Leah organizes both RustConf and EmberConf, and has been organizing tech conferences for well over a decade. She talks about some of the lessons she's learned in building inclusivity and accessibility into the conferences, outside of the technical talks. Childcare, for example, is one feature she's introduced that has had a positive effect on both parents and children. Suddenly, workers don't need to fret between networking with their peers and finding quality day care. Leah cautions that the first few years she offered this space, there weren't many enrollments, primarily because attendees didn't know that the option was available. But year after year, more parents are participating.
As ideas on gender are evolving, Leah has experimented with applying pronoun usage onto badges. At first, she made this mandatory, requiring attendees to provide their preferred pronoun while registering for the conference. She thought that this would help normalize the terminology, but she says her opinion has changed after speaking to several people. Instead, she provides pronoun stickers to attendees when they collect their badges at the conference.
Some smaller opportunities, like building fitness activities into the schedule, also helps attendees maintain their routine and connect with other conference-goers in ways they might not otherwise be able to.
Links from this episode51. Best Practices in Error Handling
50. High Energy, Low Power: A Bluetooth Christmas Story
49. Building Effective Distributed Teams
48. From NodeConf EU 2019
47. Working with an Event-Driven Architecture
46. Go at Heroku
45. Illuminating Poetry with Technology
44. GraphQL's Benefits and Costs
43. The GitHub Student Developer Pack
42. How to Prepare for Coding Interviews
41. Architecting Multi-Tenancy
40. Operating Open Collective
39. Evolving Alongside your Tech Stack
38. Building with Web Components
36. Supporting Open Source through Open Collective
35. Bringing Open Source to Work
34. An Introduction to Rust
33. GopherCon 2019 Spotlight, Part 2
32. GopherCon 2019 Spotlight, Part 1
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