NPA Summit Proposal Guide

Are you thinking about proposing a session for NPA Summit 2023? We'll have your back throughout the entire process—before, during, and after the conference. Here are some answers to questions that might be on your mind right now, and if you're curious about anything else, please let us know!

Key dates

• Friday, February 3: Deadline to submit session proposals and stipend applications using our call for participation form
• Friday, February 17: Facilitators, attendees, and stipend applicants will be notified
• After February 17: We'll review more "I'd like to attend" form submissions on a rolling basis
• April 26-28: NPA Summit 2023, online!

What Are Sessions at NPA Summit Like?

The NPA Summit is different than many other conferences you may have attended. It's a highly participatory event focused on interactive sessions rather than panels and lectures. Our sessions are run by facilitators or session leaders, rather than speakers or presenters, because when you run a session at NPA Summit, you're in a room with dozens of other smart people with an opportunity to compare notes, share skills, and help everyone learn from each other.

A few principles lay the groundwork for our program as a whole:

• NPA Summit is built around participation, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving.
• NPA Summit exists to respond to the needs and interests of our community, and we’re intentional in including perspectives from throughout the field.
• Every attendee is a peer: we’re all here to learn from each other.

Our sessions inhabit these values in different ways, through structured discussions and problem-solving groups; peer-to-peer workshops; even games, or drawing. We avoid traditional lectures and classroom-style trainings, but we welcome your creativity across a range of hands-on and collaborative session styles. Slides are not required for an NPA session! We love a session that comes with a worksheet, a template, a framework, a whiteboard, a coloring sheet or other artifact that can be shared asynchronously.

How will participatory sessions work at an online conference?

NPA Summit 2023 will be online-only, and just like last year, we're excited about the ways that will make this event accessible to even more people. We've traded in easels, sharpies, and post-it notes for a set of digital collaboration tools, and here's how all of that will work:

• Sessions will take place over video on Zoom, which really helped us best support accessibility, participation, and security last year. We'll also share a set of documents and platforms for facilitators to use in collaboration and brainstorming work.
• We're asking all session facilitators to work with at least one co-facilitator. Facilitation teams are popular at every event we host—it's super helpful in representing different perspectives and backgrounds, plus it's just nice to share the work with someone! When an event is online, facilitators may need to respond to many different things, from shaky internet connections to keeping an eye on threads of participant comments, and we think teams will help everything run much more smoothly.
• We're planning a mix of sessions taking place largely between 9am-7pm ET, to make it easier for people from a variety of time zones to participate as well as for all participants to manage attending sessions alongside other responsibilities.

Many of the things that make our sessions great will stay the same, too. Sessions will last 75 minutes. You'll be in conversation with a bunch of other smart, engaged people, so no one expects you to have all the answers—sometimes it's important just to bring the right questions! We find that the best sessions are often led by facilitators who:

• Have a clear outcome in mind—what you want people to leave with,
• Know what they can realistically cover in 75 minutes,
• Build a clear outline for the session, but deviate from it as needed,
• Actively seek to run balanced, inclusive conversations, and
• Make a few simple backup plans in case a session gets a larger or smaller audience than expected.

Effective NPA Summit facilitation is about effort and preparation more than expertise. We support facilitators as they prepare for their sessions, and we can help match you with a co-facilitator if you don't have someone in mind already. If you're thinking about pitching a session for NPA Summit 2023, we'd love to hear from you!

What Makes a Great Session Topic?

Successful sessions often emerge from a single question or problem—if you’ve been struggling with just about any aspect of your work, you can bet others have dealt with it, too. One major theme for this year's program will be "Lift As You Rise," a reminder for us all to achieve great heights while always reaching back to extend a helping hand.

As in the past, this year's Summit will be based around two core tracks: support and practice. We want to expand what that means this year:

• support is who you meet, how you build those relationships
• practice is what you do and how you get it done

Like any good product, a great Summit session has a clearly defined audience. It's important to remember that our community includes a wide spectrum of skills and experiences. Is your session for "only-lonely" product people in small and rural newsrooms around the world? Maybe your session is for anyone who didn't realize they were a "product person" until they signed up for the summit. Or, your session could be one of our signature Master Classes, diving deep into a narrow slice of news product work or thinking.

We know from our community survey that finding your peers is a top priority for many NPA community members. The visual designers are looking to meet the other visual designers. There are faculty educators who want to welcome new adjuncts. There are executives seeking peers from their lonely perch at the top. This year's summit will include more wayfinding opportunities to ensure everyone is able to find folks they feel community with.

Some sessions at the summit come with the answers and best practices ready to share. But some for some topics, there may not be a right or wrong answer yet, and the summit may be our opportunity to raise the issue and explore something new. As you sketch out you proposals, I hope you'll constantly be thinking about three things:

• What will the facilitators teach or share ?
• What will the group co-create or build together?
• What do you want people to walk away with ?

A few more thoughts that may help as you develop your session ideas:

• Maybe you've had a big win in your news product work this year and you want to invite the community to look deeper inside. Pair up with another community member from a different region or another kind of news organization and walk us through how they tackled the same or a similar challenge or win.
• One type of session we'd like to host more of this year would be co-creation brainstorms and working sessions. An example of this could be combining a student with an educator and a product director to develop best practices for creating news product internships.
• Another session type we're interested in are show-and-tell lightning talks -- choose a theme or something that unites the work or presenters and give a series of behind-the-scenes tour of a product, project, piece of code, workflow, etc in 5 minute presentations
• Last year's continuous asynchronous discussions were the runaway hit of the summit. We loved watching the crowd huddle up, pool their ideas and resources in real-time across the globe. We'd love to see more of that format this year as well.

Finally, it's important in our community to not just foster inclusion and development but to create opportunities for folks to spread their wings. To that end, priority may be given to sessions that allow first-time speakers and speakers from under-represented backgrounds to shine. We encourage more seasoned and experienced presenters to share their guidance and advice in the proposals discussion channel on Slack.

We don't consult a list of the latest trends to figure out which sessions to invite; we want NPA Summit to be a place where passionate facilitators challenge us in ways that couldn't happen at any other conference. Whatever shape your ideas are taking, please share them with us! You should feel free to talk about things at whatever level of detail you feel good about—we'd love to think things through with you.

What if I kind of have a session idea, but it's not fully formed yet?

That's completely okay! If you're excited about being part of the NPA Summit program, we're excited to work with you to refine your topic.

How We Support NPA Summit Proposers

Ok, so you're excited to pitch your NPA Summit session! If you feel ready to go, you can submit your proposal now. If you have still have some questions, we are here for you:

• Always feel free to email summit@newsproduct.org. We're happy to give feedback on session proposals, answer questions not covered here, or help in other ways.
• Check out the #summit-proposals-2023 channel on the News Product Alliance Slack. NPA Summit team members are in the channel, so if there's a question that may be of broad interest, feel free to add it there.
• Emma Carew Grovum and Ryan Pitts from the NPA Summit team have made a limited number of 1:1 conversations available to discuss proposal ideas. Please email Michelle Santa Ana at Michelle@kimbap-media.com with subject line: "NPA Summit proposal feedback" and she will help you get signed up for a spot.
• We'll publish a guide like this one with details and advice about facilitation, and we'll host group calls and provide other resources for facilitators. If you're passionate about your proposal but unsure about the facilitation part, don't worry—you will be well supported in the months leading up to NPA Summit 2023.

Our session review process

Our goal is to build a program with a mix of practical workshops, culturally focused discussions, and sessions that exist somewhere in between. As the NPA Summit team reviews proposals, we look for:

• Relevance to one or more of our core audiences (including: students and early-career product thinkers, established product professionals, news and technology executives, global product thinkers, etc)
• Innovative and participatory session approach
• Clearly articulated expected participant takeaways
• Representation of diversity across speaker diversity, global region, news organization type, etc.

NPA staff reviews session proposals as they come in, and invites a diverse group of community members to provide feedback during the review process. Our priority is to build a balanced program that reflects the entire community, and we actively welcome session proposals from members of communities underrepresented in journalism and product, and from around the world and in languages other than English.

What kind of planning support is there for session facilitators?

If your session is selected, we'll support you during your planning process. That starts as soon as we confirm your session for the program, when we'll share a Facilitator Guide that will be a lot like this one. We know you might have questions about how things will work at an online conference, so we're planning facilitator training calls that will use the same platforms and tools you'll have available for your session.

We'll also check in with you individually to ask about scheduling needs, make sure you're happy with your session name and description, and offer any feedback you need on your session plan. And we're always happy to jump on a call to talk through any questions or brainstorms that come up.

And we believe that conferences like NPA Summit are where amazing work only begins, so we're already thinking about ways to support you in moving ideas forward after your session is done.

Is there any financial support for session facilitators? Do facilitators have to purchase a ticket?

Yes, financial support is available. We have free scholarship tickets available for any faciitators who need them. In addition, we have a limited number of $250 stipends for facilitators whose time preparing for the session would not be covered by their employer or who need caregiving support. If you'd like to be considered for the stipend, there's a question about it on our call for participation form.

Because NPA Summit is a collaborative, peer-to-peer event, we ask that all participants, including facilitators, buy a ticket, if they are able. This approach to ticketing is part of how we make the event accessible to as many people as we can.

If you or your company are not able to pay for a ticket, when it's time to purchase your ticket, there will be an option right on the Eventbrite registration form to pick up a free scholarship ticket directly.

What happens when the conference is over?

One of the most exhilarating things for us as conference organizers is to see people go out and DO THE WORK. Maybe that'll be you, as a session leader, with newfound energy after talking through how you're changing the ways your organization operates. Maybe it's an attendee who learned something new in your session, and takes home a plan to change their community's relationship with journalism. There are so many exciting things that can happen when passionate people get together at an event like NPA Summit 2022. And we want to help you plan for those outcomes! If there's something you'd like to build together or move forward after the event is over, we're here to support that work. We just want you to tell us what you need.

Additional resources