Community Tickets

CodeCraft’s ethos is that everything we do, including meetups and conferences, should reflect the members of the tech community, which in reality, encompasses people from different walks of life, experience, nationality, age, colour, sexuality, and gender.

Over time we have done a number of things in order to create a space in which people feel safe, comfortable, and included. We introduced a code of conduct, moved our events away from pubs into office spaces, rebranded from craftsmanship to crafting, and changed our logo and branding to remove alcohol from our imagery. We have also started to run a podcast, to connect to those who can’t make it to our events.

This also affects our conference, CodeCraftConf. Every year we put effort into having guides from different backgrounds. In addition to that, we also have a small number of free tickets which are designated for underrepresented groups in tech, for which the cost of the ticket would prohibitive to attending the conference.

In the past, we had found that calling the free tickets, “Diversity Tickets” was not the right phrase.

Some of the feedback we received was that diversity tickets had the connotations of “diversity tokens” and many people were sceptical of them. Some felt the name perpetrated the notion that if the person was to take the ticket they are only going in order to up the “diversity quota”, or that they were given a ticket purely because they are not a white male in tech. In addition to this we found that having conversations about the tickets with potential recipients made it difficult, as people were sceptical, and the name “diversity tickets” did not help to build trust.

This is obviously not what we wanted our efforts to portray. As our conference focuses on conversations led in groups (we do not have any speakers), everyone is given a platform to speak and share their experiences. We are hoping that people who would otherwise not be able to attend but can with the help of a ticket would enrich the conversations by making their perspective heard, if they choose to do so, over the course of the day.

In order to reflect that, we have started calling the free tickets, “Community Tickets”. We hope that the name change will reflect the intention behind those tickets and that those who receive them will feel welcome at the conference, and remain a member of our tech community.

If you would like to apply for such ticket, please email contact@codecraftuk.org