Penguicon respects diversity in all forms. We are committed to cultivating a safe and inclusive community in which feedback from all community members is heard and valued.

It is our goal to ensure that people who want to contribute to Penguicon are welcomed and included, as long as they are civil toward the perspectives of all attendees and abide by our Code of Conduct policies. To this end, we will have remote access available for all Penguicon 2018 ConCom meetings. We encourage anyone with an interest in volunteering with Penguicon to reach out to a member of the Con Committee.

Penguicon welcomes event submissions of all types and perspectives. Our criteria for Penguicon events are that they be safe, ethical, respectful, and relevant to one of our tracks. Unfortunately we are not able to accept all event proposals that meet these criteria due to time and space constraints; our community submits more excellent event proposals than we can schedule during one weekend! Penguicon does not select presenters based on any personal characteristic, including political views, nor do we direct presenters to take a certain viewpoint or perspective during their events.

Penguicon recognizes the need to keep all members of our community informed. Our communication plan for Penguicon 2018 is to post all information to our website and then share links to those posts on Facebook and Twitter. We will also offer a weekly digest of Penguicon updates via the mailing list.

It is our intention that ALL attendees are safe from harassment at Penguicon. We have made a few changes to the Penguicon 2018 code of conduct to ensure that this intent is clear. We will post the revised code of conduct, along with explanations of the changes, on the Penguicon 2018 website in the coming days.

We intend to continue offering the popular engagement stickers, but will work on improving their intuitiveness and accessibility.

Penguicon’s Guests of Honor are chosen by the year’s event chair, who considers many factors in their selection. Any focus on current events or the direction of the future is inherently political; thus, we believe that Penguicon has always been political, whether by inviting the Electronic Frontier Foundation to be our charity or selecting a Guest of Honor that represents, to our view, important trending topics.

The decisions we have made are based on respect for the points of view of others. This convention began as an acceptance of people with different points of view – not just in the hopes of finding common ground, but to share with each other what’s important to us. Penguicon has grown steadily on the back of the freedom people have to celebrate being themselves. People who respect diversity of opinion, lifestyle, and experience are Penguicon people, regardless of their political persuasion.

Sincerely,
Penguicon 2018 ConCom