How to build a better alcohol culture at your tech conferences and events

Most events in tech involve alcohol at a social event. Although it can be a social lubricant, it’s also a catalyst for bad behaviour, Code of Conduct violations, harm, and exclusion. How do you build a better alcohol culture at your event?

Content warning: this article talks about excessive alcohol consumption and subsequent harassment, assault, addiction and similar concepts — though without great detail on individual occurrences.

Travelling to many conferences, I go to quite a few social events and speaker dinners. As far as I can remember, 100% of them involved alcohol. I do enjoy drinking moderately from time to time, and I see how alcohol can make social interactions between strangers a little bit easier. But at the same time, excessive alcohol consumption is fairly common. The consequences can range from harassment to creating a space that is only enjoyable if you happen to be rather drunk yourself.

Concerns about these behaviours scare people away from these events, and conferences as a whole. And at an average 300 person conference, you will also have ~30 people with a history of alcohol or other substance abuse. In the end, events with alcohol aren’t always a bad thing, but creating a space where alcohol is allowed, but excessive consumption is discouraged, and people who drink barely or not at all (whatever the reason) feel welcome, requires specific effort.

If you’d like to understand more about alcohol addiction, recovery, and alcohol culture in tech, I strongly recommend Tim Allen’s stellar DjangoCon US 2016 talk: It is Darkest Before Dawn.

What we are trying to achieve

There are a number of goals with a good alcohol policy:

1. Make people who do not drink alcohol feel welcome, and feel like this can be a fun event for them. They may not drink due to current or past addictions, pregnancy, medical reasons, because they just don’t like it, or anything else.
2. Make people who have poor experiences with being around drunk people feel like this event is safe.
3. Reduce the amount of attendees who get drunk, as they more often cross boundaries of acceptable behaviour.
4. Be able to act against drunk people.

These goals all complement each other. Having non-drinkers in a group, or people who at some point decide to stop drinking, can significantly reduce the total alcohol consumption. Having a single person in a group that orders a non-alcoholic drink, makes it much easier in a social context for others to switch to non-alcoholic drinks as well. And avoiding factors that push people towards getting drunk, can make recovering alcoholics feel a bit more welcome.

When I consider someone “drunk”

In this article, I am defining drunk as a person who has consumed alcohol to the point that they are no longer a reasonable functional human with reasonable acceptable behaviour. That includes people who talk without understanding their words have impact, or who have no filter for their words, but also people that can no longer function physically.

Over the years, I’ve experienced drunk attendees that just shouted really loud and were impossible to talk to, people that passed out, people making awful jokes about minorities and marginalised groups (really common), and one recent time an attendee appeared to try to set another attendee on fire. These situations were all caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

In general, drunk people are only fun to spend time with if you are at least somewhat drunk yourself, and often just really annoying if you’re sober — at best.

The easiest solution

The simplest solution is often easy to implement: do not allow any alcohol at your event. This is difficult if you’re in a public bar, but in almost any other venue you can easily organise a non-alcoholic event.

However, some people feel that would be pushing too far, or think their community would respond very poorly. So in the remainder of this article, I’m going to work from the assumption that you want to allow some alcohol consumption, but prevent or strongly reduce the issues that come with it.

Inclusion comes from many angles

The first thing you need to be aware of, is that this involves many different actions, which are all needed as part of an inclusive program. It requires consistent messaging, appearance and enforcement, from long before the event, during the day and evening, and afterwards. Adopting only a few of these recommendations may have a very limited effect.

Reasonably sober organisers available all night

In order to do all of the below, you need to have reasonably sober organisers available until the end of your event. Reasonably sober to me means drinking is not entirely forbidden, but it can’t impair your judgement or ability to respond to issues. A good guideline is probably the legal limit for driving a vehicle.

This does not have to apply to all organisers — you do need at least two. These two people need to deal with any incidents, and also in general keep an eye on the people at the party, and on whether people seem to be mostly comfortable.

Other organisers should also not drink excessively: all organisers are providing an example to others, and the attendees will follow their example to know what is acceptable at your event.

Alcohol should not be the default or better drink

Alcohol should never appear as the default, or as the fancier drink. This means that getting any non-alcoholic drink should be at least as easy as getting an alcoholic drink, and non-alcoholic drinks should be at least as varied or fancy as alcoholic drinks.

This means you can’t host at venue which has beer taps on the tables. That would make alcohol instantly accessible, whereas non-alcohol requires getting the attention of waitstaff. Similarly it means you can offer fancy cocktails, as long as you offer an equal variety of non-alcoholic cocktails (often called mocktails or virgin cocktails, but I especially dislike the latter term). And if you have a dozen fancy craft beers, offer more variation in non-alcoholic drinks than coke and water. At one party I organised, we had such fancy non-alcoholic cocktails that they were really popular, just because they looked amazing and tasted great.

The name of an event can also make it sound like alcohol is the default — and non-drinkers aren’t welcome. So names like GoBeers or SwiftCocktails are exclusionary (I made these names up).

Make sure people eat

People get drunk much faster if they have an empty stomach, so this enlarges all the problems with alcohol. Make sure people eat before your event, and communicate that clearly, or make sure initial food is available very shortly after people may start drinking. Offering alcohol at the end of a conference day, without food, or offering alcohol during the conference day, is a recipe for attendees getting drunk very fast.

Easy access to water

Offer easy access to water, which means people shouldn’t have to order it at the bar. Have bottles of water with glasses on the bar, along with a sign to encourage people to take some, or have a water station somewhere else. Making water the easiest drink to access increases consumption, reducing the effects of alcohol and the amount of alcohol consumed. As a bonus, it helps against dehydration.

No unlimited free alcohol

Unlimited free alcohol dramatically increases consumption. And I’m counting “drinks on us until our budget runs out” as fairly unlimited, as it doesn’t include a personal limit. Here’s some alternative ideas, to both counter this problem, and shift consumption to non-alcoholic drinks in general:

• Give all attendees a small amount of tokens (two to four), where one token buys a soft drink, two tokens buy beer or wine. Anything more is at their own cost.
• Provide free non-alcoholic drinks (probably up to a maximum budget), and have people pay on their own for alcoholic drinks.
• Give all attendees a limited amount of tokens, which only work for paying for non-alcoholic drinks.

You could also mix some of these options.

On tolerance for drunkenness

You can consider a zero tolerance policy for drunkenness. Even if a drunk person (per my definition earlier in this article) has not violated the Code of Conduct directly, they are at a seriously increased risk of causing an incident. Even if they don’t, drunk people are nearly always an annoyance to people who don’t drink, or don’t drink as much, up to the point that those people leave. For me personally, leaving an event early due to annoying drunk people is quite common.

A lighter alternative, if you feel no tolerance is too harsh, is to cut people off alcohol if you notice them being drunk. If you, being the organisers, consider a person drunk, you could tell them that they are not to drink any more alcohol, and keep an eye on them. That way, they at least won’t continue to escalate their behaviour. If they violate this and order alcohol anyways, you could make them leave the party.

Make sure your Code of Conduct has space for these scenarios. And note that you don’t have to ban a drunk person from the entire conference: an appropriate response could be that they have to leave the party, but can come back the next day, and the issue will be further discussed once they’re sobered up. If something more serious has happened already, stronger action can be appropriate.

No tolerance for pushing others to drink

With drinking alcohol as a social behaviour, it’s common for people to push others to drink, or drink more. This behaviour gets worse as the group gets more intoxicated, and often involves demanding reasons on why someone doesn’t drink, or pushing alcohol drinks into their hands anyways.

This makes the event extremely unwelcoming for people who don’t drink, even if it’s packaged in the form of a “joke”. Particularly when others demand to know why they don’t, as these reasons can be very personal and very sensitive. This behaviour is also a major cause for excessive drinking by people who usually drink responsibly.

If you notice someone pushing another person to drink, I recommend speaking to them and explaining them that this is unacceptable and demand they allow others to make their own choices. On repeat occurrences, removing someone from the party is warranted.

You should also communicate this to the bar staff. They should not assume people want alcohol, and not offer people a beer unless they’ve asked for it. Their question should simply be a neutral: “what can I get you?” or something like that.

If someone lies to or misleads someone about the alcohol content of a drink, in a situation where they should reasonably have known, that is (attempted) physical assault. It should be treated no differently from any other poisoning attempt, including a permanent ban for the offender. Depending on the needs and wishes of the person who was harmed, you may need to involve medical aid, and should offer to assist in involving the police.

Get your partners and sponsors on board

Make sure all partners (which includes the venue) and sponsors are on board with all of this. They can not advertise with “join us tonight and get drunk at our cost!”. They need to understand your approach to events and alcohol, and if needed, you must enforce that they follow along with it.

Clear and consistent communication

In general, your communication about all of the above must be clear, consistent and repetitive.

• Never use the word “drunk” in a positive or encouraging way.
• Every time you say the words “drinks” or “alcohol”, or any alcoholic drink name, stress that there is a variety of non-alcoholic drinks, and pushing others to drink is not acceptable.
• Stress that intoxication is never an excuse for Code of Conduct violations.
• Do not give away alcohol as any gift or prize in any part of the conference.
• If possible, on your website, include information about recovery meetings — like Djangocon US.

Continuously stress your Code of Conduct, including policies you have about drunk behaviour. Make sure your CoC contacts are known, all your organisers are trained, and make a phone number and e-mail address available. People are often reluctant to report a situation, so keep an eye out yourself as well.

Even as someone who enjoys responsible drinking, I very often see the exact opposite of each of the points above, and it always leads to the same kind of event — like clockwork. I’ve warned organisers about this in the past, and then saw the event play out exactly like I told them would happen. Some people get very drunk, lose all sense of boundaries, and I leave with a sour feeling. For many people, this image and related issues are reasons not to attend at all in the first place, or even avoid entire conferences. This affects marginalised groups more than others, as they are more likely to be harmed.

The pervasive drinking culture in tech causes exclusion, biased towards people with less privilege. It causes harm and increases the risk of addiction. But we can do better, and you can be a part of that. If you’re organising any kind of event or conference, please consider how you have an opportunity to make this a better space for everyone by building a better alcohol culture.