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How SRCCON 2020 Will Work Online

Schedule and speakers: https://2020.srccon.org/schedule/
July 15-17, 2020

How do I join SRCCON 2020?

Fill out our call for participation here and we’ll be in touch with a way for you to buy a ticket to the event (or grab a scholarship ticket). As space remains available during the event, we’ll be checking this at least once per day, so you’ll have the opportunity to join mid-event as well.

Once you have your ticket, be sure that you have installed or updated the latest version of Zoom.

Just before the conference begins, you will need to log into Eventbrite to access the event. (Be sure to use the same email address you used when you registered.) From there, you will see individual Zoom links that will allow you to join each talk or session.

All registered? Step right up to the virtual registration booth!

Normally, you might be picking up your welcome packet and pronoun pins when you arrive, so we wanted to give you a short, digital orientation too.

Step 1: Grab your name tag.

Now that you’ve gotten your Slack invite, edit your Slack profile! At in-person SRCCON events, we always feature your name prominently, and we do not display the name of your organization. Help us maintain our focus on each of you as people and not as employees, and leave your organization name off your Slack profile. (We’ve already hidden email addresses from all Slack profiles.) Instead, put in three of your passions or interests into the “What I do” section of your Slack profile as conversation starters instead! Missing your Slack invite? Grab the direct sign-up link on our Eventbrite page.

Step 2: Add your pronoun pin.

In lieu of physical pins, you can display your pronouns digitally this year! In your SRCCON Slack account and on Zoom, we invite everyone who’s comfortable to add their pronouns to their display names. For example, “Sisi Wei (she/her).” Displaying your pronoun even if you don’t feel like you need one helps create a welcoming space for our colleagues who do (and please, respect other people’s pronouns).

Step 3: Your map of our facilities.

This year, SRCCON will have direct Zoom links for all our talks, sessions, and meetups, and we can create more of them as you sign up to lead your own meetups. Getting a hold of your bearings will be easy though. We’ll be posting direct Zoom links to every event on our Eventbrite page. Consider it your digital map. Please bookmark it!

Step 4: Our contact info for questions.

If you’ve got general questions about anything, post your question in these two Slack channels:

Our Code of Conduct covers the entirety of SRCCON, and we also have a Care & Support page with thoughts about how we can be together as a community this week.

How will we network during SRCCON?

Every SRCCON is a community—this year’s just happens to be connecting online. Our weeklong event Slack is a space to meet other attendees, share and discover projects, follow up on sessions, and find emergent conversations.

You should have received an invitation from us directly, but in case we missed you, you can grab the direct sign-up link from our Eventbrite page. Sign yourself up ASAP (including before the conference) so you can start participating right now. This Slack community will also be a special place that only exists during SRCCON. That’s right, once the conference is over, the Slack will also disappear.

How do I get help if I’m having issues?

The fastest way to contact our team will be within the Slack workspace. If you’re have tech problems, post in #00-tech-support. If you have a general question, post in #00-questions. We’ll follow up as quickly as we can. You can also DM anyone with “staff” in their display name, but we’ve got dedicated folks helping us field questions in the designated Slack channels, so posting there may get you an answer faster. You can also reach our team via email at srccon@opennews.org. Response times may be a bit slower during the event.

Does SRCCON have a Code of Conduct?

Yes, we do. SRCCON and OpenNews are committed to providing a welcoming and harassment-free environment for participants of all races, gender and trans statuses, sexual orientations, physical abilities, physical appearances, and beliefs. You can access our full Code of Conduct here: https://2020.srccon.org/conduct/

What does the SRCCON 2020 program entail?

At SRCCON, we’ll come together as a community to figure out how we can reshape the ways journalism operates. We are excited for the opportunities to:

Our 2020 program includes talks, sessions, spontaneous group conversations, project sharing, and so much more. Let’s walk through those now:

Talks at SRCCON, how do they work?

Each day of the conference, talks will open and close our program.

Our talk presenters at SRCCON 2020 are:

If SRCCON sessions get us into the weeds and help us do the work, then these talks create a common, shared foundation to build upon during our conversations throughout the conference.

There are two ways to interact with talks this year: live, or on your own time. Especially since we’re all at home, we know that there are many reasons why you might need to miss a talk, even if you want to see it. That’s why this year, all of our talks will be pre-recorded and have live transcriptions. Here’s how it’ll work.

Sessions at SRCCON, how do they work?

If talks give us a shared foundation to build upon, then sessions is where we do the building.

Just like in previous years, all of SRCCON is built around three days of peer-led conversations and hands-on workshops. All the sessions on our schedule are proposed and led by community members who want to help people learn new skills, explore tough questions, or develop new resources to share.

Each day, there will be two blocks of sessions. During those blocks, you’ll have your choice between three of four different sessions:

Sessions at SRCCON 2020 will discuss the many ways journalism needs to change so we can build more representative, equitable newsrooms. We’ll be talking about how to build movements, how to build trust, what opinion journalism means today, where people leave the industry, policing the police, how to not wait for permission and so much more. SRCCON sessions, too, are usually formed by a single question or problem that people want to take on together—if you’ve been struggling with just about any aspect of your work, you can bet others have dealt with it, too.

Session facilitators represent backgrounds and organizations from across the community, and they draw on the experience of participants in the room to guide conversations and collaborative work. At SRCCON, it isn’t about the person who starts the presentation — it’s about everyone who showed up and is in the room.

As a participant, you should be ready to be active in each session. With 75-minutes set aside, there’s plenty of time for discussions, reflection, and even sometimes group exercises and other activities. Every session will have a volunteer welcome person, so if you have to jump in a little late, they’ll help orient you. You can also follow along or catch up in the session Google Docs, also listed on the Eventbrite page.

What are “meetups & activities” and “group conversations”?

We’ve set aside an hour every day of SRCCON to specially feature a set of sessions on topics of interest about life at work and outside of it — hobbies, games, and other activities. These sessions cover a mix of topics and are in different formats, some conversational, some active, some more just listening. Many of you shared your interests with us in the call for participation form, which helped us organize these sessions.

We’ve also made space at SRCCON for emergent conversations and small-group gatherings. Some will be represented in the meetups and activities above, but we know that others will emerge organically throughout the conference, either as study groups, “birds of a feather” meetups, hobby workshops, or anything else. We’ve made sure there’s a time on the schedule or in our Slack to organize these around, and you can get the link to lead one of these on our Eventbrite page.

What are the “Projects, Products, & Research” sessions on the schedule?

Think of these almost as a digital science fair — but for amazing journalism projects. Our Projects, Products, & Research track is here to connect you with tools and ideas to plug into your work right now. We’ve invited the folks behind some amazing journalism projects to introduce themselves in advance, which includes special SRCCON-only videos:

This track is designed to help you learn more about these projects, then connect with them for 1-1 questions or group conversations. So:

How much of SRCCON will be recorded and available after the conference?

We’ll be recording our opening staff welcome, and we’ll make that available to everyone ASAP afterward, to help everyone get oriented to SRCCON and how it works at your own pace!

All of our talks will be recorded too, and available to attendees during the conference. We also have some fun ideas on how we’ll be making them available after the conference too (think: watch parties). Stay tuned for more on this after SRCCON, and once we take a breather.

We will not be recording any of our sessions, though some of them will have live transcription during SRCCON itself. Transcripts will be available during SRCCON and only to attendees.

How can I be a great SRCCON participant?

We’ve said it before: SRCCON 2020 is fully online, in the midst of both a global crisis and a reckoning within journalism. We expect that in some ways, it will be unlike any event we’ve held before. What we do know, however, is that SRCCON 2020 will remain a unique, accessible, and inclusive event that hosts frank, challenging, nurturing, and creative conversations that need to be had.

Here’s how we always hope you’ll participate:

This year, at an online SRCCON, we also hope that you’ll help us create a welcoming digital environment by:

Finally, you can help us by only sharing links with attendees.

At previous SRCCONs, some parts of our programming have usually been publicly accessible, such as a live transcript of a session, or our etherpad notes. This year, we’d like to ask for your help to make sure that all of our programming is only shared with attendees. There’s two main reasons for this:

First, it’s extremely important to us that all SRCCON participants are held accountable to our Code of Conduct. While it’s easy to share a Zoom link to a session or talk with a colleague or friend, unless that person registered for SRCCON, they will not have agreed to our Code of Conduct, which puts the community in a difficult position.

Second, just like in-person SRCCON, we’re here to create a smaller environment where you have a chance to get to know each person in your sessions, and so people can feel comfortable sharing about and workshopping difficult challenges in their work or personal life. This year, we deliberately decided to put a similar cap on the number of attendees at SRCCON online, just as we would an in-person event, because we want to maintain that same sense of comfort so participants can still be vulnerable with one another. Similarly, our facilitators are also all preparing for a normal-for-SRCCON sized session. Even if a handful of SRCCON attendees invited extra folks, that’s enough to increase our session sizes by 50% or higher. Please help us avoid this situation.

We don’t anticipate this being a problem at SRCCON, but we wanted to make sure we were both upfront and transparent about our thought process.

I’ve got another question!

If you’ve joined our Slack already, go ahead and post it in our #00-questions channel! If not, send us an email at srccon@opennews.org. We’ll be adding more sections to this FAQ all week long, to give attendees one central location to catch-up!