At IMCC, we’re extremely proud of the adoption of social media by our delegates, many of whom are leaders in setting the agenda on communication via social media at science conferences. For this reason, we hope #IMCC7 will be one of the most Tweeted, Facebook posted, live-streamed conferences to date. However, we realize there may be a small number of instances where a delegate may not want to engage with social media. In the rest of this post we outline our social media policy and steps you can take if you want to embargo content from social media. Thank you for reading and we’ll see you on our official hashtag – #IMCC7!

 

Our Policy

The use of social media to share the content of presentations, symposiums, focus groups, workshops, plenaries and all other events and activities at the 5th International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC7) is not just permitted, it is encouraged! Only if an individual presenter expressly indicates that you do not publicize their work, we kindly ask you to respect their wishes. The IMCC organizers cannot enforce an embargo of any material presented at the congress, so if you are truly presenting material that cannot be shared with an audience beyond IMCC7 delegates we ask you to reconsider including it in your presentation.

 

Why we have the Policy

The moto of IMCC is “Making Marine Science Matter”. We strongly believe that marine science is most likely to matter when it becomes not just an activity of academia, but of society as a whole. We believe sharing the content delivered at IMCC over cross-society platforms, like those of social media, is one of the best chances we have to communicate our science to new audiences and to engage in conversation with those audiences. The goals of our organizing institution, the Society for Conservation Biology Marine Section, reflect this ethos:

 

·Facilitate the dissemination of the science of marine conservation through education, publications, presentations, and media outreach.

·Encourage communication and action across disciplinary, national, and institutional boundaries.

 

Embargoing the content of your presentation

There are two ways to do this. Firstly, at the beginning of your presentation or a slide/talk section you can verbally ask the audience not to publicize content, to take photographs, and/or to live-stream video. Second, you can insert one or both of the following images onto EACH ONE of your ‘embargoed’ slides. We recommend you use both approaches as somebody may walk in after you have made your announcement.