Best Practice for making events accessible to more personas

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Summary

This guide documents examples of good practice in making events accessible to a wider set of personas.

Jez Cope Is "persona" sufficiently well-understood to use? Does it need defining or replacing with a term better known to lay-people?

Lack of suitable infrastructure can be a barrier to online participation for some.

Provide hardware that facilitates active participation
- In preparation for the SSI fellowship online selection day, shortlisted fellows get sent headsets to ensure similar sound quality when participating in conversations and discussions as the interaction is a crucial part of the selection process.
Provide financial support to facilitate remote participation
- Open Bioinformatics Fundation (OBF) in 2020 is sponsoring ways to participate in conferences remotely & can cover high speed internet, headsets, etc. as they announced it in the tweet

Run an event more than once to allow for participations from across the globe
- When moving the Research Data Alliance Plenary RDA15 to a virtual plenary, most working group sessions moved to virtual sessions and offered two schedule options to allow for participants in different timezones.
- Most of the Carpentries meetings are held twice, to accomodate participation from across the globe
Be very clear about the time of your event
- To make it easy for attendees to judge if they can join, advertise the event time in several timezones. One way to do this is by adding a link to the set time on a timezone converter such as World Time Buddy.

Set up communication channels and be clear what they are for
- Gallantries workshop used gitter chat to tell the instructor how they are received in the classroom: is the font large enough? is the right content/window shared? can the speaker be heard?
Use chat for quick polls/voting
- NL-RSE meetup allows participants to vote on questions, so that most interesting questions can be answered. This helps a lot when to deal with time constrains and also allows to filter out (short) opinion speaches disguised as questions.
Assign one or more facilitators specifically to watch the chat/ other tools you use to engage
- Collaborations Workshop uses a Google Doc for asking questions, and assigns a helper who organises, clusters and finds duplicates, and fills in answers given by the speaker.
Use status flags if available in your video conferencing tool (variety will depend on the tool used)
Have participants take on specific roles roles (facilitator/chair, note taker, time keeper)
- Example: Inc.com article on meeting roles

Provide an opportunity to test equipment and tools
- CollabW20 offered a zoom drop-in for session facilitators and leads where they could familiarize themselves with zoom to ensure their session will run smoothly. Attendees were able to connect early on the conference day to test out their microphones, screen sharing and connections.
- NL-RSE held office hours in advance of their virtual event to allow people to try out connection and ask questions related to the event logistics.

Create a single master document linking out to all other documents
Linking out to relevant documents
In large documents, cross-link to different parts of the document and create a Table of Contents to aid navigation
Have an agenda to give participants clear expectations of what will happen when
Have a roll call where participants can provide a little information about themselves
- This will also allow you to see who attended which sessions
Provide a "cursor garden" at the top of your document where viewers can leave their cursors
- If using collaborative tools such as Google Docs to take notes for a larger event, many cursors. Everyone not typing and just viewing the document can leave their cursor at the top which reduces activity https://osf.io/f7vzd/ (GoogleDocs)
Make full use of "suggest" mode and comments in Google Docs
Use headings to create a logical, hierarchical document structure
Assign a dedicated note taker for each session

Provide opportunities for networking and social interactions
- Have a channel for chatter and social conversations
- At CollabW20, a dedicated Slack channel was set up to share pictures of pets.
Twitter competitions such as #CollabW20mindfulness

There is a Google Chrome plugin to show line numbers in the Google Doc
When clicking on the person's icon (or animal) at the top of the document, you will jump directly to the place they are editing