CW20 Infrastructure

We had already organised registration for the in-person event through Eventbrite. We emailed registrants through Eventbrite to notify them of the decisions that we were making and thereby keep them informed. Because of the unconference nature of the event, we even asked for participant input to our contingency investigation; surveying them to see if they preferred the event to stay as an in person event, move to online or be cancelled.

As we worked to reformat the event and move it online, we gave registrants time to cancel and collect full refunds. We also reduced the cost of the event (from £250 to £50) and issued partial refunds through Eventbrite to participants who wanted to stay and participate in the virtual event. We took the partial refund route in order to maintain continuity with our registrants, but another option could have been to outright cancel the Eventbrite event, issue full refunds and start from scratch. The option to outright cancel the Eventbrite event was worth considering, as an Eventbrite fee would be imposed on registrants if they requested refunds for no longer being able to attend as per the refund policy. (Although we note that Eventbrite eventually added a COVID-19 option as a reason for cancelling registration and requesting a refund, which did not impose a fee on the registrant or organiser.) We also provided guidance and documentation on reclaiming costs to help participants who had already booked their travel to Belfast.

For the in-person event, we had planned to use additional tools such as Slack, Slido and uCONFLY, however for the online event we felt that it was important to minimise the number of platforms that participants had to register with and keep track of. We narrowed our needs down to platforms for video conferencing, a chat system for sharing information and community engagement, and a tool for collaborative note-taking to keep everyone synchronised.

Platforms

Video conferencing

Zoom was very quickly identified as the video conferencing platform that we would use because we had the most experience with it and it had the functionality we needed (scaling and stability with many video-based participants, breakout rooms and easy recording of the event). We initially planned to use a single Zoom meeting room to contain the entire event (with breakout rooms used for the discussion, collaborative ideas, and mini-workshop sessions). However, workshop facilitators also wanted to make use of the breakout room feature for their sessions, which wouldn’t be possible if they were already in breakout rooms. We therefore obtained five Zoom Host accounts in total to accommodate this: one for the main/plenary room, plus four for the mini-workshops which would take place in parallel.

Chat system

Although Zoom has chat functionality, it can be distracting for hosts/speakers and difficult to manage when there are many participants using it. We decided to disable the Zoom chat (except for the case where participants could communicate directly with the meeting host) and direct engagement and communication to the CW20 Slack workspace, as this would allow participants to connect even when the Zoom room is closed. A communication channel that persists outside the meeting is helpful for maintaining access to resources shared, referencing discussions and facilitating community engagement.

We created practical channels for event organisation and communication, such as a #help-desk channel for participants to direct their technical issues to, and private backchannels for the organisers, helpers, and Code of Conduct committee. Participants were able to create channels for their discussion groups and Hack Day teams. Slack also allowed for a more human and informal engagement through the creation of channels such as #pets-at-cw20, #kids-at-cw20 and #outside-my-window-cw20 for sharing photos of our pets, children and working from home environment during lockdown.

Collaborative documenting

The final resource that we needed to decide on was what platform to use for collaborative note-taking - a method for participant interaction and engagement that we learned from communities such as Mozilla Open Leaders, rOpenSci and NL-RSE Meetups. Google Docs was the obvious choice for CW20, as we generate a lot of Google Docs through uCONFLY for the various sessions, and it also has the lowest barrier to accessibility (no need to log in or register and you do not need to know specific syntax or markdown language such as with HackMD). We created a note-taking document for each day which contained the full agenda and all relevant event information, a space for roll call, instructions and links (links to Zoom rooms for parallel sessions, discussion group and collaborative ideas documents, etc.) as can be seen in this example collaborative document.

There were spaces created within the document for people to take notes during the talks and to ask any questions; all of which could be preserved and referred back to in the future. Crucially, general guidance was included at the top of the document reminding participants of the Code of Conduct (and reporting procedure), that the event was being recorded (so to mute any audio/video as necessary), security precautions (warned not to share any of the links publicly to avoid the meeting getting sabotaged by “Zoom-bombers”), and all the pathways to engagement (notes documents, Slack workspace, etc.). We also provided space for feedback at the end of the document on what worked well during the workshop and what didn’t so that we could adapt for the next day.

One limitation of using Google Docs is that only 100 people can edit and comment at the same time - which we experienced at the start of the event. Although it requires some knowledge of markdown syntax, HackMD can support 200+ concurrent people accessing a document.

Normally, we require CW participants to register on the SSI’s unconference resource management system uCONFLY, which allows them to request instances of Google Docs for their group sessions and vote for the best collaborative ideas. It also allows all of the outputs from CW to be centralised. For CW20, we used uCONFLY purely as an admin tool by creating the templates for the discussion, collaborative ideas and mini-workshop sessions, and generated all of the needed instances ahead of time ourselves. We then collated them via Google Sheets (see this example spreadsheet) which we linked to in the day’s collaborative note-taking document/agenda.

Resources

You can find the full collection of CW20 infrastructure and documentation resources on Figshare.

Resources included that were used behind-the-scenes:

  • An index of links to documentation and event resources for organisers to easily navigate on the day.
  • A duties roster with lists and descriptions of the extra roles we needed for our online event.
  • A spreadsheet for the mini-workshop and demo sessions assignments to demonstrate how we organised parallel sessions.
  • Zoom instructions for events with parallel sessions to make sure all account hosts are on the same page.
  • A checklist to remind the event chair what tasks need to be done before and at the start of the event (such as a reminder to send the connection details, assign co-hosts, record the event and take a group photo).

Resources included that were participant-facing:

  • An example collaborative notes document (with agenda) to guide participants through the event, provide another pathway to engagement and compile questions, notes and outputs from the event.
  • The spreadsheets which we used to facilitate our unconference sessions (discussion groups, collaborative ideas and Hack Day).