She's Geeky is a powerful conference for me because it is one of the few events that bring women together who are truly technical (as well as geeky), and cuts across niche-specific organizations, as well.
In Silicon Valley, like the rest of the world, women engineers, QA leads, product developers, front end engineers and even PMP/technical project manager leads are a minority--it's far more common for the women who are working to be in marketing, visual design, or what is considered a "softer" area. Of course, that in turn leads more people to assume those jobs are what women do, and that the other skills are out of their range.

So this conference is an affirmation of women's skills, and of diversity--and it is also a place to talk honestly, in the unconference format.  Someone I know has asked to co-lead a session with me on transparency and identity, a topic I have written and talked about a lot, and if people are interested, we can definitely do that session.

The topic I would like to talk about though, is failure. A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to join Ben Casnocha and members of the Silicon Valley Junto at a lunch where failure was the topic, and it was a great discussion--one I am excited to have with more people, and with more women (as it turned out, I was the only woman who made the lunch I attended).

Some of the junto questions and items to think about have kept my attention:

• What behaviors and attitudes tend to lead to failure?
• What are the best practices for dealing with failure when it happens?
• How can we handle our emotions and maximize what we can learn from failure?

I'm interested in doing a session on this, maybe on Saturday.

There's an informal list of proposed topics on the wiki---and a list of attendees here