Diversity

During the hackathon we aimed to make the most of being able to easily discuss several topics that would prove difficult over chat. A few big topics we picked revolve primarily around SymfonyCon and the community.

SymfonyCon Social

One of the big topics to work on is the social evening of the next SymfonyCon. Our aim is to improve accessibility with a diverse set of activities to cater different groups and preferences. Think about a music room where you can dance versus a board game room where people can have a more quiet interaction with each other. We also try to come up with ideas to ensure enough seating is available, non-alcoholic drinks are the primary focus and people don’t want to or have to leave early.

Conference Improvements

When working on improving the conferences, there are bigger and smaller issues to solve. We have been classifying and refining points to work on ranging from both physical and digital accessibility to things like food allergies, scents and fragrance, and various conference comfort points. We aim to add a keynote or lightning talk to the opening of the conference in Amsterdam, to give an explanation and goal of this initiative, and a presentation to invite people to become a speaker.

Another point we want to try and improve, is the social experience during the conference; namely between the talks. By introducing a system based on DockerPals, we hope to give ‘pals’ an experience that goes beyond the technical aspect of a conference.

Full list of achievements

As we have had two days to work on diversity, we managed to work on a fair amount of topics. Here’s a list of short summaries that we’ve worked on:

List of achievements:

• Arrange the SymfonyCon Social with diversity and inclusivity in mind
• Working on Non-English resources to make the basics of Symfony and the community more accessible
• SymfonyCon lightning talks:
  • Speaker Training to try and motivate (first time) speakers
  • Diversity keynote to spread the goal and possibly the statistics of diversity
• Improving conference accessibility (a11y)
• Using inclusive language at conferences and in the community (Slack, Github, etc)
• Coordinate with communities outside our own regarding underrepresented groups
• Reviewing, closing and updating open diversity issues
• Conference Pal program to improve the experience of (new) visitors having difficulties blending in
• Improve lightning talks and unconf track logistics by having someone responsible available and possibly record the talks
• Improve Symfony documentation on how to review PRs and deal with feedback on PRs and issues
• Growing the CARE team beyond the scope of the Symfony core team
• Provide feedback to the European Commission about diversity
• Conference badges and stickers indicating things like pronouns, languages, whether or not you want to talk to people etc.
• Making conference networking easier and more accessible
• Improve digital accessibility for symfony and conferences
• Training content that can be used for mentors, conference pals, etc.