equersa

Volunteering with Equersa

Equersa supports conferences by creating a joint organising committee. These conferences are:

By volunteering with Equersa you will be helping all three conferences at the same time!

Why volunteer?

We want you to volunteer so you can be doing something that:

  1. is motivating to you,
  2. would benefit you in some way (eg. add to your resume), and
  3. will also help Equersa help the conferences.

Commitment to our volunteers

We want to avoid being extractive of our volunteers, and we want to keep them safe from burnout by:

  1. lowering expectations for conference participants if we recognise we are burning out our valuable volunteers.
  2. recognising that while we do expect that initially you can commit, we know that this may change and that you can stop at any time. Life happens, and you are volunteering.
  3. asking that if you can, let us know that you do not want to contribute anymore so you don’t get messages inappropriately.
  4. asking that if you can’t let us know, we may reach out to check in on you and see if you are OK.
  5. asking that if you feel we are being extractive, please reach out to Rowland Mosbergen via his LinkedIn to let him know.

Code of Conduct

The RSE-AUNZ Code of Conduct is designed to provide all participants with community participation guidelines.

Everyone volunteering at Equersa and attending the conference needs to abide by them.

What should you know

We are still welcoming volunteers, especially people connected closely to Africa and Latin America.

We have 4 types of volunteers, with co-chairs having the highest level of commitment, down to reviewers and session chairs having the lowest level of commitment.

Commitment Type Time commitment over 30 weeks Expectations of Role Status
Highest Co-chairs Up to 60 hours / 2 hours per week Organise and oversee all aspects of their conference, plus work on one area. Regularly attend and chair co-working weekly meetings. Provide email responses within 72 hours. Filled
High Organising committee members 30 hours / 1 hour per week Suggest and implement ideas for an area of the conference. Attend some of the co-working weekly meetings as needed (or more if you want to hang out and connect). Provide email responses within 72 hours as appropriate. Still available
Lowest Reviewers 2 to 4 hours total Review submissions for talks, lightning talks, panels and flexible formats Still available
Lowest Session Chairs 2 to 4 hours total Welcome participants to the session, provide information to speakers at the session (including time keeping), thank the speakers at the end of the session. Still available

Meetings for co-chairs and organising committee members

Please note that the weekly co-working meetings are there to:

Different areas for co-chairs and organising committee members

We have a lot of roles available in different areas as we want to have more than one person working on a particular area across all three conferences. As an example we would ideally have three people volunteering for the marketing area that are from Asia, Africa and Latin America. You can find out more about the areas in the table below:

Area Details
Program Organise the themes of the half-days, the schedule, the program (who is doing what and when) and keynotes. This includes organising the reviewers to do the reviews and to pick the speakers for the conference.
Social Media / Marketing Organise / setup the LinkedIn, Mastodon social media accounts, prepare and schedule/send regular social media posts, prepare and schedule/send regular email newsletters via various email lists. They would also help with creating a Justification Letter.
Sponsors/Partners Setup prospectus and branding, finalise prospectus and connect with potential sponsors/partners, interact with sponsors around marketing opportunities and to ensure the provision of promises from the prospectus.
DEI Improve and implement the Accessibility Fellowship program, the micro-grant program ($50 AUD to help attend the conference), and the scholarship program (free tickets).
Technical / Digital Tools Update the github.io website, create a web page that has the schedules for the conferences along with links to show the times in every country, help to source alternatives for slido and other tools used at the conference, such as batch creation of volunteer certificates.
Volunteers Reach out to potential volunteers, help them get onboarded, check in with them to ensure they are getting a benefit. This also includes organising session chairs and reviewers. This includes the translation of pages to Spanish for Latin America.
Social Networking Plan and implement social networking activities such as potential in-person social catchups after the final session of a day, or potential online speed networking (where you meet someone and introduce yourself for 2 minutes each), or other potential ways on how to get people to connect with each other and make a human connection.
Post-conference Write up a summary report, put accessibility fellow reports on the website, organise honorariums, upload videos to YouTube, and provide certificates for volunteers.

How to reach out

Please reach out via Rowland Mosbergen’s LinkedIn if you want to find out more.

To sign up - please send the following to Rowland:

  1. Your name
  2. Your email address
  3. Your current country location
  4. What type of volunteer? Organising committee member, reviewer, session chair
  5. What areas you would like to contribute to (if you want to be an organising committee member) - we don’t have a limit for any area
  6. That you agree to the Code of Conduct

For session chairs and reviewers, we will email you an acknowledgement.

For organising committee members, we will then send you a welcome email after we give you access to:

  1. one of the co-working meetings
  2. our documentation on Google Drive
  3. our Github Project
  4. our Slack workspace
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