If you want to volunteer for Equersa you will be helping the Research Software Asia Australia, the Research Software Africa and the Research Software Latinoamérica conferences - all at the same time!
We are still welcoming volunteers, especially people connected closely to Africa and Latin America.
Time commitment for a regular volunteer is about 1 hour per week for 30 weeks. We will have a regular weekly meeting and you are encouraged to join part of those meetings to help you to connect with others and build a sense of community, as well as to contribute ideas and help out.
If we face challenges in maintaining regular volunteer support, we may need to set lower expectations for conference participants. We would rather push back against conference participant expectations than burn out our volunteers.
We have a lot of roles available in different areas as we want to have more than one person working on a particular area across all three conferences. As an example we would ideally have three people volunteering for the marketing area that are from Asia, Africa and Latin America. You can find out more about the areas in the table below:
| Area | Details |
|---|---|
| Program | Organise the themes of the half-days, the schedule, the program (who is doing what and when) and keynotes. This includes organising the reviewers to do the reviews and to pick the speakers for the conference. |
| Social Media / Marketing | Organise / setup the LinkedIn, Mastodon social media accounts, prepare and schedule/send regular social media posts, prepare and schedule/send regular email newsletters via various email lists. They would also help with creating a Justification Letter. |
| Sponsors/Partners | Setup prospectus and branding, finalise prospectus and connect with potential sponsors/partners, interact with sponsors around marketing opportunities and to ensure the provision of promises from the prospectus. |
| DEI | Improve and implement the Accessibility Fellowship program, the micro-grant program ($50 AUD to help attend the conference), and the scholarship program (free tickets). |
| Technical / Digital Tools | Update the github.io website, create a web page that has the schedules for the conferences along with links to show the times in every country, help to source alternatives for slido and other tools used at the conference, such as batch creation of volunteer certificates. |
| Volunteers | Reach out to potential volunteers, help them get onboarded, check in with them to ensure they are getting a benefit. This also includes organising session chairs and reviewers. This includes the translation of pages to Spanish for Latin America. |
| Social Networking | Plan and implement social networking activities such as potential in-person social catchups after the final session of a day, or potential online speed networking (where you meet someone and introduce yourself for 2 minutes each), or other potential ways on how to get people to connect with each other and make a human connection. |
| Post-conference | Write up a summary report, put accessibility fellow reports on the website, organise honorariums, upload videos to YouTube, and provide certificates for volunteers. |
Please reach out via Rowland Mosbergen’s LinkedIn if you want to find out more.