Diversity at Events

Bringing diverse communities together

Studies have shown time and again that diversity and inclusion lead to better decision making, and diverse teams lead to better business outcomes.

Additionally, creating a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem will bring more talent in to fill the ever increasing number of open source jobs available. Finally, we believe that fundamentally, helping to create a more diverse and inclusive community is the right thing to do, and we use our events as one place to do this.

One of the many important contributions the Linux Foundation makes to the community is facilitating and supporting opportunities for the learning and collaboration necessary to spark new ideas and advance open source technologies. We host over 100 events a year, gathering more than 80,000 attendees. All of our events are designed to be welcoming places that encourage and support the diversity and inclusion of ideas, technologies, and most importantly, people.

Here are just some of the ways we encourage more diversity & inclusion in and around our events:

  • No all-male panels, all-male speaker line-ups or all-male keynote line-ups
  • Request speakers to take our Inclusive Speaker Orientation, created in collaboration with the National Center for Women & Information Technology
  • Onsite Nursing Rooms
  • Free, onsite Child Care
  • Onsite prayer rooms, quiet rooms and ‘zen zones’
  • Attendee Communication Preference Stickers & Pronoun Stickers
  • Accessibility Considerations  – captioning on video recordings, wheelchair accessible venues, food allergy management, information on event websites on wheelchair and medical equipment rental
  • Non-Alcoholic Beverages available at all social events
  • Non-Binary Restrooms
  • Gender Neutral Event Shirt Sizing
  • Diversity & Inclusion Handouts with an overview of our onsite offerings and a reminder on our Code of Conduct
  • Event Code of Conduct Signage prominently displayed onsite
  • Special Events to Promote Diversity + Inclusion (such as the Better Together Diversity Social, Women in Open Source lunch, Speed Mentoring Programs and Kids Coding Workshops

In addition, we:

  • Offer diversity scholarships to most of our events so that anyone from a diverse background who would like to attend, can attend at no cost.