Facilitating Change

As part of my work with Station C and Artefatica, I’ve been organizing with Sylvain Carle to hold an MontrealOuvert / OpenMontreal event in the fall. We had a planning meeting last April that went really well. I envisioned this as part of the OpenEverything movement, but really hadn’t done much about it. So I was happy when I didn’t have to. I got asked to attend an organizers‘ call with folks from Canada, the US, India, and Germany. Here are my notes from the meeting. I also recorded it (MP3 format, 58MB). If you don’t have an hour to kill then you can fast forward to these juicy bits:

• 7:00-16:30 — What works? What sucked? Learning so far
• 22:00 -28:00 — Summary of Montreal events (+me ranting a bit, sorry video folks)
• 42:30-45:42 — Monthly meetings in Germany, how they get folks from design, theatre, medicine (this part was especially cool for me because Patrick is in Berlin this month and he spoke about Station C at the monthly OpenEverything meetup)

My takeaways:

• A mix of pre-planned and open sessions is best. Generates more interest. Start online with a wiki ahead of time so people can propose topics and sessions and you can start to see trends. Choose themes.
• Take the time to curate — to seed events with knowledgeable folks.
• Make sure you get diverse takes on “open” — reach out to those who don’t even know they need to be there and give them an opportunity to go onstage (example: give them a speed geek session).
• Three-day offsite retreat very hard. Would not repeat. One-day events best, capturing local energy important.
• Figure out the venue first.
• Don’t make it too long, scares folks off. Even if you start at 9AM most people will only show up at around 11AM.
• Take time to explain unconference practices. Put them online first. Take the best learning from BarCamp (see Crystal Williams, Ten Steps to Organizing a Barcamp).
• Need to develop a template for future organizers.
• Documentation (photo, video, blog) needs to be a job. Someone needs to own it. Commit to packaging the outcome afterward. (For ideas on this see Social Reporting.)
• WEAK: Post-event summaries and followup.
• BEST PRACTICE: Only video the speed geeks and the report-out/synthesis pieces. That way you don’t need to edit; video can go directly online (this is what they did in Toronto).

We decided to explore holding OpenEverything in many cities worldwide on September 26, 2009. This way we build momentum and can support each other as we organize. If you want to help out with the Montreal event you can get on the MontrealOuvert mailing list, hosted by our dear friends at Koumbit.