How Slido helps AWS User Group to empower diversity and inclusion

The AWS User Group Berlin is a 5,000-strong community of Amazon Web Service users.

Though not affiliated with AWS directly, the community is a space where cloud engineers and technology directors meet to discuss all the latest developments, learn, network and further their careers. Members of the community meet regularly at in-person events.

We spoke to Kadir Keleş, who is a cloud engineer and consultant by day, as well as one of the leaders of the AWS User Group Berlin in his spare time. Kadir has been involved in the community for the last two years. In this story, he tells us how Slido is an essential comms tool for their community.

Helping to build connections in a hybrid world

There are more than 200 AWS user groups spread across 75 countries, with 250,000 members worldwide, Kadir explains. The Berlin group is the largest AWS community in Europe and we’re growing.

Our user group members work in IT, which since the pandemic, is a hybrid or totally remote career. So they need and want a connection, which the AWS group brings them with our in-person events - and that’s where Slido comes in.

After receiving some feedback from users that the events weren’t engaging enough, Kadir decided to try Slido. We wanted to make our sessions more interactive. They’re held in the evenings, after a long day at work, and we need to get - and keep - people’s attention. I’d heard good reviews about Slido from some friends who work as trainers, so I decided to try it.

Kadir says that Slido is now a ‘vital tool’ during the community’s events, which happens several times per month.

Around four times a year, we have an AMA (Ask Me Anything) section at our events, and we use Slido for that. It’s a great way for people to ask questions. We like to give people the option to ask via Slido as well as putting their hand up, and we tell them if they’re too shy to speak out loud - or even if they’re too impatient to wait to ask a question - they can add it to Slido and then we’ll address it during the AMA.

We always enable anonymity, and people can ask with or without their name, whatever they feel most comfortable with.

At meet-ups like these, asking questions can be daunting, especially for introverts. This preference highlights how Slido empowers introverts to join the conversation without anxiety and creates barrier-free access for thoughts, comments, or even ideas that would not have been expressed otherwise.

Kadir also uses Slido for lots of different purposes aside from Q&A sessions. Once everyone has their voice, he engages them.

We also do Slido quizzes, to keep participants engaged, and after the event, we utilize it to gather feedback. It’s multi-purpose, and therefore a vital tool for us to have access to.

Making the tech world more inclusive

Statistics show that around 75% of tech workers are male, with just 25% female. Kadir has been keen to encourage women to join the AWS community.

We surveyed our participants using Slido and asked them some questions, for example, out of every 10 colleagues that they have, how many of them working in engineering are women? The ratio was around one to two out of 10.

Then we asked them, when they were in the classroom studying IT, how many of your classmates were women? The answer was around three to five. From this, we can see that female talent is out there at the grassroots, but that the IT industry is failing to encourage women to go on and become engineers and technical leads. Instead they’re pushed to sales, marketing or to HR. And that needs to change - we need to encourage gender diversity in engineering.

After posting these findings to LinkedIn, a female community member reached out to Kadir, saying the post had inspired her - which in turn led to her setting up the AWS Berlin Women’s group. The group is dedicated to female empowerment, creating more space for women in IT, and encouraging them to get on stage and lead.

Passing the knowledge on

In his role as a community manager, it’s imperative that Kadir is able to easily explain how to use Slido to others. It’s user-friendly and intuitive, which makes my life easier, he explains.

I was at the AWS re:Invent conference in November 2023, and I was hosting a roundtable with AWS community members from all round the world - Japan, South Korea, Chile, Poland. I showed them how Slido works, and they were able to join with their QR codes right there and see it for themselves. They were amazed at how easy it was to understand and follow.