facilitation

The Remote Team Cohesion Lab is part of a suite of workshops designed to strengthen organisations’ abilities to achieve social change through empowering individual and team structures. This lab series is a collaboration between Sarah Allen, drawing upon her expertise as the Mozilla Festival Senior Director, and Dirk Slater of […]

What We’ve Learned about Remote Team Cohesion   Recently updated !

What follows is a collection of learnings gained from practising facilitation since the late 90s. Thanks to Gunner at Aspiration for his ongoing contributions and those who have joined me in learning about facilitation at places like MozFest, RightsCon and The Session Design Lab.  A facilitator aims to surface the unique knowledge and experience of the individuals […]

Facilitation Essentials

Strengthen your abilities and facilitation practice to support the power of those you’ve convened. We are offering this Lab twice during the week of July 29th to accommodate a diversity of time zones During this two-day, three-hour-a-day online lab, we will explore the different power domains in which change-makers operate […]

The Facilitating Collective Power Lab

Which format is best for your next convening? On March 24th, 2022, Six session designers convened virtually to talk about the pros and cons of the different session formats we now have to choose from: virtual, in real life (IRL) and hybrids (a mixture of both).  The session included Tanya […]

Virtual vs IRL vs Hybrid

My primary reflection on 2021: it was marginally less crap than 2020. Certainly not the magnitude of crap that was 2020, but with insurrections, revelations and mutations, it still seemed a year we were all happy to see come to an end. Perhaps if we keep our expectations low and […]

Learnings we will take from 2021 into 2022

The Session Design Canvas is for anyone who has attended the Virtual Session Design Lab, An Online Facilitator Coaching Session, or has read ‘Tips for Designing an Effective Workshop Session’. It assumes a familiarity with Malcolm S. Knowles Adult Learning Theories and ADIDS as a workshop format.  This canvas has […]

The Session Design Canvas V 1.0

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve run over one hundred virtual sessions, and dozens of virtual events, interacting with thousands of participants. Here are six things I’ve learned along the way. Three things I’ve learned about tech: Keep the tech simple. Only use the tools you need. For example, […]

Six things I’ve learned about virtual sessions

Breathing again with a focus on reflecting and planning. Reflecting Mor Rubinstein and I hosted a ‘social lunch’ for members of this 360Giving Data Champions Cohort as we wrap up this year’s programme. We also did a reflection on this year’s cohort with Mor getting us to respond to four […]

Weeknotes for June 19th, 2020

Of course, COVID-19 dominated everything this week. There was a coronavirus tech handbook page which a bunch of helpful links that Ed Saperia from Newspeak House shared on the Network-Centric Resources List. I found the Data in the Worldometer particularly helpful in gaining perpective The week started with write a […]

Weeknotes for March 13th, 2020

Rachel Rank and Anna Scott at 360Giving inspired this post. We are working on a Data Champion programme for UK Grantmakers and were discussing formats for a blog post on a workshop on Data Workflows. They pointed to Cassie Robinson’s concise and informative Weeknotes. So I’m trying the format for […]

Weeknotes for Feb 14th, 2020

At Aspiration’s Non-Profit Developer Summit in November 2019, I attended a workshop on Facilitative Leadership run by Misty Avila. What struck me about the session was how Misty walked the walk, demonstrating the power of facilitative leadership through the session design, providing structure and scaffolding for participants to share and […]

Recipes for Facilitative Leadership – a workshop session design

On Wednesday, May 29th, 2019, FabRiders will lead the Open Government Partnership Summit Unconference on Making Data Work for Open Government. This document will help you understand how the Unconference will be conducted and how to get the most out of it. To paraphrase US President John F Kennedy: ‘Ask not […]

How to get the most out of an Unconference

FabRiders’ Network-Centric Resources Project supports the development of people-powered and participatory resources that establish assets for networks and communities. Our past online discussions have focused on developing content with and for communities and network’s, such as Heather Leson on curating data-literacy social learning curriculum with Humanitarians in IFRC’s Data Playbook, Greg Bloom on co-creating Data Standards with Health and […]

Gunner on Facilitative Leadership, Online Discussion Notes

Outside, the air was thick with toxic smoke from the Camp Fire, with warnings to limit exposure.  Inside, it was Aspiration’s 15th Non-Profit Developer Summit and people were invested in being there.  It was the largest #NPDev yet, with over 150 registrants and it seems the smoke didn’t deter people […]

What We Learned at NPDev 2018

FabRiders’ Network-Centric Resources supports the development of participatory resources, building assets for networks and communities that share ownership, enable contribution and support collaboration. In this online discussion, Adam Hyde shared his lessons learned in enabling collaborative content creation. Note that this is a redo of an online recording which we […]

Enabling Collaborative Content Creation with Adam Hyde, Online Discussion Notes

The discipline of iteration and testing have been the most important processes to our work at FabRiders. A final product is never produced, whether it’s a how-to guide or a project plan, without distributing lots of drafts and incorporating lots of feedback. All our work is a prototype, as even […]

What We’ve Learned by Prototyping Workshops

On June 12th and June 13th, FabRiders collaborated with two doctoral researchers, Lydia Medland and Maria-Teresa Pinto, to design and deliver a workshop at the University of Bristol aimed at helping doctoral researchers strengthen their fieldwork practices and protect themselves and their research participants. To develop this participatory workshop, we […]

QAF’s and Resources to Mitigate Risks in Academic Research

From March 6th to 10th, over 1400 individuals will converge in Valencia, Spain for what is being billed as the ‘Global Unconference of the Internet Freedom Communities.’ In our humble opinion, we think calling a participatory event at this scale an ‘unconference’ is a huge disservice as the format is […]

Why We’re Excited About The Internet Freedom Festival

2016 wasn’t all bad. Here at FabRiders, 2016 was a great year of learning. Every event and project that goes by we find ourselves building and sharing on a body of knowledge that is contributed to and enabled by a fantastic set of partners and allies. Despite all the setbacks faced last year, we are […]

Building a Better 2017

I recently spent two days facilitating a workshop on how to evaluate the impact of data training and learning endeavors for Open Knowledge, several School of Data chapters and like minded organisations including DataKind UK,  SocialTIC from Mexico City, Code4SA from South Africa, and Metamorphosis from Macedonia.  At the end […]

What I’ve Learned about Impact Assessment

Just back from Oakland, California feeling nourished and re-energised after attending the annual Nonprofit Development Software Summit (#NPDev). This is Aspiration’s signature event, bringing together a collection of radical techies, graphic designers, campaigners and non-profit staffers for three days of organised chaos that is unbelievably productive. We were honored to have […]

What I learned at NPDev Summit 2014

I had the privilege of traveling to Cambodia last week to work closely with Allen Gunn (Gunner) and Misty Avila from Aspiration, running an event for the Open Institute called ‘Open Cambodia.’  We had over 100 participants from all over Cambodia, who were largely interested in using technology to support […]

What I learned at Open Cambodia

Aspiration’s NPDev Summit was remarkable this year on a number of fronts: most notably the participants were ready to share and absorb knowledge on equal measure, resulting in a dynamic agenda packed full of a wide range of topics and facilitators.  Also notable how the Aspiration team, Gunner, Jess, Jordan, […]

What I Learned at NPDev Summit 2013