[Day 4] Organizing GOSH, facilitating Collaborative Meetings

http://120.79.232.128:3000/s/Syk_zyJjQ

no Convener since its GOSH
Facilitator: Greg
Notes: Saad
Organizing gosh like event conference for OSH

Maria: unconference session proposers perhaps should express expected goals and outcomes keeping in mind the overall OpenSource broad picture

Ryan: we seem to be collecting a lot of data about doing these things and talking about organising more than doing

Greg: maybe some of the org stuff can be shifted online

Saad: perhaps we could lead by example in place of talking about how to do things

Anna: Theres a disparity between concern for a topic and participation in addressing said concerns for example documentation. New GOSHers often face the comment that an issue or session had taken place the previous year. maybe some curation could be done to re-arrange the uc sessions to address this

Greg: form has a “similar subject” feature when you start to add to the forum. the online tool could help but not adopted much

Marina: There are tools much, for documentation and can be overwhelming to have so many post-it comments maybe a limit on those to help

Greg: summarising, perhaps we could do more and talk less about doing more

People would like the internet to be better, since our output needs to go online

Diego: recognition is important and of value, re-iterates the point that previous gosh discussions or sessions should not prevent a topic from being discussed again

Lara expressed concern that Documentation sessions had a disproportionately tiny number of people participating but the few that showed up are still important to have. Could be planned better to allow space for this.

Toby: Suggests categorising sessions so the time and parallel ness can be less overwhelming. Practical ones take more time.

Greg: Would people generally like to have more sutructure?

most people agree, want a “little bit more”
Leo: we’ve got two big things: manifesto and roadmap.
could we use the 3 proposed axis
Greg: creating the roadmap was good “Structure” implementation of this would be where we add some more “structure”

Agniezka: We could use the axes to curate the sessions around the topic of the day
proposed a method: “Taking care of each other” in a buddy-system where you have one other person to take care of and one other person take care of you. This could help the community cohesion building during discussions in circles that form spontaneously

Diego: Looking at past GOSHes to identify problems and trends could help address present concerns of community
Maria difference between thinking something is important and getting involved in something important
Generally the sense of

Analia: Auto inclusion is a concern, peer / mentoring would be a good idea. remote participation / recording sessions would be good too.

Ryan suggests treat documentation people as stars! give them cake and beer and massages, generally have them be recognised as special.

Most people like this idea very much
Leo: expressed that some people not comfortable being videoed or audio recorded

Lara: written summaries are more effective in capturing ideas and happening.
Anna agrees this supports inter-generational learning. Would be good to include links to previous gosh sessions that are relevant.

Tobias Expressed appreciation for the increased conscientious effort in documentation this year compared to previous GOSH

Forum posts are hard to follow and would be good to have shepherds to try and collate and feed into the curation process.

Leo expressed the richness of the chaotic process as being part of the fabric of GOSH and how things go. Tiny structural elements are good but lets not go carried away with structure that may be stifling

Greg: summarising;

concrete outputs are not entirely practical
a bit more curation for the sessions would be a good thing to have
a buddy system to support people during engagements
incentivising / recognising documenters and there
lets us all take 20 mins to take all these suggestions and documentation and do it to see what we can come up with. picking up the best ideas so far and working with those.

Leo suggests start discussions in pairs, then groups of 4, and end up back in a big group. It’s not about performance, nothing’s perfect.

Maria proposes a card format to add a tiny bit more structure to help improve the unconf sessions.

Marina explores having sessions specific to communities or regional issues

Group echoes the idea that using the roadmap axes as an underlying structure to tie in all the sessions and themes that emerge.

Recongnizing the documenters as special could be a good addition to the event dynamic. Also implementing the buddy system and peer / mentoring.

At the end of time for the session. General feeling was positive and energised!

PHEW! this was hard to note-take — I hope I got it all as it happened -Saad.

I noticed we didn’t had a summary for this session, so I made one based @saadcaffeine great notes and what I remembered from the session. If you have any suggestion, please share.

Summary

We started with the idea of discussing Collaborative meetings or GOSH like events and quickly ended up discussing GOSH 2018 structure itself and compared it with previous gatherings to see what improved and what should inspire us for next moves. The first part of the unconference session was a more flexible conversation and in the last 20 minutes we tried to summarize the best practical ideas. We all agreed that the documentation culture during the gatherings is improving, but we still have a long path to reach a solid culture, and one example was the Documentation Unconference Session, that didn’t had many attendees. One well accepted idea was to give a superstar treatment to documenters of the event. A buddy system was suggested to reinforce the culture that we take care of each other and to welcome newcomers. We had a discussion about the structured and non structured design for the event. We agreed that a little bit of structure for the unconference sessions could be good, like grouping the themes based on the 3 axis of the Roadmap. We also thought about methods to heat up everybody during the moments that are more structured than unconference sessions and some suggestion were given, like conversations that start in pairs and step by step end up in the big group. But nothing is perfect so it is nice to try out different formats, keep learning and being flexible. In the end general feeling was positive and energized.