Weeknotes for October 23rd, 2020


Seeding a Network of Practice

We’re helping the Institute for Economic Justice plan a convening to be a first step towards building a network of practice that strengthens the connection between economic policy and human rights. We’ve started interviewing potential participants on what they want to get out of such a convening. It’s been heartening to hear a strong desire to come out of the meeting with explicit actions to be taken towards work on an intentional output, rather than bring people together for dialogue. If we can get people working together on something productive from the start, that will lay the groundwork for continued collaboration beyond the convening.

Supporting Session Organisers

We’re currently running a Virtual Event Design Lab with the team from RightsCon. After covering andragogy (adult learning), we’re now thinking about how to support sessions designed using ADIDS (Activity, Discussion, Input, Deepening, & Synthesis), a workshop format that ensures learning will happen. We want to consider how to support Session Organisers on their journey’s in learning about how to make their sessions more effective.

More Zoom Frustration

I am working with Laurent Fernandez on planning a multi-lingual virtual meeting where we will need to monitor entry quite closely. We’re using Zoom’s registration system so each participant will be issued a unique entry link. Since Zoom generates and sends an automated email for this, we had assumed that the language used in the email would match the users’ preferred language. Sadly, in testing, we’ve found that the language of that email matches the preferred language of the host, not the user. Quite a shortcoming, as the generated email can be in any language. Why doesn’t it have the flexibility to be issued so any participant can read it in their preferred language?

MobLab will live on

It was heartbreaking to read about closing this chapter on MobLab. Their groundbreaking work on integrating human-centred design into campaigning is unparalleled, and FabRiders has greatly benefitted from their Campaign Accelerator resources. Very relieved that they used a Creative Commons license on their materials so their usefulness to networks and communities can continue. Planning for the inevitable is a crucial point we cover in the Network-Centric Resources Lifecycle. We must consider how resources can have continued access if our organisation or institutions are no longer around to support them.