Inclusive Chairing Guidelines – Virtual Meeting Edition

The Committee On INclusion in SDSS has produced a set of guidelines for Session Chairs that encourage an inclusive meeting. The in-person guidelines are available under Charing Guidelines

At the beginning of the Session

• Encourage participants to upload a photo to their Zoom account to help with identifying them in the future.
• Advice for those with slower internet connections: Use the presenter format that should only have the presenter video with their presentation. This should cut back on the bandwidth required.
  • Depending on the goal of a session, in some situations (e.g., discussions rather than presentations), it may be prudent to advise most participants to turn off their video so that those with slower connections can participate more fully.
• Name Badge: Because we don’t have name badges and also might not be able to see each other, we want to use the display name in zoom as a virtual name badge. At the beginning of your session, you will need to remind folks to make this modification by clicking on “participants” along the bottom of the screen and then clicking on their own name on the participant list to edit their name. The name change will ensure that pronouns can be used and that the guideline for encouraging ECR participation is adhered to. The changes could include the following:
  • Add your pronouns, e.g., she/her, he/his, they/them
  • Indicate if one is an Early Career Researcher with the letters ECR, which we take to include all students and postdocs
  • Those of us on COINS will also place COINS by our names
  • Other leadership can also indicate themselves:
    • AC = Advisory Council,
    • MC = Membership Council,
    • CoCo = Collaboration Council
• Name Badge Script: Name badge reminder: please indicate your pronouns in your display name. Also please indicate if you are an Early Career Researcher with the letters “ECR”, which we take to be all students and postdocs.
• Remind everyone to keep themselves muted (audio and/or video) throughout the talk. As hosts of the meeting, you have the power to mute people (should they forget) and should do so.
• (Feedback from 2020 Meeting:) Remind participants to refrain from chatting in the zoom chat; the in-person equivalent to this would be having a loud conversation because this pushes a notification to all attendees. Such actions are actively distracting from the presentation and are disrespectful to the presenter.
• Enable Live Transcription for the hearing-impaired. Check that the session is being recorded.

During the Presentatations

• Time Warnings: We will not have the same physical means of giving/showing/acknowledging time warnings. But it is important that we stick to time for this conference. There is no perfect solution, but we recommend verbally interrupting the speaker with 5/3/1 minute warnings (as appropriate) as the least disruptive option. Another option is for the chair to change their background to contain a visual time warning, which may work well if all other attendees are muted and the speaker is able to see the chair’s video. We expect that feedback on these options will shape recommendations throughout the meeting.
• Balancing the Tasks: You and your co-chair will work together to balance the various needs of the session. It is hard to listen, pay attention to a timer, keep track of hand raising, mute random people, monitor slack, etc. all at one time! One division of duties is the following, but we recommend chairs making their own split:
  • Speaker Chair: starts the block zoom recording, welcomes the audience, introduces the chairs, reminds the audience to mute themselves and how to ask questions, introduces the speakers, and keeps them on time
  • Zoom Chair: monitors the chat for questions, reads or calls on people for the questions that have been noted in the chat window, monitors the time during the question period
  • Both Chairs: help monitor their session’s slack channel for at least the rest of the meeting, or however long the discussion is active
• At the mid-point of the session, record the number of attendees.

Questions and Answers

• Questions should be posted through the zoom chat feature (click on chat on the bottom of the zoom window), preferably only to the Zoom Chair (i.e., not Everyone), to minimize distractions.
• The chair should keep in mind the general Chairing Practices when deciding what order to read questions or call on askers.
• In general, questions should be held to the end of the talk. If you run out of time for all questions, encourage the askers and speakers to interact over the session’s slack channel.
• Recording question askers …

Zoom Settings that are helpful (draft)

Accessibility

• Enable live transcription for the hearing impaired (this will also record a transcript that can be posted alongside video)
• Enable automatic recording
• Enable auto-saving of chat (for questions)

Avoiding Issues

• Use a zoom password
  • Provide a single link in email communication (that has the password endcoded)
  • Only post the Zoom Room link on public-facing spaces
• Mute all participants upon entry, both audio and video
• For formal sessions, limit screen-sharing to hosts/co-hosts

Acknowledgements

• The initial document was made by COINS prior to the 2020 Collaboration meeting.