Jessica Ball brought the questions. She works as part of the KM Team in the UN-REDD programme. Last year, Jessica started an online community, coinciding with a two-day event in Rome, where representatives from all regions came together – but not all members of the virtual community could join. Jessica admitted that they were a bit late in starting the group and didn’t have much time to engage people before the event. They tried to connect with online group members through summaries after day one and through a final summary of day two. Despite these efforts, she asked how they could more effectively engage the community around different online and in-person events.

What could be done differently, to support upcoming and future events?

Pier Andrea Pirani was the peer assistant. He offered an example from a project he was involved with as part of a larger team supporting a three-day, face-to-face, experience capitalization workshop. The workshop was preceded by a two-week online engagement beforehand, covering a lot of ground and mapping people, expertise, potential connections, and what was needed. By doing so, both participants and the facilitation team went into the workshop with a head start, and by the end of the workshop, it was possible to produce a significant list of products, some in draft, and some still in a conceptual phase.

5 key elements to support events

Engaging a group around events requires careful planning, clear aims, and engagement before, during, and after the event.

1. Set a clear purpose: Define what you want to achieve through the online interaction, and make sure it adds to the event and brings value.
   

2. Plan carefully: Keep in mind the needs and expectations of the group. Consider the format, duration, and resources needed – and be realistic with the time and resources available.
   

3. Engage before the event: Engage with the participants ahead of the event to build connections, gather insights, and prepare for the event. Use this time to map people, expertise, and what is needed. This can help finalize an event agenda and preparations. It can be useful for both logistics as well as on the substance of a meeting.
   

4. Engage during the event: Use the group as a space to reach out to people that cannot attend the event, and to share knowledge, documents, and additional information generated or discussed at the event. It’s important to have the right expectations and motivators so useful engagement can take place. Often, some form of curation and facilitation is necessary.
   

5. Engage after the event: Follow up with the community after the event to share outcomes, gather feedback, and plan for future events. Keep the connections warm and use the face-to-face meeting as a springboard to foster online participation post-event.

Particularly where several events are planned, such online support helps to link people, support continuing discussion threads and conversations, and guide attention to agreed follow-ups, plans, or previous documentation.

Events can be a powerful tool to engage and support online groups – and online platforms can really help in supporting and complementing events. By setting clear goals, planning carefully, and engaging before, during, and after the event, communities can be brought together to share knowledge, collaborate, and work towards a common goal.

This is the second of a series of short posts from the discussion. The other two posts cover:

• Online collaboration use cases in depth – the talk show
• Online collaboration experience exchange – the 24 February session

Talk to us if you look for advice on online support and interaction around events

These events shared two objectives:

• Investigate and discuss the state, potential, and challenges of digitalisation for agriculture (D4AG) in the regions; and 
• Introduce the work of the Digital Agri Hub in collecting, curating, visualising, and disseminating information on digital solution providers in the three regions.

The first two events – for LAC and the Francophone regions – were designed in the form of a virtual trade show: in each event, 12 solution providers pitched their solutions, and participants were invited to discover more in breakout rooms. 

Both sessions also had either opening, scene-setting presentations or a closing, interactive chat show with invited guests.

Participants in both events appreciated the level of the speakers, the relevance of the solutions provided, the networking and information exchange, as well as the design and facilitation of the event. Possible improvements for future, similar sessions include having fewer solution providers presenting, and/or a slightly longer meeting time.

The Asia launch event was designed as a Policy Dialogue on Regional and Country Policies and Pathways. It focused on D4Ag policy and regulatory frameworks; technical and human capital; and the infrastructure and business environment for digital agriculture transformation. 

Because of the format of a policy dialogue requiring a more ‘formal’ and ‘managed’ setting, we opted to host this event as a Zoom webinar, designed around two facilitated panels with guest speakers. Audience interaction was achieved through the public webinar chat; the Q&A module; and Menti. 

One advantage of the webinar mode over meetings (besides the more detailed meeting reports generated by Zoom) is the Q&A module. If well managed and used in a coordinated manner between meeting facilitators, session moderators, and speakers, it can help harvest, answer, archive, or bring offline a large number of questions. 

We supported these events with:

• Overall session planning and design;
• Facilitation – in Spanish for the LAC event, with Rocio Sanz as the lead facilitator; French for the Francophone event, with Ewen Le Borgne as the lead facilitator; and English for the Asia event, facilitated by Jessica Ball;
• Sourcing and coordination with session interpreters – with Agostina Sueldo coordinating live interpretation Spanish/English and and Serge Dalli coordinating live interpretation French/English;
• Liaising with speakers and participants – for guidance on platform and process;
• Technical hosting – on Zoom;
• Post production – follow up messages to participants; Zoom reports; session recordings, materials etc.

Talk to us if you look for facilitation support and advice for your events, meetings, and conferences

At its simplest, Liberating Structures could be presented as a set of 33 participation formats and facilitation methods. But really it’s a lot more than that. It’s a language unto itself – a language of collaboration.

Ewen briefly presented some well used and known Liberating Structures such as 15% Solutions, Troika Consulting, 1-2-4-all, 20/15 Crowdsourcing, TRIZ.

LS are modular so you can nest one inside the other, combine them together, scale them, in a set of infinite possibilities.

Ewen also reflected on what advantages Liberating Structures bring to our practice, regardless of the type of meeting and events. LS bring a conscious and explicit effort to involve everyone from the outset, making space for each individual reflection and contribution.

Ewen concluded by sharing the 10 principles of Liberating Structures and invited everyone to explore LS and ‘borrow’ from it for ideas and examples in our online or offline work.

Facilitated by Lucie Lamoureux (KM4D Associates) the webinar was designed mostly as a peer-assist session. Two participants presented two case studies, illustrating the challenges they face in maintaining their communities of practice (CoPs). Other participants and the facilitation team provided feedback and suggestions on what can be done to overcome the challenges identified.

http://www.slideshare.net/dgroups/troubleshooting-your-dgroup

The first case presented the very common issue of stimulating participation in a community of practice. Their internal group comprises users in the headquarters and users in decentralized offices of a large international organization. In this specific case, the trend is for users in the decentralized offices to be less active, and therefore missing the opportunity to exchange and learn through the community.

Amongst others, webinar attendees suggested the following options and advice to deal with this issue:

• Keep restating the purpose of the community;
• Produce and share with the community some curated information;
• Keep on asking questions;
• Produce email digests/summary;
• Keep engaging the members by teasing out their ideas;
• Run it like a “journal”: new piece of research to be highlighted when published, and the members can comment. Leverage the possibility to have direct access to the author;
• Collect/share also the “thank you” messages, as it builds the community spirit;
• Ask the participants to state their expertise, and then invite “behind the scenes” to contribute to discussions when relevant;
• Convene a physical conference to build and strengthen links. This has proved to be very useful, but also very expensive;
• Consider that 10% active participation is common in several online groups and communities.

The second case focused on the challenge of responding to requests from within a CoP to transform a CoP from an informal and flat network into a formalised structure. This specific community is a mature and very active network, where some members want to take it to the next step. Proposed solutions for this case include:

• Breaking into subgroups – when the dynamics justifies it;
• Surveying of members – considering the risk to capture only the voice of the minority;
• Giving mandate to a specific subgroup to explore the way to work jointly for a limited time (year?)
• Split the group along the formal / informal pattern.

If you have missed this webinar, you can access the webinar recording or download the slides we used in the session.

You can also find the materials from the previous two webinar in this series at the links below:

• Learning the ins and outs of the Dgroups platform
• Developing and supporting your Dgroups

Last but not least, if you have any further suggestions for the cases highlighted here, or have additional topics/challenges about facilitating your community that you’d like to discuss in future webinars, please let us know in the comment section here below.