Sharing format for events

For various reasons not everyone can attend Global Gatherings, including Visas being denied… :persevere:
Any thoughts on best ways to keep people ‘in the loop’ during the event? What have you seen work well in the past? What do you think we could consider (all of us) as a sharing format for events? Thanks for your ideas!
For those who are in this position of having Visas denied for Mozfest, wondering especially what feels of value to you to stay connected to our cohort!

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Hey Emma,
I would suggest good documentation on what happened on the event so people can read afterwards. Especially if we are going to have workshops it will super helpful to document those and offer them afterwards so people can replicate them in their local communities.
In past events, we had also live streaming and a channel of communication in order to enable remote participation. Lastly you might want to consider on recording the sessions so people can watch them afterwards :smile:

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Documentation of what happened during each session with enough details to imagine what’d have happened in it. If it’s something that interests me, I can always connect with the people who attended the session (or even facilitated the session) and find out more details. But if I don’t know what happened, I will have to first ask someone to figure out if it interests me at all.

Also, for sessions like getting down with github, at least names of all the tools that are mentioned. (These would be very easy to document. Just put a URL and I can learn about every feature of the tool from the website)

For sessions which are about generating ideas, the ideas that were generated. After all, these sessions are meant to be documented, because otherwise they’re pointless. (Even just documenting ideas are not very useful, but let’s ignore that for now).

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@asdofindia We can’t document every session BUT I wonder as in your case where you shared which sessions you wanted to attend, we tag someone in the cohort to follow or share on that session.

How do you think we could easily track ‘sessions for shareout’ , almost like match making between someone there, and someone who can’t be? Is this just a spreadsheet, a Discourse topic? This feels doable and awesome but we need a plan. I also think when we have to document what we learn, it helps the person doing the sharing as well.

That sounds good. Participants documenting events will serve different purposes - 1) they get to consolidate what they learned, 2) they build an ever-lasting memory for their experience 3) there’re chances that there’ll be multiple posts about same event giving different angles.

But since no participant will have enough time to document everything they attend, it makes sense to coordinate the action. I’ll just create an etherpad with the list of sessions I need and others can +1 on that and/or add sessions they need. And whoever is willing to document can write their name under the session? How does that sound? (Link to etherpad. Does this work?)

This probably applies only to non-Mozilla-organised sessions at MozFest (but I think is still worth remembering for all sessions and events), but I’ve been in a number of sessions where there’s been no successful effort at keeping people ‘in the loop’ after the event. Often there’s been a great deal of enthusiasm and discussion during the session or event, but none afterwards.

The solution? (and I think this is going to be a bit of a trend from me over the weekend)
Discourse (of course!)

This isn’t because it’s some revolutionary new concept, but merely because it’s a not-crap forum/mailing-list type thing. The importance of a place for open discussion after a session or event is huge. It’s just a slight shame that it’s all going to be crammed into one little subcategory this weekend.

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@leo You’re right on the history.

(rewrote for clarity)
Thinking of this as less like remote participation more as a way to connect people with clear asks about a session (who cannot be there), with answers. Less about summaries, more about tapping people on the shoulder to ‘own’ the feedback someone else needs to move forward with their goals for 2016.

Almost like matchmaker for people who can and cannot be there - how do you think Discourse structure can support this?

Maybe by experimenting in deliberate ways like this we get better at overall events connection.

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+1 to using discourse for continued engagement. Immediate catching up can happen in mozfest category and long term projects can happen in respective categories like community education.

For MozillaPH, we normally have a re-echo session conducted by someone who attended a global gathering such as a meetup or a workweek. There are times that these re-echo sessions are aided by videos recorded via Air Mozilla.

Learing network is already using discourse