Recently I had the pleasure of co-hosting two online sessions with the purpose to talk about the tech side of virtual facilitation – what is happening behind the scenes? My co-host Stephan Morales, took the lead designing the sessions using Liberating Structures, a suite of tools that help to engage all participants in the meeting. I volunteered to do the tech hosting of the meeting as it was a great opportunity to try some new skills in a safe setting.
The sessions themselves were filled with rich conversation, resources, tools, and tidbits of advice. People asked for us to share back the recording (April 21 and April 24), the chat and contact info people were providing. Once I scanned the chats, I knew a curated harvest would be helpful!
Interestingly, Stefan and I spent a lot of time designing the sessions and figuring out how it would roll out. However, we never spoke about the harvest. This is perhaps one of my greatest oversights. Thinking to the future, as we get wrapped up with the technology, of virtual facilitation, its important to stay rooted in the foundations of our facilitation practice. For me, I have always loved the advice I got years ago from Chris Corrigan about planning for the harvest from the outset of your design.
I suspect for many of us, experiencing and learning during the sessions was our ‘harvest’. However, the curation of the details shared is also of value particularly over time. Going through the chats 1-2 weeks post-session was illuminating. So despite being a bit late, I cleaned the chats (the method is described in this resource doc) and then combed through both sessions to pull out the great resources, tips, and Q&A. I have posted them in a google doc online. I uploaded the session recordings to my YouTube Channel (April 21, April 24) so that people can have access to them once the zoom cloud storage is maxed out.
I sincerely thank all the fish who volunteered their expertise, our graphic recorder and my co-host for proposing the idea in the first place!
In summary:
Guest Fish:
- Session 1: Nancy White and William Aal joined by many more fish in the moment.
- Session 2: Anna Jackson, Fisher Qua and Paul Tevis
Digital visual harvest thanks to Bob Mack (Session 2).
Co-host Stephan Morales.
Powerpoint from the session. Cleaned Chats from April 21st and from April 24th. .
I invite everyone to contribute to the Q&A as not all answers were provided in the session. Instructions on how to ‘clean the chat’ easily are also there (thanks Nancy White!).
Thanks again for all who came to play, share and experiment!
