How to hold meetings on a wiki

In the days immediately following our first World Cafe, our team couldn’t find time to hold an evaluation meeting. We decided to try holding the meeting on our wiki, and found that the results were better than in a traditional meeting. Here’s what we learned:

1. Allow enough time for the discussion. While a traditional meeting can last as little as a dozen minutes, the time-distributed nature of a ‘wiki meeting’ makes it necessary to allocate at least one day, depending on how busy team members are with urgent projects. Don’t expect people to drop everything and participate on a wiki discussion. We created the wiki discussion as soon as the World Cafe ended, and within 24 hours had obtained input from all team members.

2. Offer structure. As you create the wiki page, populate it with questions and issues. Make the structure simple and specific. Add content, don’t just post the meeting agenda. Include all relevant information, spell out your opinions on each subject and ask for more information where necessary. People are much more likely to respond if all they have to do is agree / disagree with an opinion or answer a specific question.

3. Encourage participants to openly sign their contribution. Mediawiki software parses three or four tildes (~~~~) into the signature of a participant to a discussion. A simpler option is to simply preface each comment with “Ron says:…” While most wiki software allow readers to find out who performed each edit, openly signing content goes a long way to keep the tone conversational.

4. Provide participants with tools to follow the discussion. Whether your software produces RSS feeds or simply sends email, make sure everyone knows how to set up frequent notifications. (Wouldn’t it be great to have wiki software produce Twitter feeds?)

5. Manage the discussion. While a moderator is usually not necessary once you have created structure and obtained participation, a discussion will often require participants to gather additional information or perform external tasks. Someone might have to install and demo some software, make some phone calls, cross over into the office of a non-participating coworker to obtain his expertise on a particular issues, or simply dig up some information. While participants will often self-organize, it is your job as the initiator of the discussion to follow through. Above all, make sure you keep contributing with any information or ideas made necessary by the discussion.

6. Capture actionable items. Regardless of the project management system your team uses, it is very important to capture and act on any requests made during the discussion. At the very least add ideas to a “To consider” or “Someday” list that everyone can see. Discussions on a wiki are available for reference, and few things discourage people from participating as much as the evidence that their contribution was not followed through.

7. Declare the meeting closed. Give participants 3-4 hours’ notice to put in a last word. After, that, formally close the meeting. Post a notice at the beginning of the wiki page. Don’t leave the conversation open-ended. It’s discouraging.

Green Cafe

Last week, our team at SOPOLEC hosted a World Cafe based on the question: “What can be done to encourage sustainable building practices in Romania?”. We called it the “Green Cafe”.

This was my first experiment with hosting a World Cafe, and it was very exciting to see groups quickly become engaged in conversation, leading to very clear common themes across the different groups by the time participants re-united.

Hosting this event at our office required a little creativity. We created six spaces for discussion, including a number of offices, a conference room, and our terrace. I was worried that, while spaces such as the terrace would create welcoming environments for discussion, drier spaces such as the conference room would be rather forbidding. However, people were so quickly engaged in conversation that the environment was quickly out of mind. In some spaces, people felt more comfortable sitting on the floor.

When using multiple rooms to host Cafe conversations, it becomes a challenge to end each round of conversation: by the time you move between the rooms, people are confused as to who is staying and who is leaving. We always seemed to end up with 1-2 tables where the table host was left alone… and then had to round up the stray people left on the hallways continuing previous conversations.

After three rounds, of conversation, everyone convened in the main space for coffee. We taped the visual products of each table to the walls, people moved from one to the next, trying to quickly grasp the content. After a 10-minute discussion in which we summarized the 3-4 common themes that had been discussed at all of the tables, the Cafe participants enjoyed ice cream on the terrace while continuing their conversations.

(My colleague Anca wrote about it on BusinessIDEAS.ro)