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I'd love to add one thing here -

depending on who is your target group, especially the younger generations are not used to participating in those former text-based discussion threads. They do not have the attention span, they might not even have the writing skills, and they are used to more visuals-based content. It's a generational challenge that we are struggling with a lot over here, at least. Maybe that's one aspect that needs to be considered when thinking of discussion forums and asynchronous participation. I cannot think of any good forum either, BTW. So I personally think it has to be a media mix.

C.

Hi Nancy

I’m with you. As someone from those early days, I had been thinking the same. Synchronous communication was a rarity.

(Interestingly, a number of our clients are now struggling to host synchronous events online because their institutional systems are straining under the load.)

A bug bear of mine is that I haven’t found any asynchronous tools with a good threaded discussion function (like we used to have).?

You need to be able to sort by subject, author, date, etc., And you need to see on the screen how the discussion had developed. Then you can have some deeper, more meaningful conversations that build on each other.

Blogposts, slack, and don’t do it. They are good for handy little messages that no-one needs to look at again. Or for generating so many parallel threads that you need a spare life to be able to hold a conversation rather than jump along on a pogo stick.

All that to say - I would love to know if anyone out there knows of a decent discussion forum tool!

Bev

On Mar 19, 2020, at 13:48, Nancy White <nancy.white@...> wrote:

This post is part "thinking out loud" and part action/question. So if you are interested in both, please read till the end.

One of the things that is showing up for me is people writing/calling/texting asking "how do I convert this F2F meeting to online?" (More on that in a separate message.)?

Well, last night I made the mistake of looking at FB before bed so I slept very poorly AND I had a lot of ideas swirling around in my head. One was a flashback of the online events many of us designed and hosted back in the "olden days" when most online events were primarily text based and asynchronous. There would be discussion threads rolled out over a period of days and people would generally have a 24-48 time period to read, post, and respond to others before we moved on to the next "agenda item." When we got really fancy we would add periodic telephone conference calls (yes, telephone!) and things really broke open when we could start to embed media like visuals, audio and video.?

The ideas behind this work was that we could include many more people than could fly to a meeting, and when we had to support access to local connectivity, it was very often FAR FAR FAR more economical than bringing people to a physical gathering. While those who were used to F2F meetings pooh-poohed us, those who never got to go to those meetings were deeply engaged, appreciative and brilliant contributors.?

Arrival to March 19 (it is March 19th, isn't it? How many days have we been quarantined in each of our corners of the world??) After 10-14 days of super intense Zoom meetings, my brain and body was not happy. The intensity (yes, of course, jacked up by the pandemic) was showing on our faces as we stared into our cameras, still wearing the same sweatshirt from ... how many days ago?

It hit me, we DO HAVE the ability to use asynchronous tools with our lovely synchronous tools. Many of us do it every day (yes, email, basecamp, trello, teams, slack) but those uses have been for tasking, small message exchange, and not really deeper conversation. (Yes, JonL - the ?conversation!) Set up a discussion board, parse out the things that can go slower, that don't need video, that focus on information exchange or slower, calmer (and deeper) conversations. Let people figure out how to take care of the kids and work by making some of the meeting time a slower, asynchronous time.?

Today I have two calls about meeting design and I wondered, how would I convert those meetings? What are some of those great approaches and techniques that worked so well 15-20 years ago??

So what I'd love to discuss - yes asynchronously for now on this email list - is our ideas for rethinking F2F longer form meetings (3 day strategic planning, 2 day training, 5 day intense team consultation) into synch/asynch online meetings. How do we rethink of time (believe me, we aren't going to sustain all day online meetings and raise the kids etc, folks. Get real quick!) What rhythm works well? How does this enhance cross time zone work.?

I have a lot of ideas, but they are all a-jumble. Please join in this thread and think with me. I'd like to bring together our best thinking over 3-5 days and then write it up (we can do that collaboratively too if folks are interested.)

AND THEN, I propose we do a series of redesign-shops where one org brings their old meeting agenda, and we offer redesign ideas. What do you think?

Chime in!

-- 



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