Thoughts from Planning Corps

Planning Corps kicked off last week. Check out Shin-pei’s summary of the evening, and some info on the mixture of skills reported with sticky dots. Some additional thoughts below - wanted to get these down before exploring the feedback survey results.

How to start and end the evening?

Maybe we can play with the meeting format some more - skip the opening presentations, and dive straight into working. Or, make the opening more of a sell between competing projects and tables.

Not having a report back at the end meant we could spend more time on projects. But it makes for a slightly inconclusive evening. Sticking the notes up on the wall was a start - maybe we needed to put them by the elevators (or even, in the elevators?).

Another way to end the evening might be a smaller working session for the non-profit team, in this case TA - regroup, recap for each other and to tidy up notes, quickly chat about possible next steps. It’s cool to see the ideas immediately getting put to use. Or - and this takes up more valuable time - some kind of email summary from each table that night or soon after.

Get commitment for follow-up - maybe this already happened ad hoc, but we could be better at facilitating the connection of planners to projects beyond the meeting. Or maybe that’s heavy handed? It’s a fundamental question - is the event a crucible, to bring people together and let them find connections between skills and projects, or a more structured format where Planning Corps does a lot more matchmaking and assignment?

Minor logistics…

• having a projector/etherpad isn’t useful unless you’re hearing from the group, or noting down comments at the tables. Otherwise, it’s just a distraction. We didn’t even really need it for the agenda.
• better notes - or more direction in note taking - might be useful. I wrote notes for a couple of tables, not sure that my selection of noteworthy nuggets was necessarily the best. Maybe that’s where the laptops and etherpads come in handy.
• like Shin-pei, I’m not sold on our Hot Potato experiment - mostly because I was talking to myself on it. But it was also something of a distraction from participating in the discussions around the tables. Maybe some events are immediate and engaging enough to not need an additional layer of social media? Or maybe it works if you get enough people?