What’s the schedule?
The convening will take place from June 22nd – 24th, 2021, North American time (June 23-25 in Australia & NZ). The main synchronous portions of the three days will take place for 2-3 hours each day (morning in Australia/NZ, to evening on US/Canada east coast. Following those times, we’ll have opportunities for you to join the other participants in cultural events, so please keep that in mind as well. See more details below.
June 22, 2021
Time converter at worldtimebuddy.comThe meeting will run for 2 hours, with much of that time spent in small groups to explore specific prompts to help us move forward. It will be followed by an optional 30 minute (or so) cultural infusion led by artist and poet Asante Salaam, in which we’ll be hearing about an incredible art project by Édgar Sanchez, who will be joining us to discuss Nueve Arte Urbano.
June 23, 2021
Time converter at worldtimebuddy.comThe Day 2 convening will follow much the same schedule as Day 1, with 2 hours in a workshop format. Following the workshop, you’re welcome to stay for another 30 minute (or so) cultural infusion led by Asante Salaam, in which we’ll get a taste of creole cooking with Shawanda Marie, Culinary Storyteller and owner of New Orleans Creole Story Pot.
June 24, 2021
Time converter at worldtimebuddy.comIn Day 3, we’ll be bringing together the work of the first two days, and over the course of 3 hours (please note that Day 3 is one hour longer than the previous 2 days) we’ll be creating ideas for moving forward together. Following the programming, we’ll closing with music and will keep the virtual doors open for an extra hour of New Orleans music for networking, connecting, and informal wrapping up.
What do we hope to accomplish in this time?
This convening is seen as a first major step in coming together across sectors, organizations, communities, and widespread global regions, and we want to be both practical and realistic in our work. The following are the aims of the convening:
- Create a safe space to share and connect honestly as humans
- Lay the foundations for relationship building and repair
- Building a basis for reciprocal relationships between communities and centers of power
- Inspire radical thinking to rebuild a more just metadata infrastructure
- Build a concrete roadmap for change in the sector and keep conversation going
Zoom Fatigue is real, how’s this going to work?
We hear you, and we agree. And this is an international convening, making it impossible to have all continents represented. For this initial convening, we are focusing on Canada, the US and territories, New Zealand, and Australia to at least make it practical to have some small amount of time we can work together.
There will also be other activities taking place each of the three days that you can do on your own time or that are optional. We’ll have a number of cultural and social events happening as part of our gathering that you won’t want to miss, including inspirational interludes, and a very special social/music event at the end.
While it’s not yet safe to travel, we’ll do whatever we can to bring you a taste of that, virtually hosting this event in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.
We’ll be using Zoom for the synchronous group work, we’ll also be getting creative with Google Docs as well as Miro, both of which should work fine with any web browser.
Photo credit: Wayne Hsieh