CSSconf EU strives to create a genuinely welcoming, safe, and inspiring event for the CSS community. We offer Diversity Support Tickets to allow an even more diverse audience to participate in the conference.
How do Diversity Support Tickets work?
You purchase a ticket for yourself, and enable another person of the conference’s choosing to attend the event by paying a share towards their ticket. The support options range from contributing 25%, 50% and up to 100% towards a full ticket. We thank you in advance for your generosity and awesomeness and look forward to a more inclusive CSSconf EU than ever before.
Why Diversity Support Tickets?
We believe that only a diverse community is a healthy community, and we welcome and encourage participation by everyone. The Diversity Support Tickets initiative is one attempt to increase the number of participants that would love to attend but are financially or otherwise unable to do so.
Who will receive the sponsored tickets? Can I apply?
Anyone from an under-represented group in tech is invited to apply for a scholarship. This includes, but is not limited to: women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, and people facing economic or social hardships. We do outreach with organizations that represent disadvantaged groups in tech to reach the right audience. In the case where there are more qualified applicants than there are ticket, we have a lottery for the available spots, with priority given based on a combination of need and impact. The number of spots is determined by Diversity Support Ticket sales and dedicated diversity contributions made by our sponsors.
What else are you doing to increase diversity?
In addition to the Diversity Support Tickets initiative for attendees, we also aspire to encourage a diverse group of speakers to apply. We provide a lot of information about the application process, additional blog posts covering the topic, as well as personal support (emails, slack chat). We reach out via email to under-represented individuals and groups to encourage them to submit talk proposals.
CSSconf EU and its team are active members of the local community. In our desire to support those just getting started in web development we organize free weekend workshops called CSSclasses. Those workshops aim to introduce people completely new to programming to the basics of becoming creative with code. Each event has up to 70 attendees, and is completely free of charge. We have run over 20 CSSclasses events in Berlin, Hamburg and Edinburgh.
We operate under a Code of Conduct that we enforce. We educate ourselves and our team about how to ensure a safe and inclusive event. We are constantly learning, educating ourselves on how to do better, and we plan to be as transparent about our process as possible. The Diversity Support Tickets initiative which we launched in 2015 is one attempt at improving in this area.
Can I contribute or sponsor in other ways?
Help from sponsors is greatly needed – if you are interested in supporting CSSconf EU to become more accessible and inclusive, please reach out directly via e-mail: contact@cssconf.eu.