A major goal of Steel City Ruby Conf is for it to be a great first experience for someone who has never been to a Ruby conference before. In her post about the inception of the conference, Carol discussed some of the factors we tried to account for, such as keeping costs down and planning activities with a new conference-goer in mind. In addition to these things, we wanted to make sure that the conference would be a safe and inviting space for a variety of people, not just your average conference attendee.

We kept this goal in mind when reaching out to speakers for the conference. We wanted to increase the likelihood of attendees seeing people who they share something in common with, provide some new people with the opportunity to speak at a conference, and (most importantly) have great people give presentations that inspire others. We are very excited about the people who will be speaking at Steel City Ruby Conf and think they will add to a great conference experience. Lindsey Bieda and Steve Klabnik are planning to speak about anti-oppression and tech, so they will be expanding on some topics related to inclusivity at the conference.

A factor that discourages some people from attending conferences is concern about harassment or an uninviting environment. The majority of conference participants are inviting and respectful of others, but occasionally someone’s poor judgement ends up diminishing what should be an awesome conference experience. If you want some examples, go check out the timeline of incidents at the Geek Feminism Wiki.

The Steel City Ruby Conf organizers agreed early on that the conference should have an anti-harassment policy to help prevent incidents and provide a safe, harassment-free environment for everyone. We adopted the policy suggested by the Geek Feminism Wiki and are following many of their other recommendations. We are proud to join a growing list of conferences that implement these policies and encourage others to do the same to help promote inclusivity in our communities.

Another important part of inclusivity is outreach. The average Ruby conference attendee who is already hooked into the community (following the right people, blogs, podcasts, mailing lists, etc.) probaby will have an easy time finding out about our conference. We wanted to make sure these were not the only people who got excited about Steel City Ruby Conf. Our outreach efforts included local Ruby user groups, where many new people get their start in the community, and Girl Develop It, a group that provides low-cost, judgment-free environments for learning software development.

We hope that these efforts will make Steel City Ruby Conf an inviting and awesome experience for all people interested in attending! Please feel free to post any questions about our policies on the Google Group.