December 13 & 14 in Philly Support OpenNews!

SRCCON:POWER closing

Day & Time: Friday, Dec. 14, 2018, at 5:15pm

ERIKA: I felt like a moment where I was calling us to order. We’re going to begin to draw things to a close. So thank you — thank you so much, everyone for being here over these last two days. Just wanted to take a moment to go through some thanks, and actually, to announce a bit of news that everyone who waited until the last part of SRCCON will get to hear first and tell you a little bit more about how we see this work continuing going forward. So, again, just want to start out with thanks and gratitude to you all for these two days. We’ve heard that there’s been a lot of heavy topics that people have been getting into. Power is a difficult and complicated, and layered topic, and folks that have been discussing it, and supporting one another and investigating different dynamics of it over the past few days. So thank you so much for all of that. Thank you for creating that space for one another. I’ve heard that maybe it’s a little bit tiring. I may be also a little bit tired. So I’m going to try to keep this quick and I really appreciate you putting that effort and energy and attention. So there’s a bunch of people who made this event possible. Just want to go through and thank everyone. So those include other volunteers in the gold shirts who you saw.

[ Applause ]

Our friend, Stan, who did stenography!

[ Cheers & Applause ]

Big thanks to the venue for providing this space and a museum!

[ Applause ]

Thanks to the OpenNews staff and the whole SRCCON staff team!

[ Applause ]

Thanks to our sponsors, the news integrity initiative, democracy fund, Vox Media, and JSK Fellowship. Thank you so much for making this possible.

[ Applause ]

Thanks to about a third of you who were facilitators in the group. Thank you so much!

[ Applause ]

Thanks to our speakers as we explore different ways to engage with this topic and research and discussion behind it, and, especially, thanks to Kim for MCing all of the discussions.

[ Cheers & Applause ]

And thanks to all of you as attendees, and participants for folks who hosted dinners, who encouraged friends and colleagues to attend, who donated to make it possible, who asked questions and bought people a drink, and made sure the folks around you were comfortable and able to engage. So thank you all for creating this space together.

[ Applause ]

So we believe that time that we can spend together in person, as a community is really important. There’s difficult questions that we have to get into, there’s networks that got built and strengthened and grow from this time that we have together in person at SRCCON and a range of other events in the community.

So SRCCON:POWER is one of our events. And I can announce the next SRCCON coming up. So SRCCON 2019 will be back in Minneapolis from July 9th through 12th. We literally signed the contract yesterday. So SRCCON is a space that’s about twice this size and just sessions. It’s really a place where you can talk and get into a lot of different dimensions of what it means to work in journalism and technology. We have this conference and its prior iteration, SRCCON:WORK is important because we know the power dynamics and the roles, and the understanding of what it means to be a journalist and what our responsibility is to each other in the world really shapes how we do this work. And so we wanted to have two days just focused on that. That’s also a component of SRCCON if you join us again in July.

But, really, to have these two days together just for that time because we — Kim pointed out that over these two days, we were talking about things that we don’t usually talk about.

These are topics that are always there in how we work in journalism but we don’t usually get to discuss them. In newsrooms, it’s okay to critique a headline or a lead or to argue vociferously about how you’re approaching a story, but talking about power dynamics, our responsibility to our communities, how we go about hiring, how we use technology, how we treat one another as people. Like, what it means to succeed as an organization that’s thoughtful and intentional, and inclusive and equitable — those aren’t seen to be the arguments that people are willing to have in a newsroom but those were the kinds of discussions we were able to have during these two days. That folks were able to challenge one another, to be vulnerable, to ask questions, too up space for conversation and we’re just so grateful to you for creating this space together. For creating this space for one another. So thank you so much for trusting each other and trusting that this was a place where it was okay to get into those topics but there are precious few other spaces in this industry to do that in. So thank you. Thank you so much.

Thinking about moving ahead, it’s great to get to discuss these topics after everyone gets a little rest, maybe. But there’s much, much more work to do and we’re really excited to be in this work with you. If you check out opennews.org/blog, there’s a post where I have some information about concrete ways that are available to support the work that you’re doing in terms of giving feedback, small grants, connecting you to outside expertise, connecting you to potential collaborators. We’re really excited to continue the work that happened these two days. Also, as a few people mentioned on Twitter, we’re excited to talk about how to run events like this. So if you know anyone that’s running a large event, a meeting, that could benefit from some of the strategies that you’ve seen employed over the last two days, talk to us. We would love to work with them. We also have a lot of it documented on srccon.org for how to work. And we’re wanting to document more. So if you want to know more about it, please let us know. So I’ve talked about ways we’ve been able to create space and support one another. One of the things that happened this year that was really wonderful was we opened the first donation campaign many folks in this loom donated and as part of that, talked about how shaped their lives and their careers. And it was wonderful to see how folks who received a scholarship donated back so another person could get a scholarship who really benefited for all those deeply detailed facilitation emails that Ryan sent, and contributed to enabling us to send more of their emails. So we’re so grateful for that support that we received in July. And as it is the end of the year, we’re non-profit, if you go to opennews.org/donate, we would love that support. Oh, my God! People are cheering for donation requests! This really is a different kind of event. Thank you for that, too!

We know that there’s so much more that needs to be done and we are here for you, and we have seen throughout these two days, how we’re all here for one another, too. And we’re so excited about ways to help knit together those connections, and help support you in supporting one another. So thank you for doing that over these past two days, and hope everyone gets a nice rest and we’ll be here for a lot more in 2019, including SRCCON, July 11th and 12th back in Minneapolis! Thank you!

[ Applause ]

KIM: Yay Erika!

[ Cheers & Applause ]