to say no to Agnès in fact. You have to know everything Agnès asks of me.

Gregory : Nobody knows how to do that.

The genesis of MiXiT

Walid : Let’s talk about the genesis of MiXiT, when did it start and why was it created in fact? What led to the creation of MiXiT conferences?

Audrey : Actually what’s interesting is that MiXiT, the first edition if I’m not mistaken, was 2011, it’s the very first conference in France. In fact, there were JUGs everywhere, so Java User Groups, but there was no conf. MiXiT went for it, and the next one was the JUG Summer Camp.

At the time, it was a bit… I remember that I had taken time off, I paid for my train tickets at my hotel to go there, because I was like crazy. MiXiT has the particularity compared to others of not being purely tech in the sense that originally it was the CARA, so it was the Agile Rhone Alpes community, and the JUG of Lyon who joined forces to make an event. So it was really a mix of the two.

Gregory : The initial objective was, with CARA and JUG, to propose a tech conf with an openness, yes dev but also how and how collectively and why dev. And so the idea was to bring that, to have a tech conference, but that also opens up the way to do it.

Walid : And the name MiXiT?

Audrey : Ah, very good question. There, we won’t be able to tell you because we’re not founding members. You would have to ask Agnès, Cyril or Cédric again. But it was precisely to represent this desire to mix agile and tech and especially to mix devs and people on the business side, that everyone talks to each other.

By the way, a small question we are often asked is “how do you pronounce it?” So, you have the right to say “MixIT”, you have the right to say “Mix IT”, you have the right to say mixity, you just don’t have the right to say that you are going to “MiXiT”.

Gregory : No, “the MiXiT” is not the right.

Audrey : No, it’s a no. This total exclusion is not possible,

Gregory : The MixIt, you’re going to MixiT, we don’t really know

Audrey : You go to MiXiT, you don’t go to MiXiT, please!

Walid : who is the original team actually? How many people are there for it? A small team at the start?

Gregory : Yes at the beginning it was a small team of about, it seems to me that there were 3-4 people. I know that there was Franck Depierre, so I’m not sure that we’re going to talk nonsense or forget people. There is a person who was there initially, but I don’t know what his name is anymore and I didn’t know him. But there was Franck Depierre, Romain Couturier, Agnès Crépet and Cédric Exbrayat, it seems to me. And Cyril Lacôte. Cyril Lacôte were not far away. There you go.

Audrey : Indeed, it wasn’t supposed to be much more than that.

Gregory : And I don’t have any people to tell you either. There is an extra person. Unfortunately, I’m sorry if the person doesn’t listen to the podcast. I don’t remember your first name. So there, 2011, so the context, that’s what you explain.

Walid: It’s that in 2011, the context. This is what you explain: there is no conference.

Audrey : No, it’s getting started.

Walid : You have to have a bit of willpower to put this together. What were the first editions? It was rather amateur or already from the first editions, there were… How can I put it? There were sponsors, etc. How were the first editions? It made you laugh a lot when I said amateur.

Gregory : The question is, are we no longer amateurs of amateurs? That is the question.

Walid : After all these years.

Audrey: It was rock’n roll in the first few years. It was funny. It was nice too. That’s part of the charm. There had to be sponsors. That’s pretty much for sure.

Simply, you have costs to manage to set up this kind of event, you can’t do it for free and I imagine there were, I admit I don’t really remember.

Gregory : It was in the premises of Epitech or Epita, the very first ones were less than a hundred people.

Audrey : Just the first one because from the second one it was

Gregory : To Supinfo. So we were at Supinfo for a few years and then in fact it continued to grow so we didn’t have any more at Supinfo so we went to the CPE (Campus Université Lyon 1). As there is always a lot of demand, we wanted to continue to grow.

We went to the Tobacco Factory and we realized that we didn’t like being fat at all.

Gregory : We were at 1000. The factory, the idea was to increase to 1000 people, which was done.

Audrey : That’s it. And in fact, it’s an event size that doesn’t allow us to preserve what makes up the MiXiT spirit. So we went back down and went home.

Walid : We’ll come back to this later on what the MiXiT spirit does. And here, just to know, the conference for example in 2024, how many people are we talking about?

Audrey : It’s around 700 actually.

Gregory : Including the speakers, the tips, but yes.

Audrey : The team, the sponsors, the speakers and the participating participants, that’s 700 people. There you go.

The MiXiT Team

Walid : Speaking of teams, who is the team actually made up of?

Audrey : So today, it’s made up of 11 people, including 6 girls. We are in superiority!! So, I’m going to start with the girls. There you go. We have Agnès, of course… who is called the boss. I think we can… We fuck the news.

So Agnès, the boss, there’s Anaïs, there’s Amélie, there’s Véronique, there’s Aude. On the boys’ side, there’s Romain, there’s Guillaume, there’s Mathieu, there’s Charles, let’s not forget Charles, and then Greg and then me.

Walid : 11 people, is that the team that plans the whole conference? After that, are there additional volunteers who help?

Exactly, you have the organizations whose role is to prepare the conference beforehand. So generally we meet around the end of September or beginning of October to place our desires, to reposition, to relaunch things, to do a walrus. And on the big day, we are supported by volunteers. This year, I think, we had about fifteen of them, which will allow us to make sure that we are able to accompany the speakers, that we are able to help the participants find their way around, manage the cloakroom, manage the tickets when they arrive, move all the furniture and put them away. That’s a lot of… it’s a help… We clearly couldn’t do what we do if it were just us.

Audrey : Without the volunteers it doesn’t work actually. There you go. You need a team of orgas but if you don’t have people on the day who are ultra motivated to do tasks of a grade, well it doesn’t work.

Walid : And what are volunteers? Are they students? Are they people around you? Who is a volunteer in fact?

Audrey : It’s more people around us. We make calls, we open to students, but we rarely have them.

Gregory : We used to have a lot of them, we almost only had students. We made calls to the universities of Lyon that had information services. We also have the CPE, we do our conference which gave us visibility to their students. Before, we almost only had students. We also have organizations today that are former volunteers, from when they were students.

And in fact, in recent years, we’ve had a lot of people around us who really wanted to give us a hand. You have to know that we are also volunteers, it’s something that you have to keep in mind, it’s that when you talk in your head and volunteers, everyone is a volunteer, there are no employees at MiXiT. But people who really want to support us, what’s important for us is to make sure that people are really there to support us. And sometimes, it’s the entourage but a little far away and so we make sure that it’s not people who just want to go to the conference. We struggled trying to get a ticket and in reality it has already happened once or twice but it’s not a big deal but it’s a small mix today but we mainly have people around us. Or people who come back too, that is to say that the entourage is more students but people who want to become us every year to help us.

Audrey : We also have former orgas, people who don’t necessarily want to be in all this long preparation time anymore because we start working in September, well it’s September until April, you know. But who want to continue to give us a hand.

So in fact, typically, we have Cédric, we have Cyril, we have Anne-Laure, we had Horacio this year, people who were orgas and who now continue as volunteers.

Walid : Is it always about the same dates, every year, or does it change?

Audrey : It’s about the same dates, yes, because quite simply we stick to the school holidays, since when we’re in a CPE, it’s a school, so obviously we can only go there when the students are on vacation.

Gregory : In fact, we had both configurations, that is to say that when we are at the CPE, the school opens the doors to us because it is closed to students, on the other hand when we were at the Manufacture, on the contrary, they closed during the holidays. So we had to go. That’s how we usually meet around the end of April for the conferences we do at CPE. Whereas when we were at the Manufacture, we did from the end of May to June, because those were the slots they had left.

But today, and I think for some time to come, it will be more like the end of April during the school holidays.

Walid : last question about the team. I wanted to know if you had rather complementary profiles? Are the distributions of tasks actually simple enough according to people’s skills?

Gregory : We don’t have event management skills, so we’re going to potentially question the selection of speakers. The question may arise about the complementarity of skills. And there, we have a lot of diversity with devs, people who are more in the work methodology part. We have someone who works on the front, on the mobile, so it’s more like that. Afterwards, on the choice, how do we organize ourselves on the preparation activities, here for once, it’s where people want to register to be able to lead the subject of the organization.

MiXiT’s values

Walid : We mentioned it earlier, but I’d like you to go into a little more detail. That’s something that came out of the preparation that you really wanted to talk about, and that was the values of MiXiT. I would like you to explain a little bit, both of you, what are the values that are carried by these conferences and whether it has evolved since the beginning or not?

Audrey : Overall, if you want, I would say that there are values that are added, there are values that are not from the beginning. And there are things that are added because quite simply, 2011 is a long time ago. There has been an awareness of certain issues that we didn’t have in 2011. So in fact, what was already present in 2011 was a strong desire in terms of accessibility, especially in terms of price, because the idea was to have a very, very low entrance price so that people. If people had to pay for it themselves, which was my case at the time, for example. And I was a junior, so I wasn’t paid thousands and cents, but I could afford to get into MiXiT.

And then also on accessibility in relation to disability, since very quickly there was velotyping for example. There was also the breastfeeding room, it happened very early. After that, there has always been a desire for a mix of audiences, trying not to have a 95% audience…

Gregory : Say it, say it!

Audrey : White, heterosexual, cisgender, and developer.

Walid : That’s it!

Audrey : So that’s a long-term work that we’re continuing. And then, there are things that naturally came to be added. You see, for example, the first MiXiT, there were goodies. I still have the goodies, the first MiXiT. And in fact, the goodies, very quickly, they cleared because ecologically, it’s not… Finally, overall, in the team, everyone is aligned on the ecological aspect, so that’s one of the things that emanated from it. And then, on the other hand, from the beginning, there was still the desire to do something oriented on ethics, with the idea of making people think, opening horizons to the participants on making them take a step back from their responsibilities. You see, in a profession that still has a societal impact, I think it’s hardly comparable in human evolution and in terms of scale, I would say. And then open their eyes to other subjects that are completely in line with what we call aliens. That’s it, that’s almost always been there and it remains the heart.

Gregory : We can say that year after year, we just try to strengthen, it gets stronger and stronger. That is to say, typically the subject of Velotyping, at the beginning, was… We experimented with small things.

Walid : Wait, can you call Velotypie back, what is it?

Gregory: Velotypy is a service. These are people who will have special keyboards and who will transcribe what they say in writing, which allows people who are deaf or hard of hearing to be able to follow the conference.

Initially, we were conducting experiments. Today, we are accompanied by a company called System Risp. This year, we went up to three screens in parallel. We had only done two. Before, we had one, then two, and today, it’s three. Because we really want that, we know that we can improve, there are things we have to put in place. It always requires resources, it’s always something to think about. But it’s part of what we want to implement and so globally these values of diversity, accessibility, respect, reflection on our society from year to year are strengthened, they take up a lot of space in the conference for us wisely.

Walid : And I was wondering if apart from the conference itself, these were actions, things that you were doing as individuals, and so the conference was just an extension of that?

Audrey : Overall, you don’t join the MiXit organ if you’re not aligned with the values, because you’ve had a bad time, you’re arriving in Wokistan, so it’s tough. That’s why, you see, when Agnès told me “no but it’s dead you come” it’s that the fit was natural, that’s all I like, that’s all I want to defend in my everyday life, so and I think it’s pretty much the same for everyone in the team, finally.

Walid : So you’re all very, very committed, in fact to formulate it like that?

Gregory : That’s it, you can be committed, you see, we all have this thing that remains on the side of our heads, I’m not going to speak for the co-organizations and say how they are committed. But clearly, as Audrey says, if you don’t have a major questioning of these things, if you don’t have an opening in any case on all these subjects, it’s going to be complicated in the organization.

Audrey : You can not be aligned with our values and come to the conference and I think I’ll have a good time anyway, but in the organization, it would be tough. It would be very, very tough. First of all because you would have to put up with my jokes about cisgender heterosexual males, so there you go.

Gregory : Oh well, it doesn’t hurt.

MiXiT funding

Walid : There is something that interests me, it’s a lot about podcasts in general, it’s funding. How things are financed, how projects are financed, etc. And there, how the conference is actually financed.

What choice did you make? Earlier, we talked about the fact that there was an entrance fee. Yes. I would like to understand a little bit what the economic model you have around this is. Who are the people who support you? In what way? I’m quite interested in knowing more.

Gregory : There are two sources of income. It’s sponsorship and ticketing. Today, we are lucky to have sponsors who follow us from year to year, others who come. I think we have a lot of conferences, we’re not exceptional in that, I think we’re quite aligned with other conferences. We have different packs that allow us to have different levels of visibility. What’s cool is that once again, we have sponsors who come here because there are also values.

Walid. What kind of sponsors do you have? Are they publishers? What is it?

Gregory : service companies, IT services companies, publishers.

Audrey : We have both, we try as much as possible to have a balance between the two, because otherwise you find yourself in competition, it’s not necessarily cool.

So there you go, to keep it nice for the sponsors as well, we try to have a balance on that too. Maybe the small difference of MiXiT is that we don’t accept sponsors who participate in global warming in any way, sell weapons, if they have been convicted of acts of moral harassment, sexual harassment within society, things like that, well you can’t be a sponsor of MiXiT. There you go.

Walid : It seems quite logical given what you said before…

Gregory : And then we have the ticketing. Historically, so you may have known everything from the beginning how much it was, it was around 50 euros.

Audrey : It was 50 euros from memory.

Walid : So it has always paid off?

Audrey : Yes.

Walid : Was it a choice from the start?

Audrey : When you organize a conference, you rent the premises of course, you will have to pay for the technical management, you will have the caterer, you will have a lot of additional costs that will be added. To be completely transparent, today the price of the ticket is just the caterer. In the end, the participants only pay for their meal. And so unfortunately we had to increase the ticket to 75 euros because we got more than 15% inflation. There you go. But that’s what allows us to stay in balance because sponsorship allows us to pay for everything else.

And that’s part of what limits us. Because, for example, in accessibility, we would like to do many more things, but prices are rising very quickly. That’s why we can’t equip all the lecture halls with velotyping, for example, all the rooms with typical bikes because we simply don’t have the means.

Walid: There’s this lottery there, I’d like to talk to you. I must admit that I discovered MiXiT conferences a little late and that there are not that many conferences that are paid apart from very professional events etc. So I was really curious why, so I’m glad I got the answer, it’s pretty cool.

And then transparency on what it pays, so that’s…

Audrey : I take the liberty, I think it’s because you have more of a vision of conferences on the free side.

Walid : Yes.

Audrey : In the Dev community, the Java community for example, all the confs have an entrance fee. And we are very, very low.

Gregory : And the same in agile communities, it’s the same thing. That is to say that most of the conferences are about these prices, but they are still paid. And I’m surprised, I’ve come across conferences, it’s prices at 300, 400, 500 euros per ticket, and now, as soon as you even leave our dev circles, it’s conferences that have prices that are crazy stuff.

Audrey : yes, even if you stay in dev, you know, there’s a conference that I love which is DDD Europe. It’s a fantastic conference, it’s something I like a lot, it’s overpriced, it’s more than 500 balls, if your employer doesn’t take care of it it’s hot, because it’s Amsterdam so there you go, it was a parenthesis but in fact in the dev ecosystem it’s the common practice because you have to pay the price, Simply.

Walid : I was raised on Fosden and all that it gives.

Audrey : That’s right.

Gregory : That’s right.

The Lottery

Walid : So on the other hand, one of the particularities is the lottery. So that, I really discovered. I would like you to explain a little bit about why it is in place and what you are actually doing it.

Gregory: In fact, we set it up because historically, it was a practical ticketing system. You arrived, on D-Day, at the opening, and well off we went. So at the beginning, it was in a single salvo and the salvo, in 10 minutes, in a quarter of an hour, we had nothing left. Come on, in three-quarters of an hour, I’m not going to overdo it. And in fact, afterwards, we started to do it in three salvos and it’s the same, you know.

In 30 seconds, all the seats were gone. And finally, we had a reflection on the justice of this, that is to say that in fact, who has access to this? The people who are behind their computers, at that time, we even had people who created bots to be able to fill out the form and like that, hop, it was faster to click as soon as the button appeared and so it questioned us two things, it was the fairness of saying “well there are people maybe every year in fact they get screwed but it’s not it’s not very cool and it’s always The same ones who will come back and it also questioned the diversity of our audience, that is to say that well it’s full of biases, that is to say that it’s people who are not in a meeting at that time who can come.

Audrey : who don’t have the kids to take to school

Gregory : You see, there were a lot of things. So the lottery was for us the way to be able to temporize, that is to say to allow a maximum of people to come, to say to each other hey I’m interested in it and then randomness does the job.

Walid : In any case, in the conferences I know I had never heard of lotteries, I don’t know if in other conferences you know there is this mechanism.

Audrey : to give you an overview of the situation, in fact in the dev confs, the problem of all the places are gone in 10 minutes, it’s universal. That is to say, we don’t have a dev conference where it’s not a problem. So I think there are other confs who are thinking about imitating us because it bothers them too. This is a very common practice in the Unconference, especially the Socrates. The Socrates played a lot of lotteries.

Walid : But at the time you set it up, were you the first?

Audrey : Yes. Well, Google I.O. has done it in us, that’s it. Because Google I.O. had the same problem. Because to give you an idea, we receive twice as many lottery registrations as we have space to sell.

So Google I.O. had done it and I think the idea came from there. We were inspired by it at that time by telling ourselves that this is what we have to do because it’s really not just otherwise.

Walid : There’s something you didn’t mention and I’m going to add it because it seems important to me, which is that, ok, you’re not selected but unlike other conferences, I think typically Open Source Experience, the confs are filmed.

Audrey : yes.

Walid : Like other events, the conferences are filmed, which means that, well, even if like me you couldn’t go, well at least you’ll be able to watch quietly at home after the conferences. It adds fairness, which means that, well, you’re not physically there in the event, but hey, you can still have the content, so you’re not physically there in the event, but you can still have the content.

Audrey : Exactly.

Gregory : There’s that and there’s also a rule that we set the third time we put this in place, which is that if you’ve been refused three times, you tell the organization and you have your place. If you have registered for the lottery and you know the organization and you can benefit from it. Three times in a row.

Walid : Last question about financing. Does financing allow you not to lose money or allows you to make money?

Gregory : It doesn’t allow you not to lose any. Clearly, today, we try as much as possible to be in balance.

Audrey : It fits right in.

The place in the ecosystem and the influences

Walid : ok. We talked about events. I wanted to know a little bit, precisely in relation to your place in this whole ecosystem, I wanted to know a little bit, do you have any relationships with other events, free or not? Are there any events that inspire you, so you inspire or have inspired the creation of MiXiT?

Audrey : So who inspired the creation, I don’t think so, because we like it a lot. The people at Paris Web are big friends of ours, we love each other very much, we love each other with love.

Walid : but wait, I think that Solution Linux at the time was there before?

Audrey : So I’m really talking to you about the Dev ecosystem actually.

Walid : OK, okay.

Audrey : In terms of the Dev ecosystem, especially Dev Java, it was the first. We could ask the founder again, I don’t think there is necessarily any inspiration.

Gregory : There are inevitably things that were happening, inevitably, even with the CARA, there were also agile conferences, there are similarities, tracks, things. Indeed, it will ask the founder and the founders what brought all this about. Afterwards, on the search for openness, the inspiration side was to look at what was also being done in the ecosystem, how we talk about tech, how we share to say, we also want to share other things for this same audience. And so yes, Paris Web today as an inspiration is clear.

Audrey : That’s it and we’re also quite teachers from AFUP, the French association of PHP users, who are also friends, we get along well, we’re aligned in terms of value, so there you go, they’re our favorites.

Walid : I also wanted to know a little bit about your location in relation to the city, with the institutions, with the user groups around it, etc.

Gregory : It represents the conference itself, I want to say. That is to say, it relied on the JUG and the CARA for the initial organization, with research in terms of theme. We don’t pretend to have a local impact or things like that on our integration with the communities, it’s the same, there are no things that happen outside of the conference.

Walid : One of my questions was typically, you have free software conferences and next to these free software conferences, as people are there, they take the opportunity to do meet-ups, to hold annual meetings where you see.

Audrey : We don’t have things like that. After that, we have… Well, that’s enough… The interesting side, because in your initial question, you told us about the city of Lyon, etc.

There are two important things to note. First of all, the metropolis offers us our evening. That is to say, on Thursday evening, there is an evening for the participants. And in fact, the metropolis provides us with the Chapel of the Trinity, which is a magnificent place, absolutely splendid. She offers us the caterer and it’s their way of supporting a local event.

And it was very funny, at the very beginning of the year, when we were starting to prepare, we had someone from the city of Lyon who called us, who got in touch with us saying “can I explain to you what you do, I was interested in my teams”. So he came this year. Maybe we will have among the participants of the next editions the IT services of the city of Lyon.

Gregory : For the establishment, I remember that in 2019 I think, Agnès had met people delegated to the city in Lyon who didn’t know us. Nobody knows us. We have no visibility at all. Apart from our ecosystems, that is to say in our networks in Lyon, we are all in touch with the local communities who know us a little. We have Lyon Tech Hub, we have Java User Group, we have CARA, etc. But apart from that, we’re invisible. And so the person was like, “What can you do, how long have you been doing this?” You should know, it’s been 6 or 7 years that you’ve been bringing 700 people to Lyon who come from all over France to talk about tech, to talk about ethics, etc. She was completely hallucinated to learn that there was this in the city. No, but very bad.

Audrey: yes, a nullity. There you go.

Gregory : Until this year.

Audrey : Until this year because you see, we ended up admitting it in fact, we ended up looking things in the face. And we hired someone to take care of the communication precisely because it’s a real job and because no one… For once, it’s a point that no one really wanted to take in the team. Well you see, each time it was suffering for the person he was taking care of.

Except Cyril who, for years, managed Twitter and it made him laugh. So we had a tone… In addition, we benefited from Cyril’s humor, so you have to like him. I love it, but it’s quite biting. In fact, this year, we chose to get help. In fact, the thing is, as you know, we have this notion of lottery. So people need to have the information in time to be able to register, etc.

So it’s really important to have effective communication and so we have Alice now who does it very well, who kisses it.

MiXiT and communication

Walid : Because in fact it was all my next questions about what is your editorial lineage, on which social network do you communicate?

Audrey : Oh well, that’s the moment that hurts because in fact we are forced to go on platforms that we don’t like but because that’s where people are. So in fact, we’re going to say that we’re on platforms that we don’t use personally, you know. I have a Twitter account that I haven’t used for 4 years, except in cases of absolute emergency and that’s it, to really be told “no, you have to go read this message, otherwise I won’t open this shit”.

We went back, we were on Vimeo for years and then Alice told us “yes, well kids, you’re cute, but everyone’s on YouTube”. And we were like “yes but yes!” Well yes but hey, there is a moment, it’s knowing what you want to do. Do you want to survive or not? There you go. You also have to go where the people are. If you want your conference to continue to be successful, you should continue to attract sponsors and participants. So there you have it.

So we got made, we got caught up, it was very funny. It was really, really funny because in the opening keynote on the first day, we had Olivier Alexandre , who is a researcher who has worked on Silicon Valley.

Walid : I read his book.

Audrey : And so he stuck a little cleat on us in the process.

Gregory : as an introduction from the beginning.

Audrey : But we had a lot of fun.

Gregory : yes, it was cool.

Audrey : that’s it, but there are reasons, there are reasons, we’re not… it’s not a happy thing you see, well we much preferred to do all our communication on Mastodon and that’s it, except that on Mastodon there is almost no one who follows us so it’s not that we have to centralize the efforts unfortunately.

Gregory : We’re on Mastodon and BlueSky, we’ve also started on BlueSky, but today it’s not networks that have been… There hasn’t been a mass migration. I believed in it, I believed in it, I went on Mastodon, I believed in it, I did ah, I went on Blue Sky, I believed in it, I did… Ah. And in fact, today, as we can see, we have had more and more…

Since Covid, in fact, there has been a slowdown, since the takeover of Twitter by the other coco. Same thing, there were a lot of things that were deserted. Historically, our communication was mainly on Twitter. People don’t read emails, or it falls into spam. Well, we don’t have people who are going to phon all the participants to inform them of the existence of the next edition.

So social networks are our main tool. And it was a real debate between us, with Alice, when we started discussing this, because we didn’t want to come back to YouTube, Twitter we wanted to desert it too. With Covid, there has been a loss of visibility on the networks, but also a slight slowdown in registrations. And so we say to ourselves, maybe there’s a link. And at some point, you have to make a choice, you have to make a choice.

Audrey : Now, it’s slowly coming back to normal, but really slowly. And so we scared ourselves a bit, you know, the last two, three years, it’s complicated.

Walid : But for me, there is one of the subjects that I deal with very regularly on the podcast because I love it, well it’s one of my favorite subjects, it’s everything that is around the news item, freedom in terms of decentralization etc. And these are subjects that are fascinating with Peertube for example, etc. Of course it’s better to have an audience to advertise on proprietary networks, but there’s this whole new world that’s developing, which for the moment is a bit embryonic but whose possibilities are really… It excites me a lot.

Gregory : We are completely aligned with this ambition too. After that, there are two things that come into play. There is the energy that it takes to multiply and that today, as Audrey said, we were a little scared. Really, 2021, we have on our online remote edition, I think there are people who were a little surprised because we had only chosen alien keynotes. We didn’t have a tech topic at all. And so, I think there are a lot of people who come to see us for tech topics, we have also been criticized for the last lessons, that’s why this year we decided to rebalance and bring back more tech and so we still lost a little visibility in this and for the moment our objective was to be sure that we manage to fill the conference, That’s also it. So tomorrow if it’s no longer a subject, that is to say that we no longer have a problem with this in terms of visibility, people are informed, etc. Our ambition is to move towards things that correspond to our values, as Audrey said, if we had the choice, we would leave a lot of platforms that we came back to this year. It wasn’t a happy thing, it was really a necessity for us.

Audrey: It’s horrible to say, but I can’t tell you how relieved I am because it’s Alice who opens the messages. I don’t have to open this filthy Twitter. It’s just because someone asked a question and so by the way you see all the amount of waste that is dumped.

Walid : I understand very well.

Audrey : And that’s it, it’s not an easy subject and it’s not a subject where we are necessarily the most comfortable but we make choices that are necessary for the survival of the conference.

Walid : It’s very nice to be able to talk about it and to see that it’s never black or white for everything. When you choose tools sometimes it’s not exactly what you want. It’s never exactly how you want.

MiXiT and Free Software

To stay a little on this subject, I wanted to know a little bit about your relationship to free software. So in fact I would like you to explain to us a little bit what is the place of free software and the whole free ecosystem in MiXiT, because there are associations that come there, that come to talk, etc. So it’s an event that I experienced through my networks of free software players.

Audrey : In fact, we in general, are always very, very happy when we have people who come to talk to us about free software from different approaches.

Because, you see, for example, this year, we had Pierre-Yves, one of the co-founders of Framasoft, who came to talk to us about Framacloud. But we also had Matthieu Faure Mathieu works at ADULLACT. ADULLACT in fact, their job is to install free software in the public, so who came to give us feedback on this. We have APRIL who came to talk to us about how to put more diversity in the world of free software because I realized that in terms of their members, they had a ratio that was not what they wanted.

In general, it’s part of our values, so we’re always very happy when we have free subjects that are proposed.

Gregory : It’s in the middle of the rest of the conference, we think about our audience, about what will bring them something too. Before, our tagline (Editor’s note: slogan) was “ideas for right away”. And so inevitably, we’re wondering what the topics are on everyone’s lips today and so we don’t want to surf on the trends, but we also try to bring things that we haven’t talked about and that we need to talk about a little bit.

And the example for us is that this year we had a topic on Figma. Figma has exploded lately.

Walid : Can you just explain for people who don’t know what Figma is?

Gregory : Figma is a… I just have to do it, I’m non-technical of history. It seems to me that it’s a tool for UX, in fact, for prototyping and for making wireframes. We have someone who had proposed a subject on Penpot. We really asked ourselves the question, which is to say today we had a Track design because we also wanted to push in this spirit of openness. We have quite few topics overall in our calls for speakers and so we said to ourselves well in fact we have very few topics but we have two that will talk wireframe, Penpot and Figma, what do we do?

We said to ourselves for the moment maybe we should first talk about Figma like that, at least it’s done and at another time we may talk about alternative solutions as we do for… If there is someone who proposes a free version of a subject which is another proposal but it’s okay we know what the main proposal is. Ok I’ll look for what’s going on elsewhere but I think it’s a reflex that we’re going to have once again the nuance is important Penpot it’s an open source alternative, not free software it’s open source.

Walid : From what I understand is that in fact you have a continuity over the years of the subjects.

Audrey : Well yes.

Walid : You’re trying to get one.

Audrey : We’re trying to have a… to have something coherent. Indeed, this is typically the example that Greg cited, we had never had a topic on it so it seemed easier for the participants to start with the reference and then once you have introduced the reference, you can start talking about the alternatives. But if you come up with the alternatives right away, people won’t necessarily make the connection.

Actually, Figma, they may not have practiced, but they may have heard of it and so they’re going to want to dig into it. If you come directly with the open source alternative, then on the other hand, they won’t know what you’re talking about and as a result, it’s not comfortable for the person who proposed the subject either because he may find himself in front of an empty room. There is this balance to be found which is not always easy. We try to do the best we can.

Walid : Do you happen to have examples that have happened in previous years?

Audrey : There, you ask a lot. I wonder

Gregory : If you have to remember all the conferences… I don’t have an example.

Audrey : There are some subjects that mark us more than others, so we know that we talked about them, but typically on tool issues, it’s not necessarily what will stick with us the most. So, we should start again… After that, the videos of all the previous editions are on the site. They are accessible, so you can look for them if you want to do a little archaeology.

Walid : I brought out videos from 2008 to contact people again on certain subjects, etc. It’s something I really appreciate.

Alien Conferences

Walid : But by the way, I realize that there is something that we have not defined, you spoke earlier of “alien” conferences and I forgot to ask you to define what an alien conference was. Because as much tech I imagine very well, what is alien?

Grégory: Alien is subjects that are neither going to be part of a tech field such as code and nor to be part of project management, almost not to be part of the company, project management or how I dev, but really something that is an opening to society in general, a reflection on the functioning of our society. So that’s us, most of our plenary sessions, most of our keynotes are what we call alien keynotes because here, they come to switch to something else. So even if we’re talking about Silicon Valley, even if we’re talking about… We’re going to talk about cyber-surveillance, we’re going to talk about the way Silicon (Valley) works and from a political and social point of view. And we’re also going to have things in aliens that are lighter, in quotation marks. We talked about penguin feathers, we talked about how to make chocolate, etc.

Audrey : A year ago, we had an orchestra! We had an orchestra on stage, with the conductor explaining to you how it worked! These are moments of envy.

Grégory : and it’s the idea of bringing an opening, a reflection, a shift still elsewhere, to go and seek, in this term, not only overused, but inspiration, but really to be able to say to yourself, “Hey, I have a conference in which I learned things for my everyday job, which will be useful to me right away. At the same time, we talked about something, but it questions me. And hopefully, it makes me question my own practice.”

The audience and the conference

Walid : And it’s necessarily tech people who come to it? Because you talk about orchestras, etc. Are there non-tech people who come to these conferences?

Gregory : As a participant?

Walid : Yes, as a participant.

Gregory : We still have mainly people who come from tech, mainly developers. Really, the big, big, big, big, big of our audience is developers. We will have people who do the operational project management, people who are interested in these subjects. But in the bulk of the public, it’s still developers.

Audrey : On the other hand, what’s very interesting is that overall, every time we have people who come, you see, for example, last year, we had a mathematician, we have sociologists, we have historians, we have people who really come from the environment where we’re the aliens for them, in fact, You see.

Gregory : A lecturer, lecturer.

Audrey : And they love the experience and they tell us “but I’ve discovered something, it’s extraordinary, I’ve talked to a lot of people, it’s fascinating your job”, etc. It’s quite funny actually, because for us they’re the aliens, but in fact for them it’s us. They have a great time and they have a blast. It’s a pretty nice thing, quite magical.

Feedback from the 2024 edition

Walid : if we now move on to the 2024 edition… What must be said is that initially I wanted to do this conference before the 2024 edition and that finally we do the recording afterwards. So it’s a good thing now you’ll be able to tell me a little bit about how this 2024 edition went. Was it a good edition for you and did it keep its promises in terms of what you had set for your objectives?

Audrey : So this is clearly my favorite edition. I’ve done a lot of them as a participant, I’ve done several as a speaker. I even spent a year with my best friend, I did the closing keynote, so it was in the beginning. It was really in the very beginning. And this is my fourth edition as an organization.

In fact, I think that beyond the content, we were very happy with the program overall, we were very happy with the keynotes we managed to have. But in fact, what makes me happy is that we continue to work very the diversity aspect, and in particular to make sure that my kit is a safe place.

Every year, we get feedback from the participants, but also from the sponsors, etc. Saying, “it’s incredible, I feel really good in the event, I had a great time, I met super nice people, I had a lot of crazy discussions”. I can’t explain why…

I started, I’ve been volunteering since I was a dev and I’ve always volunteered around dev and it was to give back to the community a little bit of everything it gave me. And finally I do that and I take ten times more in the face because when I see people super happy at the end, it’s incredible, you know. I know that typically when we close I am on the verge of tears of happiness but I am on the verge of tears, so there you go.

Gregory : We had excellent feedback on this edition, so as I said, we wanted to rebalance, we had been criticized post Covid for having a little less tech. We tried to see a little bit how we could… We multiplied the types of subjects from year to year, and the types of techno too, since before it was only Java, so we said we’re going to talk about something else, and so inevitably it reduced for everyone. And this year we decided to go back and reaffirm the tech part, and therefore to give more space compared to the other types of it. And I think we’ve had pretty positive feedback on that, only good feedback. So we haven’t received the poll yet, maybe it will be a cold shower.

But no, really, you could feel it during the event. We had feedback that was absolutely great from a person at a booth who told us “I need to tell you something”. Well, not to me, but I think she gave you the name back Audrey, she needs to tell you something. Usually there’s always someone who comes to annoy me when I’m behind my stand.

A bit heavy and who comes to flirt with me. No one did. It’s the first time it’s happened to me, no one came to talk to me a little bit to flirt with me. It’s little things like that. I saw it at the very end, they were dismantling their stand. I chatted with them and told him it’s your first MiXiT because I’d never seen it.

She tells me yes it’s my first. I have the first conference where I don’t get bored.

Gregory : yes. And then you say to yourself, bingo, it’s because you’ve built something anyway. And compared to what had been set, it’s once again, year after year, we try to put little extra things in. I said earlier, we have put a third room in velotype. We have a system that we have been in place for a few years called the Mixette, whose objective is to finance associations.

And I think that this year, it worked really well, that is to say that everyone understood what it could be used for. Because in fact it’s something that we’re going to give, it’s a small change that we’re going to give to participants so that they come and finance the associations, but it’s also currencies that we give to sponsors to try to find techniques to make a link with the participants and I think it’s a year where sponsors have really been able to put together animations and things around this small change, whereas before it was the transition phase. The goal of the Mixette is that sponsors no longer bring goodies. That’s your thing, I don’t have my brand on it, how kind of you are to give it to me between the legs. Our goal was to stop the production of goodies also from the sponsors and this year, to be at the event, they adapted their system to that very well and it was very, very nice. It worked really well, we also have something called MiXiT on Air, in parallel with the conference we do interviews with people who have given conferences, people who do keynotes, associations who come to see us, on our day to talk about different subjects.

Audrey : There are speakers too, in fact, we take speakers from the conference on topics that will be close enough in fact for us to create an interaction etc. And we’re going to interview them over the two days.

Gregory : And that didn’t work well, we have a partner called Ikada who manages all the video. You see if we have replay it’s thanks to them. They created a studio for us to do this streaming which was magnificent with an image and sound quality that is crazy.

Audrey : It’s something we started, it was Romain and Anne-Laure who had the idea at the beginning, and we launched it last year by saying to ourselves “go ahead and try it”. We had a blast doing it, and so this year we said “we’re putting a little more resources on ourselves”, we paid for a nice décor, etc. to have a nice rendering. And it’s a really very cool moment actually, it’s really a very nice part of MiXiT I think.

Where do the speakers come from?

Walid : A question that comes to me like this, are your speakers French or are they francophone? Do you have people who come from abroad to talk?

Grégory : we have people who come from abroad, there is no subject, we have some, the only thing there is is that we have fewer and that we have stopped … So we pay, whether it’s our keynotors, whether it’s the people who have gone through the call for speakers, we pay for travel expenses, we pay for travel, we pay for the hotel. On the other hand, we don’t pay for the plane.

In fact, we didn’t want to bring in people from California. We would have done it, it was a real pleasure, they are great people, but the idea of taking a plane ticket, generating that, bringing them just for two days of conference, took us a little by the throat.

Audrey: That is to say that a few years ago, when we did it, it was because we made sure that the speakers behind us could do a tour of Europe. That is to say, if you want, OK, they took the plane, but then by train, they were going to give a conference not far away in Germany or whatever, etc. They were doing more. We were trying to have this weaving.

You see, it kind of justifies coming. It’s something we’ve lost over the years, I think Covid has finished us off on that. We still have a few people, we make a few exceptions when there are people we really want to have, but it’s really exceptional, we put it very clearly, we don’t reimburse the plane biases, we don’t want to participate in that. But we have Belgians, you see, for example, who come by train, so we have French-speakers.

Walid : The last part is a part that I do every time, which I call the challenges in fact. And what I’d like to know is a little bit what your challenges are, what are the major subjects on which you’re going to have to work on the… You want to work on the years… the years to come, if there are any.

Audrey : Greg, you’ll tell me if you agree with that, but for me the subjects are not going to change because in fact they are complex subjects. Whether it’s in terms of diversity, when I talk to you about diversity, it’s diversity in the participants. We really want everyone to feel welcome, whether it’s in terms of speakers, or in terms of accessibility. In fact, these subjects are constant work in progress. You can’t come in and say it’s okay, I’ve solved the problem. That’s it, it’s false. This is completely false.

It’s really a long-term job. And at the same time, you see, that’s what’s interesting about MiXiT, because I was a volunteer at another conference before where we didn’t ask ourselves these questions.

MiXiT, in fact, there are times when we tear our heads off, you see, there are times when it’s ultra complicated between what we would like to do and what our values impose on us. And there are times when we make choices, we’re there, too bad, well we won’t do it.

And at other times, on the contrary, it’s completely out of whack because we say to ourselves we’re finding a way to go further, precisely.

You see, for example, this year, we did a training course with the AVFT, the association that fights against violence against women at work, to allow us to be able to be able to happen if ever sexual violence were to occur during the conference, to be sure that we would be able to bring the person to safety, but not only physically, but also psychologically, to accompany him/her, to have a collection of his/her words that would allow him or her to move forward in the rest of his or her steps.

For me, it’s continuing on all these subjects, in fact, where we always try to go further, to see how we can improve.

Gregory : There is a challenge of… to increase visibility also on these subjects, you see, on velotyping, and therefore on accessibility. We know people… We have an audience that has been out for quite some time, which is gradually coming back because in fact, until now, the confs were not equipped, so why would I bother?

And so there’s also a communication issue around that, in the same way, as Audrey says, around sexist and sexual violence, to say, well, if there’s a need to talk, MiXiT is a space in which you have referents, and we want there to be things happening at MiXiT. And that’s what I think we’re going to look for.

And our challenges are to make people feel welcome to participate and express themselves more and more.

Audrey : Me, my biggest pride this year, we had a closing keynote that was absolutely fantastic by a researcher who is a queer activist, etc. and who compared us during her keynote to a queer space where she used to organize events. That’s my proudest moment actually, as an organization, you know. It’s to say to yourself, we’re identified as queer welcome, you know, that’s cool. For me, it really fills me with joy.

Walid : The first talks I listened to from MiXiT, I don’t know what it was, what a conference it was, from a woman who told why after 10 years of computer science, she left IT.

Audrey : yes.

Walid : It posed the problems very well and indeed, it made you think a lot. So, I found it really interesting because it’s not necessarily subjects that are very much discussed elsewhere, even if it starts a little in the conferences more, etc. But it always remains…

Audrey : It’s much more so, fortunately, but in fact… It’s much more so, but hey, we could certainly go much further. The problem is that we still don’t have the miracle solutions.

You see, I know that on a personal level, I’ve had some not so great experiences as a woman and in fact I think it’s important to be able to create spaces. Typically I joined the Spring project because, well, first because it’s an open source project that I loved, but also because I knew that it was a place where I was going to be safe as a woman. And it’s also good that you see, there are confs that offer what offers this same environment. To say you can come, whatever your ethnic origin, whatever your weight, whatever your hair color, whatever your sexual preferences, your romantic preferences, your non-binary, you will always be welcome in fact at MiXiT. That’s the thing. And I think it’s important that there are confs like that.

Conclusion

Walid : ok, I just said that makes a good conclusion. And before giving you the floor for the op-ed, I had two short questions.

The first question is what would you say to a non-technical person to introduce MiXiT?

Gregory : To a non-technical person to come to MiXiT, I think it’s a great entry point to connect to this tech community. Because there is this openness and this is the space we want to create. It’s that there is openness for all types of people. If you come to MiXiT, you can get in touch with someone, ask them what they do, what they do and they will explain it to you in your words to make sure you understand.

There are tech conferences, of course, and there are things that can be quite abrupt, but there are a lot of things on the other hand. So if you want to see a tech conference to see what it’s like, it’s possible. And on top of that, if you even do tech workshops, I’m sure you can get in touch with people who will explain everything to you live. And on top of that, it’s all the other subjects that don’t require any technical skills to understand. Once again, it’s more part of the organizational part. Ok, former tech, ok, a little cultured, we don’t do too much, we can do 80% of the conferences. And so in the 80% there are necessarily also conferences.

Walid : Second question, what would you say to a freelancer or a person who works in IT to introduce MiXiT?

Audrey : Very good question. Thank you Greg.

Walid : I want to introduce MiXiT to my colleagues on the product team I work in, who don’t know MiXiT. How do I present this?

Audrey : Overall, you could tell them that there is a lot of festivities in the book project and the open source project. You can tell them to submit, because I’m interested in it, you see, you have to submit.

Walid : My colleagues are not free software players, I don’t work in a particularly free software environment, but on the other hand you said DDD earlier, that will speak a lot to my colleagues.

Audrey : it’s one of the subjects we like, let’s say that, yes, overall you can tell them that there will be a… We try to have a diversity of subjects so that everyone can find things that will actually interest them immediately in their daily lives, you know, compared to their daily lives. And then also to have all these crazy things on the side, sometimes completely perched. Well you see, this year we had a carpentry workshop, it was fantastic! I think that’s the best thing to explain to them. It’s that if you want to learn things and at the same time you want to have a lot of fun, well Mixit works quite well.

Walid : If you want to get a message across related to Mixit or not related to MiXiT, I’ll leave you each a few sentences to conclude. Audrey?

Audrey : Well, I’m going to pass on a message to all people from minorities not represented in tech, submit to MiXiT. Submit, submit, submit, come. We want that, you see, we actually want us to have what we call a line-up on stage. A line-up is your selection of speakers that resembles a little more the society in which we live. Let them come and talk to us about things, problems that you can’t know if you don’t have a disability or things like that. Submit, come, we need you.

Walid : Gregory?

Gregory : I will pass on a message if there are ever people who work in companies, and you have people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or PRM, or blind, visually impaired, do not hesitate to contact us.

We give tickets in exchange for feedback to all these people we try to serve in the conference and we know that we have a lot of room for improvement. And we want MiXiT to be a space that is accessible. And we have trouble reaching different audiences and therefore not hesitate to communicate, to say but go to MiXiT, send us an email and we will be able to make room for you.

Audrey: yes and that’s the case, well yes that’s really the participants. Same, people from minorities, finally come, come to MiXiT because you will be welcome no matter what. Don’t be afraid of any discrimination, we’re a bit revered on the subject, we repeat it in the morning, I put a code of conduct everywhere, so there you go, you’re all, all welcome. There you go.

Walid : well congratulations, we’ll stop there, next year I hope I don’t miss the lottery so that I can try to come too.

Audrey : With pleasure.

Gregory : We’ll communicate on the worst social networks so that you know.

Walid : I’m mainly on the Fediverse, so I don’t want to miss the information.

Audrey : We have a newsletter if you want, we only send the minimum necessary emails.

Walid : He’s the most reliable. There you go. Perfect, listen thank you very much Audrey and Grégory for taking the time to talk about MiXiT. I was really interested, I didn’t know more than that, I was interested in understanding a little why, how, I had a lot of questions, you answered all that, so it was really nice.

I hope to have the opportunity to invite you or other people from the organization again, why not, to talk about future editions.

Audrey : Absolutely.

Walid : See you soon, and then be well, and then for the listeners, as usual, don’t hesitate to share, and you get the point, you also have to participate in the lottery, and you also have to submit conferences, that’s it.

Audrey : yes!

Walid : It’s your duty for next year.

Gregory : Thank you very much Walid.

Audrey : Thank you very much.

This episode was recorded on May 3, 2024.

License

This podcast is published under the dual license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.