OSCON06: Face 2 Face: Processes for OS Communities

Ever attended a meeting that you felt just wasn't focusing on the real issues and knew others at the meeting felt the same. Kaliya Hamlin's "Face 2 Face: Processes for OS Communities" tutorial at OSCON 2006 provided good techniques to make meetings and conferences a lot more productive. While her tutorial was targeted at a conference to addresses problems within an open source community, they apply to just about any size gathering of people invited to resolve some issues. Some of the methods are obvious while others would be considered avant-garde. Also, at the request of many participants, we discussed ways to deal with people who derail meetings, or worse, get verbally confrontational or blow-up. First, an important part of any meeting, that is often overlook, is to let everyone introduce themselves and if time permits provide more than just their name. Obviously this is for groups having people who don't know each other by name (yet). It is really important for people to put a face to name. At the level of a conference or large meeting she emphasized that the "art of invitation" is really important in getting the right people to attend. Express your hopes and goals of the meeting in the invitation. Also, if it is for a large conference try to come up with a cool name or logo, some examples are winecamp and the internet identity conference. Next, at the start of the conference get participants to suggest sessions on a sheet of paper and create a chart of the available rooms and time slots. Let everyone post his or her sessions to the chart. Once all have seen the suggestions ask people to negotiate a better arrange and/or come up with better sessions. We did this pretending to attend a conference on ways to "improve online collaboration". I suggested a session entitled "ways to reduce office email using a community blog". About three others had similar session ideas and we quickly rearranged and merged our sessions into a topic track we all like. I was somewhat surprising how smoothly this went, I expected some chaos to ensue but none did. To "break the ice" of a meeting we played the "game" called "A Strong Wind Blows..." akin to musical chairs. Everyone sits in a circle except for one person standing in the center. The center person states a quality about themselves like "a strong wind blows for all linux users". Those who use linux get up and scramble for a new open seat, including the center person. The one left standing then takes a turn. I have to admit I had some reservations at first but was amazed at how well it worked. There was quite a bit more openness and energy in the room after only about 10 rounds. I wouldn't try this technique at the next board meeting; however, it really seemed perfect for an offsite. It is a technique to get people to know one another and get a sense of who is in the room. After this she outline the "fishbowl technique". In this method a set of chairs are arranged in concentric circles starting with about seven in the center. Get six volunteers to sit in the center or choose six with differing opinions about an issue being addresses. During the conversation among the six when someone outside has something to add they sit in the empty chair and one of the others self-selects themselves to step out. The method worked well for our discussion, how to deal with someone who blows-up at or derails a meeting. Some of the suggestions were "work hard not to hire such people", "have some formal communication methods", "everyone should take a break and the manager should talk to the person privately". When talking with such a person emphasize connection, build up their trust, and that you are giving them the attention they are asking for and they now need to give others equal time. When listening don't always do an analysis (male trait). (read Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono). Try to make the environment as open as you can to allow everyone to comment. If you find a meeting spiraling into defensive communications, e.g., hearing a lot of "I don't think …" or "no that's not …" try to pull it out possibly by pointing out the defensive patterns observed. If you find someone keeps shooting down ideas create a forum (meeting, community-blog, etc…) of some kind having the sole purpose of generating ideas and forbid any negative comments for a period of time (a week or two) after an idea is posted. Another issue raised was how to handle someone who doesn't follow through on tasks? Create a list of action items at the meeting and check-up on each person about their task. If they have not completed it ask if they still "want to own it". If not, move it to the orphaned list. At the next meeting review the list, if important items are on it they will be addressed. The other technique we did was called spectrogram and is meant to get the range of opinions on a critical issue. We choose the question "Can you trust Microsoft?" A line of tape on the floor represented the range from "yes" to "no" with the middle being "don't know". You stand on the line where your opinion lies. (I was alone at the "no" end, surprising since this was at OSCON.) Most people hovered around the middle. Next, we had someone ask people why they chose to stand at this point on the line. It was enlightening to here other points of view. A lot of people seemed the feel that Microsoft is changing for the better these days. Kaliya had another technique called speed-geeking that she wanted us to try but time ran out. Overall it was good excellent session and I learned a lot. Benjamin Smedberg also blogged about the session.