Notes from Networking subgroup meeting April 19th 2023

The meeting started with a round of presentations and a quick look at the events list and speaker directory.

Event list and speaker directory

These documents are not and will probably never be complete, so we’ll see how they evolve.

One interesting idea that was put forward in the meeting was to document not only upcoming events but also past events, with lists of speakers and topics, in order to provide inspiration for people who will be planning networking events. Especially events that have been recorded would be valuable to be able to find afterwards.

Experiences from 10 years of a11y meetups in Sweden

The main feature of the meeting was a presentation by Ida Franceen, founder and organizer of the T12T meetups. Usually held in Stockholm, but sometimes in other cities in Sweden – or online – these meetups have become very popular. The community today has about 2500 people in its mail list. The meetups usually gather 50-100 people, sometimes several hundred.

Ida told the history of these meetups, and in particular walked us through the T12T organizer checklist, that is available online for anybody to copy or be inspired by. This checklist is very useful!

Other takeaways from Ida’s presentation:

• It is good to have a group of organizers (approx 5 persons seems to work well) so that the workload can be shared
• Much easier to recruit speakers when you have a date set, and ask for a 10 or 15 minute talk than if date is vague and speakers are expected to speak for longer period.
• Important to visit the venue before the event, so you know about physical accessibility and practical details, such as microphone availability et cetera.
• DO NOT forget to leave time for people to actually meet and talk with each other! The meeting should not end when the last speaker finishes!

Tentative date for next meeting

June 20 at 15.00 CET.

Pär Lannerö volunteers to coordinate this meeting, too.

Topic suggestions are mostly welcome!