Weeknotes for August 21st, 2020


This week, I finished the first draft of a Session Host handbook and also started to compile safety, privacy and community participation guidelines for the Climate:Red Summit. It brought home for me how events are living organisms. The critical elements of that organism are the participants, and the focus has to be on their experience. Not the experience of the organisers, nor the speakers, nor the facilitators. If your event doesn’t have the participants’ needs at the centre of its design, it will fail. And of course, a virtual event is no different, but you have different challenges. Preparing for the Climate:Red Summit, the challenge is we will have participants joining this event from around the globe, that speak multiple languages, on a universal topic and ensuring all the parts of this event are ready to serve them. Found a lot of inspiration reviewing Mozilla’s Community Participation Guidelines and RightsCon’s participation and privacy guidelines.

Started working on a report on the 360Giving Data Champions Cohort we wrapped up in June. Agility and flexibility to meet the needs of the participants are central to the programme design, and this strategy certainly paid off as we started the programme at the beginning of the year. We held two face to face workshops before the lockdown, and then everyone became consumed by COVID-19 response and funding. We postponed the final workshop but ended up splitting it in two half-day workshops, which worked well AND even managed to co-create a Data Strategy Canvas that 360Giving just released.

And speaking of co-creation – looking forward to convening an online discussion on Wednesday, August 26th to compile lessons learned and best practices in engaging communities and networks to design resources that serve as knowledge assets.  Chloé Mikolajczak from The Restart Project, will share challenges, successes and lessons learned in their efforts to engage community members in building the European Right to Repair Campaign ToolkitChloe. RSVP to get details.

Back in the mid-’80s, I was living in San Francisco and was dating someone who was best friends with an LGBTQI/AIDS activist named Cleve Jones. At the time, Cleve was organising to create the AIDS Quilt. It was nice to see Cleve’s article in The Guardian that applies lessons learned from AIDS to the pandemic. There’s a lot to learn from AIDS activists on so many fronts. The documentary How to survive a plague is required viewing.