For the second year in a row, we’re very pleased to launch our scholarship program! We are super excited to open the scholarship process for this year’s SymfonyCon Lisbon 2018, December 6th and 7th. We hope to help the Symfony community members who can’t afford to attend the conference to be part of this great event.

The scholarship program is part of the Diversity Initiative which was launched last year at SymfonyCon Cluj and is led by Lukas Kahwe Smith, a long time Symfony core team member. Lukas recently posted an update about the Diversity Initiative, if you didn’t read it you can find his blog post here.

Fundraising

This year, we’d like to call the entire Symfony community to contribute to our scholarship program by donating funds to help us cover the scholarships expenses for SymfonyCon Lisbon 2018. We aim to offer 3 scholarships at SymfonyCon Lisbon 2018 and we need your help. We’re thus opening a fundraising campaign to collect enough money to offer 3 scholarships to people who cannot join us at the conference for financial reasons. You can donate via our Symfony page on Open Collective website. Anyone can donate on Open Collective, a company or an individual. You can donate the amount you want and either become a backer or a Sponsor! After your donation, you’ll automatically get a PDF invoice.

Our objective is to receive enough money to cover the 3 scholarships we’d like to offer at SymfonyCon Lisbon. In order to be able to cover these 3 scholarships, we aim to collect a minimum of 4 000€ ($4,500) to cover the conference ticket, travel (flight or train tickets from the city of departure to Lisbon) and accomodation for 3 nights per grant recipient. If we exceed this minimum amount and have enough funds to provide more scholarships, we’d be very pleased to extend our scholarship offer to more people. All the available funds and the submitted expenses will be available on our page so everyone can see them. We’ve chosen Open Collective because of its mission to operate in full transparency and because we want to involve the community in this initiative as much as possible.

If you want to help us in our Diversity Initiative, you can donate here.

Scholarship process

Application process for scholarships at SymfonyCon Lisbon 2018 is now open until November 16th. You just need to fill in a form to submit your application. SymfonyCon’s scholarship program is aimed to support Symfony community members who want to attend the conference, but cannot without the scholarship. Anyone regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, race, ethnicity, age, religion, or socioeconomic status can apply for a scholarship.

We want to include, encourage and recognize people from all backgrounds no matter where you come from. If you cannot attend the conference without financial aid, you are eligible to our scholarship program. We will consider every application. Priority will be given to underrepresented groups such as women, minorities, LGBTQIA and people with disabilities, or other underrepresented groups who will be unable to attend the event without financial support. Students are welcome!

Within the Symfony community, we support diversity and inclusion and are proud to launch our second scholarship program.

Apply here for the SymfonyCon’s scholarship program until Friday November 16th 2018.

The selection process for the scholarship will be handled by the SymfonyCon Lisbon organizers, Lukas Kahwe Smith (Diversity Initiative leader) and the CARE team. We’ll announce the grant recipients on November 20th.

We’d like to thank in advance all the people who will support the scholarship program and help us build the Diversity Initiative. If you have any questions regarding the scholarship program or the SymfonyCon Lisbon, please contact us at event[at]symfony.com. If you want to have more information about our Code of Conduct, you can find it here.

See you soon at the conference!