Inclusive practices during check-in

Contents

Tags: Check-in, Giving-Participants-Room-To-Be-Who-They-Are, Being-Respectful, LGBTQ+, Newcomers-and-First-Timers, Being-Open, Social-Events

Inclusive practices during check-in#

🍎 Photography Permissions#

Managing photography opt-outs:
- Badge lanyard at registration should be made available to indicate photo preferences (green = photos fine; yellow = ask first; red = no photos)

🍎 Pronoun Pins, Buttons, or Ribbons#

Indicating pronouns:
- Select a pin/button/ribbon for your lanyard to communicate your pronouns. Using a pin even if you don’t feel like you need one helps create a welcoming space for attendees who do.
- Color-coordinate the pins by pronoun for quicker recognition and processing by those who see the pins. This lowers the barrier to checking (look at the color).
  - Be sure to choose colors that works for folks with color-blindness. With color-coded pins, needing to actually read them is a stress case rather than the norm. Because people are used to the ease of the normal case, they’re more willing to take a little extra effort to read for the stress cases. (purple: he, yellow: she, green: they, blue: ask)
  - To be aware of: Make pins large enough to be easily seen. Made the pronoun itself the largest text, rather than the word “Pronouns”.
- Another option for pronoun indication is ribbons.
  - Have custom ones printed for Zi/Zir and a “Fill in your own” ribbon. For fill in your own, make sure you provide fabric markers. (h/t @oxinabox)

Further reading:

Thanks to OpenNews and SRCCON for the pronoun pins idea
Pronoun Ribbons
Improving the Color Accessibility for Color Blind Users
AdaCamp Toolkit on Photography/video/audio recording

Welcoming New Attendees#

Ribbons for badges can be useful, e.g. “First-Time Attendee.”
- Consider what visual cues would encourage people to engage with one another and go out of their way to be friendly to someone.
Consider running a mentoring program that matches experienced attendees with first-timers for networking and to provide a friendly resource to get to know the conference.