Responsibilities

  • Keep an eye on the IRC channel for your track and copy questions to the relevant Etherpad so that hosts and speakers can easily find them.
  • (optional) Copy other talk-related items to the talk's Etherpad
  • (optional) Copy other conference-related items to the conference Etherpad
  • (optional) Answer conference-related questions
  • (optional) Announce talks and Q&A sessions

The IRC conversations can be pretty fast and difficult to follow. Your help in copying questions and other important points to the Etherpad will be much appreciated by hosts, speakers, and other participants.

Preparation

If you'd like to announce talks and Q&A sessions, we can share a pad with announcements that you can copy and paste.

If you would like to help set the channel topic or moderate the channel, please ask one of the main organizers (bandali, zaeph, or sachac) to add you as a channel operator.

Process

Copying questions

Open #emacsconf-gen and/or #emacsconf-dev depending on your shift and your ability to keep track of multiple things at the same time.

In another window, open the Etherpad for the relevant talk(s). You can find pad URLs on the talk page or in the talk announcement that is also posted on IRC.

When you notice a question posted in IRC, reply to the person and say that you'll copy the question into the relevant pad. If you're using ERC or another programmable IRC client, you may want to make a command that simplifies that process.

Copy the question to the bottom of the question list of the relevant pad and add the person's nick after it in parentheses. Please keep it as a top-level item instead of nesting it under something else. You can reword the question for clarity if needed.

The conversation might be too fast to keep track of, especially if the channel for a track has overlapping discussions. Feel free to ask if people have any more questions for a particular speaker. You can also encourage people to use conventions like starting their questions with Q: or Q-talkid:.

Copying other talk-related items

IRC participants might share interesting observations, links, or feedback. Please feel free to copy them into the Etherpad for future reference.

For Q&A sessions done over IRC, it would also be helpful to copy the answers to the Etherpad.

Announcing talks and Q&A sessions

At the indicated time, paste the announcement into the relevant channel. (This might be automated if we get around to it.)

In case of...

  • Incidents: If someone isn't keeping guidelines for conduct in mind, let us know in #emacsconf-org and we'll figure out how to deal with the situation.

After the conference

We'll review the chat logs and add anything that might have been missed to the Etherpad before archiving it onto the talk page. Thank you!

Check out other ways to volunteer

CategoryVolunteer