 Apologies for all the technical problems that you could possibly have at a conference or at a monthly. My name is Jenny, I talk really fast, I'm really sorry, but we only have probably less than 30 minutes now, so my slides are usually self-explanatory anyway, but if you do need me to repeat something, just put your hand up and tell me to slow down and repeat it. I will not take offense to it because I'm very used to it. And plus I know I'm in Europe, so sometimes people don't want to see my accent, so that's absolutely okay, put your hand up and I will try and slow down. Okay, so actually I am a community addict, self-confessing community addict. I have been going to conferences since I was a student and basically like the open source community helped me pass my dissertation, pass my degree, I got a job, so I have a lot of senior open source community and therefore I feel like, you know, when there's a great support network, you kind of come back for more support, so this is why I'm a community addict. And we, in the community, in the especially open source community, we have offline and online communities, and this in terms of different, well also this in terms of exactly the same, because you know, the same type of people are in both those places. Today I'm going to be talking to you all about building an offline community in particular, because that's where I start from today, but many of the things I'm going to talk about is also applies to online communities as well, you just need to think about how would this translate to an online community, and most of the time you can go to me to figure it out, if you're not sure, I won't go out until the day. So this story is about an event that I have the honour of being a lead organizer for last year, work at London 2016. It's a word press event, happens in London, and now it's no secret that in tech communities especially, we talk a lot about diversity, and there's been a lot of movement in the events, in the open source community especially, to encourage diversity in our events. And as an organizer of events, and an attendee and a speaker who goes to a lot of events, I've seen many different ways of tackling diversity in particular. So as a lead organizer of work at London last year, we tackled it another differently, we didn't look at diversity, but I didn't want the word diversity to be anywhere in the way we thought. Instead, I wanted to focus on inclusivity. My idea was, if we make the most inclusive event possible, then diversity should kind of fit itself. And you know what we do as an organizer, we're just like, well, because it's my time to check this theory. So I'm going to share with you today what we did and how it went as well. But first and first, if you're going to do anything in a group, generally it's a good idea to have organizers buy in. So is it one camps that are organized by a team of volunteers, I was not the only person on that team. Thankfully, because it's far too much work, there was another seven people that I had to get buying from. And so I actually asked all my co-organizers to have buy in with this mentality, with this vision of creating an inclusive event. And so after I got buy in, the question is, how do you make a community inclusive? And the answer is that was accessibility. Accessibility is a problem. No, back to the beginning. So, how do you make a community inclusive? And the answer to that is put accessibility at the core. So when you put accessibility at the core, it's really the answer to everything. You ask yourself, will this make the event more accessible to people? And what I learned was that the budget that you have as a conflict organizer or the size of the event doesn't matter. There's different ways to make a community accessible to more people. So I'm going to go through the 11 different points of today. And I'm going to start off with context. The first thing as an attendee that you see about an event is the context. It's the wording. So at Workout London in 2016, we did a big push to have gender neutral programs everywhere. Regardless of what people submitted, we went and changed everything. Because ultimately, we didn't care about the sex of a person. We didn't care about the gender of a person. We also changed the tone of voice. If we want nice people, be a nice person online, and hopefully they'll turn up. Because, like the traffic light, apparently. So we were really careful about the way we described things and made sure that what we said really meant what we wanted. We also had to realize quickly that different accessibility terms mean different things. So hard of hearing is different to deaf. For someone who isn't hard of hearing, I didn't know they're different. And so I was using things interchangeably. And it's not someone else to point this out and say, no, you're using a word in one. And so it's very, you need to do your homework in terms of the actual words you're choosing to use. Depending on the language that you're from, these rules might be a little different. They say that one image is about a word. So when we picked imagery for our event, we were carefully selecting what kind of event we wanted to show to try and tie the same event to become a real thing. And it's kind of a thing that's quite hard to do at the beginning because you have to be proactively finding imagery from your old events to then be the images that we want for the next year. So it was actually hard for the first year. But we do have some photographers who go around the event and take photos. So we asked them if there could be an x particular time of photos for the next year as well. But we proved right everything. Our next in 2017, our edition this year will not be as good as last year. But I'm hoping to rectify that as soon as it's over. But we proved right everything. We made sure that we were able to really stay in contact to make sure that things weren't misrepresented on paper or on screen rather. And that was really good. Our team was like this, so different people had different language skills in different languages. So adding it now, for example, the word Cooley's is in the US and in the UK as well. So nothing's like that. Catch you out if you're trying to encourage more people. The other thing is childcare. The cost for childcare last year was $3,340,000, which is a lot of money. It started off with this particular tweet asking us if we had any plans for childcare. And my response to Joe was basically if you join the organiser team, they will be. I'll give you the money for it. So she did. It's a nice way to get organisers if you want to know. Basically they want something, they can sort it out themselves. But there's a lot of things about childcare, especially in the UK. There's a lot of legal issues that come with looking at the children that are not your own in particular. So you have to be really careful. So my ticks to you, including don't do it yourself, do not be responsible for other people's children, because parents are the most protective people I've ever met. In my life, five professionals are more important than that, the professionals. Just because they say they're professionals doesn't mean that they are. So if your country has different kinds of documentation and different reports and stuff that they're meant to have and if they still get, make sure you see them and vet them. Even better, have a parent talk to them. We actually did a face-to-face meeting with the crash at the university where we're holding the venue with some parents that were on our organiser team to ensure that parents' instincts are being met, because parents know that they have children. You have these instincts, so you use them. Make sure you meet them in person. And also get testimonies and follow through of it. It's one thing to say, yeah, they're great. It's another thing to phone up the testimonial. Did you really mean this? So go that extra mile, because having people's lives in your hands is one of the scariest things you'll do as an organiser. So it's the one thing that you want to make sure you're looking after. One thing we do at the event was to encourage attendees to check it out. I always need, I wanted to make a crash a standard at Workout London because of the size of the event. But to encourage more people to use it, they need to know what they're buying into. So I encouraged parents to go and see the crash. Last year we only had one child in the crash. But $2,300 quid, that was one kid. It's probably the most expensive child care they'll ever get in their life. But they had a great time. So it was totally worth it. We also had parents coming in and checking the place out and saying, now that I know who is dealing with the crash and they look legit, I'm going to use them. And it's a good thing to say, at the end of the event I actually announced, because I was so impressed with the team, we were definitely going to bring the same team back. I saw those folded vetting checks were firing for this year as well. Luckily they are, so they are coming back to our van this year. And we already had two kids sign up, which is better than the one kid. So I feel like I'm already gone. At least the class is pretty powerful, although they are siblings. But it's super cool to see that the father and the mother can go to the event. And this is important when we're trying to be accessible and be more diverse. Half the people that we know probably look after someone. In age, there's so many different reasons that people are looking after other people. So try and be considerate of that as much as you can. Face planning. The cost of face planning is free, because obviously if you're going to rent an event, then you've got the space. And if you're on the internet, you create the space. So really the cost of face planning is free. Some of the most obvious things when you're doing events is to think about wheelchair access and how easy it is for a wheelchair to get around. This room is not exactly great, but we'll just slide over that. I was also thinking about in the UK, hearing aids. In most locations in the UK, although in the UK some of them are top notch only, hearing aids are usually in particular locations, especially event locations. And especially given to a university, they're usually all hooked up. Because it's just a legal requirement. So that usually ticks yourself off. But if you don't have one, then check. The location that you've picked for your event doesn't have a hearing aid. Just read old films about it. People like to know, because they can keep being bad on what you don't have as much as what you do have. We also had multi-favourites, which was great. We actually listed the different types of re-examines that were there. We also had a lactation ring for people who were expressing milk. We also had a quiet ring, which is one of my most favourite rings of the whole type of event. Because it's an organiser when you don't want to talk to him. Everyone, this is your favourite room. I went to PyCon UK and Django UK the last two years. And they had a quiet ring in Cardiff. And it was the best thing ever. You go in and no-one talks. It's amazing. And you just go there and you take five and we see each other. You go back out and you all look everyone else. It's the best thing ever! There are props to the PyCon community. There is more on PyCon than here. But yes, green rings. As a speaker, some of you saw me outside pacing quite rigorously because my drone was going. It still is going. But really, it was a great place as a speaker to go with the free cab in private. So that no-one else sees it and laughs at you. So if you have to play some green rings, it's always great. Your speakers just go and check the slide. Make sure you have a doctor, a freak out, in private. So we have a green room as well. There are seven times you go to a conference and then some client calls. There's some work emergency and you just need quite a space where you can have a phone call and deal with a work issue. Or maybe a team of you can deal with something together. We have a room specifically for that. So when people have a freak out call, they have a space where they can go and do things and get it done as quickly as possible. Without interfering with other people or other people saying, hey, what are you doing? I'm getting really interested in the fact that you're trying to fix a hat website. We also have a media room, which I only like two people use. So it's not really great for the size of a bag, but it was cool. Like, if people wanted to do podcasts, there was a space for them. And it's all about creating spaces for the people that you're expecting. We also have lots of breakout spaces. We have large pour-way tracks, which we designed with chairs and TVs to break out the spaces and change the way people felt. So even though it was a 600 person event, you mostly feel like a 200 event because everything was so spread out and scattered. That way, you just have a big event that will have a small local feel as well. And that's important. Creating that feel is really important. There's also own flow areas because sometimes you just can't predict what people are going to do. For example, this track has been crazy this year all day. There's been people outside. And we're not wondering what to do. We actually feed out the TVs outside the room with the video camera, so outside they actually can see what's going on inside and they have speakers so they can hear. Which is going to hand you. Yes, signage. I didn't realise printing was really expensive, but this is what happens when you print everything 48 hours before you're done. Go, go, go. And then when you print it inside it's only two of everything because it's not as helpful. It was not. Signage is really, really important. And maybe not for the reasons that you realise. I mean, it's signage that you get from A to B, but also it creates an atmosphere. So for example, in this room here, the ceiling is actually super tall. But what we did was we put printing at the top to make a more relaxed and harmless atmosphere by learning the ceiling. Otherwise, you just have that like an empty, great big hole that goes in the lift hole. Signage is also really important because it allows self support for people with neurodiversity. Something I learned in one of my many travels was that people with neurodiversity don't like asking questions and talking to other people, but they do want to be self-sufficient. So signage allows those people to be self-sufficient. Now, you'll always need more signage than you think. Basically, you can't see a signage you get somewhere and you imagine you have two second memory loss. Basically, your signage should be able to deal with that. Make sure you brand them, especially when you're in a co-ordinary location, like a university. Make them write an eye-catching so it's very quick for your eye to just quickly look and know where to go like the exit sign over there. Proceed. So if we didn't do actually what we should, we're hoping to do this year, is use a really friendly font and this helps with people with dyslexia and other type of emergencies. It just makes it easier. So something like all capitals is like some people hate, some people don't. And always make them fear that you realize because there's a lot of others and there's one piece of signage. And most importantly, because I'm five but two, have them above head height. Because especially if you're in, I don't know, let's say they're the ones where everyone's six foot by standard and I'm five foot two, I can't see anything at the six foot level because everyone else is in the way. So you've got to put them high up as high as you can. So when you're far away, you still see that signage. Signage always takes more time to put up than you realize. And also be careful on your venue because some sticky things they don't line and then they end up getting paid, like it was for like paperwork. That's not cool. But one opportunity that I have been doing for the last year is pre-organizing the signage the day before so that you're ready for signage straight away and they're all in the correct order and they're all in the correct locations. So even if you just put the sticky pads in the back of it, just make it that much faster on the day. Brings out a black branded signage because you always buy somewhere which could do an extra sign so you can just quickly wipe one up. But when you're going to write something up and you need it to be big and bold, use a chisel-tipped marker pen otherwise you'll be stuck there for hours. And also volunteer seizure is the signage. I feel like anyone who forgets about the service seizure, volunteer seizures are a must but you know who's taught you who to ask. Because I realize this clock thing is completely wrong. It's saying twenty nine hours so I don't mind. So schedule it. I really like it when they give you the turn-over time in a schedule. Scheduling is really important. Ask turn-over time so people know how long they've got to get from A to B. Real changes and like me, basically I've written an event for myself. I have a review of apple injury after being drunk in Singapore for conference so I can't really walk fully on my left leg and when it's applied up, my apple injury means that it takes me five minutes, basically thirty minutes. So injury is actually and not always obvious so please think about that when you're looking at your turn-over time. Also if you have an event where people bring their children, it takes time to get children from A to B so it helps them as well. Plus it's nice to have a breather and an air delivery as we all are feeling right now. The other thing is having a backup house lunch for all your sponsors and all your volunteers before they've manic all your attendee's turn-over lunch time. Have a time that's actually going to allocate it for them so they can if they're free go and get a lunch ahead of the queue which is nice. And have it before and after the main lunch. So what I've also learnt and what I'm going to do this year for the part of the community is shift lunching. So what they did was on every attendee's badge have an A and B on it and so A went 45 minutes at the beginning and then B went up 45 minutes after and it was amazing so we're still in that shift. Those are the live gashes which I have also learnt from the band of community. Honestly they've got so many cool names. Live Gashling is actually one of the most expensive accessibility things we did at £5,218, it's actually more expensive this year. And it's really cool, there are dinner wrappers, STTRs, a light short handbag. At the beginning I thought it was really cool because it was useful for hard of hearing people. But then I realised it's also super handy for people with accents which like to say in Europe is a lot of accents. So having someone where you can read the subtitles of the accent is super handy. There are some extra A and B considerations because you need to have the actual thing going underneath but if you talk to your A and B team they usually help you. Something that has been asked and Budget Penning will do is have what they call a comforter at the beginning of the screen in front of the speaker. So that the speaker when someone asks a question they can read the question which is super handy too. And what I didn't realise is because I thought they were just always built in because we went these things separately from our own companies and they're not too expensive. So it's definitely worth thinking about if you're doing an event. Bathrooms. Now I'll explain why in a second. Now a lot of times in tech and we talk about diversity, we talk about de-genting toilets. But at Workhouse London we did not do de-genting toilets because you have to be aware of the local laws on public safety and bathrooms and the location and venue. So don't just go and do something. Make sure your religion or legal rights are lit before you go and do something. Especially with stores. Now in a store in the UK where there's a space of 4-1 below the door. Forget it. You're not going to get it anywhere past everyone else. But if it's complete in case of room where it doesn't have this space of 4-1 below then you should get away with it. But talk to the manager. Okay, so the manager will be the only space in the event. So I'll tell you about managers. Like essential boxes. This is the 50 quid. When you have these in every room there's a lot of wear in this room and a lot of look in this room. And then pretty sure they probably go to an event where they just were on the wrong schedule and they just don't know what to do. These things are, God so terrible. Have everyone open and put in a personal note because people are more likely to use it. Have different tampons and towel sizes and different sizes. It's super useful. And also remember, which I didn't realise, have extras to refill. It was so much fun sending people out to buy more. This year we're going to put it all back in. Because someone pointed out to me last time I did this talk, that it's not just women who need these boxes and it's totally true. So we're going to put them in all buffets this year, which means the cost is from 50 to about 100. But it's totally worth it. Tickets. Now you can do a lot of your tickets. How much time do I have? The Irish would require this because it just makes it easier for the catering people to actually know and improve their catering before. And actually you're going to ask as many questions as you want because it's the internet, you need to take as much space as you want. I bring up what we do. We actually put a tick box that makes people aware that SWAD isn't always guaranteed that hour of end. Which means that when we go out on the budget, we're covered, which is kind of awesome. Asking if anyone needs sign language, a usual ticketing system to find out what kind of attendees you're going to need. Also don't ask if people require child care and phone packs for the crash. And any other requirements. So I have someone who had a carer. I didn't know this, but she added this into her thing, child carer. So she wasn't sure if she needed to buy a carer ticket and we just gave the carer a ticket. Kind of nice, right? You should open your maps as a way to deal with the different culture clashes that happen at events. This is one of my favourite pictures. One because it says show someone speaking and I'm sure we're opening that room where there's two people at the back having a matter and it's just really annoying. It's like a being in your ear. So usually you open your maps and then it's always bringing different cultures together like Swazda. So usually, I don't know if I should set the tone. It also empowers your organisers and volunteers to follow your lead and enforce what you expect of people. Also use the turnover. I'll work on it in 20 minutes to remind people of the kind of politeness that you expect from people. For example, whilst there are lots of people to think about themselves, they can put that on the turner and the slides and people just get reminded of it. Speakers. This is super important to me because it means that people can say what they want to hear and it means that as a speaker submitting you can pick and create talks that are actually where people are interested in. Outreach to other communities in your local area have applied to speak sessions with organisers so that people can jump on with their hangouts and talk to you directly. We encourage speakers. We have one-on-one from these speakers and group mentors for people who are already speaking. So that way everyone has some kind of fear and we can help them with that. I feel like the more we help people the more we get new people to join in and the more diverse our speakers are. We encourage people to sign up as mentors because that way it's less possible for me to go and sign people and we also, beforehand, have a virtual room and I already mentioned a physical room and we have dedicated speakers to organisers so you don't annoy me or anyone else which is handy. We also have a serious information path because it's really, really handy having one PDF or one email that has all the information of where you need to be, when you need to be there, what kind of BJA, HDMI situation you're going to end up with, what, 4, 2, 3 ratio, the list is endless. The one-on-one location is when you're stressed out on the train and you don't know what to do, you just look at this email and go, ta-da! That is always, always handy. I've heard in downloadable PDF format, other people have other opinions that's absolutely fine, but I do recommend you grab them so people know that they're in the right PDF because I have the own previous year's PDFs and got it wrong so I'll be telling you that. Last thing, not least way, socials. Because of our socials, 5,860 pounds we have non-alcoholic centric event. And what I mean by that is not that we don't have any drinks, but rather we expect you to eat before you drink. And when you fix that because there's a big problem in the UK, is we give free tokens when people go and have their dinner. Our socials include food. Not above-their food. Pie, mashed and mushy peas. It's really worth it. And we give our drink tokens after this because, like, okay, you've got us something full of food you can now go drinking. I know we only give out two tokens because if you want to get drunk it's not an hour cost. We give also, I don't need something to do, last year we had retro games and it was amazing for like, I think it was like 500 quid. This random guy turned over all his retro games and it was like, come here all 64s and say you're meant to produce. He set them all up in the evening and he went home and it was 500 quid. This year we can't get hold of it. I'm thinking right now we're six weeks together, but I'll figure it out. Also we have a drink menu posters which we give tokens to tell the people what they can expect to get out of the bar so the bar queue isn't so long. And we put non-alcoholic drinks first because it really annoys me that the alcoholic drinks are always first. Like, hey, it's my event I get to do it the way I like. You know, I like to drink first because people are more likely to look at the top and go, yeah, I'll have a fancy before they say yeah, I want a whiskey. Also at our socials we have two floors locally so we have four dedicated to a crisis space. Hasn't showed out music, tables, really bright lighting and people talk there and then all the games and the crazy in the bar are all downstairs. So you get this two-tiered system for people you just want to have in chat. It's a nice thing. This is how it breaks down. Oh, it's 367 pounds even better. I don't think I'm going to get that this year but never mind yes. There is definitely more to do but the cost of that is time. In Weigh Out Women the whole final budget was basically £74,000. Weigh Out Women this year is basically £78,000 because the cost of selling things has gone up which is kind of annoying. In fact, at this point of six weeks to go our budget is minus 32%. So the cost of that is basically meaning not sleeping there, we might at the moment. So yeah do not panic, you'll be fine. But a lot of people say to me maybe we should get rid of some of this accessibility. Maybe we should cut back on the cost but the downside of it is when you truly believe that diversity needs to be improved then accessibility needs to be a first-class system in our events. In all our events, our users and our online events and our offline events. We need to set an expectation of what people have and then people can work around it. When you tell people what to expect and what people not to expect, people know how to deal with our situations and they don't have surprises. It's when we have a surprise that people freak out. Any improvement gives better than no improvement. I'm going to be proud of all the people that are working on this. They've had one that I shared. This is the team and they were all absolutely brilliant. They gave so much time to the project and it was I have no words for them. It's coming up in just over six weeks. You're more than welcome to come and see how this all actually works. Yeah, very short of some time but I'm around. I'm on Twitter and I'm a prolific tweeter and you're more likely to get an answer from people who are on my inbox. Do feel free to contact me after this event. I'll be outside after this. The question, I went to an event in Gothenburg and they're on the nice and cheap way to get sign language interpreters. They protected the school for our sign language. That was really good idea. They had their first real world training. Just for the record, you went to an event in Copenhagen and they used sign language students to work experience at their local event which made it cheap. Any other questions? How many sign language for that event? I have no idea. We pay for the venue which is £12,000 and then we pay stuff on top but because it's at university and because we're over the weekend I basically walk around the area and I have that room too and basically don't mention the price and I get away with it but then they kind of suss that out this year so they wouldn't be a sponsor on the website. It's putting a logo on the website and giving me extra rooms. I'm totally going to take that offer but also if you're at university lectures or panels with the students and they'll give you more stuff for free so that's a true tip for you right there. Do you have any ideas for rail signage or large print signage ways to get that done inexpensively? I would suggest putting on the tickets. Making the tickets say that someone needs a braille and you can have those done so that they're ready to go. You don't make them all like that. Ideally we'd like all of them to be done but that's far too high so you do one-off runs and not too bad usually but case-by-case basis really how much money you have versus what you do. I would love to have more money and blow the whole thing apart but there's a realism to it as well which is why I mentioned the kind of cost I expect. Alright, I'm not sure if I finished but I will be outside so I'm going to take all the questions outside. Thank you Laura for listening to this room.