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Diversity at RustFest |
RustFest is one of the biggest Rust conferences and takes Rust's mission for an inclusive community seriously. This is based on multiple pillars.
RustFest aims to have a low ticket price, while maintaining a good quality of the conference. We're the most affordable and longest Rust conference, with our ticket price fixed around 100 Euros and rebated tickets available. The ticket price is focused around a single principle: If RustFest had no sponsors, it would still happen.
Although not always guaranteed, historically, we paid the full expenses of our speakers and organisers to attend the last RustFests. We always pay in full for people who can't afford otherwise.
Budget overages are often invested into community efforts or kept around for the next edition.
The last RustFests have had a sizable amount of diversity tickets (5%). In contrast to many other conferences, we started to pay full travel and hotel lodging for the first set of tickets. This includes intercontinental travel. On request, we pre-pay the travel for diversity ticket holders.
It is important to us that diversity ticket holders have no issues attending. For a conference of our price range, travel is often more prohibitive than tickets.
When talking about diversity efforts in IT, disability is often forgotten. We believe this needs to change. RustFest has always had an accessibility statement with proper, upfront documentation. Our efforts are cross-checked and implemented with actually disabled people. RustFest always has a person responsible for accessibility efforts.
RustFest acknowledges that disability is diverse and will work with you actively to meet all of your needs.
We always ensure our caterers can serve proper vegetarian and vegan meals and can cater to special requests. We also try to cater to other dietary needs. If possible, we search for catering that is built around these options, as we found it the easiest way to provide a good quality to all at scale.
Requests are handled quickly and we up to now only had one request we couldn't serve.
Please note that due to RustFest being a travelling conference, we can only ever work with a caterer once, which still leaves an element of variance.
RustFest has a strict rule around free alcohol: there is none. This includes refusing offers from sponsors for some. We found during previous conferences that offering free alcohol contributes to an aggressive party culture, as people would drink for free and then buy some more.
Please note that some fringe events of the conference may have alcohol on sale, but we check that there's always affordable and good non-alcoholic options available, and enough space to avoid drunk people.
We have processes for dealing with a lot of things that are tiny issues for us, but big ones for you.
We don't ask for proof and always assume good intentions when approaching us with a request. RustFest is here for you to have a good time, and if you have any kind of need, we'll do our best to help you.
We trust you and so far had a great experience with that.
The Rust community is young and RustFest is a young project. We're happy to take any feedback about (this and previous) RustFests at any time. Please contact us at [email protected] around that.
If you see something that can be improved, please let us know! We will care about it. If it happens to be a thing that you like working on, please also approach us for becoming part of the team. We appreciate that solutions are not always for free and will always try to provide effort as well as a budget for your task.