This document describes an event format that's easy to run, requires absolute minimal commitment to participate and provides opportunities to learn on par with going to a conference and a fraction of the inter-personal benefits too.
Wouldn't it be great to share the experience of watching talks from top conferences with your team? And do it mostly for free, without allocating much time and getting travel budgets?
There's a way to do that. It's been tested, it's easy to run and surprisingly effective.
- A bit of borrowed time (8 to 12 timeboxes of ~45 minutes)
- lunch break in the office on every [select weekday] of the quarter, or every day, for the 8-12 slots
- a weekly call for a remote team
- a special day devoted to running the Busy People Conf
- A group of people, preferably not larger than 12
- coworkers, online community, offline community etc.
- A way for them to watch a video together
- inperson: book a room in the office, order lunch for the same time, watch the video together while eating
- remote, sync: use an app to watch together - zoom meeting + screenshare or discord audio chatroom with youtube playback feature
- remote, async: bookclub style - everyone watches the video on the same day and makes notes or posts comments to shared channel. It's important to talk fresh after watching the video though. At most a few hours after.
- A tool to collect links and vote
- most project boards can be used for that, GitHub discussions work pretty well with a minimal featureset.
- Get the group together, explain the concept
- Create the place where people can submit links to talks. Preferably allow posting a title and a link, not just the link
- Give participants some time to collect talks they'd like to see. They're not supposed to watch the talks before recommending them. This is all about judging the book by its cover. Or hearing recommendations from other people.
- After submitting time runs out, everyone votes on what they find interesting. Limit the number of votes so that each person has at most half as many votes as the number of talks you want to have in your event.
- Order by number of votes and start from the top.
- Make sure people know they can comment while the talk is going on. Depending on your group's style/culture you can use text chat or just say brief comments/jokes live as it's going. It's part of the conference experience to be able to whisper to a buddy how much you disagree with the talk only to feel dumb 5 minutes later as it was fully explained.
- When running remotely, remind people to prepare coffee/drinks/snacks for the session. It'll make it a more human experience that doesn't feel like yet another zoom call. Play a song while people are gathering. No chatting before the talk starts tho. You want them in their "I can't wait to say something" mode for later.
- As soon as the talk ends, discussion starts. Getting the first person to break the silence might be hard in some groups, but the expectation was set that there's going to be a discussion - "so, what do you think?" is a good enough way to start.
- If your group is not jumping into the discussion easily and you want to be a great facilitator, prepare an icebreaker question that's a little triggering. eg. For a talk titled "A new programming language" (that you don't know the content of because that's part of the game here) you could ask "Does it really matter what programming language you use for a project?". You know it does, but it's a question that leaves everyone itching to say why.
- If your group is very talkative (or includes talkative individuals) announce upfront that there's a time limit on how long one can speak. Don't be too strict when enforcing it. Some people will need a reminder, but for most just the awareness of a time limit is gonna be enough.
- At the end of each meeting pull up the list of upcoming talks to remind everyone what's next - to build some excitement.
- If you brought lunch to a conference room, air it to avoid getting reprimended like I did.