Hackathons/Handbook/Event Interviews

'''**THIS PAGE IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THE LINK AROUND AS THOSE INTERVIEWED WILL GET A FIRST PASS AT REVIEW BEFORE THIS IS ACTIVELY SHARED.'''** This message will be removed after review. (Please feel free to edit for typos. :)

All content on this page is from interviews with the 20 event organizers listed in the footnotes. See our hackathon guide for more event organization tips, programs and ideas.

This page is the result of a Mozilla Open Leaders project.

Safe Spaces
Codes of Conduct, Participant Guidelines, inclusion & event safety

Logistics
Signs
 * Our “Safety team” is there from the beginning of the weekend to the end. They provide emotional safety support and are physical safety first responders. This team of people came out of the participants asking for this resource.  (2)
 * Having a large safety team is important because you can’t ask volunteers to go through the entire conference on duty. They should also be allowed to experience the event and have the space to breathe and take a break. (2)
 * Have a physical location or a room for the safety team to take reports and interact with participants. As an event offers more safety resources you will get more requests for support. (2)
 * We have safety officers. There are multiple ways to contact them. One is associated with Mozilla, and one not. They are different genders. (7)
 * Online in our slack communities. Participation guidelines are pinned to the top of the channel. A bot sends the guidelines right away when you join slack. (6)
 * The Code of Conduct alias is active all year round. Anyone can email the alias which goes to the set of people who can help. (10)
 * Set up a mobile based chat that allows people on your Safe Spaces team to easily find and communicate with each other. (20)
 * Special emergency telegram channel for organizers who would deal with any issues. (3)
 * We did a poster version of the Friendly Space Policy, Our main conference room had small round tables so we put a poster on each table. (8)


 * Put posters all over the event with a shorter version of the Friendly Space Policy, photos of the people who could take reports, and an email address and phone number to call. Both men and women identified to take reports. (3)
 * MozFest participation guidelines are printed in large format on every space floor and translated into 7 languages (6)
 * Print out copies of your policy and have them at reception to people who missed reading it before showing up to the event. You need to communicate the policies in multiple places to ensure that no one can claim missing it. (20)

Training
For your response team For your participants
 * The safety team coordinators have been trained in transformative justice, de-escalating conflict and mediation. We trail our entire safety team and require that they have some previous training and experience. (2)
 * Hold in-person briefings to those on call for reports. What does it mean to be on call? Go over possible scenarios. (5)
 * We have safe space training modules, most of our volunteers do the training modules in advance (8)
 * Choose your safe spaces team both based on previous experience and training and also based on trust and reputation within your communities. Provide new training as needed and sync up with your team both by email and in person before the event starts. The team should help define and make changes to the reporting process as needed at each event. (20)
 * Before the event we have an online hangout where we go through everything with volunteers to train them. Volunteers make sure that anyone reporting is safe and then hand them off to the duty officer who has more training. (11)
 * Devise a clean avenue of engagement so people are clear on how to help each other and extending the resource into the night time activities. (2)
 * Train participants in the 4 Principles of a safe space: 1) Equalize the space. 2) Check your assumptions. 3) The right to be human. 4) practice consensual dialogue. (4)

Prevention

 * Don’t want to turn everyone into police. Make sure people can assume good intent. Help people to not jump to assumptions that someone is harassing especially with cultural differences.  (1)
 * You should change you participant guidelines for each event that you run, adapt it to your audience.  (1)
 * When there is an expected tough workshop or conversation the Safety Team will pre-stage there.  (2)
 * We co-created list of positive behaviors at event with attendees. We also listed behaviors we don’t want to see. This was a small-group icebreaker activity and each submitted the lists of behaviors on Mentee. (8)
 * When the event opens organizer read the entire policy outloud to all participants at the event. In a serious voice. Formal speech. Serious issue and please take is seriously. (3)
 * Our code of conduct is part of the registration process (5)
 * Attendees are aware of Participant Guidelines before they arrive. We do things ahead of time and update the website year round. Participant Guidelines are change to be event specific. We Tweet them out on social media and email the to every participant who has bought a ticket. (6)
 * At the opening of the event we asked one of the participants to do short story about how she had used the Friendly Space Policy as a support when she had felt harassment. I wanted to do this because I hear people questioning “I have never seen harassment - why are we wasting time and resources on this”(8)
 * We provide safety tips depending on where we are in the world with local knowledge on how to stay safe. (10)
 * We had a duty officer available at all times at the registration table in the main lobby. They stood out by not only having a specific role separating them from the rest of the organizers and volunteers in helping attendees feel safe, but also by their easily identifiable orange shirt.(11)
 * You need to help people remember to be safe and welcoming. Teach community about micro-aggressions and remind them that is not what they want to be doing. Anyone registered to our conference gets added to an online community forum. People can add their own examples. Creating a resource together. All attendees get pointed to this resource.(14)
 * Post your Safe Spaces team’s photos on your events page and identify them in-person at the opening of your event. You should also indicate multiple ways to report (in person, by chat, by phone, by email, by email after the event). (20)
 * I would recommend that organizers don’t just stop at making people aware of the Friendly Space Policy, they need to actually make sure that people know where to go to and who to go to.  (17)

Taking Reports and Responding to Problems

 * We provide a private  office space where people can give reports in case someone is uncomfortable.  (17)
 * How do you solve the “happy hour” problem? This is the unsolved problem. You can take alcohol out of the equation, or spread people out throughout the room who can pay attention for any issues. You will need someone who is willing to confront people, but they need to do it away from the group and begin with questioning and understanding the situation. Make sure the data that was reported is correct. “Were you in this situation?” and “Did this happen?”   (1)
 * Organizers need to have a conversation with someone first before reacting to the report. In the majority of the time offense was not intended. (11)
 * We created an incident response plan to go with the Code of Conduct (14)
 * Three people on event staff should discuss any issues before any decisions are made (3)
 * Except in the case of serious emergencies, the Friendly Space team discusses in a private chat and agree upon the next best steps. That way one person’s biases are not dominating the results.  (20)
 * Before you take action it is usually important to run your plan by the reporting party / target to make sure their are comfortable with your approach and decision. (20)
 * All reports should be written up and kept. If the person is at the event on behalf of their employer you should consider reporting serious incidents to their organizations HR team or their direct manager. (20)
 * If there is one person who is being a jerk, kick them out and notify the event. “We need to let everyone know that we had to remove someone from the event, we take this seriously.”  Helps people follow the rules. (1)

Cultural Considerations

 * Code of conducts can be tone deaf and can create a false sense of security. They are written to presume that people are going to violate them.  The collective ethic is more important. You should communicate that we are here taking care of each other, ask participants to be a collective part of the solution.  (1)
 * The development of having friendly space policies comes from the USA. in The USA it is taken much more seriously. It is politicized there. In Europe it is much more recent. People are still kind of learning what this actually means. People are still kind of reasonable. I would try to keep a kind of balance. I trust people that they are able to have normal conversations with each other. Maybe people can work issue out among themselves before conference staff. In 10 years FSP will be standard in german events but for now it feels strange to germans. (3)
 * It was suggested to have our own friendly space policy for the German speaking groups.
 * American ways of describing or identifying race and ethnicity is an important issue because we never use the term” race.” The Friendly Space Policy needs to be adapted to the surrounding and context instead of using the American model. If I was to organize a german-only conference I would spend more time on contextualizing and adapting it. (3)
 * MozFest also adheres to Mozilla's general code of conduct which was developed by communities around the world. Even for our event’s shortened version we cleared it with an international group. (6)
 * Safe Space policy is part of the Wikimedia Foundation project but it’s not like the Indian way of doing things, here there are a lot of subcultures. Everyone agrees that more diversity is needed. But writing down a code of conduct that works for everyone in India is not easy (9)
 * It's not just a translation, it’s something we came up with. It was more positively framed and less formulated as prohibitions and rules. We wanted to communicate positively that “this is for you.” (16)
 * In many cases people from outside the United States or who do not belong to a minority group have significant trouble understanding the need for having a Code of Conduct or a Friendly Space Policy. It is important to engage them in conversation and explain instead of reacting negatively to them. Having clear examples of past situations can help to illustrate. (20)
 * The Friendly Space Policy is mostly generic enough, but we also need to bring a bit more local context. When we organized WikiIndaba in 2014 the LGBT community was only starting to be recognized in our country and we had to explain what it means to be friendly. We had to be explicit. (17)
 * Code of Conduct and Friendly Space policies are North American. The language and the way of speaking is foreign. What do you mean when you are listing these things? It is better for events in different countries to create their own policies with more cultural context. I would have liked to use ours.  (8)

Inclusion

 * Language is a deciding factor in india. English becomes the preferred language so there is no favoritism. Hindi people who are not fluent in English can have someone who is good at both English and Hindi translating for them. (9)


 * Detailed note taking and sessions summaries for those who do not speak english as a first language or who are not physically able to be at your event (20)


 * Concept of a mouth: Someone can serve as a mouth for somebody else. Some people don’t want to ask a question in front of a large group. Participants can write something on a paper and then someone else will ask it. (16)
 * Pronoun ribbons for badges. Educate them in advance - and encourage everyone to participate. “This is the norm here at our event” Try not to “other anyone.”(14)
 * This work is hard to start because you feel like you are doing everything wrong. Its OK and you can’t do everything right and that is understood. You have to show commitment and show action. For us I think a lot of this work has helped  make us who we are and be successful. Anything that we have is owed to diversity and inclusion work. (12)
 * It’s not just about saying you have a CoC at the beginning of the event and then having nothing but white men present for the rest of the event. This makes your CoC less meaningful because you show you are not a place that shows by action that you value different perspectives. (12)
 * We are creating space and time for people from different backgrounds to come together and work together. How does it speak to different groups? The communities we want to serve are represented on the stage. Diversity inclusion lense is brought to every piece of the work, we are designing from the ground up as best as we can. (12)
 * We like highlighting diverse, early career voices, while complementing them with leading experts, (12)
 * We work hard to try and identify people with mobility issues, some of our participants are in wheelchairs or crutches. We connect with them in advance and the venue staff can show them easy ways to get through the building. (11)
 * Having quiet/silent woking rooms for participants who are introverted or need to get away from noise and socialising has been appreciated. This is especially important if your venue is far from your event’s hotel. (20)
 * We do captioning for some of the theaters. Someone who attended who was deaf so we connected with him ahead of time and got a list of sessions that he was interested in and all of those sessions were in a room with captioning. (11)
 * We have a mothers room - private room where people can do breast-pumping and has a fridge. 3-4 mothers using it this year - they became friends. We have assistive listening devices. Main theater or some of the other rooms. We make feminine products available in the women's room. These things send a signal to attendees and people with other needs. (11)

Philosophy / Other

 * Safe space goes beyond physical safety, extends into how are you experiencing the conference. How much of your opinion and vision can show up in that space.(2)
 * Participant and social media guidelines, are about honoring the place that we are in, the people already in the place doing the work, collective genius. It's important to go back to the intentional root. It is really had to create a safe space as an addendum. The consideration of that means comes after the creation of that space. We change ours every year. (2)
 * Parties are the most stressful for organizers (in terms of safe space enforcement) (3)
 * We renamed it the “Policy for Friendly meeting” to “Guidelines for inclusive meetings” This communicates that we want to have an inclusive meeting - then we can define how do we actually include each other. This was divided into “why do we need inclusive meetings” and “How is this connected to the diversity policy”. Then we have a list of “how to include each other” and “how to make everyone’s contributions valuable” and then it has some paragraphs about harassment (8)
 * There was no room for anyone to question why we want to have inclusive communities. This is at the core of what we are doing. (8)
 * The work of creating a safe space and helping attendees to feeling included starts way before the event actually happens and continues quite significantly after the event (dealing with cases . working through things). This is a significant allocation of time spent dealing with issues that come up. We don’t think this is because we are a nasty community but because we do so much work in this area - encouraging people to report - we end up with a lot to deal with. (12)
 * A lot of the Safe Spaces work requires a team effort but also a lot of inward reflection, analysis and personal growth. For most people, the process of learning how to create safe and inclusive spaces require those people to look internally as well, which is not very easy. We don’t talk about this enough externally but it’s good for event organizers to talk about. (12)
 * (Creating a Safe Space) Sometimes changing the thing that you are and really looking deeply at understanding what you are doing and the structure that you are building will be uncomfortable and involve changing significant parts of what you do. We understand deeply what we are trying to do and are mindful. This is a process that event organizers who are less mindful don’t always see. (12)
 * We have seen that the community feels special to people who are generally marginalized because we pay attention to this (Safe Spaces), even if we don’t always get it right there is clearly a focus. Starting this work is difficult because you realize how complex the problem is, how many mistakes you have made and how much there is left to do. (12)
 * Code of Conducts make some people feel uncomfortable and this is something to recognize. When privileged people who don’t feel like they need protection all of a sudden having rules of how they can conduct themselves. This can cause anxiety. Any mistake can make you feel guilty and worry. (12)
 * We didn’t have any reports made during our conference. However, we are aware that this is not necessarily a measure of success, and that the attention of events organizers should be focused on providing a safe atmosphere during a conference, to make sure that no problematic behavior happens. (19)
 * A motivation for creating your own policy: if you come up with your own policy you need to more actively engage in the whole topic. If you just sign off on someone else's policy then you don’t think about it as much. (16)

Pre-Event Engagement
Encourage participant excitement, planning and participation before your event starts

Communication
Communicating with your participants or helping them to communicate with each other

Co-creating events
Empower and work with your attendees to make a better event for everyone

Measuring Success
Metrics and measurements to show that your event was a success

Event Follow-Up
Assign action items, support efforts and give feedback to participants and speakers

Post Event Engagement
Use your event as a catalyst, encouraging participation and enabling work after the event ends

Mentoring Programs
Help grow your communities bench depth with mentoring and buddy programs

Newcomer Support
Help newcomers to feel comfortable, welcome and ready to participate at your event