Running a Coding Confessions event
As well as submitting your confession to us, you can run your own coding confessions event at your organisation or as part of a conference. We have three possible styles for this: public talks, “confession booths” and noticeboards.
Its really helpful if the outputs of these are fed back to our blog for everybody to benefit from. This could either be in the form of a post for each confession or a summary post covering any commonly occuring themes. Either way please submit an issue to our github repository and label it “event confession”.
Notice board
This style requires the least effort to manage. A notice board is setup for people to attach their confessions written on postit notes or larger pieces of paper if required.
Online Noticeboards
For online conferences an anonymous document editing system such as an etherpad or hackmd could be used instead.
Public Talks
Here each person wishing to confess has a few minutes to talk about their confession. Our suggested format is a lightning talk style where:
- Each person gets 5 minutes to speak
- Maximum of 3 slides
- 2 minutes for questions
Volunteers to confess could either be identified in advance or requested at the time (or a few hours in advance if slides are needed). The first option requires more planning but guarantees you’ve got some people to speak.
Confession Booths
In this option the person giving the confession (the confessor) and the person listening to them (the absolver) sit together in a room with some kind of barrier to prevent them from seeing each other, but allowing them to hear each other. This could be a curtain or a screen.
This option needs at least two people to run it. One to act as the “absolver” who will listen to the confessions. The other to ensure that nobody else enters the room while the confession is taking place. The absolver should have some experience in mentoring. Please see our code of conduct for absolvers.
This style of confession allows the confessor to tell their story without judgement. But unless something is recorded it doesn’t allow the lessons to be presented to the wider community. The absolver could (with permission of the confessor) write down some notes which could form the basis of a blog post. Or for a more anonymous approach, they could write a blog covering only the broad themes which were confessed to them.
Online confession booths
For online conferences there will need to be a place that the confessor can anonymously chat with the absolver. This could be achieved with an anonymous platform that does not require a login such as Jitsi Meet. The confessor should not give their name or switch on their camera and could even opt to say everything via a text chat. The absolver could reply via text or audio.