DevOpsDays Austin believes in supporting the local community that supports us, the techies of Austin. As we’ve grown and we’ve been able to end some of our years with extra money from our sponsors. We are careful to be thrifty with the event and rely on our volunteers to do a lot, and all DevOpsDays events run on a nonprofit basis; one of the few core rules of all DevOpsDays is that the events are not for individual or corporate profit.
The Austin technical community is a cross-section of, and part of, our community. We have a diverse set of individuals from many backgrounds and neighborhoods all around the area. As technologists we are largely blessed with decent salaries and technology companies have lots of money, and many of the keenest needs in the area need relatively little funding to make a real difference. We believe it’s our responsibility as a part of the community to use part of what we make to give back to support the most vulnerable among us. Therefore we’ve made it a point to use our excess funds to give back to charities that directly help those most in need.
We started DevOpsDays Austin in 2012 from nothing, and relied on a free venue (courtesy of my employer at the time, National Instruments). We made enough to make a down payment on a venue in 2014, and by 2015 we were confident enough of our finances that we considered our first charitable donation.
The natural choice was the Central Texas Food Bank (at the time, known as the Capital Area Food Bank), a well known long time Austin charity that combats hunger in the area. We gave $5000, and we also did a charity drive at the event, handing out leftover t-shirts and swag from the previous two years to those who made a donation of their own, which sent another $2600 to the food bank.
In 2016 we moved to a new, larger, much more expensive venue (the Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium out at UT Austin) so we could let more people attend DevOpsDays. That put us at the limit of our finances for a couple years, especially with our 2017 “Monsters of DevOps” blowout conference with many international speakers and great fun events. But by 2018 we had that venue dialed in as well and had $20,000 left over that we decided to donate to charity. That year, instead of sending all the donation to one charity, we let each of our 20 organizers send $1000 to a charity of their choice. This ended up driving our helpful accountant Laura at ConferenceOps batty trying to get proper tax receipts from everyone, however, and we promised her we wouldn’t do that again.
Then in 2019 we had a great event, sponsors were in a right frenzy to get in and we had to add more sponsor booths to accommodate them – which was a lot of work, but left us also with a lot of leftover money ($25,000, off a conference with only a $200k total budget). We weren’t sure how we could be the most effective with a gift like this, and one of our organizers said “Did you know… There’s a new project here in Austin that builds miniature houses for the homeless in a beautiful community?” And that’s how we were introduced to the Community First! Village, a quickly growing and very effective outgrowth of Mobile Loaves and Fishes to house the homeless. And it turns out $25,000 is exactly how much it takes to build one of those homes. Our organizers enthusiastically approved the donation and we went out and did a great tour of the site, and many of us have returned as volunteers since.
And then the hard times came. During the pandemic, DevOpsDays Austin was on ice. In fact, we had planned on moving to an even more expensive hotel venue and had a down payment in place when the lockdown came, and we had to get a lawyer into play to get our deposit back.
But the needs of the community weren’t on hold. We have many Black and brown technologists in our community, and the high profile brutality directed at them was completely unacceptable. Long time friend of DevOpsDays Austin, John Wills, started a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter around making a quilt with all his DevOpsDays shirts (many of which were from Austin) in 2020, and we felt compelled to donate $2000 of the more than $12,000 he raised.
Then we were in the long night of lockdown. We weren’t doing anything from a DevOpsDays Austin perspective in 2021, though there was a virtual DevOpsDays Texas conference to fill in some of the gap. But as jobs and aid dried up, hunger became a critical need again in Austin. Fellow organizer Boyd Hemphill encouraged people to help out and volunteer during a virtual meetup, and his words made my conscience burn till I brought it to my fellow DevOpsDays Austin organizers to see if we could dip into our reserves and help. They all enthusiastically approved a $10,000 donation to our old friends the Central Texas Food Bank again.
Two donations without any revenue, that’s good enough till we can have an event again, right? Well, you’d think, and then Russia went and invaded Ukraine.
While we’re an Austin organization and we’ve always given to help out in Austin directly, we have many Ukrainians as part of our local tech community. I worked with many of them hand in hand while I was running teams at Bazaarvoice, as we had a great relationship with the Ukrainian consulting company Softserve. We brought many of them here to Austin to work with us, we went out together, I had toasted them with “Slava Ukraini!” Many of our organizers had similar experiences. And since we don’t like bullies around here, that riled us up. After a discussion along the lines of “well, we started from nothing once, we can do it again if we have to,” we donated $10,000 to Ukrainian relief organizations Razom for Ukraine and Nova Ukraine.
And that brings us up to date with the past, but we finally managed to have DevOpsDays Austin again! In May, we got a great venue (the University of Texas Alumni Center, at half price courtesy of Bill our venue lead being an UT alum) and planned for a slightly smaller than usual (350 masked attendees, to hedge against super-spreading) conference on our 10 year anniversary – the DevOpsDays Austin 10 Year Class Reunion.
Since it was our 10th anniversary, we did a yearbook. And when I put the charitable donation page together for the yearbook, I realized we’d given $72,000 to charity over the years. 10 years and an even $100,000 sounded mighty nice.
The conference went great, and all those sponsors have been saving up their marketing money wondering what to do with it. After some laborious running of numbers I realized we could free up the $28,000 donation to get to that bar and leave enough for us to make a venue down payment the next year.
As we contemplated this year’s donation our Texas state government decided to openly attack the LGBT+ citizens of our state. Many of those in our technical community we meet with every month in user groups are gay, lesbian, transgender, binary, and so on, and this is a direct attack on many of our coworkers, colleagues, and friends. And not just them, but their children.
As a result we gave $14,000 to The Trevor Project, a national service that provides suicide prevention hotlines for LGBT+ youth, $14,000 to Out Austin, a local place for youth of all sexual orientations and gender identities. I’ll write a separate post about those organizations and why them, and more importantly how you can help.
But in the end we’ve been very happy that we’ve been able to use our position as techies in the tech hotspot of Austin to consistently give back. We’d challenge other conferences, tech companies, and individual technologists to do so as well – especially to reputable charities that directly help those who need it.
I hope that DevOpsDays Austin can continue to give back in this way over the next ten years too!
