We are preparing for the International Zine Librarians (un) Conference, to be held online October 30-November 2, 2020 (start and end dates vary by timezone!)

Screen cap of zine librarian on Zoom

On Saturday 19th September, 22.00 – 22.30 UTC we held a meeting of representatives from all the different spokes (working groups) working on organising IZL(u)C. The meeting was facilitated by Lilith, notes were taken by Kelly M. In attendance were Ziba and Milo (Outreach and Promotion), Matthew (Technology), Kelly S, Kelsey and Ella (Programming), Kelly M and Lilith (Co-ordinating)

The main focus of this meeting was hearing from programming, asking questions and feeding back and forth.

Ella and Kelsey explained the structure that programming had come up with for IZL(u)C – with three hour blocks (1 hour of pre-planned programming eg. talk, zine library tour, panel, followed by 2 hours of unconference session/s) across the three days, co-ordinated by individuals across different time zones. They then opened to questions and discussion including:

How will unconference sessions work? How can we translate the open agenda, and space for attendees to pursue topics which interest them, into a virtual space?

There was a lot of out loud thinking about how these could run. Lilith and Kelly will be running open meetings (29th Sept, 1st Oct) to gather programming ideas, unconference session discussion topics, invite folks to come facilitate etc. There’s potential for more of these meetings closer to the event. Technology is open for requests for voting systems or similar if wanted to run these sessions.

How will programming for the structured first hour be decided?

This isn’t fixed – speaking off the experience of J21, programming encouraged more ‘bossy’ voices – ie. not being worried about making bigger decisions. It was suggested some programming may emerge from the enthusiasm or interest of people who volunteer to co-ordinate blocks. Other ideas may come from the open meetings above. At the moment there is a working list of ideas attached to the programming spreadsheet.

Will programming be multi-lingual?

This depends on the co-ordinator for individual blocks/gauging needs from the open meetings.

Is there a fixed deadline for programming stuff?

Listening to the needs of O-P in terms of time to design graphics/promote events, a provisional deadline of 14th October was set for confirming fixed programming content.

How can we make sure that the programming is accessible to folks who may not be able to attend for large chunks of time?

Matthew was concerned that longer unconference sessions may be difficult to drop into – especially without knowing discussion topics in advcance. Kelly M observed there’s responsibility on both sides – organisers and attendees – and we can only do so much. There was consensus that a first step was for programming to write up a simple and accessible guide to the event, for potential co-ordinators and attendees, and that this could feed into a document on the website etc.

The next spokes meeting will be on Saturday October 3rd at 22:00 UTC. If you want to get involved in organising or want to co-ordinate one of the three hour IZL(u)C blocks, join zlibrarians_2020 on Keybase or email zineluc@gmail.com.