Alternative to finding speakers every month

[Coby Chapple]

Happy Tuesday all!

Every month this group goes through a similar process to plan the next month’s meetup, and it seems like the vast majority of the effort required each month is finding people who want to give a talk on something at the meetup. I’d be interested in exploring ideas for how we could structure things so that this is never an issue—it would reduce the amount of coordination significantly if the only variables to be decided each month were the venue + date/time.

I recently came across http://leancoffee.org/, which outlines a method for having "structured, but agenda-less meetings" (I guess similar to other unconference-style formats—see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference). I’m not suggesting we follow any new buzzword-centric fad to the tee, but it might at least be worth considering if a similar structure(less) format could be beneficial to Belfast Ruby.

For the sake of argument, the lean coffee process goes like this:

1. Using post-it notes, create a three column kanban board (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board), with the three columns being "to discuss", "discussing", "discussed".

2. Everyone gets access to the post-it pad and a pen, and proposes topics they’d like to talk about.

3. Once "enough" ideas are proposed, the person responsible for each idea gets to do a 2 sentence introduction about the topic.

4. People vote on which topics they want to hear/talk about. Everyone only gets two votes, and votes are done by putting a dot on the desired post-it note.

5. Give each topic 10 minutes, and work through as many as possible in order of popularity in the available time.

Pros:

- No advance organization required to secure speakers each month.

- A variety of topics is guaranteed each meetup

- Topics covered are guaranteed to be the most interesting to the specific audience on the night.

- Each topic is more of a multi-way conversation (e.g. questions are more welcome) than a one-way presentation.

- Less pressure on the presenter to be uber-prepared.

- Option for multiple topics to be talked about at the same time, if there’s enough demand to split the group.

Cons:

- I usually avoid things that have buzz-words like "lean" in them like the plague

- Harder/impossible to convey meetup topics ahead of time (e.g. on the website), esp. to people attending for the first time.

- Requires at least a few people turning up to be comfortable volunteering to lead a topic session on something.

- At least one person each meetup must be responsible for keeping the process moving, organizing kanban board/post-it duty, etc.

- Less formality around talks could be perceived as lack of organization.

- There’s a risk that the process of deciding topics/working through them could dominate the night if process is too strict/heavy.

Other tangential ideas:

- Could a public/shared kanban board (e.g. Trello) be useful for deciding topics using the *current* format each month, instead of email threads?

- Are there other unconference-style formats that could be worth exploring?

Just throwing all this out here for the sake of discussion. I’d love to hear what people think :)

--

Coby

[Steven Holdsworth (@holsee)]

I like it Coby +1

[Stephen McCullough]

Hi,

I like it. Anything that moves us away from:

 - email threads

 - putting the burden on one person/company

to me is a good thing.

Cheers,

Stephen

On 16 April 2014 13:46, Steven Holdsworth (@holsee) <shold...@gmail.com> wrote:

I like it Coby +1

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[Simon Hamilton]

Agreed and certainly worth a try!

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[Barry Gordon]

I definitely think this is worth a try. 

We had a brief talk at the last meeting about moving talks out to every other month with a pub-meet in between the two to give us a chance to discuss topics for the next event with potential speakers. This format seems like a better way forward; I've found that talks with a lot of discussion after way more insightful, and this would promote that aspect.

[Jason Ordway]

+1 from me as well. Thank you Coby.

[Melissa Keizer]

Just had a read through your post there Coby, apologies I didn't reply sooner, I must have missed the notification. 

I'm happy with these ideas too. I think breaking up the talk months with discussion-type meetups is definitely worth trying. It could end up sparking ideas for new talks and perhaps motivating others to give a talk in the following months, plus it's a great opportunity to discuss the things you're interested in and learn a few things over a few drinks. 

Thanks for posting this, I'm looking forward to trying this out!