A Partial List of Style Guides Everyone Should Read

Before deciding to create The Responsible Communication Style Guide, I spent years looking for a style guide that filled that niche. I didn’t find one style guide that covered topics like race and gender and health all in one place.

Instead, I found dozens of style guides, covering a huge range of topics. I compiled this list as a starting point for folks who want to explore these topics and who want to dive a little deeper.

This list is really just a starting point, though. For The Responsible Communication Style Guide, we’re going to focus on five specific facets of identity: sex, gender, race, religion, and health and well-being. Within each of those sections, we’ll suggest key words and phrases to use when discussing these topics. We’ll also have a set of essays giving broader advice about writing inclusively. Throughout this process, we’re using technology as a lens to focus our coverage.

Each section editor has lived experience with the topic they will cover, as well as experience with writing and an understanding of our intersectional approach.

And if you’re interested in helping us fund a new style guide that covers identity with an intersectional approach, check out the Kickstarter for The Responsible Communication Style Guide. (Pro tip: at the $15 level, you’ll get a digital copy of our new style guide so that you can use it in your own writing as soon as possible.

AAJA Guide to Covering Asian America

Prepared by the Asian American Journalists Association. Covers terminology for covering topics of interest to Asian Americans.

Highlight:

JAPANESE NAMES:

In Japan, typically family name first, personal name second. But in the United States, Western word order is common. Women’s names often end in -ko, or “child,” as in Michiko.

American Sociological Association Style Guide

(Link to Bookshop listing!)

Prepared by the American Sociological Association. Covers style and terminology used in the publications of the ASA.

Highlight:

Race and Ethnicity

The classification and terminology of race and ethnicity are complex and have changed over time. Avoid racial and ethnic stereotyping of groups. Authors using racial and ethnic terms should aim to be as specific and precise as possible when identifying a person’s origin or group. For example, Cuban is more specific than Hispanic; Japanese is more specific than Asian.

Apple Style Guide

(Direct link to PDF!)

Prepared for internal use at Apple. Covers brand and company-specific terminology.

connector

Use to refer only to an item that can be plugged into a receptacle (such as a slot, port, or socket). Use the following terminology: edge connector: the connector on the edge of a peripheral card; fits into a slot minicircular connector: an 8-pin connector [Don’t use mini-DIN.] plug: a connector with prongs or pins In user materials, describe connectors by their shape and size, by the icon that appears on the connector, or in another way appropriate to the context. The user should be able to identify the connector easily even if she or he doesn’t know the terminology. Chapter 2 Style and usage 38 Avoid obscure names such as power input unit in favor of more direct terms, such as plug. Don’t use male or female to describe types of connectors.

BuzzFeed Style Guide

Prepared by Emmy Favilla and Megan Paolone for BuzzFeed. Covers publication-specific terminology and style.

Highlight:

LGBT Identification:

• Unless you already know based on research, it should be standard to ask how people identify themselves: gay, bi, genderqueer, queer, trans, etc.
• A person can be trans WITHOUT also being gay or lesbian. Don’t assume.
• Use “cisgender” (rather than “non-trans”) to refer to a person who is not transgender.

The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style

(Link to Bookshop listing!)

Prepared by Robert Hudson for publication by Zondervan. Covers terminology and styles used by the Christian publishing industry.

Highlight:

you, You (deity pronoun, second person)

Lowercase the second person of the deity pronoun as you would lowercase the third person. An exception is sometimes made in books of devotion or prayer when the capitalized, second-person pronoun is used to address God directly. (For more detail, see “Deity Pronoun, The” as well as “thou, thee, thy, thine.”)

Disability Language Style Guide

Prepared by the National Center on Disability and Journalism. Covers recommended language with an emphasis on specificity.

Highlight:

Handicap/handicapped

Background: The Oxford English dictionary defines a handicap as “a condition that restricts a person’s ability to function physically, mentally or socially.”

NCDJ Recommendation: Do not describe a person as handicapped unless it is central to the story. Avoid using handicap and handicapped when describing a person. Instead, refer to the person’s specific condition. The terms are still widely used when citing laws, regulations, places or things, such as handicapped parking, although many prefer the term accessible parking.

Conforms to AP style

The Diversity Style Guide

Prepared by Rachele Kanigel, for the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism. Covers a variety of terminology; however, this style guide is sourced from a variety of other style guides, rather than in-house development.

Highlight:

gender-neutral pronouns

Some people don’t feel that traditional gender pronouns, such as she/her and he/him, reflect their gender identities. Transgender, genderqueer and other people who step outside the male-female gender paradigm often adopt new pronouns for themselves. If a person doesn’t identify as male or female, it’s best to ask which pronouns they prefer.

The Economist Style Guide

Prepared by The Economist for its writers. Covers publication-specific information and style.

Highlight:

Gender

Gender is nowadays used in several ways. One is common in feminist writing, where the term has a technical meaning. “One is not born a woman, one becomes one,” argued Simone de Beauvoir: in other words, one chooses one’s gender. In such a context it would be absurd to use the word sex; the term must be gender. But, in using it thus, try to explain what you mean by it. Even feminists do not agree on a definition.

Gawker.com Style Guide

Prepared by Lockhart Steele, Choire Sicha, and Gina Trapani for Gawker.com. Covers publication-specific information and grammar.

Highlight:

WORDS AND PHRASES THAT YOU MAY NEVER USE

A long list, sure, but it is topped by “interesting” and “funny” and “of interest.” If it’s funny or interesting, that’ll prove itself, and it’s actually not funny or interesting if you have to describe it as such. See also: “Arguably.” (Fuck no.) This list also includes “lede” and “hed” and other sorts of made up journo-words. Gag. Finally, do not ever suggest in your writing that you do not care about something, or are bored by it, or that you do not know about something, or that you are above it. If you don’t care, are bored, or are confused, or the like, don’t write about it. Or fake it. Nothing is more off-putting for a reader than arriving at a post pre-bored and pre-disinterested. No apologies, no regrets.

GLAAD Media Reference Guide

Prepared by GLAAD. Covers terminology for “reporting on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives, issues, and stories.” Note, portions of this guide is sourced from the AP and New York Times style guides, rather than in-house development.

Highlight:

Coming Out

A lifelong process of self-acceptance. People forge a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identity first to themselves and then they may reveal it to others. Publicly sharing one’s identity may or may not be part of coming out.

Media Takes: On Aging

(Direct link to PDF!)

Prepared by the International Longevity Center and Aging Services of California. Covers terminology for the “accurate portrayal of aging.”

Highlight:

Handicap

Not a synonym for disability; describes a condition or barrier imposed by society, the environment or by one’s own self; can be used when citing laws and situations but should not be used to describe a disability; for example, the stairs are a handicap for him

NABJ Style Guide

Prepared by members of the National Association of Black Journalists, including Jerry McCormick and Angela Dodson. Covers “terms and language usage of special interest or relevance to our membership and our community.”

Highlight:

African, African American, black

Hyphenate when using African American as an adjective. Not all black people are African Americans (if they were born outside of the United States). Let a subjects preference determine which term to used. In a story in which race is relevant and there is no stated preference for an individual or individuals, use black because it is an accurate description of race. Be as specific as possible in honoring preferences, as in Haitian American, Jamaican American or (for a non-U.S. citizen living in the United States) Jamaican living in America. Do not use race in a police description unless the report is highly detailed and gives more than just the persons skin color. In news copy, aim to use black as an adjective, not a noun. Also, when describing a group, use black people instead of just blacks. In headlines, blacks, however, is acceptable.

NIDA Media Guide

(Direct link to PDF!)

Prepared by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Covers terminology for policy discussions, scientific discussions, and health discussions, as well as media resources.

Highlight:

Cognitive-behavioral treatments

A set of treatments that focus on modifying thinking, motivation, coping mechanisms, and/or choices made by people.

NLGJA Stylebook

Prepared by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. Provides terminology to improve “inclusive coverage of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, includes entries on words and phrases that have become common, and features greater detail for earlier entries.”

Highlight:

coming out

Short for “coming out of the closet.” Accepting and letting others know of one’s previously hidden sexual orientation or gender identity.

A Progressive’s Style Guide

(Direct link to PDF!)

Prepared by Hanna Thomas and Anna Hirsch for SumOfUs. Covers core terminology for progressive activists in order to combat discriminatory language. Note, Hanna Thomas wrote about her experiences creating the guide.

Highlight:

Disability

Most times there is no need to refer to a person’s disability, but when the need arises, choose acceptable terminology for the specific disability or use the term preferred by the individual.

Race Reporting Guide

(Direct link to PDF!)

Prepared by Race Forward, the Center for Racial Justice Innovation. Covers terminology for “reporting on specific racial and ethnic groups. Also includes terminology and practices to avoid.

Highlight:

Ethnicity

A socially constructed grouping of people based on culture, tribe, language, national heritage, and/or religion. It is often used interchangeably with race and/or national origin, but should be instead considered as an overlapping, rather than identical, category. See the section “Covering Key Issues with a Racial Lens” and the term “Racial & Ethnic Categories.”

Religion Stylebook

Prepared by Religion Newswriters Foundation. Covers “the major religions, denominations and religious organizations journalists often encounter.”

Highlight:

Bible Belt

Areas of the United States that are noted for a prevalence of strict evangelical Christian teachings, particularly in the South and Midwest. Writer H.L. Mencken coined the phrase in 1925 while reporting on the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. It can be considered offensive in some contexts so the term should be used carefully.

Style Guide for NASA History Authors and Editors

Prepared by Steve Garber for NASA History. Covers preferred language, units of measurement, and publication-specific information.

Highlight:

Manned Space Program vs. Human Space Program:

All references referring to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, un-piloted, robotic). The exception to the rule is when referring to the Manned Spacecraft Center, the predecessor to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, or any other official program name or title that included “manned” (e.g. Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight).

Style Guide: Reporting on Mental Health

(Direct link to PDF!)

Prepared by TEAM Up and the California Mental Health Services Authority. Covers preferred language and language to be avoided.

Highlight:

relevance

Do not assume that there is a link between an event that seems irrational and the mental health of someone in the story. Not preferred: “A man whose neighbors said he seemed depressed left his sprinklers on for days, leading to neighborhood flooding.” Preferred: “Sprinklers that appeared to have been left on for more than 80 hours led to damage in three nearby houses, water officials said.”

The Supreme Court’s Style Guide

(Link to Bookshop listing!)

Prepared by Jack Metzler with the Office of the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States. Covers terminology, cases, and styles used in Supreme Court decisions.

Highlight:

Repeating citations

(a) “Hereinafter” shortened form. If in the text or (more commonly) in a footnote frequent citations are to be made of a certain secondary source, it is often desirable to use a shortened form for the subsequent citations. This is generally done with a parenthetical that immediately follows the citation of the source and precedes all other parentheticals. Where a specific page is cited in the subsequent reference, do not then use “at” or “p.” Simply use the shortened form followed by the page number.

The Yahoo! Style Guide

(Link to Bookshop listing!)

Prepared by Chris Barr for Yahoo! and revised for print. Covers style for materials written for online publication.

No highlight available.

Looking for design or development style guides and pattern libraries? Start with these posts!

The Responsible Communication Style Guide: A Kickstarter and an Explanation

I’m working on The Responsible Communication Style Guide with Recompiler Media. This project is something I’ve been thinking about for years and I wanted to write up how I got to this place.

Our Kickstarter is here — backing at the $15 level is the fastest way to get a copy of The Responsible Communication Style Guide to use in your own work.

CONTENT NOTES

This post is over 2,500 words. There’s some heavy emotional stuff in here (lived experience + the Holocaust, how language affects our lives, and diversity in technology). I do hope you’ll read the whole thing.

How to Screw Up as a Journalist in One Easy Step

I screwed up early in my career as a freelance writer: I conducted an email interview with an individual named “Chris” for an article I was working on. In the article, I referred to Chris with a male pronoun. My source emailed me immediately after reading the article to say that “Chris” was short for “Christine” and that she would appreciate me fixing the error.

Chris was super nice about the whole thing, making me think that I wasn’t the first person to make this particular mistake. Now I do some obsessive Google-ing if I’m not sure how to describe a person just from an interview — though even Google can’t always tell me enough information.

Ever since, I’ve also been looking for a guide or workshop or some sort of education on how to ask questions about identity without being offensive. Sure, asking someone their pronouns is one of my standard interview questions (along with how to spell their name and what their professional title is), but that’s not enough.

  • How do you even begin to ask a trans person about referring to them by their dead name if you’re writing about them during a time when they still used that name?
  • How do you make sure that unconscious bias doesn’t influence your writing?
  • How do you write about someone engaged in activism without bringing an internet shitstorm down on their heads?
  • Heck, how do you even determine if you’re only telling stories about people like you or if you’re finding diverse sources or stories?

I don’t have the one true answer to all these questions. Figuring out how to handle these sorts of topics requires both empathy and context. Context, in turn, requires lived experience.

What is ‘lived experience?’ Lived experience, or the experiences, emotions, and impressions of a person living as a member of a minority, is easily dismissed as a buzzword from a women’s studies class. Hanging out in tech circles, I mostly hear people talking about their lived experiences and how they differ from what other people may see (such as a woman talking about an act of discrimination, only to be told by a man that he’s never seen any problems in the industry). While I don’t think that this sort of gaslighting should be dismissed, there are even bigger dangers to ignoring others’ lived experience: My paternal grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. He spent six years in concentration camps. When he was liberated in 1945, he was 18. He weighed 85 pounds. In the years that followed, my grandfather encountered Holocaust deniers. These people told my grandfather that the hell he went through never happened.

I don’t want to turn this blog post into an example of Godwin’s Law, but every time I hear someone discounting lived experience, I see them become a little more willing to accept anti-Semitism and other bigotry. Suffice it to say that I strongly believe in the importance of involving someone with lived experience when creating training materials about their identity, history, community, and other related topics.

Back to the Question at Hand: Improving Our Ability to Communicate

At the same time, expecting anyone (no matter their lived experience, expertise, or knowledge) to educate either individuals or organizations purely out of the goodness of their heart is both rude and unreasonable. My landlord doesn’t let me live in my apartment out of the goodness of its warm, fuzzy, corporate heart, so I need to spend my time in a way that gets my rent paid — and I expect the same to be true of every human I encounter. (Kronda Adair has written several brilliant posts on this topic — start with this post.) In the event we all wind up living in a communist utopia, remind me to revisit this point.

That means paying multiple editors to look over my work who can bring the right context to it, right? Since I don’t have a lot of money, I generally can’t afford to work with more than one editor on a project. As it happens, since I write for the web, I often can’t afford to work with even one editor.

When I’m flying without a grammatical net, there are some options for improving my writing without spending a ton of money:

  • I use a ton of technology. There are tools to analyze common grammatical mistakes, such as the spell check tool built into most word processors. But there are also tools that do more specific editing tasks, such as the Hemingway app, which helps writers to follow Hemingway’s writing advice (limited adjectives and adverbs, short sentence structures and so on).
  • I got an education in writing and communications, and then kept learning. I have a couple of degrees in communication, which included loads of classes on writing. I also still read a ridiculous amount about writing. I kept learning after getting a degree, using self-education materials available from experts, ranging from writing hacks to full-fledged textbooks. A degree isn’t necessary in this field and an in-person class isn’t even required.
  • Lastly, I adore my style guide. I don’t (usually) sleep with the AP Stylebook, but I still keep both the digital and print copies handy. I also own a bunch of other style guides. I ask the publications I write for if they have their own style guides. I also have made my own style guides, both for individual publications I work on and more generally (i.e., I’ll go to bat with an editor to make sure ‘internet’ is not capitalized).

The resources for writing responsibly and ethically are few and far between. During my education, the closest I got to a class on how to write with some level of sensitivity was a graduate-level course on how to write about controversial topics — where ‘controversial’ was read as ‘political’ or ‘religious’ more than anything else. (Side note: That class was taught by Arthur Magida, author of How to Be a Perfect Stranger, which I have referred to as The Book that Keeps Me From Screwing Up Other People’s Weddings. I highly recommended it.)

That particular class was incredibly valuable, but I had to wait until I was working on a master’s degree to have an instructor start talking about how to start thinking about dealing with difficult topics, despite taking my first journalism class in middle school. How is there not a basic class in every journalism, public relations, and marketing program on how to write for diverse audiences? We teach basic interviewing techniques, like how to ask a question to high school journalism classes, but fail to teach those same students which questions to ask or who to ask questions of. I don’t know what your student paper looked like, but mine didn’t exactly reflect the demographics of our student body. It reflected the perspectives of the teachers leading the class and of the kids in accelerated English classes — despite having a big ESL program at our school, I can’t remember a single ESL student writing for the student paper. I’m not advocating for fully restructuring journalism (yet!) but we do need to make a point of teaching empathy in journalism.

We’re at the beginning of conversations about representation in the media. There are a few organizations now that try to track statistics on authors and writers, like the VIDA Count. Getting more diverse writers (and other media makers) into big publications is just a first step. Telling stories of underrepresented demographics is the next step — and I’m not talking about tokenism. Pro tip: it’s perfectly fine to have an article about a technical project led by a woman without every asking her about whether she thinks tech is a tough industry for women. As a matter of fact, skipping the focus on how different the story’s subject is means that you get to spend more time on how cool the actual project is.

Some individuals and organizations have started working on this problem, but many resources are fragmented. I have more than a dozen style guides and media guides just for covering religion. (I’ll get more into what’s out there in another post I’m already working on.)

We still have a long way to go to get to a truly diverse media scene, though. I keep thinking of our current media landscape as the beginning of a very long journey — we’re still outfitting ourselves for the trek and don’t really know what’s on the trail ahead. We won’t even know some of the work we need to do to get to that far off Wonderland until we get on the road. We know that we need to remodel or replace many of the systems in place to produce journalism and other media, but until that work is done, we won’t know many of the steps that come after.

Let’s Talk Ideals and Infrastructure for Writers

In my ideal world, I could just use pronouns that aren’t based on gender for writing and everything else. I recognize that I have to stick to the current system if I want readers to be able to understand everything I publish, but I certainly don’t like the existing system.

Until there’s a good opportunity for a linguistic revolution, I’m focused on making the existing system better. That means starting with the writers who make the articles, blog posts, and other things we read (along with the scripts for plenty of the audio and video content we see, too). Style guides are a good starting point for talking about how we cover things because we’re already used to looking up details we might get wrong.

In fact, some organizations have put out specialized style guides for how writers can cover their specific communities. These resources are all over the place, however, and sometimes contradictory. Creating a standard resource is the first step to making improvements in who writes what stories. Having discussions about diversity and inclusion before publishing anything will, at least, limit some of the more thoughtless headlines and references that we see constantly. As a personal goal, I’d like to see publishers avoid referring to an Olympic athlete as someone else’s wife.

I have thought of other formats this style guide could take. I kept coming back to the idea of doing the research and running an in-person workshop, geared towards newsrooms. But while we clearly need more educational materials about writing responsibly, style guides have more power than classes. I’ve taken more writing classes than I can count. I don’t remember where all the handouts and notes are from those classes, though I can point to the occasional writing hack and say that I picked it up from a particular instructor. You could have swapped out most of my writing teachers for other writing teachers and I would never have noticed.

But taking my AP Stylebook from me would turn me into a mess. And while I could manage if you took my Chicago Manual of Style or one of the other style guides I rely on, I would be pretty unhappy. These reference books have impacted my writing far more than anything or anyone else.

Making a Real Difference with The Responsible Communication Style Guide

I’ve spent the past couple of years casually talking about making a style guide that answers some of the questions I have. Audrey Eschright, the publisher ofthe Recompiler, heard me talking about the idea for The Responsible Communication Style Guide this spring. She said that she wanted something similar and would be willing to work on the project.

Working with Audrey is amazing — we’re on the same page about everything except whether there’s a hyphen in ‘ebook’ (I’m anti-hyphen, while Audrey is pro-hyphen, if you’re wondering). Perhaps the most important thing we agree on is how to construct The Responsible Communication Style Guide. Our particular manifesto for this project can be broken down into the following bullet points:

  • We’re hiring the right people to write each of these sections and we’re paying them. None of that crap about asking people to educate us for free here.
  • We’re creating a printed resource, as well as a website. Different people use different formats (and we’ve got some cool ideas for even more approaches once we’ve got the initial iteration ready).
  • We’re developing training around The Responsible Communication Style Guide, because people only use resources they have some familiarity with.
  • We agree that this sort of style guide isn’t just about writing clearly. It’s also about being able to communicate in a manner that doesn’t harm anyone: writers, editors, and publishers influence culture and attitudes so directly that we have an obligation to use that power responsibly.

Yes, we’re both absolutely scratching our own itch with The Responsible Communication Style Guide. But we’re also creating something that we know there’s a need for — and something with the potential to guide major conversations in technology. Yes, journalists working in this space need the guide. But there’s more room than that in the long run. Ultimately, everyone in technology is a writer: a programmer writes documentation, technical blog posts, and internal talks, even if they never publish a single word outside of an employer’s media. Designers, marketers, and even business analysts create reams of written material every day.

This guide gives people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as writers a starting point for thinking, talking, and, yes, writing, about users in an empathetic way. There’s a real potential for The Responsible Communication Style Guide to equip us for important conversations by providing an introduction to concepts of identity and a framework for writing about those concepts.

So here we are. There’s a big chunk of my heart and soul up on Kickstarter right now. I’m a bit terrified, especially of getting things wrong with the people who I want to contribute to The Responsible Communication Style Guide. I’m ridiculously hopeful about what bringing this project to life means for the books and blogs I’ll read in the future. I’m wound up waiting to see who will back this project. We’ve got just under a month to make this happen. Let’s go.

We Need Your Help

If you are as excited as I am, we are looking for help!

  • Please consider backing our project, even at a low level. If everyone just bought an ebook copy at the $15 level, we would need just over 1,300 backers — and there are far more than 1,300 people writing about these topics.
  • Please share our Kickstarter with everyone who you think might be interested. From our perspective, that means journalists, marketers, speakers, and other folks who write publicly. But once the Responsible Communication Style Guide is a reality, we expect people to use it in ways we never considered.
  • Please let us know if you think of any ways to make this material more accessible to your community. We have some ideas (I want a linter for writing!), some of which will be incorporated into this first iteration of the guide and some of which we’ll work on after the Kickstarter (including my hopes for a linter).

Thank you for reading this whole long post and thank you for your help.

The Responsible Communication Style Guide: A Kickstarter and an Explanation

TL;DR

I’m working on The Responsible Communication Style Guide with Recompiler Media. This project is something I’ve been thinking about for years and I wanted to write up how I got to this place.

Our Kickstarter is here — backing at the $15 level is the fastest way to get a copy of The Responsible Communication Style Guide to use in your own work.

CONTENT NOTES

This post is over 2,500 words. There’s some heavy emotional stuff in here (lived experience + the Holocaust, how language affects our lives, and diversity in technology). I do hope you’ll read the whole thing.

How to Screw Up as a Journalist in One Easy Step

I screwed up early in my career as a freelance writer: I conducted an email interview with an individual named “Chris” for an article I was working on. In the article, I referred to Chris with a male pronoun. My source emailed me immediately after reading the article to say that “Chris” was short for “Christine” and that she would appreciate me fixing the error.

Chris was super nice about the whole thing, making me think that I wasn’t the first person to make this particular mistake. Now I do some obsessive Google-ing if I’m not sure how to describe a person just from an interview — though even Google can’t always tell me enough information.

Ever since, I’ve also been looking for a guide or workshop or some sort of education on how to ask questions about identity without being offensive. Sure, asking someone their pronouns is one of my standard interview questions (along with how to spell their name and what their professional title is), but that’s not enough.

  • How do you even begin to ask a trans person about referring to them by their dead name if you’re writing about them during a time when they still used that name?
  • How do you make sure that unconscious bias doesn’t influence your writing?
  • How do you write about someone engaged in activism without bringing an internet shitstorm down on their heads?
  • Heck, how do you even determine if you’re only telling stories about people like you or if you’re finding diverse sources or stories?

I don’t have the one true answer to all these questions. Figuring out how to handle these sorts of topics requires both empathy and context. Context, in turn, requires lived experience.

What is ‘lived experience?’ Lived experience, or the experiences, emotions, and impressions of a person living as a member of a minority, is easily dismissed as a buzzword from a women’s studies class. Hanging out in tech circles, I mostly hear people talking about their lived experiences and how they differ from what other people may see (such as a woman talking about an act of discrimination, only to be told by a man that he’s never seen any problems in the industry). While I don’t think that this sort of gaslighting should be dismissed, there are even bigger dangers to ignoring others’ lived experience: My paternal grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. He spent six years in concentration camps. When he was liberated in 1945, he was 18. He weighed 85 pounds. In the years that followed, my grandfather encountered Holocaust deniers. These people told my grandfather that the hell he went through never happened.

I don’t want to turn this blog post into an example of Godwin’s Law, but every time I hear someone discounting lived experience, I see them become a little more willing to accept anti-Semitism and other bigotry. Suffice it to say that I strongly believe in the importance of involving someone with lived experience when creating training materials about their identity, history, community, and other related topics.

Back to the Question at Hand: Improving Our Ability to Communicate

At the same time, expecting anyone (no matter their lived experience, expertise, or knowledge) to educate either individuals or organizations purely out of the goodness of their heart is both rude and unreasonable. My landlord doesn’t let me live in my apartment out of the goodness of its warm, fuzzy, corporate heart, so I need to spend my time in a way that gets my rent paid — and I expect the same to be true of every human I encounter. (Kronda Adair has written several brilliant posts on this topic — start with this post.) In the event we all wind up living in a communist utopia, remind me to revisit this point.

That means paying multiple editors to look over my work who can bring the right context to it, right? Since I don’t have a lot of money, I generally can’t afford to work with more than one editor on a project. As it happens, since I write for the web, I often can’t afford to work with even one editor.

When I’m flying without a grammatical net, there are some options for improving my writing without spending a ton of money:

  • I use a ton of technology. There are tools to analyze common grammatical mistakes, such as the spell check tool built into most word processors. But there are also tools that do more specific editing tasks, such as the Hemingway app, which helps writers to follow Hemingway’s writing advice (limited adjectives and adverbs, short sentence structures and so on).
  • I got an education in writing and communications, and then kept learning. I have a couple of degrees in communication, which included loads of classes on writing. I also still read a ridiculous amount about writing. I kept learning after getting a degree, using self-education materials available from experts, ranging from writing hacks to full-fledged textbooks. A degree isn’t necessary in this field and an in-person class isn’t even required.
  • Lastly, I adore my style guide. I don’t (usually) sleep with the AP Stylebook, but I still keep both the digital and print copies handy. I also own a bunch of other style guides. I ask the publications I write for if they have their own style guides. I also have made my own style guides, both for individual publications I work on and more generally (i.e., I’ll go to bat with an editor to make sure ‘internet’ is not capitalized).

The resources for writing responsibly and ethically are few and far between. During my education, the closest I got to a class on how to write with some level of sensitivity was a graduate-level course on how to write about controversial topics — where ‘controversial’ was read as ‘political’ or ‘religious’ more than anything else. (Side note: That class was taught by Arthur Magida, author of How to Be a Perfect Stranger, which I have referred to as The Book that Keeps Me From Screwing Up Other People’s Weddings. I highly recommended it.)

That particular class was incredibly valuable, but I had to wait until I was working on a master’s degree to have an instructor start talking about how to start thinking about dealing with difficult topics, despite taking my first journalism class in middle school. How is there not a basic class in every journalism, public relations, and marketing program on how to write for diverse audiences? We teach basic interviewing techniques, like how to ask a question to high school journalism classes, but fail to teach those same students which questions to ask or who to ask questions of. I don’t know what your student paper looked like, but mine didn’t exactly reflect the demographics of our student body. It reflected the perspectives of the teachers leading the class and of the kids in accelerated English classes — despite having a big ESL program at our school, I can’t remember a single ESL student writing for the student paper. I’m not advocating for fully restructuring journalism (yet!) but we do need to make a point of teaching empathy in journalism.

We’re at the beginning of conversations about representation in the media. There are a few organizations now that try to track statistics on authors and writers, like the VIDA Count. Getting more diverse writers (and other media makers) into big publications is just a first step. Telling stories of underrepresented demographics is the next step — and I’m not talking about tokenism. Pro tip: it’s perfectly fine to have an article about a technical project led by a woman without ever asking her about whether she thinks tech is a tough industry for women. As a matter of fact, skipping the focus on how different the story’s subject is means that you get to spend more time on how cool the actual project is.

Some individuals and organizations have started working on this problem, but many resources are fragmented. I have more than a dozen style guides and media guides just for covering religion. (I’ll get more into what’s out there in another post I’m already working on.)

We still have a long way to go to get to a truly diverse media scene, though. I keep thinking of our current media landscape as the beginning of a very long journey — we’re still outfitting ourselves for the trek and don’t really know what’s on the trail ahead. We won’t even know some of the work we need to do to get to that far off Wonderland until we get on the road. We know that we need to remodel or replace many of the systems in place to produce journalism and other media, but until that work is done, we won’t know many of the steps that come after.

Let’s Talk Ideals and Infrastructure for Writers

In my ideal world, I could just use pronouns that aren’t based on gender for writing and everything else. I recognize that I have to stick to the current system if I want readers to be able to understand everything I publish, but I certainly don’t like the existing system.

Until there’s a good opportunity for a linguistic revolution, I’m focused on making the existing system better. That means starting with the writers who make the articles, blog posts, and other things we read (along with the scripts for plenty of the audio and video content we see, too). Style guides are a good starting point for talking about how we cover things because we’re already used to looking up details we might get wrong.

In fact, some organizations have put out specialized style guides for how writers can cover their specific communities. These resources are all over the place, however, and sometimes contradictory. Creating a standard resource is the first step to making improvements in who writes what stories. Having discussions about diversity and inclusion before publishing anything will, at least, limit some of the more thoughtless headlines and references that we see constantly. As a personal goal, I’d like to see publishers avoid referring to an Olympic athlete as someone else’s wife.

I have thought of other formats this style guide could take. I kept coming back to the idea of doing the research and running an in-person workshop, geared towards newsrooms. But while we clearly need more educational materials about writing responsibly, style guides have more power than classes. I’ve taken more writing classes than I can count. I don’t remember where all the handouts and notes are from those classes, though I can point to the occasional writing hack and say that I picked it up from a particular instructor. You could have swapped out most of my writing teachers for other writing teachers and I would never have noticed.

But taking my AP Stylebook from me would turn me into a mess. And while I could manage if you took my Chicago Manual of Style or one of the other style guides I rely on, I would be pretty unhappy. These reference books have impacted my writing far more than anything or anyone else.

Making a Real Difference with The Responsible Communication Style Guide

I’ve spent the past couple of years casually talking about making a style guide that answers some of the questions I have. Audrey Eschright, the publisher of the Recompiler, heard me talking about the idea for The Responsible Communication Style Guide this spring. She said that she wanted something similar and would be willing to work on the project.

Working with Audrey is amazing — we’re on the same page about everything except whether there’s a hyphen in ‘ebook’ (I’m anti-hyphen, while Audrey is pro-hyphen, if you’re wondering). Perhaps the most important thing we agree on is how to construct The Responsible Communication Style Guide. Our particular manifesto for this project can be broken down into the following bullet points:

  • We’re hiring the right people to write each of these sections and we’re paying them. None of that crap about asking people to educate us for free here.
  • We’re creating a printed resource, as well as a website. Different people use different formats (and we’ve got some cool ideas for even more approaches once we’ve got the initial iteration ready).
  • We’re developing training around The Responsible Communication Style Guide, because people only use resources they have some familiarity with.
  • We agree that this sort of style guide isn’t just about writing clearly. It’s also about being able to communicate in a manner that doesn’t harm anyone: writers, editors, and publishers influence culture and attitudes so directly that we have an obligation to use that power responsibly.

Yes, we’re both absolutely scratching our own itch with The Responsible Communication Style Guide. But we’re also creating something that we know there’s a need for — and something with the potential to guide major conversations in technology. Yes, journalists working in this space need the guide. But there’s more room than that in the long run. Ultimately, everyone in technology is a writer: a programmer writes documentation, technical blog posts, and internal talks, even if they never publish a single word outside of an employer’s media. Designers, marketers, and even business analysts create reams of written material every day.

This guide gives people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as writers a starting point for thinking, talking, and, yes, writing, about users in an empathetic way. There’s a real potential for The Responsible Communication Style Guide to equip us for important conversations by providing an introduction to concepts of identity and a framework for writing about those concepts.

So here we are. There’s a big chunk of my heart and soul up on Kickstarter right now. I’m a bit terrified, especially of getting things wrong with the people who I want to contribute to The Responsible Communication Style Guide. I’m ridiculously hopeful about what bringing this project to life means for the books and blogs I’ll read in the future. I’m wound up waiting to see who will back this project. We’ve got just under a month to make this happen. Let’s go.

We Need Your Help

If you are as excited as I am, we are looking for help!

  • Please consider backing our project, even at a low level. If everyone just bought an ebook copy at the $15 level, we would need just over 1,300 backers — and there are far more than 1,300 people writing about these topics.
  • Please share our Kickstarter with everyone who you think might be interested. From our perspective, that means journalists, marketers, speakers, and other folks who write publicly. But once the Responsible Communication Style Guide is a reality, we expect people to use it in ways we never considered.
  • Please let us know if you think of any ways to make this material more accessible to your community. We have some ideas (I want a linter for writing!), some of which will be incorporated into this first iteration of the guide and some of which we’ll work on after the Kickstarter (including my hopes for a linter).

Thank you for reading this whole long post and thank you for your help.

Put Your Damn Money Where Your Mouth Is

Diversity is important to tech, right?

We want the makeup of our company to reflect the vast range of people who use Twitter. Doing so will help us build a product to better serve people around the world. — Twitter

Intel is committed to setting the industry standard for a diverse and inclusive workplace culture. — Intel

At Facebook, we value the impact that every individual can have. We are dedicated to creating an environment where people can be their authentic selves and share their own diverse backgrounds, experiences, perspectives and ideas. — Facebook

Most of these companies have backed their words with money — funds that are earmarked for improving diversity. And they do back some good things, like events specifically meant for the demographics those companies are trying to add to their own workforces.

But the money that most tech companies have set aside for diversity isn’t going towards the infrastructure necessary to truly create a sustainably inclusive tech industry.

I’ve been an organizer with the local PyLadies group for a few years now, and we have no shortage of companies that want to buy us pizza so that they can tell our members about job opportunities. When someone talks about offering childcare at broader meetups, everyone agrees that the idea is sound, but no one wants to pay for it. The same is true for tech conferences. As co-chair of Open Source Bridge this year, I hoped to find a sponsor specifically for childcare — a simple change that would make it easier for attendees with families. The business case seems pretty obvious: no matter their gender, senior programmers routinely have families. If those programmers work remotely, are single parents, or split care with another parent, finding childcare can be difficult. Weekend conferences, in particular, can be hard because a parent might have to leave their children with someone overnight.

Providing childcare means that parents are more likely to attend conferences or other events and therefore have a better chance of interacting with a recruiter for a given company. That sort of infrastructure dramatically improves the number of people able to attend.

Adding infrastructure like childcare services to the technology industry’s norms is a prerequisite for making the industry more diverse. Recruiters have to be able to find diverse candidates if they’re going to connect them with employers. That means funding the infrastructure that gets those diverse candidates into the room.

So why is it so hard to get sponsors for things that make diverse conference attendance easier, even for relatively inexpensive additions like providing ASL interpreters?

I offered myself up as a walking billboard in our crowdfunding campaign in order to cover our childcare costs at Open Source Bridge. I asked numerous sponsors if they would be interested in being our childcare sponsor. The lack of enthusiasm compared to our standard sponsorship levels and even compared to sponsoring diversity scholarships was obvious. (Surprise: Even guaranteeing that a company get their logo on one of the most visible people at a given conference isn’t enough to get money for childcare. We managed to cover the cost of childcare, but it was a near thing.)

Apparently the name on the label is very important to sponsors: specifically labeling a sponsorship level as a diversity opportunity gets potential backers excited because they like having their names associated with the word ‘diversity.’

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for diversity scholarships. They play an important role in making conferences more accessible. But each scholarship only helps one person. The right infrastructure will make tech events, along with the rest of the industry, more accessible to a much larger number. I may be hung up on childcare, but by offering childcare at no additional costs makes a world of difference for people who can afford a ticket to a conference but can’t afford the $100+ cost of a babysitter for a single day . For instance, think about developers whose employers will pay for their ticket and travel but won’t cover any other costs. And when you consider that multiple attendees will face that sort of expense, eliminating the cost of childcare means multiple attendees will find a conference financially accessible.

From a strict business perspective, this is ridiculous. And it’s easy enough to fix, provided tech companies truly want the diversity they keep talking about.

It’s time for tech companies to put their money where their mouths are.

In terms of conference sponsorships, that means funding real accessibility. The bullet points below are my personal wish list for conferences I run, but every conference needs different things:

  • An accessible venue
  • On-site, free childcare
  • Transcription and ASL interpretation
  • Multiple food options, including at snack times (vegan, halal, etc.)
  • Swag other than t-shirts

(Liz Abinante has a more exhaustive list here.)

There are plenty of other opportunities to develop better infrastructure in the tech industry in general, too:

  • Scholarship funds (not just individual scholarships) for code schools
  • Dry (alcohol-free) parties and other events
  • Childcare for meetups and other networking events

Dry events, in particular, would be a welcome addition. There is no doubt that the tech industry has a drinking problem. Even casual meetups often focus as much around a keg as they do around a technical talk. That excludes so many people: folks who have alcohol intolerances, folks who are pregnant, folks who need to drive home, and — perhaps the elephant in the room—folks who struggle with sobriety. An estimated one in 12 people have problems with alcohol abuse; they’re at every meetup, happy hour, conference, or other tech event we go to and have to face the choice of fitting in or taking care of themselves. And yet, many of these events don’t even have an alternative to drinking (asking for water can be difficult). We need not only alternative beverages, but alternative types of events that don’t rely on booze.

Because this sort of infrastructure doesn’t yet exist, many people are shut out of the tech industry. If you can’t go to the next networking happy hour for tech companies in your town — whether you can’t get a sitter, you can’t drink, or for some other reason — your chances of getting a job in the tech industry go way down.

A few people make it in anyhow, by paying what amounts to a tax on being more diverse than the next programmer over: finding a way to pay for whatever tools necessary to cover the cost of fitting in is the only way past those problems. In an ideal world, tech companies should give giant signing bonuses to candidates who improve their diversity numbers, if only to cover those candidates’ costs of getting into the industry in the first place.

The wage gap makes me think that sort of bonus will never happen, so pay for the infrastructure your company needs to recruit these people.

Want an easy way to start putting your money into the infrastructure the tech industry really needs? Cut a check to an organization today. Even $25 makes a difference, so if you benefit from that aforementioned wage gap, consider putting money in personally as well as through a company.

PyCon, by the Zines

I spent last week at PyCon NA (in Portland this year — how convenient!). I made a zine to hand out explaining the Python community in Portland, along with suggesting some events for out-of-towners.

Here’s a PDF you can download if you want to check it out.

Even better, I wasn’t the only zine maker at PyCon!

Jessica Garson organized a zine open space where I met a few other media makers. Jessica also gave a lightning talk about teaching with zines (her slides are here).

Roxanne Johnson presented during the poster session (Data People: Learn Python) and brought a zine she made called “Build Your Skills in Data Analysis.”

Audrey Eschright was working on The Recompiler while at PyCon and announced the next call for contributors, covering hardware.

The Discussion We Need to Have at #APIStrat

While APIstrat is an interesting conference (I’m always up for learning about amazing technical advances) I feel like a tsunami is approaching. I can sense it and I’m just waiting to hear the sirens go off.

But most of the other folks at APIStrat seem to feel like they’ve caught the edge of the big wave and they can just ride it down. There’s this sense that the entire concept of APIs are well established in the world; that the developers we work with are coming up with ever-increasingly brilliant ways to use our APIs and that all that is left do is create a few more APIs for a few more developers.

And, yet, most of the APIs we’re talking about touch surprisingly few lives. It’s rare to even hear about an API used to streamline the process of applying for veterans’ benefits or to improve the cash flow of the bodega on the corner.

APIs don’t have a trickle-down effect that we can rely on to help reach those people being left out of this new evolution of work. Without concerted effort to bring more people to the table, we can’t assume that we’ve done everything possible to truly disrupt the organizations that came before.

Part of this problem is a question of diversity — when most developers have shared worldview, seeing the missing pieces of the API puzzle is difficult. When you’ve never gone through the process of applying for food stamps, you can’t really come up with a way to make that experience work better.

Waiting for someone to fix the diversity numbers in the tech industry isn’t going to move us any closer to that tsunami. The underlying issue there is not that women and other marginalized groups don’t have access to STEM education (at least in the US), it’s that we keep entering the industry and keep facing uncomfortable situations where the only healthy option is to drop out of tech and do something where we won’t face as many micro aggressions, unequal hiring efforts, or doxxing attacks.

Before you ever start working on an API, you truly need to ‘get out of the building,’ to steal a phrase from Steve Blank. There are a wealth of opportunities out there for developers who step outside of their own worldview and examine what people who are far different from you need in their day-to-day lives. The business case should be obvious (if your API is a utility, selling access to it is a piece of cake), but you should also think about the opportunity to leave the world a little better than you found it.

Furthermore, think about how absolutely simple you can make using your API. Frankly, building on top of a good API shouldn’t require programming skills. IFTTT is a good example of what can be done in that direction, but there are also plenty of ways to create sample apps that just require someone to figure out a little copying and pasting in order to adapt to their own lives.

We have a chance to get this right. We have a chance to build a fundamentally better world — a place I’d love to live in — but we have to actively pursue doing the right thing. We cannot wait for every single person on the planet to learn to code. We cannot hope that they’ll scratch their own itches, because there’s no chance in hell of that happening.

So here’s your call to action:

  • Start reading and learning. Don’t assume you know about anything except how to build a great API. Start with “The Unexotic Underclass” (http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/) — it’s a short essay that you’ll read through quickly. Subscribe to Model View Culture (modelviewculture.com) and The Recompiler (recompilermag.com). Work your way through the 101-Level Reading List (http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-101level-reader-books-to-help-you-better-understand-your-biases-and-the-lived-experiences).
  • Spend time around people who are very different than you. Volunteer for organizations that bring you into contact with people who don’t own computers. Work with homeless shelters, the Boys and Girls Club, and anyone else who needs a little help.
  • Build a network outside of tech. Find people who you can run ideas by, as well as get ideas from, when you’re deciding what to build next. Look as far afield as you possibly can. Make sure that those people can use your API on some level, even if it’s just through a little web app you throw together for that purpose.

The PyDX Post-Mortem

We spent over a year planning PyDX. From my perspective, the result was worth every bit of stress. I’ve been thinking about what I want to say about the conference now that it’s over. I’ve stopped and started this post a dozen times so far. Several versions have been downright sappy.

Instead, here’s the top five things that stuck out for me during PyDX.

1. Bake Diversity in from the Start; It’s Not Something to Add Later

I have no shame when it comes to talking about diversity numbers in order to drum up sponsors, but I actually feel good about how we PyDX organizers handled questions of how to make our conference more diverse. We focused on what real people needed to feel comfortable showing up to a conference — providing a safe environment, offering child care, even small group opportunities.

  • We came within four tickets of selling out.
  • We provided full scholarships to more than 90 percent of applicants, and were able to offer free tickets to the rest through our volunteer program.
  • We didn’t keep official numbers on diversity, but I made some informal counts. About half our attendees and speakers were diverse on some axis.

We didn’t have to focus on creating diversity when we already had a space that welcomed diversity in — and we responded directly to what people told us they needed to be able to attend. Remember, you can’t assume you know what anyone else needs.

Given that I attended a conference earlier this year that was exceedingly proud that 15 percent of attendees were women, I feel great about PyDX on this front.

2. Technical Talks Don’t Get All That Much Love, Surprisingly

I was obnoxiously proud of our speaker line-up, but I was surprised by what attendees responded to most enthusiastically. Looking at social media during the conference and talking to attendees afterwards, everyone was excited by talks that focused less on code — talks about topics like how to learn and how to build culture did really well.

The exceptions — the technical talks that got rave reviews — all had one of two key characteristics. Either they were workshops, where attendees participated and left with code of their own, or they were doing something far outside of typical Python projects, like making music,

Just about all of the talks went well, by the way. I’m not critiquing any of our speakers here. I’m speaking solely about what attendees were most excited by.

3. Not Screwing Up Codes of Conduct Requires Planning

I strongly believe that having a code of conduct is a minimum requirement for a conference (as well as smaller events and even occasional meetups). Having one sets expectations and creates a safer environment for every single attendee.

Organizing PyDX has only solidified my belief. The experience also highlighted some areas where we can make setting up and enforcing codes of conduct much easier — PyDX was a learning experience, because I’ve usually only been in a position to think about codes of conduct for smaller events.

These are my key takeaways:

  • Create an incident response plan in advance. You never want to be trying to figure out how to deal with a specific issue in the moment, especially when you’re already stressed out of your mind about whether the keynote speaker’s laptop is going to work properly with the A/V equipment.
  • Talk to an expert when creating your incident response plan. We actually didn’t write our own plan — instead, Audrey Eschright sat down with us and went over potential issues and how we wanted to handle them. She put that information together into a document we could refer to during the conference and that had enough detail that we could hand it to a volunteer if need be. Budget the money for that sort of expertise; it’s far cheaper than a lawyer after the fact.
  • Every single organizer and volunteer is on duty for code of conduct issues. You should absolutely have a point person, but any attendee facing a problem will talk first with the staff member they most trust who they can catch alone. And those conversations are going to come up unexpectedly — no matter the events I’ve attended, restrooms are de facto meeting rooms because most people feel they can safely talk about anything there.

4. Venues Control So Many Things and They Could Use Their Power for Good

Our venue was our single largest expense. Our venue was also the most constraining factor in planning PyDX. Until we’d found a venue, we couldn’t figure out food, childcare, or even the actual dates of the conference.

First off, the UO White Stag Block was a great venue to work with. They were able to meet most of our requirements right away and there was really only one request we made that couldn’t be met, due to the classes that were in session in the building during our conference.

That said, any venue winds up controlling a lot of how a given conference runs. We had to work within our venue’s constraints:

  • We could only use specific tape for hanging anything on the walls.
  • We could only use catering that had already been approved by the building.
  • We had to have insurance for the event.

That last constraint has kept me thinking: Insurance is required in order to fix any problem that occurs during the conference, including legal dilemmas. Why don’t venues have similar expectations for tools that mitigate risk, like codes of conduct? Isn’t requiring events to do more work to avoid any problems or negative attention more cost effective for venues?

5. The Amount of Help People Offer is Amazing

PyDX is truly a community conference. We had two larger sponsors: MailChimp and Anaconda, both of whom made a major difference in our ability to put on the conference. But around 80 percent of our funding came either directly from ticket sales or from local companies supporting the conference (including a lot of consultants and other small businesses!).

I feel like everyone I spoke to in the weeks leading up to PyDX offered to help in some way. The whole experience has been an important lesson in gratitude for me — a reminder that people will help if you just remember to ask. A few will even go out of their way to help without the request.

Thank you to everyone who made PyDX a reality.

And for those inquiring minds who want to know, we were four tickets short of selling out, so I’m not getting the tattoo. At least, I’m not getting it this year.

A Preview of the Conference I’ve Been Planning for the Last Year

pydx-color-logo-blue

I’ve been working on PyDX for over a year. So have my phenomenal co-organizers, Rachel Kelly, Georgia Reh, Melissa Chavez, and Christopher Swenson. This weekend — October 10th and 11th — all of that hard work is going to pay off.

PyDX, by the way, is a community conference for Python programmers in the Pacific Northwest.

Our Schedule Rocks

I’ve already said that I sort of wish I wasn’t organizing PyDX, because I want to attend it. We’re filming all of the talks, in part because I would cry if I didn’t get to hear at least a few. Here are the talks that I’m particularly thrilled about:

  • Melissa Lewis’ keynote (Saturday AM) — I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Meli speak at PyLadies events and she is going to blow away the PyDX crowd.
  • Terian Koscik’s Build a Bot workshop (Saturday AM) — Terian has an impressive array of Twitter bots that do some cool tricks. She inspired me to start working on my own Twitter bot, but I need some help (I’ll probably watch the video of this talk repeatedly).
  • Evan Palmer’s Making MIDI Music with Python talk — I admit that I actually got to hear Evan practice this talk, but I’m still excited for the final version. He’s making music programmatically!

You can see the whole schedule here as a PDF. I’m biased, of course, but I think we’ve got a great line up across the board.

I’m incredibly grateful to our speakers for putting in proposals and agreeing to speak at PyDX. Many are traveling to Portland on their own dime to do so and I’m a little in awe of the group of people we’re bringing together.

A Conference for Everyone

One of our commitments from the start of organizing this thing was to create a welcoming conference where everyone feels comfortable. Every PyDX organizer has been to tech conferences where we’ve felt like we don’t belong and we’re willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid anyone feeling that way this weekend. A lot of these decisions, by the way, didn’t take all that much time or money to implement.

A Dry Conference: Tech conferences tend to be boozefests, even though many people either don’t drink at all or would prefer not to drink around people they know professionally. So we’re not providing alcohol as part of the conference (though attendees are welcome to meet up after hours for drinks if that’s their thing).

A Code of Conduct: I’ve reached the point where I just won’t deal with events and organizations that don’t have a code of conduct (as well as a way to enforce their CoC). It’s a matter of safety.

Scholarships: Our tickets are priced at $100, which isn’t cheap. The value is more than there (especially when you consider we’re providing food, childcare, great speakers, and more) but we are aware that it’s out of reach for many of the people who might benefit from attending PyDX. So we’re offering scholarships. And if you want to sponsor someone else’s scholarship, you can sponsor for any amount through this payment form. A full scholarship costs us $200 to provide, because we offer stipends for travel and other expenses, depending on the recipient’s need.

We had a good business case for diversity, by the way, which helped us explain the importance of these steps when fundraising and marketing. PyCon North America is taking place in Portland in 2016. We’re making sure that anyone who is considering learning Python before that point has an easy way to get started and to join the local community (which desperately needs more programmers).

Plenty of Pythonic Personality

Community conferences are great because they have more personality. When a conference hosts several thousand attendees, everything has to run like a well-oiled machine. But since PyDX is a smaller community conference, we can have a little fun.

Our entire vibe is a weird mix of hipster jokes and Monty Python references. I’m still not sure I’ve found all the jokes on our website, but I did have a great time writing our sponsorship prospectus (I did have to spend some time researching synonyms for ‘artisanal’).

And I’ve dared the community to help us sell out. If we sell out of tickets (and yes, scholarships count), I’m going to get the PyDX logo (the snake at the top of this post!) as a tattoo. I was originally threatening to get that tattoo on my butt. However, since I want to be able to show it off without violating the code of conduct, I’m thinking my leg is a better bet. Last time I checked, we still needed to sell about 40 tickets for me to get that tattoo. Want to make it happen? Buy a ticket (use FRIENDOFPYDX for 10% off) or sponsor a scholarship (same payment form as before). You know you want to see me all inked up.