Rust Belt RustBridges

As you may or may not know, I'm one of the organizers of the Rust Belt Rust Conference that'll be happening Oct 18-19 in Dayton, OH, US this year.

We've had RustBridge workshops at Rust Belt Rust the past few years, but lately I’ve been thinking that holding a RustBridge at the conference is too late, sort of. I think it’d be better if folks attended a RustBridge to get introduced to Rust, then had some time on their own to explore Rust, and then decide if they were interested in attending a whole conference on it.

So with that goal in mind, I’d like to encourage people around the Rust Belt region of the US to hold RustBridge events sometime this summer in anticipation of Rust Belt Rust 2019 this fall.

People who run, volunteer at, or attend one of these RustBridge events would get a discount code for 50% off tickets to Rust Belt Rust. The first 3 events that open registration for their workshops (so not necessarily the first events to occur) will be eligible for up to $250 in reimbursement for space rental or food expenses from my consulting company, Integer 32.

To qualify as a RustBridge, the event needs to:

  • Be free to attendees
  • Primarily for people underrepresented in tech, where underrepresented includes nonbinary, LGBTQIA+ folks, cis women, people of color, and people with disabilities. The event may choose to allow folks overrepresented in tech to attend as a guest of someone underrepresented in tech, so that attendees are at least 50% those from underrepresented groups.

To qualify as a Rust Belt RustBridge for the purposes of getting the discount codes to Rust Belt Rust and be potentially eligible for the $250 reimbursement, the event needs to:

  • Take place somewhere in the Rust Belt, which I am loosely and generously defining as the states mentioned on Wikipedia: New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
  • Have a code of conduct compatible with the GeekFeminism event CoC
  • Be wheelchair accessible
  • Have gender neutral (aka single occupancy) restrooms available

If you've never organized an event like this before, I promise you are capable! The RustBridge workshop was inspired by the RailsBridge workshops, and RailsBridge has a really helpful Organizer Cookbook that has lots of helpful tips for organizing the logistics.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment here or email me, carol dot nichols at gmail, and definitely get in touch if you're running an event about the discount codes and reimbursements!

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I am interested in doing this thing! I think that I might need to hold it in a different space than the one where I am holding meetups, for a number of those reasons, which should be possible.

Anybody else interested in doing something in southeast MI, get in contact :slight_smile: estelendur at gmail

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