Things I was grateful for this week.
Heather Leson sharing this article on teams.
It’s been great to be part of The Solferino Digital Team, with Heather, Laurent Fernandez and Shaun Hazeldene. these past few months, and I wholeheartedly agree with a lot of whats in the article. When you have a group of people who know each other well and can get on with the work, it makes a huge difference to efficiency. The article also got me reflecting on how, as a consultant, I rely on personal agility to move between teams. The most important thing is to be self-aware enough to know what skills I bring, but not be too self-important, someone else in the team might have more experience or a better way of doing it than me – and I have to have a certain amount of humility to let that come out. But I also need to be able to get on with what I can do on my own.
A conversation with Allison Corkery and Rebecca Berger at CESR…
…on capturing, reflecting and applying learning during planning meetings.
As CESR starts to implement their strategy, they know they need to capture and apply learning as they move forward. We explored how learning is applied – and it came to me how its really about brains in play, rather than documentation. It’s about pooling the knowledge of the collective experience, rather than reviewing a document of captured learning. We apply learning when we plan and implement. Dialogue drives planning meetings, during which people reflect on experience or what was recently read.
Laurent Fernandez’s Zoom Breakout Room Script
The focus for the week was two meetings run by The Solferino Academy for IFRC Leadership. We used Zoom’s registration system so that we could get people to tell us what their preferred language was so that we could put them into small groups accordingly. It was amazing how badly the registration system works within Zoom. You would think you would be able to pre-assign people to small groups in the meeting settings. You have to generate a report (as if the event already happened) on who registered and then format a CSV file into a particular format and load it back into the pre-assigned breakout rooms. Thankfully, Laurent created a script to make it much easier to do the rejig. However, you have to load the .csv file BEFORE you start the meeting and then hit ‘reapply pre-assign breakout room settings’ AFTER everyone has arrived. Even though the zoom setting didn’t work for us, we still had a spreadsheet from Laurent’s script that meant we could manually make breakout room assignments, and no one other than the tech team knew. It was seamless to the participants.
Another limitation of the registration system, Zoom generates a unique link for everyone that registers – but this link becomes the only way that they can get into the meeting. Which means they have to dig through their inbox to get the link, and occasionally dig it out of their spam folder. If the registration option is on, there’s no way to share a link to allow people to enter the zoom meeting. They have to use the registration link and the link that is provided to them from zoom via email.
Sarah Allen’s post on what’s next for MozFest
Not thankful
Exactly three years ago, our network of capacity builders went through a harrowing time when 10 colleagues were arrested during a digital security training near Istanbul. The #Istanbul10 were charged with terrorism, and then imprisoned for more than a hundred days. On Friday, outrage as four of the human rights defenders were convicted.