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Please submit to the FAccT socials by April 10th if you need financial support. This will allow us to review your application and give you a response so you can apply for funding separately by April 12th.
We are calling for community empowerment groups to host FAccT-endorsed in-person and virtual socials at FAccT 2024. FAccT 2024 will take place on Monday June 3, 2024 through Thursday June 6, 2024 at Othon Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with some CRAFT and tutorial sessions occurring virtually. While virtual access decisions have not been finalized, all the in-person keynotes, and some CRAFTs and tutorials will be streamed via an online platform. Based on the location of this year’s edition of FAccT, we encourage socials in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, among other languages.
You can send the proposal to the Community Empowerment Socials team (social@facctconference.org) in the form of a PDF file. We accept proposals and can communicate with organizers in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. If you are unable to submit by the deadline, please inform us and express your interest, and we will try to make arrangements for your social(s). For full consideration, we highly recommend submitting by the deadline. FAccT's bylaws discourage co-located events that are not FAccT-endorsed. If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.
In an effort to provide additional guidance, we include the following suggestions, which have been adapted from NeurIPS’ Call for Affinity Events (to which an author of this document contributed).
Community empowerment groups promote and support the ideas and voices of marginalized communities and raise awareness of issues that affect their members. Examples of community empowerment groups include Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Queer in AI (QinAI), Black in AI (BAI), LatinX in AI (LXAI), {Dis}Ability in AI, Indigenous in AI, Global South in AI, Muslims in ML, and Jews in ML. In this call, we welcome applications from all kinds of community empowerment groups. We recognize that hegemonic categories of social location and marginalization are often U.S.-centric, and we thus especially welcome community empowerment groups that center forms of marginalization that are unique to Brazil (e.g., Amazonian Indigenous peoples) and communities in the Global South (e.g., Rohingya in Myanmar, Hazara in Afghanistan).
There is a need for members of community empowerment groups to build community and participate and network at FAccT [1]. The main aim of community empowerment socials is to encourage and create a supportive environment for people to step into the FAccT community. Community empowerment socials are meant to promote diversity and inclusion. They establish research communities out of community empowerment groups and raise awareness of the challenges faced by their members. Furthermore, they provide safe, inclusive spaces for members of community empowerment groups to socialize and network.
Socials can largely take place any time during the conference (June 3 to June 6). Tentatively, socials can take place each day before the first keynote (before 8:30 AM local time), during lunch (roughly 12 to 1 PM local time), or after the last session (after 6 PM local time). Socials cannot take place during plenary sessions. We will work with all the community empowerment groups so that they have flexibility in deciding the date, times, and length of their social(s), with minimal overlap across groups.
Socials can be partially or fully virtual. In-person socials are encouraged to have some virtual component, but not necessarily concurrently with in-person activities. For example, in addition to an in-person social, community empowerment groups may consider hosting two virtual socials on a different day that are scheduled 12 hours apart to increase access from around the world. Zoom links will be provided for virtual socials.
Community empowerment groups will decide the structure of their socials. In the past, socials have included: talks, socializing and networking, discussions, etc. Most socials will take place outside the conference venue, to support local businesses. Socials should not be too far from the conference venue. Furthermore, social organizers should avoid holding their events at places with loud music, strobe lighting, spotlights, or other strong sensory experiences; any social with such experiences will appear with a sensory experiences warning on the FAccT website.
For physical accessibility reasons (Rio has many hilly areas and may not have paved sidewalks in places), we will work with groups to host socials at the venue itself, if needed. Any food at socials in the venue must be purchased through hotel catering; the hotel can be flexible regarding menus and negotiate prices.
The socials chairs are currently curating a list of queer, disability, and COVID-friendly places to hold socials outside the venue. Social organizers are encouraged to apply for travel and registration support, which is need-based.
Furthermore, like all FAccT attendees, social organizers are entitled to apply for grants and sponsorship to support their work. However, affinity groups and other social organizers must make clear that they are not fundraising on behalf of FAccT. All organizers holding a FAccT social event must abide by these two additional constraints: (1) Before fundraising, organizers must submit a list of potential sponsors to the executive committee for approval. (2) They must not offer any benefit to sponsors for this social event that is not permitted by the most recent version of the FAccT sponsorship policy (including recruitment).
All socials must adhere to the FAccT community agreements: https://facctconference.org/2023/community.
For examples of past socials, you may consult:
Alcohol based gel sanitizers will be available and use of masks is recommended. FAccT is looking into providing disposable gloves at buffets and buying a substantial amount of masks for distribution beforehand. The socials and accessibility chairs are also looking into curating resources for attendees to get paxlovid, antigen, and PCR tests in Rio.
We will actively host meetups and organizing sessions to provide community empowerment groups with the support they need to host their socials. We will also update all the community empowerment groups on D&I travel and conference grants. Additionally, we will help community empowerment groups advertise their events and recruit participants.
There is no length requirement for the proposal. We accept proposals and can communicate with organizers in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Please CAREFULLY read all of the previous sections before writing your proposal.
Additionally, please answer the following questions to help us plan:
Arjun, Renata
social@facctconference.org
FAccT 2024 Socials Chairs