Diversity and Accessibility

We care deeply about making Domain-Driven Design Europe a safe and welcoming space for everyone.

As with everything, this involves making many trade-offs. We want to get better at prioritising the efforts that have the most impact on safety, comfort, diversity, and accessibility. Below is our work-in-progress. It includes the things we are doing, the things we haven't decided on yet, and the things we decided not to do (for now).

We need your help! Your feedback will help us prioritise. If you are affected by these efforts, if you have relevant experiences, or if you are simply a bystander who cares, let us know what you would have us do differently.

Please send your ideas or concerns to contact@dddeurope.com or call +32 468 109 891. We treat all submissions confidentially.

Doing

Code of Conduct (CoC)

We ask all participants, speakers, and staff, to adhere to our Code of Conduct, and mention it in the opening speech of the conference. Our goal is to create a safe and welcoming environment for all participants. We fully intend to enforce it, and have scenarios in place for dealing with violations.

Contact person

We have a contact person for reporting Code of Conduct violations and related concerns.

Speaker reimbursements

Speakers' expenses are fully reimbursed, so that having limited means is not an objection to speak at the conference.

Language

We encourage participants to speak English, even if you share another language with your conversation partners. This makes it easier for others to join.

Speaker diversity

We put a lot of effort in curating the content of the conference, and do additional research efforts to find relevant speakers from underrepresented groups.

Presentation support

We offer support to speakers who are new to public speaking, or who are developing new content. For example, we sometimes pair up new speakers with experienced speakers to give feedback on the material, or help find opportunities for new speaker to do a tryout at a meetup.

Gender-inclusive language

We attempt to use gender-neutral language in all our communication. Let us know when we make mistakes.

Volunteers

You can volunteer to help out during the conference, and get to see a number of sessions for free.

Doing for physical conferences

Security

We have professional security staff at the venue.

Quiet Room

Attendees can retreat here, and we ask others to respect it.

Wheelchair accessibility

The venue provides this, as it is required by Dutch law. There are wheelchair-accessible bathrooms downstairs. The hotel offers guestrooms for invalid guests. Please contact the hotel to assure you have such a room.

Reserved accessible seating

Contact us for info.

Audio loops

We can provide this upon request.

Bring your assistant

If you need an assistant to help you attend the event, we'll give them a free ticket.

Assistance animals

Animals are not allowed but we make an exception for assistance animals.

Gender-inclusive bathrooms

Gender-inclusive bathrooms are clearly indicated

Childcare

We will have professional child care providers at the venue. This is a free service, but we charge a €20 registration fee to avoid false positives. We can refund it after the event upon request. Register in the ticket shop or contact us for info.

Dietary requirements

We inquire about dietary requirements during the registration process.

Prayer

The Quiet Room in the venue can be used for prayer or meditation.

Under consideration (or upon request)

Accessibility Fund

Some events have an accessibility fund to cover provisions for people who need them, such as taxi rides, ramps, translators, escort from the station etc... We don't have a fund. Instead, so far we've evaluated and paid for each request individually. We haven't felt the need to set aside a predetermined budget, but we're interested in learning about pros and cons of such a fund.

Live Captioning

At present we have no plans to have live captioning during the event.

Transcriptions

Published videos presently do no include transcriptions or translations.

Instructing staff

We hire a lot of staff through suppliers (catering, hospitality, security, ...). We discuss our various accessibility and diversity requirements with these suppliers, but it is hard for us to make sure every one of the staff they bring in is fully trained. We're considering what and how to teach them about these efforts.

Discounts or scholarships for students or underrepresented groups

At the moment we have no scholarship program. We feel that given the topic, the conference mostly benefits people who work in the industry and can therefore afford to register. We are open to consider individual cases, so do get in touch if you feel we should give you a scholarship.

Custom pronouns

For every edition we reconsider if we should put custom pronouns on badges, but so far haven't found a compelling reason to do so.

Web Accessibility Guidelines

We attempt to apply some best practices in designing our web content, but acknowledge that we have a few gaps to bridge.

Not doing (for now)

Speaker quota

Although we aim for an equal representation of women, people of color, and other minorities, a 50% speaker quota is hard to achieve for a niche conference like DDD Europe. We believe that tech conferences should set an example for the industry. So, we don't just rely on our CFP process, but we also actively seek out speakers from underrepresented groups to make DDDEU more diverse and grow towards have equal representation.

Sub-conference

Host an underrepresented group sub-conference. We presently don't feel this gives the right signal.

Blind CFP selection process

We feel a title and an abstract alone are not sufficient to determine whether the presentation is suitable for the conference. We research candidate speakers by watching videos of their earlier talks, reading their blogs, having a conversation upfront... Therefore blind selection is not possible.

Sign Language Interpreter

There are many different sign languages, making this impractical. Audio loops and live captioning are better solutions.

We Support the Diversity Charter