HOWTO Communications

Welcome, O’ hearty soul, to the communications team! Your task will be difficult, frustrating, annoying, and ultimately extraordinarily rewarding. This position is on-par with the program committee, placing it one rung below the conference chairs.

As a chair of the communications team, you are the public face of the conference. However, more importantly, you are the representative of the community to the other organizers! Your job is to advocate for all members of the community, equally.

Musings

Communication is a two-way street. It is your job to make sure that both of these avenues remain open and positive for the entirety of the conference and its organization. Often, this requires putting aside your own personal feelings about an issue.

The conference chairs set the organizational goals overall. It is your job to see that these are achieved to the best of your abilities.

In many cases, you will need to step in and act as an official mediator between organizers, the community and organizers, or other vested parties. Because of this you will often be involved in touchy issues. It is therefore extremely advantageous to be strong friends with the other top brass. Additionally, always make it very clear when you are acting as the “Communications Chair” on behalf of the conference rather than as an individual. People you don’t know will nominally defer to the conference authority as long as they feel that their grievances are being heard (your job). Your friends and fellow organizers will understand that they are putting you in an uncomfortable situation that they themselves don’t wish to have. By listening and making your role clear, you should be able to diffuse and resolve most sensitive topics.

Always act with empathy.

Duties Checklist

-Website content management (some html knowledge beneficial) -Graphic design (collateral development, program, t-shirts, banners, signage) -Outreach (developer mailing lists, meetup groups, individual outreach to speaker prospects, attednees) -Activities / Social committee (greeters, floaters to ensure introductions are made, people feel included, etc, newcomers ) -Icebreaker activities (stickers, welcome BoF)

-At event: -Photography, photo sharing site?

Officially, your duties entail the following:

  • Drafting, editing, and sending official emails (no more than 1 per week)

  • Managing social media websites:

    • Twitter

    • Google Plus

    • Facebook

    • YouTube

    • and others

  • One of the chairs needs to be the master of ceremonies (MC) for the conference itself. This involves making sure everything happens on schedule.

  • One of the chairs also needs to be in charge of running the lightning talks.

  • Determining and scheduling session chairs. Ideally, the session chairs are notable folks from the community. This is a nice way of honoring people whose contributions may otherwise go unrecognized.

  • Respond to any emergencies or code of conduct violations

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are one of the more democratic parts of the conference as anyone who wants to can get up and deliver one. That said, as the organizer of them, it is your job to make sure that the rules are strictly adhered to!

Rules:

  • 5 minute talks

  • The first to sign up is the first to present

  • If you aren’t present when your name is called you will be skipped

  • One Talk per Person

  • Have fun!

Here is a Sign up sheet.

Session Chair Organization

See the mailings directory for a sample invitation email to help round up sessions chairs. This should be sent out a week or two prior to the conference to give everyone a really good idea of whether or not they will actually be able to make it to the conference.

Point of Contact

As the communications chair you are the de facto main point of contact for the conference (in addition to the conference chairs themselves). You must be willing to have your email and cell phone number publicly available during the conference.

In the event of an emergency or the need to moderate a code of conduct violation, use common sense and prudence.

Within the teams

To contact all organizers, email to scipy-organizers [AT] scipy [DOT] org.

Weekly phone calls are scheduled with both co-chairs. Anyone is welcome to join.

Outreach

To inform the outside world about the conference,

  • a SciPy conference twitter account has been created. Andy Terrel (andy.terrel [AT] gmail.com) is the owner and should be contacted about password. username: SciPyConf (For 2015: Courtenay Godshall has information (cgodshall [AT] enthought.com)

  • a google+ page SciPyConference has been created and can be reused every year: https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/100948873231627513165/ The current owner of the page is jonathanrocher [AT] gmail.com. Others are currently managers: cgodshall [AT] enthought.com

  • To increase diversity at the conference, there are women coder groups that we want to make sure to contact including PyLadies, LadyCoders, Women Who Code and CodeChix. Also be sure to make a friendly post to the Python diversity list.

Advertising

Online websites that people read are best places to advertise for the conference:

  • scipy.org

  • numfocus.org

  • python.org

  • Enthought.com

Magazine type site are even more effective: * Slashdot * Hacker News (don’t think they do ads) * Reddit.com (r/programming or r/python) * Stacked Overflow (especially https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/ ) * Ars Technica * Wired * NA-digest (https://www.netlib.org/na-digest-html/)

You might also try to do organize join-advertizing with other related conferences:

  • PyCon (in all its state and international flavors)

  • PyData

  • OSCON

  • SuperComputing

Not very many developers read journals or magazines, though occasionally people follow:

Mailing lists (unsent):

Mailing lists (sent, by):