There are many ways to take part in SRCCON, and we’ll help you find what works best for you. Our call for participation form is open to tell us how you’d like to take part.
Participation at SRCCON
SRCCON is a hands-on conference, which means that everyone who attends actively participates throughout the event. Our call for participation form is open to tell us what you’d like to bring to the event and what you hope to take back home with you. The deadline to propose a session has already passed, but we’ll keep this form open for attendees as long as space remains available.
We keep the size of SRCCON intentionally rather small at 300 people, and we’ve experimented with different ways to allocate tickets. We’ve landed on this approach—one single form to gather session ideas, applications to attend, and scholarship requests—as the easiest experience for potential attendees and a streamlined process for us as organizers, too.
The small conference size means that we have to be intentional about equitably distributing tickets and ensuring that there’s a mix of perspectives and skills at SRCCON. Our call for participation form will help us understand who would like to take part in SRCCON and what you want to get out of it. With those responses, we’re able to create a schedule and audience that reflects the dynamic interests and needs of this community.
Details about ticket prices
In 2019, we began experimenting with a tiered ticket-pricing system. Accessibility remains a core value for us, and this is our attempt to balance the actual costs of the conference with keeping prices as manageable for attendees as possible. We also continue to offer scholarships to attend.
Here are the tiers (plus Eventbrite ticketing fees):
- $275: This is the base price designed for people who are paying their own way, from small news organizations with fewer than 50 people, or nonprofits with budgets $750,000 or less.
- $395: A new ticket price for people from medium-sized news organizations of 51-250 employees, nonprofits with budgets $750,000-$2 million, and other similar-sized organizations.
- $695: This ticket tier reflects very nearly the actual cost for each attendee of SRCCON and is for people from large news organizations with more than 250 employees, nonprofits with budgets over $2 million, and other organizations that provide full professional-development budgets for employees.
In addition, we also offer a free scholarship ticket as one of the tiers. We have a limited number of free tickets set aside for people who otherwise would not be able to attend, in particular for laid-off and freelance journalists. We also give priority to people who identify as members of communities underrepresented in journalism and technology, such as journalists of color or journalists from smaller and non-coastal newsrooms.
Here’s the most important thing to know about these ticket prices: We want you to choose the one that makes sure you can be at SRCCON 2024. We don’t review who pays what, and we won’t follow up with any questions. If you work for an organization where budgets have already been set or there’s not support available to you, choose a lower price and join us. By the same token, if you budgeted for higher travel costs you no longer have to spend and are able to purchase a ticket at a higher tier, please do. If you’re interested in contributing to a scholarship ticket, please pick the highest ticket tier you can afford. Paying for free tickets and scholarships is something we deliberately build into our ticket tier structure.
We based these tiers on community feedback encouraging us to find ways to share event costs. Ticket funds are a huge part of what makes it possible to organize event with dozens of travel and caregiving scholarships, live transcription, two lunches, dinner, and ample snacks and drinks, and the support of a skilled event team in preparing sessions and constructing a schedule that lets attendees focus on learning and talking together.
If you have any questions at all about ticket pricing, please reach out.
Not just attendees, but participants
At SRCCON, everyone participates in some way. Our hands-on sessions rely on participants who are ready to share their experiences and perspectives. Facilitators create space for in-depth conversations, design exercises, demos, and workshops, and participants bring questions and take ideas back to their newsrooms. In addition to sessions, people help make SRCCON an inclusive, welcoming place by leading group activities, volunteering, and even just saying hi to new friends and collaborators over breaks and activities.
Our call for participation form has a few questions for you about what you’d like to bring to SRCCON and how we can support one another. We look forward to seeing what ideas folks have and how we can make them possible during our days together. As one prior attendee put it, SRCCON “will be a special opportunity to take some of the brightest minds in journalism, data, and community-building to tackle everything that has come to a head in the past couple of months with positivity, frankness, and creativity.”
Facilitating sessions
At SRCCON events, session facilitators regularly make up more than a third of attendees. All of our sessions are peer-led by conference attendees—learn more about how facilitation works at SRCCON. The deadline to propose a session has now passed, but if you might be interested in helping out with a session or coaching facilitators, there’s a spot in the form to let us know.
Welcome, first-timers
We think SRCCON is best when there’s a mix of folks new to SRCCON and veterans of the conference. And we want new folks to feel able to participate in whatever ways interest you. There’s a spot on the form to ask for more information if you’re interested in attending but not quite sure how you want to participate. In reviewing forms, we’ll aim to have a healthy balance of newcomers and returning SRCCON participants. So SRCCON alums, you can put your name in without worrying that you’re taking a new attendee’s spot.
Financial & family assistance
We offered a limited number of travel scholarships to help people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. The deadline to apply for a scholarship has passed, but free scholarship tickets will be available on the ticket registration page.
Scholarships can also provide support for childcare or other caregiving needs and costs. In the past during in-person events there wasn’t sufficient usage of the free childcare we organized, so we’re not planning to offer it this year. But we’re very interested to explore other ways to make the event more accessible to parents and other caregivers. Please email us if you have any questions or ideas.