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i want to talk a little about how i did panel assignments for #FiyahConFringe in case 1) this strategy can help other people plan or 2) anyone has suggestions to refine it in the future https://twitter.com/shaunduke/status/1317859955613999106
because Vida and I were trying to keep things manageable on such short notice, we didn't open up general panel calls--we had a lot of conversations with people we knew about what they wanted to discuss, and drew up a topic list
we always made sure to collect possible participants' time zones while planning, and i made a GIANT chart that showed our twelve available time slots, using EDT (main Fiyah time) as base. subsequent columns showed what that time slot was in UTC, working eastward.
once we had confirmed at least one person for each panel, i organized this into The Playlist. when were people going to be awake? this is why the middle of the program had more people from southeast and east asia, and more participants from africa near the end.
when i had times more or less locked in, Vida reached out to 1) people knowledgeable about that particular topic or 2) people we knew we definitely wanted on board who could speak on a variety of topics, with "hey, it'd be at X:00 for you, can you make it?"
it was tricky in some spots because i had to contend with stacking a LOT of people in UTC +1 (Britain and a large part of Africa) in consecutive panels, which is why we had to ask Zen Cho to be awake at 7:00, but locking panel times to the first signup minimized uncertainty
there's a lot of stuff i'd like to do better next time. one of my biggest regrets is that we didn't get South American participants, whose time zones were optimal for main-con events. if i did this again i'd scout some for the early-shift panels which would be their evening.
i'd also like to pull in some people who are not always directly involved in the sff industry but whose work enriches ours: visual artists, scientists, climatologists, etc.
and because i really, really want to be able to say that we got participants on every continent: if you know someone who works on an antarctic research station, send them my way!
i do think that focusing our recruiting by time zone--looking at a whole bar on the map, northern and southern hemisphere, instead of a radius from a set point--helped us avoid all-one-ethnicity panel and bring panelists from multiple countries into one topic
it was very important to us to also recognize the diversity within regions: to make sure that we were not asking a single person from Asia or Africa to speak for their whole region
