Mostly from '08

Role of the Working Group: (over view)
• To co-ordinate workshop, forum, and plenary content before and during SoS.
• To approach potential speakers, make call-outs for workshop propopals, and deal with incoming workshop proposals.
• To decide on program content
• Liase with the Venue Working Group to get rooms for all the sessions, fulfilling requirements of speakers, capacity needs, tech needs etc.
• Find someone to do up program booklet

Number of people in WG:
4-5

Timeline:
This working group was formed when we started planning to have SoS in Newcastle, but started to become really active in the 6-8 months leading up to the conference. Most of the work we did, we did in the last 4 months.
What we did: (main tasks)
1. Wrote and distributed (via emails, letter and phone-calls) call-outs for workshop and forum proposals, as well as actively seeking out people to present at plenary sessions and on forums.
2. Made decisions about all aspects of the SoS program including what content to include in the program, how the days would run, whether each day would have a ‘theme’, how many workshops would be running at the same time.
3. Kept a database of all proposed workshop, forum and plenary content, making sure that we kept track of things from the time they were proposed to the time we put them in the final program
4. The SoS Program booklet; we wrote all the content of the booklet, and organised for it to be designed and printed before the conference.

Things to think about:

• Indig Content:
  - Some of the organisers were Indigenous and this was essential for SoS to be relevant to Indigenous people.
  - It's important to remember that western and Indigenous cultures sometimes place different value on time, and that you'll have to be flexible with locations and times that may change during the conference.

• Decision-making processes:
  - it’s really important to get a good process going from the very start. You will need to be making decisions on a whole bunch of things, the biggest one being which workshops to approve and which ones to turn down. You will definitely receive more workshop proposals than there’s room in the program for. Our process was pretty ad-hoc and could have been much better – we started off just sending all workshop proposals to the SoS e-list as we received them, then discussing them at the next Program Working Group meeting and deciding whether to approve them. This process became impractical when we started getting several proposals a day, and when we had other more urgent stuff to do at meetings. We ended up using a process where workshop proposals were sent to the e-list, and if there was no dissent in 3 days they were considered approved. If there was dissent, they were automatically brought to the next meeting to be discussed.
• Speakers
  - Confirm the speakers for the next day are still coming the day before.
  - We sent emails out through elists calling for content. We also have contacts from last year if you need them.
  - It's really important to keep a record of who has been invited and how likely/far along they are in coming to SoS. We used GoogleDocs to help with this (explained below).
  - The local Indigenous Kattung Sovereign Congress required anyone coming onto their land request permission to do so if they had not received an invitation. It's important to seek your local Indigenous nations and find out the correct protocol for this.
• Room bookings
  - Check the needs of speakers early on; ie projectors, computers, lecture theatre or classroom, inside or outside.. this stuff will impact on what rooms you book.
  - Work real closely with the venue working group; ideally, they will be able to just book out a whole bunch of rooms when the uni agrees to host SoS, and those can be narrowed down closer to the conference.
  - During the conference, you’ll need to have one or two people who are totally onto the inevitable changes, cancellations, misprints or general fuckups that happen – they can let people know about these at the morning plenaries each day and ask people to pass the information on.

Tips: (what we learnt, what was very useful, what we’d do differently)
Google Docs…
We like them. We used Google Docs to create a database of proposed program content, divide it all up into ‘topic streams’ and track the progress of workshops. Everyone from the working group put their hand up to look after one or two ‘streams’ each; this meant liasing with the speakers, making sure there wasn’t any doubling-up on workshop ideas (ie getting two people who each wanted to do a workshop on vegetarianism to get together and co-present), making sure that the speaker bio’s, blurbs, times and rooms for the workshops were all sorted, and finally putting them into the program to be printed.
If you haven’t used them before, google docs are a way a bunch of different people can work on the same document, online, without having to save and send it to each other. You have to aget a google account to use them, but its real simple and you don’t need a Gmail address or anything. Some tips if you plan to use google docs for planning out program content:
- Make sure you save a hard copy regularly (it crashed one time when we were doing a marathon program-making session, no fun)
- Try not to have too many people working on the same document at the same time, it makes things tricky.
- Give workshops a code as well as idenfitying them by their name: when you are working across two or more documents, and changing the names and blurbs of workshops all the time, it is really helpful to have a simple way of referencing workshops. For example, look in the Program Content Database – we gave all our workshops a letter and number code based on the ‘topic stream’ they were from, and the row they were typed into. Check out the instructions on the first page of the database to see how we used the system.

Documents - Working Program:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ptpux9A71bAnmg2B_-K_qPA
Program Content Database:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ptpux9A71bAnQXgBPr2YvEA
All the different pages within the document can be seen by clicking the tabs at the top of the page. If you guys want to use these docs (obviously without all our text in them), the get in touch with us and we will add you as collaborators to the document.