I really enjoyed working as part of the MYT Events team to programme lead the Inclusion International Virtual Genearal Assembly.
The General Assembly was set up as a webinar and used an interactive conference platform to enable the attendees to ask questions and interact throughout the meeting. Inclusion International is the international network of people with intellection disabilities and their families. The meeting was therefore set up to be as accessible and inclusive as possible with the use of live closed captioning, interpretation into Spanish and Arabic with two separate webinars being hosted in 2 time zones, at 1pm GMT and 1am GMT. The conference platform agenda and joining instructions were available in English, Spanish and Arabic.
The webinar could be watched via the Zoom App and was also embedded within the Conference Platform. In order to ensure this worked effectively we ran several technical rehearsals and tests to ensure that everything was set up for the closed captioning and interpretation to be accessble to all. The agenda included multiple videos so that the attendees could hear from across their international network and we could stick to time; to ensure this ran smoothly we were an MYT team of 3 including a technical host. The webinar delivery went really well due to very thorough planning and testing which is essential to ensure the best possible results.
It was a pleasure to work with the Inclusion International team and there was such a positive feeling – I really like their theme of “Building inclusion together, while working safely apart”. I hear people say ‘you can’t beat face to face meetings’ and whilst there will be a time when we can all safely meet again, I personally see such positive engagement from our virtual meetings that I am hopeful that we will continue to virtually connect. Many of our attendees would not have the means to participate in these events and now they can join in, listen in their own languages, read the captions, make their voice heard and feel part of something!
