General discussion

People, please invite others here who you think should be here!

To start us off, I would love to organise two things in the coming 2-3 weeks:

1. a case clinic around the annual EDGE Funders Alliance (https://edgefunders.org/) conference that I'll be co-chairing next March. I need support / ideas for making this a great inspirational event for 200+ international funders and would love to tap into the experiences of people who have organised this size of gathering before and/or have a background in philanthropy.

2. a discussion about crypto philanthropy - anyone here who knows about this and/or is interested in exploring? I'd be up for it!

Hi Romy,

happy to be part of case clinic for EDGE funders conference. I'm super busy till October 1, but pretty open after that. By then I should have more materials from the gathering next week

Yay! And yes, it will the the 1st or 2nd week of October for the call, I guess. By then I'll also have had the first call w the planning committee. I'll not have to do the logistics and background work but more agenda setting and broad strokes and would love input / thoughts / techniques f large gatherings. maybe @Richard D. Bartlett also can share some wisdom?

I can help in the organization part. Recently did a conference for 150 people. I know Ismail also have experience on creating big events.

Cool, I'll get in touch soon when we have a couple more people down to plan a call.

@Romy Krämer here is an article I wrote about how we run Enspiral retreats (around 100 people, mostly open space plus some group process for intimacy). Does any of that thinking fit here?

yes, thanks!! of course I know that article (! ;)) and think it'll be much more relevant for our Guerrilla Foundation grantee meeting which will also take place in 2020 (totally open still in terms of size, objective and topics/format) but for this one, which is a rather conventional funders gathering, I feel most of it would be a bit 'too much'. There will be open space though and anything related to how to run good open space sessions will be super valuable!

We ran a ~100 person 5-day gathering this year with two rounds of open space. What worked really well was having lots of people with content, plus 2 facilitators on hand to help them think about process.

The best sessions were the ones where the host was running a process they already had run before, or they had a specific action they could conclude with the people in the room (e.g. make a decision), or they had some coaching from us to think about how to use their session in a more interesting way than just 'show up and talk for an hour'.

Some of our coaching tips:

• focus on a compelling question

• switch modes a couple times (e.g. presentation, popcorn (unstructured dialogue), round, pair-share, small group breakout, fishbowl)

• in addition to talking, also use movement and silence

• your session is "in competition" with other parallel sessions, so give it a clear topic (don't be too clever), pitch it with enthusiasm, and personally invite people you want to attend

We had this 'facilitation cheat sheet' with a bunch of useful methods. Feel free to duplicate and use that, just credit TheHum.org

this is great! thanks a lot! Will do and will feedback how it went and what we learned. last time, there was no facilitation f the open space and I definitely see the value in adding that! it just prevents these one-directional blah-blah sessions and the same people meeting over and over again just because they know ppl in that session instead of going to places where they can really contribute

I enjoy the emergent free-for-all of classic open space, but also I have had good results creating some prep space, e.g. a digital environment where people can meet beforehand and start to form offers and requests for sessions.