I was lucky enough to be invited to moderate a Drupal 7 Online Summit last Sunday evening.
Background: I have never used Drupal. I know approximately what it is. I have experience of IRC meetings and moderating offline discussions with members of the Open Source community. I have run many offline workshops with different audiences.
Preparation: This Virtual Summit was planned for 2 hours and was conducted in a Public Skype chat. We created a Google doc listing the objectives and linked to some relevant documents; people attending inserted their own details, I added some some times to the agenda and created an Outputs section.
The focus of the Summit was to make some major decisions.
We decided that I should write in caps so that, as moderator, my comments would stand out against other people’s.
How did it go? I was prepared for it to go a lot worse, it was a challenge and I enjoyed it.
Here are some things I learnt:
1. Those things you do in an offline workshop you do for a reason. Don’t skip steps or shorten them because it is online.
In a physical room I use intros as my opportunity to make a quick assessment of the participants. Many different characters appear in every discussion; they are much harder to identify and therefore encourage or manage in a text only interface. I should have taken a little more time over the introductions.
2. Get help
I missed being able to quickly write something on a post-it, stick it on a wall and then use those notes to summarise. Scrolling back is not an option. Cut and paste? Yeah – that works to a point but, what would’ve been nice is to be able to highlight and ‘pin’ comments. Something that meant I could create my notes without moving focus from the chat window. We use Gobby quite a lot, perhaps that would’ve been helpful? In the absence of magic non-existent functionality – someone in the same room as you that you can talk to while you continue to read might be a solution.
I thought the attendees to the summit were very well behaved. Occasionally, I really really wanted to mute them to give me a chance to summarise. I wanted to be faster and more nimble. The discussion would stop but my window of opportunity was small – it would’ve been good to point people to a virtual wall of post-its so they could see what they had said – as it was, I simply couldn’t gather information for the ‘this is what I heard’ summary fast enough.
3. Sometimes violent agreement and violent disagreement can be almost indistinguishable from each other.
Would the attendees like to add anything? How was it for you?
I mostly just want to say THANK YOU! and to say, again, that asking you to moderate was probably the smartest thing I did when organising this online summit – It was infinitely more productive and focussed than it would otherwise have been thanks to your guidance. You were very brave to take it on and I am very appreciative that you did. Will you moderate for us again next time we need to do this? 🙂
Hi Ivanka,
It was a good discussion with lots of different opinions. The session ended with next steps and conclusions – and that was the goal. I’ve moderated offline focus groups in the past and it’s not easy. I wondered how you’d do this online and with (not 8) but 30+ people. I thought your methodology worked really well. The all caps writing was unnerving at first, but worked. The other things that made this a good experience for an attendee was breaking the session into chunks of time with a stated topic, summarizing things when there seemed to be some consensus, and keeping people on topic. Thanks for your help on this project.
My pleasure. I’d even consider doing it again!
Now, in return, all I ask is that you show a couple of people my mock-up and tell me what they say 🙂 http://www.ivanka.blog/?p=143
Thank you very much for moderating. You were a big help.