search

sparcopen / opencon

Planning OpenCon Openly
Other
11 stars 3 forks source link

Evaluate story circle plans #5

Closed JosephMcArthur closed 7 years ago

InquisitiveVi commented 7 years ago

Will it be possible to create some visual templates for story circle. This will orient people more easily to share their stories. At the end of the story circle, members can update a new picture of their circle or novel learning from this exercise. This idea is an inspiration from OpenCon 2016 Alumni : Bett Pick and Kristin Briney, who made sketch notes in the story circle I was.

JosephMcArthur commented 7 years ago

What do you mean by "visual template", perhaps sharing that sketch with me would help?

On Thu, 6 Jul 2017 at 16:46 Vinodh Ilangovan notifications@github.com wrote:

Will it be possible to create some visual templates for story circle. This will orient people more easily to share their stories. At the end of the story circle, members can update a new picture of their circle or novel learning from this exercise. This idea is an inspiration from OpenCon 2016 Alumni : Bett Pick and Kristin Briney, who made sketch notes in the story circle I was.

— You are receiving this because you were assigned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/sparcopen/opencon/issues/5#issuecomment-313436300, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AEuWZ0giweRyokwedSQvLBIpAL_TlhaHks5sLQFfgaJpZM4Nv3kt .

-- Joseph McArthur Assistant Director: Right to Research Coalition http://righttoresearch.org/ Co-Lead/Founder: Open Access Button http://openaccessbutton.org/ Twitter: @Mcarthur_Joe https://twitter.com/Mcarthur_Joe Skype: joseph_mcarthur

JosephMcArthur commented 7 years ago

Story Circles were our rated our top session in 2016, with almost universal praise. That is frankly amazing considering we managed to host 30 of these having only ever been in 1... I get anxious again just thinking about it. We've also seen at least one other conference reuse this idea with our materials \o/ .

The challenge this year is going to be making sure this isn't a fluke! After all, we only have N=1 for these being good sessions :)

Feedback

From participants generally:

From moderators on the day:

If you heard a great story, we'd like to see if we can get it filmed. Can you drop us the person's name in response to this email?

Lots of people had someone, but we didn't have time to act

Do you have any feedback (especially constructive criticism) on how the sessions were organised or the idea. Should we do this again?

Everyone thought we should do it again. The most common bit of feedback was that some time for Q's after would be nice. There was certainly some people who were worried if they did it "right", but nothing major.

how many people were in it?

Most had 8. Need to give advice on what to do if people get less though. Seems 8 was about right.

how did people react, what questions did they have?

Participants generally reacted well it seems, suggesting our intro and framing are about right. It was noted that some participants were nervous.

was it a rewarding experience for you and others?

Yes.

anything else you think we should know

People stressed the importance of getting the logistics right here (making sure people were on time etc). One specific comment I noted was:

To help non-native speakers of English, I would recommend adding few more thoughtful narrative questions, to go on with this session.

From my notes on the day:

General learnings and reflection (from me today)

Recommendations

Broadly, I think our key decisions from last year worked (e.g moderator type & training, session length and weekend placement, participant mix etc) so wouldn't suggest many changes at this point. However, some potential high-level tweaks/steps forwards might include:

Despite more story sessions during the conference (e.g one on day two) being a popular request, I don't think this is a good idea unless (at the least) we find a strong way for these sessions to be followed up on after the conference.

More feedback

Would be great to hear from @sparcopen/staff-opencon / @sparcopen/oc-opencon around:

@InquisitiveVi I'd especially like to hear more about what you suggested here.

mendulla commented 7 years ago

It's probably best not to have a second day of it, as novelty contributed to its appeal.

The Story Circle is a very engaging, very personal session. Stories are very powerful. I guess its natural for people to like sessions where they are engaged in that sort of way.

I wouldn't recommend scrapping a session just for the fact that it received low votes. Whatever the criticisms of the 2-minute presentations, I think they are great. I bet the people who opted to present their projects or ideas all voted to retain that session. They just happen to be only a fraction of the respondents. Yes, the time is short. But it is supposed to be merely an introduction that sparks further conversation and follow-up.

JosephMcArthur commented 7 years ago

Thanks for the feedback @mendulla!

The below is an intro that Jake Orlowitz used that he's licenced CC-0 for us to use.

  1. Sit, take a few breaths, put away your phone, put down your computer unless it has a few notes from your talk, or questions you'd want to ask. Put away social media: this group is our social platform for the next hour.
  2. Forget judgment -- there is no right or wrong, better or worse here, just stories. Try to show the parts of your journey that are personal to you and unique. It's ok to be afraid to speak in the group. This should be a safe space for sharing.
  3. Don't broadcast -- this session is private by default.
  4. I need a timekeeper please. Help me keep speakers to 8 minutes.
  5. We're not doing any questions until after everyone has spoken. We'll go around in a clockwise circle, starting with me so you know whey you're next.
  6. This is about listening well, so offer to make eye contact and try to hear their story
  7. Support each other. Support each other in being brave or funny or just being yourself.
JosephMcArthur commented 7 years ago

Sharing some more great feedback we got From @chealsye & @rchampieux who reused our materials.

Yes, we used a story circle in the FSCI Global Souths class and it worked fantastically, I think – really set the tone for the rest of our time together. From a facilitator’s perspective, I did struggle a bit with keeping people to their five minutes. When someone is sharing personal info, it’s difficult to know when and how to gently interrupt. It could be helpful to provides tips to this end.

I agree with Robin that sometimes it is hard to keep people to their times. I haven’t experience that as much - if anything it is hard to get people to share at first. I’ve noticed in multiple Story Circles that stories, on average, get longer the further through the circle one gets. I am assuming people get more comfortable, hear what other people are sharing and share their own versions. I think it would be very useful to provide a one pager on Story Cricles — a brief explanation on what they are (I struggle explaining them succinctly and clearly in a productive way), suggestions on keeping people within time, the structure so others can incorporate them to their own satellites and other events.

char-siuu-bao commented 7 years ago

I think story circles are great! I'm glad we'll be doing it again this year.

On a guide for others to use at their events — @chealsye were you using this guide? http://www.opencon2017.org/story_of_self_circles If so, does it require more detail and guidance? BTW, I really like Jake's intro! This is something we can add to our facilitation guide?

On keeping with time: perhaps doing a hand motion / holding up a sign at the 2 mins left mark? (to not interrupt but signal to the speaker their time is almost up?)

@JosephMcArthur: I think the suggestions you put forward were great. An internal logistics suggestion (that I think would minimize chaos the day of) — could we aim to divvy up the groups ~1 week in advance? That way the correct room can be integrated in people's Sched in advance, and it was also just a little bit rushed/stressful to create balanced groups the night before/the morning of last November.

chealsye commented 7 years ago

@lorrainechu3n I wasn’t using this guide. I hadn’t seen that site before and unfortunately didn’t know it existed. Is it included in the hosts' homepage? I was basing my story circle use on my experience at OpenCon and instructions were limited to an email in 2016 to my memory. It wasn’t intended to directly mimic OpenCon, but Joe emailed me because he heard I used story circles in my workshop. That site is a very useful start, but some sentences are confusing to understand (some copyediting may improve these problems and correct any misspellings). I think that page is a good prep for the main OpenCon, but changes would make it more useful for adoption in satellite events and especially in other mediums (like the workshop I used it in wasn’t OpenCon related). For example, the steps for facilitating are based on OpenCon specific scheduling (around lunch, 8 people groups), and text reads that “Now, at this point you very well might be wondering why we’re spending time at OpenCon doing this.” So, it feels specific to the main OpenCon.

I think the most helpful addition would be a clear, concise explanation of story circle that a presenter could perhaps even recite to explain what the story circle is. This could help others who want to utilize story circles for their satellite event or for another event. When I read, “Story circles are, at their heart, extremely simple.” it makes me feel like I’m being silly for being slightly confused about what they are. I struggled explaining a story circle clearly and communicating the goals of the session, so a paragraph that could provide that to presenters would be very useful! The tips are very useful as well, but I agree including some specific suggestions for gentle warnings about time would make it even more useful.

JosephMcArthur commented 7 years ago

Thanks to everyone for the feedback. This year I'd suggest we proceed as recommended, but while we implement this year spend time documenting our planning so that these sessions can be better reused by others, and as we implement these each year it becomes easier to do.

@lorrainechu3n I totally agree that making these groups last minute is certainly the worst part of this. I wonder if we can spend some time early trying to think of an easier way to do this, or perhaps give ourselves some tooling? While I want to say that, yes, we can do it a week before, if I remember much of what we had to do on the day was actually stuff that would be nearly impossible to anticipate.

Discussion & action following this issue can be found here:

and other action items will pop up as required.

Closing this, if you have comments please feel free to reopen.