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# System prepended metadata

title: Attendee Participation and Safety

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# Attendee Participation and Safety

## Participation
* Open Zulip to participants?
    * It seems like no limit to users for the free plan (limit on storage)
    * We should add people to Zulip at least a few days/week before the conference. They can introduce themselves earlier and resolve technical issues.
* How can we encourage discussion?
    * Prompt/ organise channels for different convos?
    * Q&A? (how will we organise this?)
    * When people register, they have a text box that they can fill out to introduce themselves and ask any questions (this will just be viewed by us)
        * Get's people in a participative mood
        * Helps filter out trolls
        * If we see multiple people interested in the same topic (ex: Python), we could start a topic stream on Zulip for smalltalk
        * They can ask us any questions
    * Make it as clear as possible how things will work so people know what to expect 
    * Participants will participate through Zulip (rather than through a seperate video call)
    * We should make sure to be responsive and also set the tone (eg friendly, lot's of emojis)
* Accessibility
    * closed captions for presentations? https://zoom.us/accessibility Might be possible at youtube too?

## Safety
* Encourage people to read the CoC
    * Link to code of conduct in registration email
    * Add a checkbox to form for people to confirm they've read it
* Have key message (positive vision) embedded everywhere: announcement of details/ registration on website, in registration form/ email/ form/ post on zulip at the start
    * Sometimes people online can be a bit more rude than in person - any way to mitigate that?
        * RC put some extra guidelines in an announcement, maybe we can put something like that in the CoC or somewhere 
        * Maybe some version of the social rules
    * CoC can be linked to 

* Maybe there are trolls? => Need the ability to easily block people?

* Some people might violate CoC and we want to give them a warning => Need the ability to mute people on Zulip (except for a thread with us)

* How should people report CoC violations and who will address these? It looks like previously we had a form on the website [here](https://www.enthusiasticon.de/coc/). Will this work well again this year?
    * Have people message us
    * update the CoC

* How to handle pronouns
    * Put peoples pronouns in Zulip like Recurse Zulip? Make this optional? Could

* Playbook for how to respond to things that come up

* Update the CoC now we are remote 
    * unwanted/ weird direct messages? (maybe too fine grained?)

* Possibly have guidelines for other rules/ expectations for the space eg are things like politics/ recruitment ok

## Links 
- https://helpfuldigital.com/online-meetings-how-to-run-a-conference-remotely/
- https://miro.com/blog/remote-conferences/ (a very different kind of conference but some interesting snippets about the tech they used)
- https://skillcrush.com/blog/how-to-give-remote-presentations-without-feeling-super-awkward/ (not directly related to participation or safety but kind of like looking at it from a different perspective)
- https://www.sproutlabs.com.au/blog/how-to-run-a-virtual-conference/

## Action Items
- [x] Figure out how to mute people and how to delete people from Zulip (Chris)
    - Apparently email addresses of users are visible. Maybe we should restrict this: [documentation](https://zulipchat.com/help/restrict-visibility-of-email-addresses)
    - It is possible to ban people as an administrator: [documentation](https://zulipchat.com/help/deactivate-or-reactivate-a-user)
    - It doesn't seem straightforward to mute users. Still we can just deactivate them and communicate via email if necessary. It's possible to then reactivate accounts.
- [x] Message Pieter about adding text field to regestration (Chris)
    - It seems possible with pretix: [pretix features](https://pretix.eu/about/en/features/shop). I went ahead and asked Pieter if he has any insight too.
- [x] Check accessibility features (youtube/ zoom) (Chris)
    - Youtube only supports livestream captions for channels with over 1,000 subscribers (we currently only have ~30). [youtube closed captioning](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en)
- [x] Update the CoC (how to escalate issues, read through and see if anything else needs to change) (Nasreen will do a pr)

- [x] Come up with key message 
- [x] Prepare decisions for Friday's meeting:
    - [x] key message
    - [x] registration form: include the key message, check mark for CoC, intro from them, questions for us
    - [x] having guidelines/ expectations for attendees (a few bullet points, not too long, eg politics, @ing all)


- [ ] zoom accessibility possibilities?

When we decide more on the conference format:
- [ ] Draft text to clarify how conference will work on the website (logistics)
- [ ] Draft guidelines/ expectations for the space
- [ ] Draft internal playbook of how to deal with any issues


## Other notes
* Noticed !!con has a section of their CoC for speakers. I know something came up like this last year (a speaker got in touch just before the conference to ask about something they wanted to include).  I can't remember what happened.  I'm not sure if adding something like this would be helpful in that case anyway
* https://techworkerscoalition.org/community-guide/ Their CoC also has their values and expectations around using their online space (eg no @ing all)
* I joined a slack group that had a welcome bot message with channels to join + info about how they function