Diversity & Accessibility
We care deeply about making Domain-Driven Design Europe a safe and welcoming space for everyone.
As with everything, this involves making many tradeoffs. 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.
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. We treat all submissions confidentially.
Doing
- Code of Conduct (CoC). We feature it on our website, ask speakers to agree when submitting proposals, and mention it in the opening speech of the conference.
- Contact person for concerns or CoC violations.
- Professional security staff at the venue.
- 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.
- Quiet Room. Attendees can retreat here, and we ask others to respect it.
- Gendered-neutral language. We attempt to use gendered-neutral language in all our communication. Let us know when we make mistakes.
- Wheelchair accessibility. The venue provides this, as it is required by Dutch law.
- Reserved accessible seating
- Audio loops. We can provide this upon request.
- Bring a helper. Contact us for info.
- Gender neutral bathrooms. The venue has 2 male and 2 female bathrooms. The current plan is to make one of each gender-neutral.
Under consideration
- Childcare. We are in talks with a third party that specialises in childcare at international events. We'll announce it as soon as we know more. If you are considering to bring your children, please contact us.
- Hearing loss support:
- Live Captioning. This is also useful to non-native English speakers.
- Transcriptions for published videos
- Instructing staff. We hire a lot of staff through supplier (catering, hospitality, security, ...) We're considering what and how to teach them about these efforts.
- Instructing speakers. Should we do more beyond pointing them to the CoC?
- Discounts or scholarships for underrepresented groups. At the moment we have no program, but do get in touch if you feel you should be a beneficiary of this.
- Custom pronouns on badges.
- Web Accessibility Guidelines
Not doing
- Student discounts or scholarships. The conference specifically aims at people with industry experience. We feel it would not provide much value to students.
- Speaker quota. Although we aim for a large representation of women and PoC, we are not committing to a 50% share at this time.
- Host an underrepresented group sub-conference.
- Blind CfP selection process. To ensure high quality content, we research potential speakers by watching videos, 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.
