Internal Communication methods
Fran Ellis
Public
Seen by 112
Hello, I'm Fran, I'm co-leading Arts this year, which involves general oversight of all things art grants, centre camp (the Point), programmes, wristbands, decor and temple/effigy. I'm starting this discussion as I'm also a macro lead and comms lead for Microburn and involved in various community-safety areas of the Borderland, and feel there are some simple ways we at Nest could increase transparency and opportunities for co-creation and also address recent discussions on centralisation vs. decentralisation. Whilst we are obviously not going to overhaul our internal comms methods before this year's event, (getting the show on the road is priority!) I think it's worthwhile to start the conversation anyway.
Current Internal Comms:
For those that aren't aware, the planning of Nest happens mostly via Asana (a project management platform), online meetings (of leads), community meetings (of anyone), email, Google Drive, sometimes Facebook and of course more recently Loomio.
Add any more methods if I've missed them!
Challenges:
Whilst Asana is a highly organised tool of keeping all discussions, tasks, documents etc. in one place, and retaining knowledge for the following year, it means that only those Nestlings that have volunteered for lead roles are able to see how the event is organised and what tasks need doing. And whilst emails may reduce noise on the main comms channels, it means knowledge is retained only by those party to the exchange. In my opinion, that the majority of the Nest community are unable to see how the event is organised adds to the general feeling that it all happens 'behind closed doors'. It may also negatively impact recruitment and on-boarding: if people are able to see how the event is organised, maybe they'd be more inclined to take tasks/roles on themselves in the future. It's easy to say 'anyone can get involved by taking on a lead role', but many may be hesitant to take a leadership role if they have limited understanding of what that involves. This may add to the usual suspects leading the thing year on year and eventually becoming burnt out.
Suggestions:
For the reasons mentioned above, I think it would be beneficial to open up so-called 'internal' communications to the wider community. If everyone is a co-creator, everyone should be able to see how this thing is co-created.
How?
That's up to us! Could we open up Asana to the wider Nest community? Could we move all planning to Loomio? Could we invite anyone to planning meetings, if we can get past the 10-person Hangouts limit? Some small adjustments to our internal/digital comms could have a hugely positive impact on community cohesion.
Some inspiration:
-At Microburn all planning happens on Slack, where all channels are open for everyone to observe or participate in (including the coreleads channel). This is excluding art grants, low-income applications, conflict resolution and the like, which involve confidential info and are therefore private channels to the people working in that area each year.
-Anyone can attend MB planning meetings, you don't have to be a lead. They are always recorded and left on YouTube and minutes are in the publicly accessible MB Google folder for anyone to read.
-For both MB and BL, conversations and discussions happen on threads either on Slack or Talk (Loomio). This means knowledge is accessible by the whole community and is retained, to be referred back to in subsequent years by new people.
-BL is highly decentralised, which wouldn't necessarily work for Nest and is a gradual process, not something that can happen overnight. But for inspiration, check out the Realities platform. Anyone can add a necessary task to Realities, and anyone can pick tasks up. Kiez Burn in Germany are also using this system, and Burnerot in Israel is using something similar called Doocrat.
Excited to hear people's ideas and opinions on this <3
Fran Ellis Wed 1 May 2019 10:04PM
Wonderful, thanks for the recommendation Ax - will check that out for sure. Agree Slack can get noisy - we're a smaller community at MB so works well for us, just an example really
Siren Tue 30 Apr 2019 9:52AM
AFAIAA, this is exactly why Loomio has been set up, precisely to provide a platform for the community to decide things that the core and departmental teams will then execute.
Asana isn't about decision making, it's a task management tool. We do have conversations there but they're mainly 'Amanda, can you send me copy for what vols you need by Monday night, please/ Cal, how many memberships have we sold?'
Perhaps we need to give an overview of what channels we use and why...?
Asana: project task management, detailed tasks, deadlines, project deliverables and how they inter-depend.
Google: doc storage (although we also have this on asana)
Wordpress: website (we'll be hauling this over next year)
Mailchimp: email comms
Facebook Group, Page and Event: Organisation, comms, community interaction, community discussions and decisions.
Loomio: community discussions and decisions
Community meetings: community discussions and decisions
Individual emails: all core leads have their own email address, which anyone is welcome to use at any time for other discussions. usually department or first name @burningnest.co.uk. Anyone can email @burningnest.co.uk and it will default to info@ so provided you write FAO somewhere, it will reach them eventually.
Hope all this helps. We are uber transparent at Nest, i think...
Fran Ellis Wed 1 May 2019 10:12PM
Thanks for providing that overview, @siren4, very helpful for an informed discussion. And I should have made clear in my original post: I love Loomio and think it's great we've introduced it :) But my post wasn't necessarily about decision making,
"Whilst Asana is a highly organised tool of keeping all discussions, tasks, documents etc. in one place, and retaining knowledge for the following year, it means that only those Nestlings that have volunteered for lead roles are able to see how the event is organised and what tasks need doing."
What I'm suggesting is that all Nestlings are able to see those tasks if they so desire, and perhaps even pick some of them up further down the line...
Paul Phare Thu 2 May 2019 10:28AM
It would be difficult to open up Asana to everyone and I don't think Loomio is the right tool for Project Management. My proposal of issuing minutes of team meetings on Loomio is a way of tying the two together. It would present tasks, decisions and discussions in a more digestible format. It won't be live but it will allow the community to engage and influence the core team.
Paul
07775705374
Siren Tue 7 May 2019 2:37PM
@franellis sadly, just because i know how this all works, your proposal is just completely impractical i'm afraid. With exponential amounts of people picking up however many tasks it will create gaps, overlap and confusion and generally make Nest a lot harder work than it is already.
however, i really see the value of having a dedicated release of event internal comms to create more of a feedback loop and greater transparency and I am very happy for this to sit in my area as comms lead. I do fully support this, however we have limited capacity in the comms team, so my suggestion would be that you are welcome to join the team to head this up for next year!
Happy to talk more at the event to see how this will work, but having Project Communications lead (which is what i do for a day job, incidentally!) is a really worthy role and might help us manage a lot of this interface about how the event is run.. if we have a centralised channel/releases (to loomio, on google docs, wherever) where people outside of Core and Event teams who are interested can see decisions taken and actions being managed, then that would be super useful.
I imagine it being something that we can release on a monthly basis, as per our core team meetings, increasing to fortnightly as per our core team meetings three months before the event. it would be in one place and then we can add links to here, facebook, website... it would be a bit like charities disclosing their activity and accounts... think that would work very well, actually.
Iona Steen Tue 30 Apr 2019 11:23PM
Fran already thank you for bringing up this thread and it’s super important
Particularly after joining the core team this year and being inaugurated onto a sauna I have a lot of concerns about the way decision-making is undertaken within the organisational structure of nest and I think there are many things that we could do to improve that.
I think the first thing I would suggest is that we are going to have a community meeting at the festival on the Saturday at 3 pm and I will put this topic on the agenda.
I also think that now we have lumiere as a platform to engage the whole community for decision-making and also that the community has been so constructive in their use of loomio in the last month.
that we are in a good place to divulge a lot of the decision-making that was previously made by the core team to the community using loomio as the platform.I think this is now beginning to happen and I will definitely have a cake for that trend to continue.
I agreed with Paul’s comment that some decisions my best made by somebody has well-informed without involving lots of people with them. And that’s also partly because a lot of decisions are a little bit the Nile and probably save a lot of time and energy not spending days debating them. I think this is now beginning to happen and I will definitely advocate for that trend to continue.
I agreed with Paul’s comment that some decisions are best made by somebody who is well-informed without involving lots of people with them. And that’s also partly because a lot of decisions are boring amd denial and probably save a lot of time and energy not spending days debating them.
Tom Allen Wed 1 May 2019 7:00AM
can you give an example of a decision which shouldn't be put to the community and why? i think issues that would cause days of debate are exactly the ones we shouldn't avoid as they are things people are obviously passionate and divided about. the smart way to avoid wasted effort is to ensure the question is posed in a constructive a way as possible to avoid situations like brexit. debating between two moving ideas is obviously a waste of time compared to debating between two clear ones.
Paul Phare Wed 1 May 2019 7:43AM
There are many examples of very tedious operational tasks that the community don't need to be involved with as I'm sure anyone can imagine. There are also some decisions that have to be made for us, like license conditions or contractual agreements with the landowner. You are trusting the core team to make decisions on behalf of the community and also trusting that should a decision benefit from consultation with the community, it will happen that way. Until Loomio arrived, the only way we could really consult the community was at community meetings and only then with the few committed people who showed up. Things do need to change and you can see from the conversations here, that there is a willingness to do so. May I respectfully suggest Tom, that you apply to join the core team next year if you are interested in the detail of the event but in the meantime please attend the community meeting we have planned at Nest where we will be discussing these issues.
Paul
07775705374
Tom Allen Wed 1 May 2019 8:00AM
can you explain the tone of the last part of your message please paul? why are you trying to 'respectfully suggest' that i take a job next year instead of having a discussion here? isn't that what loomio is for? why are you trying to put me off using it? i also already opened up a thread asking what the core team is, what power they have, how do i join etc, but i got flamed for 'wasting core teams time' so i deleted it. do you have a solution for how to fix that? i have almost 20 years experience in outdoor event management and 10 years in volunteer community development. for next year i have thousand of hours i can volunteer for nest. but if people keep telling me to go away and not answer my questions now, then why should i bother?
Ax · Sun 28 Apr 2019 5:44PM
Great post. I really appreciate the opportunity to see behind the scenes. The point of advice I would make is that slack can be very noisy and very hard to parse, I think loomio can mostly solve the same problem.
Regarding the Google Hangout limits I can recommend Jitsi.org for secure, big team A/V comms.