The Less Obvious Conference Checklist

This is a checklist of less obvious things for conference organisers that help build amazing, wonderful, welcoming and inclusive events. It’s easy to remember to book a venue, look for speakers and sell the tickets, but you could overlook many things that can help your conference stand out. I mainly compiled this list from my own experience and from what I’ve seen other conferences do. So although I compiled the list, many recommendations are the result of hard work of others. See the AUTHORS file for a more extensive attribution.

This is not a checklist of things you must do in order for your conference to be any good. Or a list of requirements for me to do something for your conference. Consider this more as a list of actionable and practical suggestions to help us make better conferences. You will probably not be able to follow every single suggestion, and that’s fine.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Generic License.

Contents

• Inclusivity
• Accessibility
• Code of Conduct (CoC)
• Making attendees feel at home
• Speakers
• Tickets
• Recordings
• Children
• Footprint
• Team
• Other

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Inclusivity

The importance of inclusivity is becoming well known in most communities. In general, remember that inclusivity has many dimensions, beyond just gender.

• If you are running a financial grant program, I wrote a separate document about some common issues I see.
• For events involving alcohol, help people who do not drink feel welcome. Mention non-alcoholic drinks as often as alcoholic drinks, make them equally visible and have an equal number of options. People who don’t drink alcohol should never have to justify themselves. When you announce the event, mention that the Code of Conduct applies, people are responsible for their own alcohol use, and pushing others to drink is not acceptable. I have a longer and more detailed article on this with more concrete suggestions.
• If you are providing food, ask people in advance (during ticket registration, for example) about any preferences / allergies. Personally, I’ve always been able to accommodate every option. It’s often easy to compose a menu that does actually work for 90% of the attendees, and venues are usually fine with making custom special meals for a smaller group.
• Be mindful of how you identify the geographic region for the conference. DjangoCon Europe is notably not DjangoCon EU, because EU would mean we can’t have one in Switzerland. Communicate consistently on this.
• Be very careful in how you describe your target group. If you use phrases like “advanced developers”, many people will not attend because they won’t feel advanced enough, or because they feel more like tech writers than developers. Also be mindful of terms like technical and non-technical.
• You can help make transgender people feel more at home with posters stressing attendees shouldn’t judge who is using which bathroom. Even better if you can also add explicitly all gender bathrooms. You may not want to replace all gendered bathrooms though. This may also be helpful for parents and for other trans people. If your event has multiple toilet blocks, just mark bathrooms in some as “all gender”.
• Whenever you ask for people’s names, don’t ask for a first and last name. Not everyone has a clear first and last name, and there is little reason to want to separate them. When you ask for names, ask how they would like to be called in a single field. If needed, add a separate field for their legal name. You’ll probably need the latter if you are making hotel reservations for people, for example.
• Some people, especially those new to attending events, may be uncertain about the dress code. It’s worth specifying this explicitly, even if your entire dress code is “wear whatever you’re comfortable with, as long as it does not violate the code of conduct”.
• Some ways to improve inclusivity may seem odd or useless to you as organisers. However, they can often make a big difference for other attendees in different positions and from different backgrounds, at little cost to you.
• Promote your event towards relevant groups early and often, preferably from the moment of announcement on. This reduces the chance of rush action to “fix” a less diverse attendance/speakers roster.

Additional resources:

• How to build a better alcohol culture at your tech conferences and events by me.
• “Help! someone has pointed out my conference has diversity issues! How do I fix this?” by Ada Rose Cannon.
• Alcohol and Inclusivity: Planning Tech Events with Non-Alcoholic Options by Kara Sowles.

Accessibility

• Write an accessibility statement. PyCon UK and DjangoCon Europe 2023 have good examples. In this statement, you inform people with disabilities or impairments what you can offer them, what obstacles may be present, and what alternatives you can provide. The purpose is to inform people what you are planning to do, what you do and don’t know, and that you’re happy to listen to anyone’s questions in this area. Including photos, especially when the route is a bit tricky, and floor plans is always a great addition.
• Have the accessibility statement published early on. If you publish it after early bird pricing closes, you’re basically making disabled people pay more. If you publish it after CFP closes, they are less likely to become speakers.
• Make sure there is an accessible way to contact you for inquiries, which should probably be email. Forms and too many detailed questions might be inaccessible and/or put people off.
• For people with reduced mobility, be specific about the actual situation. Some people that use wheelchairs can actually cross a few steps if needed. Some require specific accessible toilets, others do not. Width and turning radius vary greatly. A generic term like “wheelchair accessible” leaves many questions for these people. Providing photos is great.
• Some obstacles may not be a major barrier to most wheelchair users, but may be to anyone with other mobility issues or visual impairments, as they can become a tripping hazard.
• Ask (optional) for any accessibility needs in ticket registration, so you can anticipate. However, this never covers all cases, as needs can change.
• Don’t assume you know the accessibility needs of your participants, or attempt to guess them. Do not ask them to provide details of any health conditions (as opposed to their access needs) as that information is intrusive not useful anyways.
• Check and document whether things like step-free access doors and lifts can be used independently. Sometimes there is no alternative, but it’s very unpleasant when attendees can not navigate the venue independently. If there is no alternative, document it in your statement, make sure staff is available, or provide clear direction on how to contact staff.
• Make sure paths remain wide enough with furniture, e.g. for people with mobility aids. Even if buildings have step free access, chairs, tables, promotion booths and other obstacles are sometimes placed too close to each other.
• Don’t forget about access to the stage.
• Sometimes things do not go according to plan, and the situation is not as accessible as people were expecting. Do whatever you can to provide workarounds, and actively inform anyone you know may run into those obstacles.
• Also check and document the acccessibility of social event and dinner venues. They’re actually more likely to have significant issues than an average conference venue.
• Consider having a captioner/stenographer. This helps a wide range of attendees: people with hearing issues, speakers with various accents, and allows reading back if someone was distracted. It also provides a written and searchable record afterwards.
• In signage, lanyard colours and badge design, be mindful of those with reduced colour perception. A good tool to test this on Mac OS X is Color Oracle.
• Offer a quiet room for people who may feel overwhelmed by the social interactions, sound or light level and business at conferences. A quiet room should be a (somewhat) noise insulated room where there is no talking, to allow attendees a chance to decompress. It’s also a good place for people that need to focus on some work. It should not be a place for online meetings. All you need is a room with some chairs/desks/beanbags. Make sure that your quiet room is in a place that’s easily accessible. Also make sure there are no flashing or flickering light, and that the brightness level is not too intense.
• Plan for signs to guide people without overwhelming them. Design them well ahead with a consistent color scheme and the conference logo. Depending on your venue layout, it can be worth it to invest in stands to place them in the best position, rather than stick them to a wall. If there are separate accessible paths or toilets, have signs for those as well.
• Earlier in the conference, have some extra volunteers around to guide people. That will also help you discover where you need to fix up your signage.
• Publish details of your health/covid policy. Is masking expected? Required? Vaccinations? Document this clearly and early. Harassing someone for wearing a mask should always be treated as a CoC violation. See PyCon UK for an example.

Additional resources with many more great pointers:

• How to Make Your Events More Accessible and Inclusive by Cai Charniga.
• A Checklist for a Successful Accessible Conference from IFLA.
• ADA Checklist for Existing Facilities from the New England ADA center. This is very extensive and aimed more at building owners in general, but highlights many obstacles you might otherwise not think of.

Code of Conduct (CoC)

• Have a code of conduct / inclusivity policy. There are plenty of examples for this. Most of them can be summarised as “don’t be an asshole, and be considerate for how your actions may be perceived by others” but for numerous reasons that have been discussed at length elsewhere, it is important to include more detail.
• Ensure the CoC is known to everyone. This ensures nobody can say “I didn’t know” and also stresses to your attendees how important it is to you. Make people confirm knowing the CoC when they buy a ticket, or submit the call for papers. Have posters around the venue with a short version and mention it in your introduction talks every day.
• Parties are notorious for CoC violations, often related to alcohol. Stress in your announcements by mail, twitter or in person, that the CoC applies to the party too. When you make your event more accessible to people that don’t drink alcohol, as listed above, you are also making it easier for other attendees to drink moderately and responsibly. People are more inclined to keep drinking more if everyone around them is still drinking alcohol too.
• Your CoC is useless if you can not respond to issues. Set up a CoC team. An ideal size for this is four people. These people are the primary responsible persons for dealing with any reports, and should be able to have their hands free at any time. They can involve other team members if needed, but having a small team makes it easier to respond consistently, professionally and timely, without distracting the rest of the team.
• Make sure the members of the team are known and listed by name on the website.
• Have special phone numbers available for reporting CoC issues, especially for emergencies. Often people buy prepaid sim cards in the country of the conference, and put these in cheap non-smart phones. One or two members of the team carry these the entire conference. The numbers are on posters, the conference booklet and the website, and their availability is mentioned in the opening notes.
• The primary reporting mechanism is probably still email, so have a conduct@yourconference.com available and communicated that goes to the team. Don’t ask people to report to a wider group than the team.
• If you have a chat or a hashtag, don’t forget to monitor those for CoC issues. Consider also using highlight words to notify your team when an abusive term is used, or when someone starts a conversation about harassment or the Code of Conduct.
• You or your community may be hesitant to adopt a CoC, for example because it feels to some as a tool of censorship. Issues where someone’s behaviour is so unacceptable that they are removed from the conference, or even the community, do occur, and it’s essential that you are able to handle them. However, many issues are much less serious, and more due to someone being unaware than of ill will. They still require careful handling, but that could also be a serious conversation of “you did this, this isn’t cool, don’t do it again, have a nice conference”.
• To build further support of a CoC, publish a transparency report afterwards. We first published one for DjangoCon Europe 2018. Ensure nobody in there is identifiable (this applies to both the perpetrator, the target if there is one, and anyone else involved).
• You can consider screening the presenters’ slides in advance for CoC violations. This is some effort in advance, especially because not all speakers will be able to send you their slides early. A draft version might also suffice. The point is that you can catch at least some possible CoC violations before they’re shown in the large screen in front of all your attendees. You can also use this to check for readability issues like contrast (especially considering color vision efficiency) or size.
• Do not underestimate the energy it will take from the CoC team to deal with issues.
• Never assume you don’t need a CoC because nobody reported any issues, and therefore you don’t need one. It can takes time for people to feel comfortable to report issues. And not having a CoC at all is sending a very strong message to everyone that reporting isn’t worthwhile. It doesn’t mean people won’t experience issues - it just means they won’t tell you. They’re likely to tell their friends though.
• Keep the barrier for reporting as low as possible. This means people should not be afraid to report, and have to feel that reporting is safe. When I introduce the CoC in a conference opening, I always stress that “I feel uncomfortable about what happened” is enough to contact the team, and that we will not punish people if it turns out not to be a CoC violation.
• For more about CoC enforcement, see this overview of CoC warning signs by Sage Sharp.

Making attendees feel at home

• In general, use all your communication to make attendees feel welcome. At Django Under The Hood, we had posters with “Yay, you made it!” on all the entrances. Even minor touches like that can help create a good atmosphere at your conference. It’s simple but really makes a difference in the vibe.
• Basic bathroom supplies are much harder to find in an unknown country and area. At DUTH 2015 and DjangoCon Europe 2016 there were boxes near the bathrooms with items like toothbrushes and hygiene products, free to take as needed by all attendees. It makes people feel more welcome, and provides a lot of benefit for little effort. If you’re able to provide people with over-the-counter drugs like painkillers, that’s great too. However, don’t place those in publicly accessible boxes, in case children get to them. You can post a note that they’re available at your registration desk.
• The city where you’re holding your conference is probably well known to you. This is not the case for most of your visitors. Help your attendees find their way around by writing something about travelling to and around the conference. Here’s what I wrote for Django Under the Hood. Which airport should people go to? How do they best get to the city? How do they get from hotels to the venue? Can I buy transit tickets with a credit card? Do I need a visa? Is there a nearby supermarket?
• Check local news for local events, construction sites or weather warnings that might impact the attendees’ travel to the venue. Communicate these to your attendees to help them navigate it.
• When picking a date for your event, check a calendar such as this interfaith calendar to be aware of any cultural or religious holidays that may be outside of your direct awareness.
• Set up a place for your attendees to connect, like Slack. Make it specific to one edition of your conference, so that you can remove it some time after. It’s not a great idea to keep it running, because you stay responsible for Code of Conduct incidents.
• Help attendees stay near other attendees. As soon as you know, tell people what the speaker hotel will be, so that others can decide to book there as well. Publish a few recommendations of alternatives, ideally with varying budgets.
• In your program, be clear on what food you’re providing. Some conferences offer breakfast at the venue and then forget to tell attendees, which will then already have paid for hotel breakfast. The other way around also happens.
• Many communities have in-jokes and amusing traditions. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it can make first-timers feel more alienated. You can reduce this by publishing a glossary of some of these things.
• On the same note, if you have specific side events like sprints, not everyone may know what they are or whether they can/should come. Clarify it on the website and at the appropriate time at the conference.
• Don’t publish attendees’ info on an attendee list or something similar, without them opting in.
• Make sure the organisers are visible. If you have a registration desk, try to have someone there all the time. If an attendee needs help, it can make them feel very lost if they can’t find an organiser.
• Discourage clique forming, and make first-timers feel much more welcome, by encouraging your attendees to follow the Community++ rule and the Pac-Man rule.

Speakers

• Be clear on what’s in your speaker package as soon as you open the call for papers. Personally, I rarely speak at events where travel and stay are not covered by the conference, but others may make other decisions. But they can only do so if you inform them.
• If you are doing a call for papers, also send it to minority groups in your subject. If it’s a Python conference, contact your local and the global PyLadies chapter, and ask whether they can recommend any other minority groups whose participants may be interested in submitting a proposal.
• Have your Code of Conduct and health policy up on the website before sending out your call for papers.
• Conferences and communities benefit from having a good mix of experienced well known speakers, and less experienced speakers. For the latter, it can be helpful to offer some mentoring, if only by looking over their slides, to help improve their sessions and their confidence. Perhaps some of your more experienced or past speakers can help out. If you’re willing to help with this include it in your call for papers, so less experienced speakers feel welcome, confident and supported.
• Ensure that all your speakers are familiar with your Code of Conduct.
• Ensure you get the details of the sessions right. A good way to do this is to mail all speakers a week in advance (or at least before any print material is produced) confirming the times, locations, titles and abstracts of their sessions. Also useful to include: when you expect them to be at the venue at the latest, whether they should report anywhere specific, the details of their flight and hotel if applicable, and what technology you have available (beamer, adapters, connectors, etc.).
• Even if you’ve sent these details, pay attention to getting your speakers to the right place at the right time. Keep an eye on whether they have check in at all, and have a volunteer meet/find them during the previous talk. Then you can fix last minute issues, and make sure they are ready at the stage at the start of their slot. If things don’t work out, it’ll make sure you know before their start time.
• Get all your speakers a modest speaker gift at the conference, regardless of the size of the speaker package. It really makes a difference.
• Some people strongly prefer to share a hotel room with someone, others strongly prefer a private room. If you arrange hotel rooms for your speakers, you can always ask whether anyone would like to share. This works particularly well when many speakers know each other already. Sharing rooms reduces your costs. Do ensure that you always keep the option open for people to have a private room, without extra cost or justification, for those that need the personal space or need a private room for other reasons.
• Consider the diversity of your speakers, particularly your keynote speakers, and the message that sends to (potential) conference attendees. If all your keynotes are being given (or appear to be being given) by the dominant demographic in your community, that can make your conference and community look like it excludes others, even if you did not intend that. Speaker lineups are one of the early things many people look at to see how much a conference values inclusivity.
• Before you introduce a speaker, make sure to ask what name they prefer, how to pronounce it, and what pronouns they use – even if it seems obvious. It‘s jarring for the speaker if you get this wrong just before they go on stage.
• Train the people doing introductions. Often they are volunteers who aren’t used to public speaking. They should be clear, loud enough to hear, say something about the speaker, and invite a round of applause. Train them in microphone use too. A good introduction should make the speaker and the audience feel positive and ready to go. linux.conf.au has taken to asking specifically for people willing to do introductions as a separate role from conference volunteers in general, which does help to achieve good, positive introductions.
• Q&A at the end of a talk is notorious for attracting questions meant to embarrass the speaker, or make long statements - although sometimes it goes well. However, it is still often questionable how useful the Q&A part was for all the other attendees that sat and watched. You could decide not to do a Q&A and just tell people to come to the speaker. However, if you do Q&A, at least make sure to cut people off that say “this isn’t really a question but more of a comment” or who seem to be just making comments.

Tickets

• If you have a limited amount of tickets and expect to sell out quickly, limit the number of tickets per purchase. That’ll give everyone a fair chance, and help get a mixed group of attendees, instead of a small number of companies buying out all the tickets.
• When deciding when to open ticket sales, consider different time zones. 11:00 in Europe means Americans would have to wake up in the night to get tickets. 15:00 UTC often works fairly well for Europe and America, but not as good for Asia. You can sell in multiple batches at different times of day to give people from either region a chance.
• If you think you might sell out, set up a waiting list. You could send any cancelled tickets here, and refund the person that needed to cancel. At Django Under the Hood, we re-sold three tickets the day before the conference, making six people happy.
• If your tickets tend to sell out very fast, you could use a lottery instead. People can enter during an entire week, and you randomly select winners that then have one week to register and pay for their ticket. Any remaining tickets go back into the lottery. This promotes inclusivity and diversity, because if people only have a few specific minutes or hours to get their ticket, it’s easy for people with desk jobs, but might be impossible for those with other kinds of work or other responsibilities (e.g. parents).
• Don’t sell all your tickets right away. Keep a small batch (5-10 or so) for unforeseen situations. You can always decide to sell them as last-minute tickets later.
• If you have any side events, like a sprint, ask people in the ticket whether they will attend. That’ll get you some attendance numbers early on. Make sure people who are not familiar with sprints or another event can easily find what they are about.
• Giving out t-shirts or other clothes? Ask people for their size when registering, and use this list at the registration desk when handing out the shirts. It speeds things up and helps make your t-shirt order more accurate. (Also, make sure you have fitted and straight cut shirts. “Unisex” shirts do not exist.)
• Under no circumstances use PayPal for receiving payments. In general, be careful with who you give control over your funds. Get it to your own bank account as soon as possible.
• Consider using a specialised ticket sales service. Organisers in the Python and Django community have had good experiences with Pretix and Tito.
• Consider having staggered ticket pricing. Give a discount for early bird sales and charge a premium the closer the tickets are bought to the event dates. This can result in more sales early on, giving you a better picture of attendance.
• Consider having a limited number of tickets available at the spot, possibly at a significant premium. This incentivises normal ticket sales, but still allows for people who couldn’t plan ahead dues to other life events.
• Do not ask people to bring an government ID that matches their ticket. Some people, including many trans people, are unable to obtain a government ID in their correct name. Even if you are more flexible in practice, having this as a general policy is exclusionary. If you’d like more security at your registration desk, offer the choice of bringing either a government ID with name matching ticket, or showing a print/screenshot of the ticket. Be clear that people can choose either option.

Recordings

• If you are making recordings or streaming, make sure you have at least have a dedicated person for this, but ideally hire a professional.
• If you’re hiring someone to make photos or videos, make sure you carefully review the contract regarding intellectual property: by default the laws in many countries leave all rights with the creator you hired, even though you pay them.
• Make sure you notify attendees in advance that the conference is being recorded and/or streamed.
• Identify clearly and communicate which areas of the conference are on video. If possible, set aside specific areas that will not be recorded or streamed and mark them as such.
• Not all attendees might be comfortable being recorded or photographed. Many conferences offer two different colour lanyards, where a particular color indicates that attendee does not want to be photographed or recorded. When you ask people which colour they want at your registration desk, you’re also making everyone else aware of the significance of lanyard colours. Make sure you stress to your attendees that they can swap their lanyards for a different one at any point.
• Ensure that you’ve obtained permission from all your speakers for recording them. Many conferences include this in the call for papers.
• If you are uploading talk recordings to services like YouTube that allow comments on videos, ensure the comments are moderated or disabled. Otherwise, you risk harassing comments being made, at any time after the conference, when your team is also probably less available.
• Remember to check the photos and videos you published for anyone with a no-photo lanyard that you may have accidentally included.

Children

• Consider offering childcare, to make the event more accessible to parents. PyCon has done this in the past. You could poll whether attendees might be interested, and see if it would be affordable for the parents. There can be legal requirements involved.
• If many of your attendees travel longer distances, the travel costs for a child would still be substantial for the parents, and it would take them extra effort and planning. Therefore, another option is to offer to cover costs of childcare at home. If most of your attendees are local, this is less of a concern.
• In general, be explicit about whether children are welcome at your event and in which settings, and which kinds of food you can provide for them.
• Some attendees may need to breastfeed or pump breastmilk. The best is to have a space planned for attendees for this purpose, and document who to make space requests to. Ideally, this space would be near the childcare room. At a minimum, the space just needs to be clean, private, and have electricity. Include access to a refrigerator or mini-fridge if that is an option. Most event spaces (or HR departments, if the event is in an office space) are used to handling these sort of inquiries.
• Be explicit in that the private breastfeeding room is an optional service, and that feeding is allowed wherever and whenever the attendee likes. Otherwise attendees may think this is only allowed in private spaces. The private space is still needed, as some attendees may be more comfortable in private, and not every child will nurse near noise and traffic.

Footprint

• Announce alternatives to flying early: people may book cheap plane tickets right away when your conference dates are announced.
• Inspire people to alternatives to flying. For example, a nice guide to train travel or a coordinated online space for ride sharing. Definitely avoid: only documenting how people can get to your event by airplane.
• Tell your venue that you care about the environment and ask them what they can offer.
• You can reduce waste, even be zero waste: ask your venue to accommodate durable and reusable food containers: Porcelain, glass, metal etc. Provide water fountains over piles of plastic bottles
• Serve locally sourced, organic food. Your guests might enjoy both the cultural experience of local food, as well as organic and healthy food. You could offer only vegetarian food.
• If using disposable food containers, go for biodegradable. Provide people easy options to tag their cups to drink from the same cup all day. But never compromise reuse with hygiene.
• Make merchandise optional. If possible, hire someone to do print-on-demand merchandise or coordinate pre-ordering of conference merchandise.
• If your conference is a recurring event, try avoiding to put date and year-specific marks on roll-ups banners etc. that might be reused for subsequent events.
• Recommend local green transportation: how to go by bike, get public transport etc.
• Don’t sacrifice accessibility for this. For example, encouraging people to bike or walk is great, but not everyone is able to. The same goes for different travel options.

Additional resources:

• A breakdown of Wikimania’s 2019 Carbon offsets, listing air travel as >80% of the conference’s footprint.

Team

• Do not run a conference on your own. It’s a lot of work, and you need to have other people around that can relieve you of some tasks if it’s really needed, and help to find the inspiration you’ll need.
• Make sure to have some silent way of communicating across the entire team, that offers push messages too. A Slack, for example. There will be unforeseen issues, and being able to communicate within the team is essential.
• If you have volunteers outside of the main team that help you with registration, goodie bag sorting, or anything else, don’t forget to thank them for their work. Even a private word of appreciation can make a difference.

Other

• If your community uses social media a lot, keep a stream of informing tweets going from your conference accounts. Just before lunch, tweet a reminder of where lunch is served and what people with special dietary needs should do. In the early morning, tweet when the first talk will start that day. If you change locations, tweet a reminder in the evening and the morning with instructions on how to get to the new location. During the afternoon, a reminder about the party that night. It’s hard to stay on top of this during the conference, so at DUTH 2015 I scheduled about 30 tweets in advance in a scheduling tool. Just remember to update them if your schedule changes.
• If you are making badges, make sure the names are very visible. It’s not uncommon for conferences to print them no larger 14pt or so, which makes them impossible to read from any distance. Ideally, print them double sided as they tend to flip around.
• Make sure that the name of all participants is printed correctly on the badges. When using a decorative font, make sure it has support for a wide range of non-ascii characters. If the name of a participant doesn’t render correctly, don’t try and shorten or otherwise alter their name without asking them first.
• Provide buttons or stickers for pronouns, including at least “He/Him/His”, “She/Her/Hers”, “They/Them/Theirs” and “Other/blank”.
• Always make a bunch extra blank badges and posters, so that you can make some on the spot if needed, for example because you misprinted something.
• Don’t forget to have fun :)