Attending Conferences

SparkFabrik encourages team members to attend relevant conferences for personal development and to promote us around the industry.

What is a relevant conference?

A relevant conference is one that is related to your role at SparkFabrik. For example, if you are a developer, a tech conference about development or cloud may be relevant. If you are a project manager, a UI/UX designer or a business developer, a conference about project management, design or business may be relevant.

If you are unsure if a conference is relevant, please ask your team / lead.

SparkFabrik sometimes organizes conferences and events, online or in person: for those events, please fill out the form as for any other conference.

Who must file an attendance request?

Everyone who wants to attend or speak at a conference must file an attendance request.

Speakers are encouraged to file an attendance request as soon as they are accepted as speakers, even if the conference is far in the future. This will help us to plan ahead and to avoid last minute requests.

Usually speakers have special benefits from the conference organizers, like free tickets, free accommodation, etc. If you are a speaker, please let us know in the request form.

How to file an attendance request

If you wish to attend a conference, you must file your case using this form.

To praise your contribution and good citizenship, we will give you extra credits in the evaluation of your case based on:

  • Code/Design/Documentation contributions to our current active internal projects
  • Blog posts published on Tech @ SparkFabrik
  • Organization of and presence at internal workshops/training sessions/hackathons
  • Your disposition towards attending the conference as a speaker for SparkFabrik

Before filling out the form, you must with your team / lead if your participation does not negatively impact the teamwork. Also, please check with the Mktg/DevRel people if there are already plans to attend the conference.

What happens then?

The management board will consider the merits of conference attendance based on your case.

If many people want to attend we may have to limit the total numbers and will take into account if you already missed a conference previously. Anyway, we'll do our best to make everyone benefit from this boon at least one time every year.

If your application is rejected, SparkFabrik will provide you with the reason why.

If it is accepted SparkFabrik will provide the following:

  • Paid attendance for 1 or more days
  • Paid return travel
  • Accommodation costs for yourself if required depending on the distance required to travel
  • Costs of evening meal for yourself if staying overnight (this follows the same rules as usual expenses policies around food and drink)

If the conference and related travel happen over a weekend then it is not considered a working day so SparkFabrik does not usually provide time in lieu.

Owner

The main contact for everything related to conferences and events attendance is Paolo Mainardi (paolo.mainardi@sparkfabrik.com)

Credits

This policy and playbook page has been strongly inspired by the great Deeson Handbook. Sadly the original Deeson's Conference Policy page has been removed from their handbook, but we still want to credit them for providing guidance.

Last updated on 27 Feb 2024