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.

Consider this list an invitation to tell us what we're missing. Please send your ideas or concerns to contact@dddeurope.com or call +32 468 109 891. We treat all submissions confidentially.

Things we're doing

Audio loops

The venue provides a Phonak FM system, which can be used with a headset or with a stand for your own hearing aid. We can provide this upon request.

Assistance animals

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

Bring your assistant

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

Childcare

We will have professional child care providers at the venue. This is a free service, but we charge a small 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.

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.

Privacy

We have red lanyards for participants that don’t want to be photographed or filmed recognisably. You can switch your regular DDD Europe lanyard for a red lanyard at the reception.

Conference Buddy

We have a partnership with Conference Buddy. The Conference Buddy initiative is designed for everyone who wants to attend a tech conference but is hesitant to attend by themselves. Conference Buddy aims to help first-timers, introverts, and anyone who might feel shy in the midst of a conference. You can add a Conference Buddy sticker to your badge if you actively want to participate. These stickers can be found at the reception.

Contact person

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

Dietary requirements

Water, tea, coffee and snacks are served throughout the day at the conference location. We inquire about dietary requirements during the registration process.

Gender-inclusive bathrooms

Gender-inclusive bathrooms are clearly indicated

Gender-inclusive language

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

Lactation Room

We can provide a lacation room upon request contact us

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.

People with photosensitive epilepsy/seizures

We ask speakers to indicate if their presentation contains strobe effects or flickering.

Prayer

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

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.

Queuing

We understand queuing can be difficult, painful or impossible for some participants. We do not anticipate long queues during the conference, but will make participants aware to let people skip the line if necessary.

Quiet Room

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

Reserved accessible seating

Contact us for info.

Security

We have professional security staff at the venue.

Sign Language interpreter

If you need a sign language interpreter, please send an email to contact@dddeurope.com with information on what sign language you need. We will do our best to find and hire one. If you already know a person that would work for you, let us know their contact information.

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.

Speaker reimbursements

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

Volunteers

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

Wheelchair accessibility

The venue provides this, as it is required by Dutch law. There are wheelchair-accessible bathrooms downstairs. The food buffet tables are not wheelchair accessible. Our staff will assist you. The hotel offers guestrooms for invalid guests. Please contact the hotel to assure you have such a room.

Things we're not doing (or not doing yet)

Accessibility Fund

We don't have an accessibility fund to cover provisions for people who need them, such as taxi rides, ramps, translators, escort from the station etc... 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.

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 and books, having a conversation upfront, feedback in our network... Therefore, a blind selection process doesn't match well with our goals.

Live Captioning

At present we have no plans to have live captioning during the event. Let us know if you're hard of hearing, and we'll find a way to do it.

Speaker quota

We believe that tech conferences should set an example for the tech industry. At DDD Europe 2022 we had 45% non-white male speakers. We aim for an equal representation of women, people of color, and other groups that are underrepresented in tech. However, imposing strict quota is hard to achieve for a niche conference like DDD Europe. 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 equal representation.

Training staff

Our own staff is fully aware of our efforts. However, we hire a lot of staff through suppliers (catering, hospitality, security, ...). Unfortunately we can't train them up to our standards of inclusivity.