Organizers

From IndieWeb

Organizers Meetups (and Organizers Summits) are half-day events held before IndieWeb Summits, and often quarterly before IndieWebCamps, for anyone who wants to help organize an IndieWebCamp or Homebrew Website Club meetup, and especially for those have organized an IndieWeb event in the past two years. We recognize that requiring past organizing experience can be an explicit barrier that may reinforce systemic inequalities (racism, sexism, etc.) and explicitly welcome to Organizers Meetups all individuals who identify as BIPOC, non-male, non-cis, or any marginalized identity, independent of any organizing experience.

Proposal: Have you volunteered at a few IndieWebCamps? Ask an organizer for an invitation.

Proposal: make "organizer" more present tense (active organizers) to emphasize/focus/encourage more active organizing (as well as empower new folks rather than just folks that have been around, with the goal of being more forward inclusive and less insidery). Specific changes:

  • from co-organized an IWC (ever), to past 2 years
  • from organized HWCs in past two years, to past 12 months

Thoughts?

  • +1 Tantek Çelik - I’m especially interested in thoughts/feedback from folks who would opt-out, would it be a relief, a feeling of being left out, or encouragement to be more active from now til the next Organizers meetup/summit?
  • +1 gRegor Morrill
  • +1 David Shanske
    • I propose adding "or actively organizing an upcoming IWC" to the first condition. For example, while Eddie Hinkle might otherwise lapse in 2018-12, he is actively organizing 2019/Online.
    • I'm someone who would be opted-out by these changes and I'm OK with that. It's a little bit of a relief, in the short term (I might feel more freed-up to work on personal things) and in longer term I think it would encourage me to organize again.
  • +1 (with caveat) Eddie Hinkle - I think it helps to aid encouragement. With a strict view of those new changes I would be opted-out. However, I think if you embrace those rules an exception should be if they are actively planning another event (such as IWC). HWCs can be tricky because they could be "planning" an HWC for a long-time which should be discouraged since it shouldn't require as long as an IWC to plan. While the exception would keep me as an Organizer, more than it being about me, I think it embraces the spirit of the rule which is focusing on the present/future over the past.


next

The participants in the 2017 Organizers Summit (before IWS) decided that more frequent (than yearly) Organizers Summits could be beneficial.

Next Organizers meetups/summits:

The most recent Organizers Summit was 2018-06-25, a day before IndieWeb Summit 2018.

The most recent Organizers Meetup was 2019-09-27, a day before IndieWebCamp NYC 2018.

If you're planning an IndieWebCamp between now and the next summit, and want to organize an Organizers Meetup beforehand, drop a heads-up here linking to your IndieWebCamp's planning page with details about a proposed Organizers Meetup.

Issues

Collect issues here until an agenda page for a specific organizers event is created.

2020 and the Online IndieWeb Meetups

With the increased physical isolating that has occurred in 2020, how can we iterate on our various offerings in an online medium.

  • IndieWebCamps
  • Homebrew Website Clubs
  • Popup IndieWeb Sessions - having an IndieWebCamp like session by itself...not part of a camp.


Discord

Discuss whether #indieweb-chat should be bridged to Discord or other platforms where logs are available indefinitely

Photo Policy

Urgent for upcoming IndieWebCamps:

  • Photo permissions lanyards per 2018/Berlin/Organizers#Lanyards_for_Photo_Preference:
  • Need a formal photo policy
    • all photos released in public domain
    • explain opt-out
    • include steps for asking for photo removal
    • some generic way to indicate red/yellow/(none/default/black) lanyard/sticker
  • Possible Photo Policy indicators:
    • red lanyards for no photo
    • yellow lanyards for ask
    • plastic badge holders with a hole for the lanyards to clip onto
    • Reusable Hello My URL IS rewritable badges
    • Good option for this is the PVC material that is used for ID badges
  • Price Estimates – figure out a solution that organizers can just go order:
    • Different lanyards, paper tags, plasitc holders $..05-.10 each
    • Printed different name stickers $.25-40 (bulk discounts)
    • Reusable plastic wipe or magnetic name tags $2.00 - we could even print some tiny IWC logo stickers to adhere to the name tags.

Accessibility statement for events

Tantek Çelik: 2019/Berlin is/was the first IndieWebCamp with an explicit Accessibility statement.

Should we come up with a general venue accessibility statement for IndieWeb events? (IWC, HWC, Summit)

Should we at least put "Accessibility Statement" on a template so IndieWeb event organizers at least state something then leave it up to each event's organizers?

Goal: ship one for Summit.

Inclusivity statement for events

Tantek Çelik: review inclusivity statement, get consensus (resolve any issues), establish for future IndieWeb events

Goal: ship a draft one (that Organizers in general are willing to stand by, for a specific IndieWebCamp and the next Summit)

  • thread of suggestions for a more inclusive conference: https://twitter.com/holly/status/1139212302086037504
    • "Women, and especially #WomenInTech -- what do you want to see from events and festivals (eg free tampons in toilets, code of conduct etc)? Writing an article, may quote you!" @holly June 13, 2019
  • Inclusivity: Make sure hotels or other equivalent accommodations are within easy access of any IndieWebCamp venue, ie avoid making “camping” the only or primary overnight accommodation per https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/1152387776236675079
    • "How to make your event uninviting to people who wear makeup or menstruate: go camping 🙊" @taravancil July 20, 2019

Code of Conduct Updates

Incorporate XOXO CoC Improvements

Tantek Çelik: I'd really like to improve our Code of Conduct along the lines of the XOXO Conference code of conduct specifically including the XOXO CoC points about "reverse racism" etc. starting with "XOXO prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort." as a way to pre-emptively combat the false equivalency behavior that Facebook is documented as engaging in / supporting in https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-while-black-zucked-users-say-they-get-blocked-racism-discussion/2859593002/

Evaluate if/how to apply Code of Conduct for outside events

What do we do if someone shows up at an IndieWeb event who has done things outside of IndieWeb events that would be considered a violation of the CoC? There was some discussion at lunch after 2018/Organizers and then occasionally in #meta [chat log links needed] about this.

  • 2018-09-02: What would we do if it was reported that someone had been harassing others via their own site or a federated service like Mastodon?

Add Inclusion Page

Tantek Çelik: Would be great to also add a page like https://2018.xoxofest.com/inclusion perhaps at inclusion and feature it in the Code of Conduct.

Minimum Viable Organizing

Tantek Çelik: With many years of experiences with IndieWebCamps and related events, there are some patterns as to what helps things succeed, and what causes things to either fail (not happen), have several under-participation (less than 5?), or drop a lot on the floor (unfulfilled potential).

We should have an open and honest discussion about what it actually takes for minimum viable organizing of an IndieWebCamp, including actual risk mitigations, not just a low bar of "viability", and decide if we want to have explicit requirements on what can be called an "IndieWeb" event (whether meetup, IndieWebCamp, Week etc.), and what those should be (based on successful examples).

Key patterns / potential sources of concern:

  • solo (or de-facto solo) organizing
  • non-participation in community (not available in chat, not active on wiki)
  • not detail oriented
  • first time organizer as primary organizer
  • ...

Peripheral concerns:

  • not own your data (credibility gap: if an organizer is not (even) owning their notes, are they really credible to be organizing an IndieWebCamp?)
    • require organizers to also post Indie event posts?
  • ...

Possible approaches:

  • Make a list of requirements to call something an "IndieWebCamp" or otherwise "IndieWeb" event (IndieWeb Week etc.)
  • Keep events only in Planning (not listed on Events) until requirements are met
  • ...

Patterns of success:

  • Mentoring new organizers
  • What is an ideal number? 3? 4?
  • What are ideal divisions of labor?
  • ...

Future Meetings

Previous Organizers Summit session

Martijn van der Ven: I think we discussed doing it quarterly, or at least three times a year aligning with major IWCs, at the last Organizers Summit. This still makes a lot of sense to me. Though maybe it has been failing because planning an actual get together the day/night before an event is hard, and we should decouple it from the “major IWC” mark?

IndieWeb Community Infrastructure

  • What services are essential for running the IndieWeb community resources, and who has access to them?
    • Content
    • Domain name(s)
      • Who has access to indieweb.org, can configure the DNS, etc?
      • How can access to these be split amongst several people?
    • Communication
      • Who can manage the Slack server / channels?
      • Who can manage the IRC channels?
        • It looks like we have several +o people. Are they all listed as Founders or equal on ChanServ?
        • all ops are in US timezones and thus not available on EU mornings (discussed 2017-12-17 due to small spam-wave on Freenode)
        • Is there anything to gain from registering with Freenode? (or has this been done already?)
      • Is there any managing we have to do for the Matrix bridge?
      • How quickly could a new Slack bridge be created if Loqi goes down? The bridge code is available on GitHub.
    • Official channels
    • For projects we depend on, e.g. the Slack bridge, should they be mirrored to the indieweb GitHub account? That way the community has them even if the original author decides the remove their repository.
    • Third parties we depend on? Can more of these be self-hosted?

Kid Friendliness

For IWC organising, is it interesting to state kid friendliness somewhere?

We should set a goal that IndiewebCamp Events are all ages

  • encourage guardians to bring children
  • recruit participants among youth groups
    • Girl Scout troop was to attend IWC New Haven
    • The IndieWeb Meet-Ups (formerly HWC) by the Elm City Webmakers will move to Center for Adaptive Learning. This organization provides computer training to adults and youth. They also distribute gently used laptops to New Haven residents.
    • See the Mozfest YouthZone for ideas

Travel Assistance

Tantek Çelik

  • how well is it working?
  • how can it be improved? donations, applications, reviews, approvals, etc.

Aaron Parecki

  • Should this be available for any IndieWebCamp? or just Summit?
  • How can we formalize this as an ongoing thing, either as a standing fund for any IWC or as an annual Summit thing?
  • We need to document and publicize the process for applying, reviewing, and approving requests
  • We should try to get matching donations when we can

Greg McVerry

  • We should make a child care fund ticket choice for 2019-2020 events

    • Unfortunately even full-time employed women are still the lead parents in most families. Trying to get a women over 35 on a panel can be tough. We are missing their valuable insights.Fiona McAndrew

    • Many people purchase all ticket types to support. Why not give more opportunities to donate?
    • Childcare is a major roadblock for conference participation
      • Fund could be used for underrepresented: remote attendees, local babysitting in PDX, or for people traveling

Evaluate barrier of entry to wiki / wiki use-case

Added by: Martijn van der Ven

This came up in relation to diversity, mostly regarding how accessible the community is to new entrants. Please read the discussion in the #indieweb-meta chat channel from 2018-09-01, 15:12 UTC, to about 17:08. Some choice bullet points and quotes:

  • Aaron Parecki asked Jon if they could add their feedback on diversity to the wiki. This is a relatively common thing within the community to do: putting stuff on the wiki is an established workflow, and so is asking others to contribute to the wiki.
  • Jon pointed out that this adds some definite barrier of entry for people. They had to go through multiple steps – taking a good 20 minutes – to add something to the wiki. Something they had already thought to have communicated through chat.

    • The barrier restricts participation to the current non-diverse group of insiders. The default response of “put it on the wiki” immediately confronts outsiders people with this barrier. I’ve talked with more than one person who checked out the Indieweb chat room and had the reaction that it was a really hostile place because of this and so decided not to get involved.

    • the situation was somebody (me) who’s not in the core Indieweb community had some suggestions about how to make it more diverse. The response was to ask me to put it on the wiki. Requiring IndieAuth is a barrier to the group getting suggestions from a outside the core. No matter what the purpose of the wiki is, that’s going to be a problem for diversity

  • Martijn van der Ven feels that the solution depends on whether the wiki is meant for this type of feedback or not. And that the barrier to entry should be adjusted depending on that.

    • my point is that the solution to the situation depends on us deciding what the wiki is for. Either we lower the barrier for wiki edits, or we stop asking people who aren't assimilated in to the community to put their feedback on the wiki.

  • Aaron Parecki clarifies that the existing barriers (mainly the IndieAuth/RelMeAuth requirement) are there by design.
  • Martijn van der Ven is especially interested in hearing from Organizers who have helped onboarding new users on the wiki. Tantek Çelik and Greg McVerry come to mind.
  • The wiki used to be the way to register for IWC, so this barrier made sense to help restrict to creators or their apprentices. At 2016, we started selling tickets so this wasn't a barrier for IWC. Currently, I think this barrier primarily serves to keep spam off the wiki. I'm open to the idea of opening registration to the wiki somehow. I know that's probably not trivial and makes more work for organizers (some coding to make regular + IndieAuth sign-in work, moderating spam accounts), but maybe it's worth it? gRegor Morrill 22:19, 2 September 2018 (PDT)

Promoting Events

Tantek Çelik: Let's improve how we promote our events, towards goals of:

  • increasing participation overall
  • especially increasing diversity of participation
  • especially increasing breadth of generations represented

Some ideas:

  • Set dates farther in advance
    • e.g. for IWS 2020, set dates *before* IWS 2019, and at least a venue/date confirmed *before* next year's XOXO for the *next* IWS (2020)
    • Design, print, distribute "save the date" postcards
      • e.g. during IWS and XOXO where people are motivated to plan a trip back to Portland ASAP
      • or without a date/venue, and get people to put their address on them and offer to mail them out when we know the date & venue!
    • The sooner we can send "save the date" announcements/card, the sooner that folks interested can blockout the dates on their calendar so that when it *does* come to decision time months later, they find they have the time to go (and have not accidentally scheduled something else that weekend)
  • Make postcards to hand out in person
    • 1. designer for "save the date" post cards
    • 2. printing a whole bunch of them in full color
      • we could also create a *physical mail* sign-up list for people to receive post-cards when we know the date and print cards later.
    • 3. pre-stamp cards for mailing said post cards to said people signed-up
  • Participate in diverse events (like XOXO) and hand out "save the date" post cards etc.
    • XOXO
    • WordCamp
    • ... other diverse and broad generations spectrum events for creatives
  • "Save the date" stamp to stamp the backs of stickers, along with the classic "library date" stamp for start-end dates!
    • allows cheap just-in-time re-use of existing generic IWC sticker stock, and customizing for any event in the future as soon as its dates are known!
  • reach out to computer science programs at community colleges in the area
    • Historically this hasn't made a positive difference, e.g. New York. It does inflate no-show sign-ups though.
  • Find out what organizations are already focused on diversity and tech. They exist in every city. Join these organizations and listen. Then invite.

Thoughts?

  • +1 to physical flyers or postcards {jgmac1106}. Made a difference in New Haven

Homepage Update

Added by Tantek Çelik

Update Homepage Before Summit

Are there minor updates (that don't require a big redesign and testing) we can make to the home page before Summit to address some issues / concerns?

Background:

Greg McVerry We still need to simplify the wikify page as much as possible and make a link or section on the homepage. We almost always have to run an impromptu session on Saturday on just signing up for wiki and chat. Make this a major part of join IndieWeb section

  • Tantek Çelik It's already documented on Getting Started - what improvements would you suggest?
  • Tantek Çelik The "almost always have to run an impromptu session" is better addressed with emails before the event repeatedly encouraging and showing people how to sign-up for chat and wiki.

Greg McVerry Scrub homepage of jargon

  • Decentralization
  • monoculture
  • scratch your own itch
  • self-dogfood
  • UX
  • protocols
  • formats

Tantek Çelik +1


Tantek Çelik: we should elevate the fact that IndieWeb is a community, not some professional polished thing people just show up to and expect to be mature/done.

Progress On Three Onramps

What kind of progress can we make iteratively on:

?

2018-2019 Keynote Speakers

What is the issue for this section? - Tantek Çelik

Using date ranges between the 2018-2019 IndieWeb Summit.

non-profit organization

Proposer: Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki: As the community grows, having a formal organization could benefit us in a few ways. There has been some talk in chat of a "bug bounty" program or having a fund to support individual projects. While I don't think IndieWeb itself should become a formal organization, there is definitely an opportunity for other individuals to form adjacent organizations to handle things. Greg McVerry: I am applying for federal grants and there wasn't an organization or person I could point to or include.

examples:

  • Ruby Together "Ruby Together is a grassroots initiative committed to supporting the critical Ruby infrastructure you rely on"
  • Open Together "A system for Open Source

related discussion:

Interested:

Establish an IWC/training for University with Domains of Owns One Projects

Proposer: Greg McVerry,

  • Greg McVerry: There are a number of college administrators who have contacted us about trying to include IndieWeb into their Domain projects. David Shanske and Chris Aldrich through around the idea of an IWC for this audience. May just want to think about a: are we ready? b: best approach to help.

IndieWeb Community Infrastructure

Proposer: Martijn van der Ven

Currently the IndieWeb (as an organisation) is using several services, but it is not always clear who to contact about which part. It may be good to compile a list of third-parties that are depended upon, and who the contacts are for those.

Possible discussion points, taken from the running issues:

  • What services are essential for running the IndieWeb community resources, and who has access to them?
    • Content
    • Domain name(s)
      • Who has access to indieweb.org, can configure the DNS, etc?
      • How can access to these be split amongst several people?
    • Communication
      • Who can manage the Slack server / channels?
      • Who can manage the IRC channels?
        • It looks like we have several +o people. Are they all listed as Founders or equal on ChanServ?
        • all ops are in US timezones and thus not available on EU mornings (discussed 2017-12-17 due to small spam-wave on Freenode)
        • Is there anything to gain from registering with Freenode? (or has this been done already?)
      • Is there any managing we have to do for the Matrix bridge?
      • How quickly could a new Slack bridge be created if Loqi goes down? The bridge code is available on GitHub.
    • Official channels
    • For projects we depend on, e.g. the Slack bridge, should they be mirrored to the indieweb GitHub account? That way the community has them even if the original author decides the remove their repository.
    • Third parties we depend on? Can more of these be self-hosted?

Notes

Interested

2017 Next Time

From: 2017/Organizers#Task_List

  • Discussion channels
    • add bridged -meta
    • keep wiki edits in -dev
    • add bridged -wordpress
    • update #indiechat topic to direct people to #indieweb-chat
  • Logos
    • consensus they're a good idea
    • need to be well-designed, consistent
    • used in footers of websites, github, icons, stickers
  • Community Repos
    • new criteria for moving in (and possibly moving out) repos to (and from) the indieweb org repo on GitHub
    • have adaptable thresholds for projects that might need the extra nudge (and that do not allow much plurality anyway) like WP plugins
    • aaronpk will look at his repos and possibly move things out. Put out a call to others to look at their repos to?
  • organize next iterations on Nov 3 (before IWC Berlin)

Food

  • Capture food preferences/requirements for IndieWebCamp tickets, OR at a minimum express up front what the food provided will be, e.g. OSBridge was very upfront that only vegan food was provided for lunch (if folks want to supplement with their own they can do so)

Sustainability

Postmortems

Post mortems of IWCs that had particulrly low participation:

  • 2019/New_Haven post mortem - what happened and what could we do better next time?
  • 2019/Vlissingen post mortem - what happened and what could we do better next time?

planning considerations

When planing an Organizers Summit or Organizers Meetup the day before an IndieWebCamp, consider:

  • Location requires good internet for streaming
  • Some kind of conference room microphone or professional video-conference setup (Mozilla locations have Zoom)
  • time: due to the international nature of the community, good times are mornings on the US west coast and evenings in Europe (e.g. 2017/Organizers was at 09:00 PDT (UTC-7) == 16:00 UTC == 18:00 CEST (UTC+2)

Events Issues

session migrated to Organizers/event_pages

Events Brainstorming

section migrated to Organizers/event_pages

Brainstorming

Below is my brainstorm for a How To section for this page after our discussion at 2018/NYC/Organizers.

Each new meetup page would also include a link to this How To section and a note that attending organizers can add urgent issues directly on that page. gRegor Morrill 14:20, 27 September 2018 (PDT)

Meeting Format

When hosting an organizing meeting the agenda should delineate between event planning and meta discussions of issues on the organizing page.

Maybe have an agenda with time goals. Facilitating on the ground events and supporting attendees must take precedent so maybe event planning should go first. Remote attendees could then have the expectation that some, or even all, meta discussion time maybe be ceded to planning.

At same time remote participants can better plan their volunteer time to focus on meta issues.

How To

Add an Issue

Everyone is encouraged to add new issues to Organizers#Issues. If you prefer to raise an issue privately, you can contact a community organizer. When adding an issue to the wiki, please include the current date.

If you are an organizer who is attending the next meetup and there is an urgent issue, you can add it directly to the agenda on that meetup's page.

Process Issues at the Organizers Meetup

  • Create an etherpad for the meetup
  • Review the task list from the previous meetup
  • Review the issues on the meetup's agenda and Organizers#Issues to prioritize the sessions
  • Add sessions to the etherpad as they are discussed
    • Copy the issue's wiki text into the etherpad at the time it is discussed, then take notes underneath. This makes archiving easier.

Archive after the Organizers Meetup

  • Archive the etherpad sessions in the Sessions section of the meetup's page, including the original issue's wiki text
    • Remove completed issues from Organizers#Issues. Include a link to the meetup session in the edit summary.
  • Add any todos to the Task List section
  • Add any issues that require further discussion to the Organizers#Issues section

tools

past

These meetups were formerly called Leaders Meetups. At the 2018 NYC Organizers Meetup organizers decided to rename them to avoid the sound of elitism or intentional hierarchy; and because we want to encourage anyone to become an organizer!

2016/Organizers
2017/Organizers
2018/Berlin/Organizers
2018/NYC/Organizers
2018/Organizers
2019/Berlin/Organizers
2019/Berlin2/Organizers
2019/Brighton/Organizers
2019/Organizers
2020/London/Organizers
2020/Organizers
2020/West/Organizers

See Also

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