Preparing for SRCCON 2022

As SRCCON approaches, here’s everything you need to know to prepare for the conference and get setup. Once SRCCON is up and running, you’ll spend most of your time on our SRCCON 2022 Participant HQ on Eventbrite, and in our conference Slack.

JUMP DIRECTLY

SETTING UP FOR SRCCON

Accessing SRCCON 2022 talks and sessions

If you don’t have a ticket yet:

Fill out our call for participation form here. Within an hour (if not sooner), we’ll email you a link to buy a ticket to the event or grab a scholarship ticket, if we still have space available. Even if SRCCON is already in progress, you’ll be able to join through Thursday, June 23, so don’t be afraid to join mid-event, especially if you want to catch a particular session or talk!

If you have your ticket:

Make sure you’ve installed Zoom, and jump to the next section, our virtual registration booth, to get setup!

Once SRCCON starts:

You can 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 you can click 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.

Starting Tuesday, June 21, you can sign-up for our conference Slack. We’ll post this link permanently at the top of our Eventbrite page, and we’ll be emailing it to you directly too! Once you’ve signed up, 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.) You can put in three of your passions or interests into the “What I do” section of your Slack profile as conversation starters instead!

Step 2: Add your pronoun pin.

In lieu of physical pins, you can display your pronouns digitally! In your SRCCON Slack account and on Zoom, we invite everyone who’s comfortable to add their pronouns to their display names so they’re always visible. For example, “Sisi Wei (she/her).” Additionally you can add pronouns to your profile’s “pronouns” field too. 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.

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. All direct Zoom links will be posted on both our Eventbrite page and in our Slack.

Step 4: Our contact info for questions.

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

  • #00-tech-support — For anytime you need help with the tech we’re using for SRCCON
  • #00-questions — For any and all other questions you might have

If you have private, safety-related questions, please check out our Code of Conduct and Care and Support page for information about how you can bring up those concerns throughout SRCCON.

Use Slack to network and connect during SRCCON

Every SRCCON is a community—especially when we’re connecting online. Our weeklong event Slack is a space to meet other participants, share and discover projects, follow up on sessions, and find emergent conversations.

Starting Tuesday, June 21, you’ll see the direct sign-up link on our Eventbrite page. Sign yourself up ASAP (including before the conference) so you can start participating immediately. This Slack community will also be a special place that only exists during SRCCON and a couple of days after. Once the conference is over, we’ll give everyone a few extra days to save any resources they’d like from the Slack, and afterward, we’ll close down the Slack.

SRCCON PROGRAM

Talks (Participate live, or on your own time)

Each day of the conference, talks create a common, shared foundation to build upon during our conversations throughout the conference.

Our talk speakers at SRCCON 2022 are:

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

Sessions

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

Just like in previous years, SRCCON is built around 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:

Sessions at SRCCON 2022 focus on important change — whether that’s for the journalism industry, for our workplaces, or for ourselves. We’ll be talking about when newsroom hiring tests are exploitative, covering trans stories with cultural awareness, evidence, and data, how to make organizational changes stick, how to know if you’re ready for a community reporter, 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.

This year, nearly 90% of our sessions have facilitators who identify as women, and over 70% have facilitators of color. 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.

More informal, social sessions

We’ve set aside an hour every day of SRCCON to specially feature a set of sessions about life at work and outside of it — hobbies, games, reflections, 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. Just like other sessions, these will be on Zoom, and links are listed on the Eventbrite page.

FAQ

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 having 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.

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 participants during the conference and for a few weeks after.

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 participants.

What parts of SRCCON can I share publicly on social media, or privately with people who are not SRCCON participants?

These parts of SRCCON are for participants only. Please do not share:

What can be shared:

When it comes to direct quotes, anecdotes, and the knowledge we share with one another as peers, it gets a little more complicated.

At SRCCON, we seek to create a space where people can speak openly and bravely, and learn from each other. That can’t happen if people don’t feel safe sharing their ideas because anything they say could end up online. At the same time, we want SRCCON to be a place that creates real change in our industry. That’s a lot harder if people can’t share anything they hear or learn. Finally, we also believe strongly in crediting people for their ideas, so we cannot default to erasing that credit. So, to the best of our ability, we’re trying to balance these three goals, and we need your help doing the same. With that in mind, here’s our guidance:

How can I be a great SRCCON participant?

Just like previous years, SRCCON 2022 is a unique, accessible, and inclusive event that hosts frank, challenging, nurturing, and creative conversations that need to be had. There are tons of ways for all participants to help us create and reinforce this environment.

How we always hope you’ll participate:

Create a welcoming digital environment:

At in-person SRCCONs, some parts of our programming have usually been publicly accessible, such as a live transcript of a session, or our etherpad notes. At virtual SRCCONs, we’d like to ask for your help to make sure that all of our programming is only shared with participants. 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. We deliberately decided to put a similar cap on the number of participants 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 participants 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.

Be aware of our power dynamics and privilege

As we get ready to share space together online, we suggest all participants check out this resource about power dynamics and inclusion online to get a sense of the different levels of access and power we’ll all bring to this event.

Hosting a virtual conference is also an opportunity for us to reflect on the racism inherent in the digital systems that we rely on for SRCCON and in our day-to-day work. In some Minneapolis neighborhoods (a few miles from our usual venue), many households — over 50% in some areas — go without an internet subscription. Accessing a digital space for SRCCON is a privilege that we must recognize and it is one we get to explore and experiment with together to dream big and talk about the challenges facing journalism and the communities we serve.

I’ve got another question!

If you’ve joined our Slack already, go ahead and post it in our #00-questions channel! During the live event, the best way to get your question answered is to go to that channel. The OpenNews team will be keeping an eye out there, plus, many times someone else has already asked the same question, and the answer will be there already! You can also send us an email at srccon@opennews.org, but during SRCCON, we’ll be much slower to answer via email.