With the conference well behind us, the DjangoCon Europe 2024 Code of Conduct team is now able to share our Code of Conduct transparency report.
Publishing this report is a part of our Code of Conduct process, which informs our work before, during, and after the conference. The report itself provides information about general team tasks, as well as incidents we handled.
The DjangoCon Europe Code of Conduct (CoC) and the workings of the team are directly taken from past events. For this year, there were three people on the team:
Our group handled everything CoC-related for the conference, with support from the organisers and other volunteers where needed. All CoC reports are handled solely by the team, with an important policy that all decisions are made as a group whenever possible. It’s worth mentioning the team is fully separate from the Django Software Foundation (DSF) Code of Conduct Committee, which handles violations according to the Django Code of Conduct. This separate code of conduct applies to all DSF events, including DjangoCon Europe.
Our team had two major tasks before the conference: general preparations, and presentations reviews.
This generally meant doing anything we could ahead of the actual conference so our team could work as well as possible during the event:
Compared to past years, we didn’t reach out to the DSF Code of Conduct Committee as part of their support for event organizers. They advise sharing attendee and speaker details with the committee ahead of the event, but like in all past three djangoCon Europe events we decided against it as it seemed too problematic to do so while complying with personal data protection and privacy laws in Europe. This long-standing issue is tracked in the Django code of conduct issues: Compliance with privacy laws when working with conferences. One improvement which we did manage to do this year is updating the conference privacy policy to be very clear about how any personal data would be shared with the Django Software Foundation as part of any incident reports:
For code of conduct incident reports handling, we may collect additional information about individuals mentioned in any reports. We may share this information with the Django Software Foundation Code of Conduct Committee as needed. View our Code of Conduct response guidelines for more information.
With many scheduled presentations, this was a major task for us ahead of the event! All speakers were required to submit a draft version of their slides, ideally in the week before the conference, as far complete as possible. In addition to the code of conduct review, this was also very helpful to live captioning providers as part of their preparations.
The CoC team went through the slides during the last few days before the conference, with 32 out of 35 talks and workshops reviewed. Like in 2023, we decided from the get-go to only have one CoC team member review each presentation. This is a very time-consuming task and in past years (across 120+ talks) we had no occurrence of disagreement between team members on presentation review.
We didn’t review lightning talks; as similarly to past years we expected team capacity issues in trying to take on this very time-sensitive task.
Out of the 40 presentations we tracked,
To sum it up, we didn’t manage to do this as well as in past years but got decent results nonetheless. A key to get 100% of presentations reviewed is to have availability to reach out with speakers on the day of their presentation, which we recommend leaving more room for in the future by having a bigger team.
We didn’t receive any incident reports during the conference. Everyone involved played a part in fostering an excellent atmosphere throughout. The conference code of conduct was featured in online communications and during in-person conference proceedings, which helped set clear expectations for everyone.
Thibaud and Cheuk were present in person at the conference and on Code of Conduct team duty, and Joseph also monitored online conversations. We didn’t have a formal rota on an hourly basis but did make sure our small team would have at least one representative present every day.
Everyone was equally excellent during the two-day sprint at the end of the conference. Like in 2023, we were also present during the sprints, but didn’t organise to bring a printed code of conduct reference to the separate venue.
We did receive two incident reports after the conference. During that time, our team has to remain active to handle any possible code of conduct issues, review attendee feedback, and also write this transparency report. This was compromised by lack of availability on our part, which meant reports taking longer to handle than ideal, and this transparency report arriving quite late.
Here are anonymised summaries of the incidents we handled, to provide examples of what kind of incidents happen, and how we handle them.
A lightning talk speaker used language which was determined to violate the conference Code of Conduct. Due to availability issues from our team over the summer, our actions were delayed. In late August, the talk recording was taken down, and we contacted the speaker to make them aware of the issue. We also shared our recommendations to the DjangoCon Europe organizers, for them to pass on to future events: find a workable process to have CoC vetting of lightning talks; and defer publication of any talks under Code of Conduct team investigation.
Published conference photos included individuals wearing red lanyards, indicating no photo consent. Due to availability issues, action was delayed until late August, when an internal review led to all potentially problematic photos being unpublished. We also shared further recommendations to pass on to future events: go from one to two people reviewing photos ahead of publication; and in the event of a report, temporarily unpublish all photos until they can be fully re-reviewed.
Aside from the incidents, we also reflected on how different aspects of the conference went, reviewed conference feedback from participants as relevant to the code of conduct – and wrote this transparency report. We also spent time converting our working documents to templates to support DjangoCon Europe 2025 volunteers.
Aside from the above recommendations specific to the incidents we encountered this year, we drafted a few other possible improvements to take on at future events:
All of the above is based on our own reflections, and excellent feedback from participants via the conference’s feedback form. We would also recommend reviewing the contents of the Less Obvious Conference Checklist, as there are a lot of relevant details on there, including in other areas related to codes of conduct (inclusivity, accessibility, privacy, etc).
All of those likely improvements have been added to the template CoC team documents created for future events, available here: Template: DjangoCon Europe 20XX CoC team (team only).
This report is not meant to spread shame or blame. We’re publishing it to show why our code of conduct is important, and how it is enforced in practice, in line with the transparency and reporting guidelines from Django’s CoC committee. We hope that by publishing our reports, we will encourage more people to report incidents in the future, and that other conferences can learn from our mistakes and our successes.
We would like to thank the DjangoCon Europe community – attendees, speakers, and organisers alike – for working with us. We thank the organisers of past DjangoCon Europe conferences for their transparency reports, on which this report is based.
The DjangoCon Europe 2024 Code of Conduct team, Thibaud, Cheuk, Joseph
So, DjangoCon Europe 2024 is back again and it’s going to be 5 full days of talks, tutorials and sprints - from June 5 to 9:
In the near future, we will have more info about the conference, which we will publish on the website. This will include more details about the tickets, talks, workshops, grants, code of conduct, etc. For now, here is a summary of that info.
As with past years, there will be a travel grants program to assist people with financial difficulties, people who are under-represented or from marginalised groups - allowing access to an event that otherwise would be very difficult position for them to attend;
If you're interested in sponsoring the event, please get in touch at sponsors@djangocon.eu.
You can already start to prepare your talk, and for that, we recommend that you watch the talk “How To Get On This Stage (And What To Do When You Get There)” by Mark Smith. If you think you have something great to talk about – start to prepare your talk! If you are unsure, talk it over with somebody, or go to Slack to find previous speakers and participants to discuss your idea with. When in doubt, submit your talk!
As you can imagine there is a lot to do, but it's very much worth it – DjangoCon Europe is an extremely friendly, open, inclusive, and informative (for beginners and advanced users alike) conference. Join us regardless of your prior experience: this is also an opportunity to learn! In other words, you don't have to be an expert to join. Below are the teams and their activities/responsibilities that we seek help with:
You can apply through this form here.
Your location before and during the event is not significant, since it will be hosted in a hybrid format. The only important thing is that you have the energy and free time to help organize a wonderful DjangoCon Europe. The official language of all these prior activities will be English, as well as the conference itself.
We expect new challenges but pledge our hearts and minds to do the best DjangoCon Europe we can, never giving up under these strenuous conditions. Please consider volunteering and join us, we need you!
We hope we'll see you all at DjangoCon Europe 2024, and don't forget to follow us @DjangoConEurope on Twitter, and also join our dedicated Slack channel.
Hoping for the best,
The DjangoCon Europe 2024 Organisers
We will publish event announcements here.
Stay tuned and follow us on X (formerly known as Twitter): @DjangoConEurope!
