Designing a safe conference

Like any large-scale design project, creating a successful conference involves thousands upon thousands of decisions. Every decision has multiple alternatives to choose from.

Conference organizers can make a choice that increases the chance of an incident occuring. A different choice would decrease the chances of an incident occuring. Making the right choice could eliminate many safety incidents, including harassment.

Can we eliminate all incidents forever? Probably not. But we can make smarter decisions. We can design safer conferences.

“Good judgement comes from experience.

And experience comes from bad judgements.”

We use post-event retrospective sessions to dive deep into our bad judgements. We ask what the sequence of events was that got us there. We ask how we could improve the outcome. We explore alternative approaches. Then, we design a safer conference.

Party culture and conference receptions

At many events, people come because of the parties. The marketing for the event emphasizes the parties, which happen every night and go way into the morning, often with sponsored open tabs and bottomless beer kegs. As the organizers introduce each day, they talk about how wonderful the party will be. Party goers are made into heroes for staying all night and getting sloshed. Early morning presentation slots are deemed the “hangover sessions” with substantially lower attendance expectations.

Many of the incidents we hear about happen at parties like this or after the party when very intoxicated people make not-so-smart decisions. (And we hear from people concerned about their safety that they refuse to attend these parties because of the increased rate of incidents that occur.)

Creating a party culture is a design decision of the organizers. Early on, we looked at the role of parties in our events. Because we had an overall goal of making our events the best professional educational events on the market, we made the conscious decision to have a different style of “party.”

We usually have two receptions: the first on the evening before the first day, as a welcome; the second on the next-to-last day, as a networking event. People often come and go from this first reception, as it’s purpose is to get them registered and greet them.

The second reception is scheduled right after the last session of our most popular day, often from 5:30–7:30pm. It’s only two hours long. There’s a lot of food served (and we’ve intentionally served a lot of food all day). We give each attendee two tickets for free drinks. (More are available, but our staff doles tickets out personally, after determining through a quick conversation if the attendee has had too much already.)

By providing plenty of food and limited free drink access, we cut down the drunken behavior. The bar shuts down promptly at 7:30 and some people move on to bar hop, but now they are in small groups and usually with people they know. And, because they are probably still of sound mind when they leave, they more likely to make smart decisions that will prevent an incident.

On other nights, we put together dinners for first time attendees and book small group reservations at local restaurants, giving attendees an option to experience the fine cuisine and explore the city. Again, we don’t emphasize the alcohol, but instead create a fun, localized experience. We’ve only heard great things about these social activities.

As a result, it’s rare for anyone to get drunk at our events. It’s happened maybe 2 or 3 times in the last 5 years. It’s possible some may decide not to come to our events because of this, but we haven’t found that to be true in our extensive customer research.

More importantly, it’s unlikely someone who is excessively intoxicated will behave better because they read the event’s Code of Conduct. Drunk people do stupid things because they are drunk. Being strict about a enforcing a Code of Conduct without dealing with the scenarios for excessive intoxication is, in my opinion, an act of pushing on a very loose string.

I believe that if event producers were to make design decisions that would reduce when and how people get intoxicated, they’d see a dramatic decrease in incidents and their event would be safer. Not just feel safer, but actually be a safer event.

Curating content for professionalism

Another problem that many Code of Conduct documents address is offensive content in the conference program. We hear audience members becoming upset about sexualized content and imagery, racial stereotypes, and offensive language.

When a speaker is on the stage, there is very little a conference organizer can do to prevent the next few words from coming out of their mouth. If they are going to say something stupid or offensive, well, that’s just going to happen. (Another manifestation of the “jerks will be jerks” philosophy.)

Again, the decisions we make when programming our events come into play here. At our own events, we rarely put someone on the stage that we haven’t seen or heard present before. There are many talented people in this industry I’d like to add to our shows, but because I haven’t had a chance to see what they do, I haven’t approached them yet. (But, rest assured, they are on my radar and I’ll be excited to see them do something awesome.)

When I’ve seen someone, I can see how they present. I can see the way they approach anecdotes and how they use humor. I can see how the choose examples and how they build their presentation’s story narratives.

Want to eliminate offensive material from the stage? Only invite people who have a proven track record of presenting material that doesn’t have anything offensive in it.

We go farther than that. We talk with every speaker before we put them on stage. In some cases, I offer an opportunity to show me their presentation and get a constructive criqitue. I love these sessions and I can pick out places where there might be an issue before they become an issue.

A few years back, I was working with a seasoned presenter who was running through his presentation to get my feedback. He’d presented dozens of times before, but because I offered the feedback session, he took me up on it.

In his presentation, he told a story at the expense of a religious group. It was a funny story and, frankly, this group gets lots of jokes made at their expense (often by their own members).

I explained to the presenter that the designers from the religious organization were clients of ours and likely to be at his presentation. I didn’t need to say anything else. He immediately found a different way to get his point across. Crisis averted.

In my experience, when offensive content finds its way into a presentation, it’s not because the presenter has the intention to offend. It’s because they don’t see it as offensive themselves. They think it’s normal material, or they’re hoping to get a laugh because they’re anxious about their presentation’s overall quality. A Code of Conduct wouldn’t help in this instance because the presenter doesn’t realize they’re doing anything wrong.

Our process — our deliberate, designed process — spends time with the presenters, giving them background on the audience and helping them with the formation of their thoughts. We are interested in creating the best experience and when you distract an audience by using offensive material, they don’t get a great experience. We only hire presenters who buy into that premise and we work with them to bring out their best.

I present at a lot of events where the event producers make no effort to find out what I’m going to say on their stage. Maybe they trust me inherently (possibly because they’ve seen me before). Yet, there are many events where I’ve been a 2nd hand or 3rd hand recommendation and the event production staff has no idea what I’ll do or say. That’s a decision they’ve made that could very possibly come back to bite them.

Designing a professional environment

An event like Comic-Con has to present a real challenge for the organizers. After all, many of the characters and stories that are at the center of the conference’s theme and programs are, by their nature, unprofessional. There are criminal characters, overly sexualized heroes and villains, and story elements that we’d never tolerate in mature society. All for fun, but how do you create an environment that is tolerant and respectful when the artifacts you’re celebrating are being revered for their intolerance and disrespect?

I’m thankful that most of our events are about teaching great design techniques. That seems so much easier to make work. I am in complete awe of the Comic-Con team and other event producers who make those events fun and enjoyable for everyone.

That said, it’s still a lot of work to design an environment that communicates respect and tolerance at all times, even when all you’re doing is teaching great design techniques. Again, we look closely at all the elements of our design, to ensure it’s creating the mood and projecting the type of experience people can expect.

Everything from typography to our email marketing, from the web site design to the music that’s played in between the sessions, is very deliberately chosen. If we want people to behave in a certain way, we make design decisions that make behaving that way easy to do.

We have a current struggle that we’re working through. We recently took over the Warm Gun conference. We loved the program and the partners, but the conference brand name has bothered us from the beginning, because of its violent connotations.

For our first year of producing this conference, we kept the name, only because everyone knew it by that name. However, our plan is to take away its violent meanings, to make it feel safe to everyone. It was already safe, but the name made it feel otherwise.

Changing a conference name is a big deal, mucking with the hard-earned reputation you’ve built up over many years of producing a great show. We feel strongly it doesn’t create the mood we want, so we’ll do the hard thing and make the change.

The mood gets set early on. In every communication we have with attendees, we emphasize the things that are most important. We get them excited about everything they’re going to learn, we introduce them to the topics and the speakers, and we make it clear that the fun will come from professional habits. We’re completely respectful of them and develop a relationship that makes it easy for them to talk to us.

When they show up, they know the event staff already because of all the communication (much of it personalized) that they’ve already had with our event. They know they can ask us any question and get a quick answer. We’ve already helped them navigate the local transportation options, resolved issues that might’ve happened with housing, and ensured they made the right workshop choices.

All through the event, our staff is trained to glance at people’s badges and address them by their first name. (We make the first names extra big, to make that easy.) We’re always stopping people to ask them how they’re enjoying the event. All of our staff, no matter what else is going on, takes a moment to talk to the attendees nearest them.

If anyone looks the least bit uncomfortable, troubled, or confused, we take a moment and ask how it’s going. We get involved with any question or problem, whether they’ve lost an important belonging or (as recently happened) need a quiet space because they’d just gotten news of a death of a close friend. We’ve made safe, private spaces for new mothers to produce breast milk and secured a refrigerator to store it. We spend the entire event showing how we’re personally interested in them and their experience.

At the event, telling our attendees they should come to us if there’s any problem or question is already built into our process. And something they’ve already been doing for a while. If we were to add a Code of Conduct that tells people to come to us when there’s a problem, it would be far from the first time they’d heard that from us. It’s a constant message in every interaction we have.

All this relationship building doesn’t come cheaply. We’ve got full time staff to answer attendee questions and help them. For some of our events, we’ve built in a concierge service to book flights and make restaurant reservations. We invest in attentive and mindful service.

It’s a deliberate choice we make. It’s part of our design.