This week we published two new free resources to help you with planning and delivering successful virtual meetings and events: a DEI tip sheet and the next part of our Virtual Events Guidebook. In this post, we tell you a little more about how these resources came to be, and ask you what you’d like to co-create with us next year.
DEI Tip Sheet: Captioning, subtitles, and transcription for virtual meetings and events
One of our recent Community Tools Trials focused on how to caption online events, making them more accessible to participants with hearing impairments, varying language fluency, or commitments that require them to multi-task. We discussed a variety of use cases, including captioning live events without incurring major time or financial costs and how to edit transcripts when an AI didn’t understand jargon or a speakers’ accent. This hour-long session, involving several knowledgeable members of our community of practice, highlighted that there was no one, easy-to-use guide available to help community managers or meeting facilitators choose between the tools or methods currently available. And so we created one!
Our tip sheet offers common definitions and file types, some things to consider before you decide to caption your event, and a decision tree to think through exactly what you need, and the platforms that already exist to help you, free or otherwise.
Recommended citation: Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (2020) DEI Tip Sheet: Captioning, subtitles, and transcription for online meetings and events. Pratt, Santistevan, Woodley, Butland, and Gould van Praag doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4268671
A guide to using virtual events to facilitate community building: Curated resources
In the first part of the guidebook, released earlier this year, we shared 12 “recipes” for online meetings and events, co-authored with several members of our community of practice. We promised at the time that this was just the first of a number of planned sections and we now release the next one.
In this newest section of the guide, we bring together a range of existing resources about event planning, facilitation, transitioning conferences online, and much more. Divided into topical sections of links, we provide short descriptions of each resource so you can easily browse for inspiration or find answers to an existing question that you have.
Again, we worked with several members of our community of practice to co-create this resource, which was put together during an initial online “sprint” followed by asynchronous work on the shared document. CSCCE staff then did a final clean up and check of the resulting document before formatting it for dissemination.
This was our first experiment as a community in curation for publication. To make it happen, we provided rough guidance as to how to curate the links at the beginning of the online sprint so that contributors were aligned, and then they chose which sections of the guide they wanted to contribute resources to. Interspersed with opportunities to talk strategy, roadblocks, and formatting, the result is a 17-page guidebook with 8 sections, including case studies, DEI considerations, and recommendations for facilitation and platform selection.
We’d like to continue the curation experiment, so if you see something missing from the guide, we’ve also released a Google doc version where you can add additional resources as comments. If there’s enough interest we may then release a v2 of this section of the guide.
Recommended citation: Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (2020) A guide to using virtual events to facilitate community-building: Curated resources. Woodley, Pratt, Ainsworth, Bakker, Bennett-Lovell, Bertipaglia, Butland, Guay, Karvovskaya, Lescak, Meier, McLean, Santistevan, Timm, and Vasko doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4270106
What other resources has CSCCE created?
Currently on the CSCCE website we have eight resource pages that currently include:
- CSCCE Community Participation Model
- Scientific Community Profiles
- Hiring / Becoming a community manager
- Being a scientific community manager
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
- Online communities and communication tools
- Organizing community events
- Community champions programs
You can also find us on Zenodo, where we host a community repository of free-to-download PDFs.
Want to co-create with us?
If you have ideas for resources such as tip sheets, guidebooks, or other content that you would like to co-create with us, please let us know by emailing info@cscce.org. We’re currently focusing on the shift to working and meeting online.