Photo: Erik Westra

SRCCON 2018 • June 28 & 29 in MPLS Support OpenNews!

All About Our Call for Participation Process

We’ve experimented with different ways to allocate tickets over the last five years. This year, we used a call for participation form with one way to tell us everything about how you’d like to participate, from bringing your experiences and expertise to hands-on sessions to applying for a scholarship. In April, the session proposal and scholarship application sections of the form closed. On May 14, we re-opened the form for applications to participate and purchase a ticket.

We’ve selected sessions already, and were able to expand the number of tickets available at SRCCON so we’re doing another round of this call for participation process! Details about the process are below.

What Is The Call for Participation?

We’re using a call for participation form this year as a way to involve folks as participants in every aspect of SRCCON. In April, the form is how folks proposed sessions, applied for a scholarship, and told us that they’d like to attend. We’ve posted our list of accepted sessions, and since then we’ve been able to find more space in our venue and open up more ticket spots at SRCCON. So we’re re-opening the form, this time for attendance only. It’ll remain open till all our tickets are gone.

How Does It Work?

Our call for participation form for attendees re-opened on May 14. This form is how we will allocate tickets until we’ve distributed them all. Applications will be reviewed by OpenNews staff on a rolling basis (three times a week). We review applications to ensure that there will be a range of experiences and perspectives present at SRCCON.

We want to hear from everyone! Returning SRCCON attendees, folks who have never participated before, from newsrooms of all sizes, from under-represented backgrounds, from outside of journalism. The SRCCON crowd is always a mix, and the couple of questions we have help us ensure the crowd will have a lot of different perspectives to share.

Who Should Apply?

Anyone who would like to attend SRCCON! The majority of SRCCON participants are the developers, designers, journalists, and editors who collaborate on open technologies and processes within journalism. Participants come to SRCCON because they are working to change journalism for the better, whether that be pushing for more inclusive processes, bringing outside technical perspectives into the newsroom, or developing new ways to engage and inform readers.

Our participants represent organizations ranging from massive to tiny, and come from all over the US and many other countries. Some SRCCON participants also come from outside of the newsroom, including education, journalism nonprofits, technology, government, libraries, the arts, and more.

When Will I Find Out Whether I Am Invited to Attend?

You will find out about your application within a few days. We’re going to review applications on a set rolling schedule:

If you need more time than that to purchase your ticket, you can just let us know, but we’re setting this schedule out in advance to help folks plan around it.

What Happens If I Am Offered an Invitation to Attend?

If you are offered an invitation to attend, we will send you a link to purchase a ticket for $225 plus fees. We’ll be glad to see you in Minneapolis!

What if I need a scholarship?

Unfortunately, we already allocated all of our scholarships in the first round of this process. If there’s anything we can do to help you make the case to fund your trip to a boss or other source of support, please just let us know.

Why are you allocating tickets this way?

We keep the size of SRCCON intentionally rather small, 300 people this year, and we’ve experimented with different ways to allocate tickets over the last five years. This small size means that we have to be intentional about equitably distributing tickets and ensuring that there are a mix of perspectives and skills at SRCCON. Our call for participation form will help us understand who would like to take part in SRCCON and what you want to get out of it. With those responses, we’ll work to create a schedule and audience that reflects the dynamic interests and needs of this community.

Who can I contact if I have further questions?

You can reach the whole SRCCON team at srccon@opennews.org.