Guidelines for Social Media at SRS Conferences

Social media platforms such as Blue Sky, Mastodon and X are great mediums through which to involve people who are not physically present in our dialogues; one aim of live posting at a conference is to let these people follow our ideas and join in or create a conversation about these ideas if they so wish. Thus, a conference feed allows our discussions to reach beyond the confines of the lecture room and the conference venue.

Some scholars, however, are not comfortable with broadcasting the ideas they formulate as a conference paper so widely before committing them to publication, or are concerned their ideas can be misrepresented in other people’s posts; it is important that when posting a conference, we take such concerns into account. Any speaker who does not want to be posted can make this be known at any time. We will be advising chairs of the individual sessions to double-check with speakers whether they are comfortable with being posted.

We ask posters at the SRS Conference to adhere to the following set of guidelines:

• If a session chair, speaker or other attendee asks you to stop live posting, please stop.
• Always post using the conference hashtag; this will make sure your posts are seen by everyone following the hashtag, and can also be used to compile an archive of the conference post.
• Attribute correctly and clearly: begin posts of a paper with either the name or the initials of the speaker, so that readers of the post can recognize whose ideas are being reported.
• Do ask permission before posting photographs.
• If you know the speaker’s Blue Sky (e.g., @srsrencoc.bsky.social), X (e.g., @SRSRenSoc) or mastodon handle (e.g., @SRSRenSoc@hcommons.social), include it, so that people can connect to them if they wish.
• If you, as a speaker, want people to connect with you on social media to discuss your ideas, please include your twitter or mastodon handle on your paper slides.
• Be considerate to other attendees: ensure your device’s sounds are off
• If a follower asks a question, feel free to relay that question to the speaker during the question session, and report the answer back; questions from people in the room should, however, always take precedence.
• Post about whichever aspect of the conference you like, taking into account what people may find interesting; remember to uphold a high standard of collegiality and professionalism, particularly keeping in mind the very public nature of social media as a medium.

Modified from the blog of SRS Book Prize 2012 winner Sjoerd Levelt (@slevelt.bsky.social Blue Sky; @slevelt@hcommons.social Mastodon), with thanks to Sjoerd for allowing us to repost.