Providing conference childcare isn't difficult or expensive, and it makes a huge difference for parents of young children who might want to come. If your community wants to (visibly!) support work-life balance and family obligations -- which, by the way, still disproportionately impact women -- I urge you to look into providing event childcare. I don't have kids myself -- but a lot of my friends do, and someday I might. I've seen too many talented colleagues silently drop out of the conference scene and fade out of the community because they needed to choose between logistics for the family they loved and logistics for the work they loved -- and there are simple things we can do to make it easier for them to stay.

A good number of conferences have already started offering free or low-cost childcare on-site, and Above All Human is one of them. (Above All Human also used a Code of Conduct, another simple way to shift conference culture towards inclusivity and diversity.)

I talked with Scott Handsaker, one of the conference organizers, to ask how they set it up. It was easy. There was an existing daycare facility nearby, so trained staff, equipment, space, and insurance were all taken care of. All Scott had to do was negotiate the price, which ended up being $30 per child. Out of 1,000 people in attendance, roughly 10-15 used childcare, for a total price tag of $300-$450 per day.

The resulting slew of publicity was tremendous. Scott mentioned they were late in organizing childcare -- too late to advertise it on the conference website -- so they only had a little time to message via email and social media. Even so, childcare was the #1 thing people tweeted about leading up to the conference. ("This [twitter search] nowhere near captures the volume of tweets or the sentiment," Scott wrote.) In fact, that's how I found out about Above All Human in the first place -- a former classmate raving about childcare on social media. This is the sort of exposure you want for your event, brand, and community. Financing conference childcare was snapped up by Slack as a low-cost, high-impact, high-visibility corporate sponsorship opportunity.

If your conference location doesn't have childcare on-site, talk with nearby childcare providers or a local college with an education/teacher-training program. You're looking for care providers with training in early childhood education or some similarly related field, medical knowledge (CPR/AED etc), and enough experience to take care of insurance and logistics, which often involves negotiating directly with the hotel or other conference location about space and setup.

Some conferences have written documentation on their childcare setup. GovHack wrote a behind the scenes look at childcare for their conference, and YOW stands as a good example of how to promote it.

Right now, determined conference committee members can pull something together for their own event by taking advantage of resources like these, as well as tapping into the informal network of conference organizers who've coordinated childcare in the past. However, that network can be hard to find -- so as more and more events attempt to do this, we can share notes and work to make it easier. A great next step would be to compile more writeups about the childcare-at-conferences process and to list events that have had it and are willing to talk with other events who are interested. Eventually, we could create a series of templates and guides for how to email daycare providers, how to advertise, what insurance to secure, and so forth. If you know of existing resources or efforts, please let me know and I'll add them to this post.

Edit: Reader-provided resources so far...

  • David Nelson Adamec noted that PyCon, a major programming language conference, provides childcare: https://us.pycon.org/2016/sponsors/. "I like that they call out "Company X is our childcare sponsor", making it a cool thing to be and encouraging others to follow suit," says David. He also noted that http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Childcare has more general tips for organizers.
  • Sara Melnick noted that SIGCSE, a major CS education conference (academic) provides a kids' camp, almost like a parallel conference for children: http://sigcse2016.sigcse.org/attendees/kidscamp.html
  • Bonnie Tesch submitted MoMiCon, an academic gathering deliberately designed as a conference format experiment designed for mothers with young children. Some very cool design ideas here.
  • Anne Lucietto noted that childcare isn't the only need -- sometimes adult care is needed as well.
  • Peter Barszczewski noted that the same setup applies to hackathons.