The Unjoy of Panels

I’m a veteran panel moderator. I’ve been doing it since high school, and I think I’m pretty good at it. But I’m thinking about retiring from the business.    (JKL)

Last week, I moderated the SofTECH / SDForum July meeting on “Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions.” Tony Christopher had suggested me to Ron Lichty, the meeting producer. Ron and I, as it turned out, had met a few years earlier at a GivingSpace workshop. Ron explained to me his goals for the panel, told me who the panelists would be, and I said, “Sign me up!”    (JKM)

The panel went well. The panelists — Tony Christopher, Zack Rosen, Sylvia Marino, and Scott Wilder — were great. Everyone told lots of great stories, but also respected the other panelists, and no one tried to dominate the floor, which made my job incredibly easy. More importantly, the audience was engaged with the topic and the panelists. Ron was great also. He had done a masterful job of organizing the event and preengaging the panel.    (JKN)

The problem was that the panel format was wrong. Panels work best when they emerge as entertaining and informative roundtable discussions. As good as our panelists were, that was not going to happen, because the format did not optimally align with our goal — educating the audience. A panel format can achieve this goal — and ours did — but only in a broadcast model, which does not maximize group potential.    (JKO)

It was clear from an informal poll I took at the beginning of the panel and the number of faces I recognized that we had a lot of expertise in the audience itself. It would have been far more engaging and educational for all involved had we done a more interactive format, where we spent an hour in break-outs, possibly followed by a moderated plenary discussion. The panelists, in this scenario, would have been co-participants with the rest of the audience.    (JKP)

I moderated two panels and gave a talk at last June’s Collaborative Technologies Conference. One panel was in a traditional format for reasons largely out of my control, but I decided to play with the other two formats. In both of those cases, I turned the tables on the audience, rearranging the stage format into a circle, and basically played discussion moderator rather than panel moderator. Several people had already camped out in the back with their laptops open — almost assuredly planning to check email rather than listen to the talk — and a look of fear and shock came over their eyes when I told them to join me in the circle.    (JKQ)

Several people approached me afterwards and praised the format. (My favorite moment was one night at dinner, when I introduced myself to Stowe Boyd, who wrote a great essay on panels. Upon hearing my name, Stowe said, “I want to thank you.” I was completely baffled by this, as we had never met, and Stowe had not attended any of my talks. Apparently, he had heard about my panels — probably from Arieanna Foley — and he was grateful that someone had tried something different.) These folks were clearly suffering from panel fatigue, and just the fact that we were doing something different and engaging improved the experience wildly for them. I guarantee that the circle format was also more informative for the audience as a whole, because it addressed their specific concerns and it introduced a set of viewpoints far more rich than just mine or a panel’s.    (JKR)

As much as people respond to these more interactive formats, they are mere baby steps. Kindergarteners get in circles, for pete’s sake. Pre-school can be fun, but once you’ve been in kindergarten, you don’t want to go back. Facilitation techniques like Conversation Cafe and Open Space are at the first grade level, Aspiration is at second grade, and MGTaylor is at third. The latter techniques augmented with cutting edge collaborative tools is at least the fourth grade level, and we’ve only scratched the surface as to what’s possible. It’s just sad that the vast majority of conferences are at the pre-school level.    (JKS)

There are situations where panels work well as a format, but they are vastly overdone. In any case, don’t let this post prevent you from inviting me to moderate a panel. Just expect me to make some strong demands concerning format.    (JKT)

(See also Mary Hodder‘s excellent panel diatribe.)    (JKU)

FLOSS Usability Sprint, Feb 18-20

Blue Oxen Associates and the good folks at Aspiration are organizing a usability sprint for open source software. The sprint will be held at Jeff Shults‘s fantastic new facility in San Francisco, February 18-20. Those who should apply:    (HTW)

  • Developers who want to improve the usability of their Open Source projects.    (HTX)
  • Usability practitioners who want to help improve the usability of Open Source software.    (HTY)

I got the idea from a breakout session at the Advocacy Developer’s Convergence last June. A few months later, I accidentally ran into Zack Rosen on the CalTrain, and our conversation pumped me up about the idea. The next step was to find a partner in this endeavour, and Aspiration was the natural choice.    (HTZ)

This event is going to be very exciting. It will be the first gathering of developers, usability practitioners, and users devoted to improving the usability of Open Source software. It’s going to be high-energy and productive, as all Aspiration workshops are. And, it’s going to have a real and immediate impact on the quality of several applications.    (HU0)

Most importantly (from Blue Oxen‘s point of view), it will showcase outstanding collaborative processes and tools, both face-to-face and online. As always with Blue Oxen projects, the goal is for this kind of event to be replicable by anyone, and the expectation is that this sprint will be the first of many.    (HU1)

Go to the web site if you’re interested in participating. Contact me if you’re interested in sponsoring the event or if you have questions or thoughts.    (HU2)

Online Community Summit: DeanSpace

Zack Rosen, Zephyr Teachout, Nicco Mele, key contributors to Howard Dean‘s presidential campaign, spoke about their online efforts last Thursday at the Online Community Summit. Some key points:    (2EP)

  • As Dean volunteers started using MeetUp regularly, the campaign started hosting regular conference calls with MeetUp leaders as a way of disseminating information through its communities.    (2EQ)
  • One of the early grassroots activities was distributing flyers as PDF. Nicco recognized this and decided to distribute official flyers as PDF also. Once this happened, the grassroots flyers largely dried up.    (2ER)
  • Related to the flyers issue was the vetting process. Initially, the campaign reviewed contributed flyers, but on the advice of its lawyers, it decided not to officially approve of any outside work to avoid liability. This was not a problem, and according to Zephyr, the community tended to be more risk-averse than the campaign. After all, they wanted to elect Dean, not hurt his chances.    (2ES)
  • The cross-pollination between the different mediums was relatively low. In other words, folks who blogged didn’t necessarily participate in MeetUp.    (2ET)
  • Replacing volunteer organizers with paid organizers tended to kill communities, regardless of how good the people were.    (2EU)

The theme of this talk was that the campaign was reactive, not proactive. It tended to watch things happen and to try and facilitate the good things, rather than start things themselves.    (2EV)

My takeaway from the talk: You can’t organize self-organization. There are things that you can do to catalyze it, but in the end, if the circumstances aren’t right, it’s not going to happen. What you can do is get out of the way when it does happen. This is an important lesson for folks trying to replicate the success of the Dean campaign and other self-organization success stories — Open Source, MoveOn, Indymedia, etc.    (2EW)

Online Community Summit: Marc Smith

I spent last Thursday and Friday at the Online Community Summit in Sonoma, California. Forum One, which organizes the event, brought together a fantastic group of folks — about 60 people, including corporate and grassroot community facilitators, foundations, venture capitalists, consultants, and researchers. Zack Rosen joked that he wanted to come to this gathering, because he always sees the same people at the other events he attends, and he didn’t recognize anybody at this one. I saw several familiar faces — Zack, Tony Christopher (who informed me of the event), Jerry Michalski, Jan Hauser, Paul King, Thomas Kriese, and others — and recognized the names of several other attendees, but most of the group were new to me.    (2E1)

I enjoyed meeting and talking with Marc Smith, whose work I’ve blogged on multiple occasions, and who kicked off the day by giving a fantastic overview of the work he’s doing at Microsoft. Marc is doing very, very good stuff, and I’m not just saying that because it overlaps with some of our own work and thinking.    (2E2)

NetScan performs a variety of data analysis on USENET newsgroups based entirely on postings, and presents those metrics in useful ways. A lot of the innovation is in the visualization (see his slides for examples), and the visualization software is freely available. Some key points:    (2E3)

  • About two percent of the 13 million USENET users post three or more days a year. That doesn’t sound like much, but it works out to a quarter of a million people.    (2E4)
  • Support communities need about 40 active posters to be sustainable.    (2E5)
  • The metrics you expect depend on the type of newsgroup. The alt.binaries.* newsgroups have lots of posts, lots of posters, and very short threads. Metrics describe the interaction, but to place a value judgement on these metrics, you need to combine them with qualitative analysis.    (2E6)
  • Marc posed a bunch of metrics to look for in a healthy community: retention of leaders, interaction, size and growth, topical focus, speed, and host participation.    (2E7)

I am amazed that more people have not done this kind of research. The opportunity for evolving our applications in useful ways is tremendous. As Marc sardonically stated, “There’s a little room for conversation in our UIs.” Marc showed a few possible directions in which to evolve UIs, but whether or not these features will show up in future applications remains to be seen. There’s a tremendous opportunity for Open Source developers to study this research and implement its findings in their own applications.    (2E8)

Marc also described Project A U R A, which I blogged about a year ago.    (2E9)