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Does anyone have communities of practice at work with regular meetings? We have a (remote) monthly web dev catch up which I’d like to use for showcasing what’s going on in web around the company and also in the world of web more generally, but right now it feels a little too “Ms Koonin’s Compulsory Class Sharing Time”. Obvs people who don’t want to share/speak don’t have to, but any tips for things that have worked?
@sophie I run a Web Forum for the web folks, there’s only a few of us so it’s more like open discussion about topics chosen ahead of time from a main list - useful for getting a sense of pain points etc and folks are starting to get a lot more comfortable talking in that meeting now.
There’s a more general Dare Demo session that @nickrw heads up and that is generally a grab bag of shorter presentations from folks across Eng. This one works well as he goes around asking for volunteers.
@mattjbones @nickrw love this. We already have weekly eng/tech show and tell sessions which work well, I like the idea of choosing from a list
@sophie @nickrw yeah especially good when everyone contributes to the list. It can come up in code review too like “why does this work like that?” “Add it to the list and let’s discuss at Forum” (obviously that’s no replacement for 1:1 pairing but having a more in depth discussion helps all parties involved)
@mattjbones we have a quarterly web retro where stuff definitely comes up so I think that will work well
@mattjbones @sophie s/asking for volunteers/shaking people down for demos/
As well as demoing tiny things myself so people get comfortable with the idea a demo doesn't have to shiny and polished or finished.
@sophie Yeah we've got quite a lot of them across all sorts of subject areas. I'm personally involved in the security and web performance meetups and sometimes the CI/CD one.
They all work in slightly different ways but some are driven via agenda items pre-submitted on slack. That's great when you have items but sometimes means there's nothing on the agenda. Others are booked slots to cover specific items or curated by an SME team.
@sophie Some options I've tried, with varying success.
* Reach out to other similar communities (as you have) but see if you can do a bit of an 'exchange programme' Devs from your work visit others, others visit yours.
* Broaden the scope of the audience and invite 'non devs' to engage.
* Extend the subject scope and encourage folks to talk about non-dev interests.
* Have some 'lightning' talks - Pecha Kucha is a nice format - it can help people to have a predefined structure to prepare.
@toychicken @sophie Hi, I was inactive for a few months but trying to pop in a bit more regularly again!
Not sure if there's anything useful for you here but some things we've done:
- Use polls to get opinions (lower barrier for people than actually voicing things + the results could prompt more discussion)
- Published agenda which anyone in the community can add their topics to
- Rotate the faciliators (we started rotating around a small group of us, now open it up to anyone to volunteer)
@toychicken I'm keen to keep this web-focussed - we do have other avenues for more general sharing
@sophie if it's only internal, and you have a team that's not very forthcoming, perhaps try setting challenges. "Go and explore technology x and report on it" kinda thing. Though, if it puts people to spend extra-curricular time in, when they don't want to, it might be counter productive.
Some folks don't like to present in person. Perhaps get them to pre-record, then take a q&a in the session.
Tips for generally upping engagement, or for folks sharing things they've seen around the Web / have worked on recently that is interesting, or a mix of both? How many people are usually in the CoP meetings?
@www.jvt.me more ways to run the session that are more engaging? we have between 10-20 folks
Have you asked the attendees what they'd like to do? (may sound rude but doesn't mean to be!) May lead to some interesting points and feedback, or a case of "we like it but I don't read up on Web stuff much" that's interesting to know too.
In the few CoPs I've helped organise over time:
- Running a low-effort retro to see what's working and not working for folks can help - we did one which highlighted that a load of people wanted to dig into a specific subject, but no one had voiced that
- Rotating who's organising (preferably volunteering over voluntelling) can add a bit more variety - even if it's just the CoP leads/most senior folks to start with? Then can be rotated around with other folks too
- Running a lean coffee was a good way to get to chat about things in a less pressured way than folks feeling they had to present something big for the session
- Starting each session with a different engineer (who's been voluntold ahead of time) who does ~5-10 mins overview of their team, what they own and some of the stuff they've done gives a bit of an insight into what everyone does - depends on how much involvement folks get cross-team, but at a previous company this was super useful as it was a bit more silo'd
@sophie I led a "front-end chapter" weekly meeting at a past job and a few things that helped:
- It was at the end of the day Friday, and it was made very clear that it was not a "business" meeting but a shared interest.
- If people had nothing from work that week we'd talk about a cool website/library, or we had one dev who'd fill us in on the Twitter drama of the week.
- I did my best to keep tabs on other teams so I could ask them to show what they were working on.
- Often, beer.
@sophie Sadly these days it's just a Slack channel with me shouting into the void but, for a year, we had an hour fortnightly on documenting web standards and we all learnt a huge amount.
@sophie We have a group that meets monthly about how to produce and structure content for the (public sector) organisation’s users. Things that have worked well include instruction (guided workshops with clear learning outcomes announced in advance), deep-dive presentation on very specific work that might adapt well regardless of domain, presentation of work designed for the whole org, presentation of user insight (relevant for everyone). 1/2
@sophie Biggest challenge for me as the de facto organiser has been that many of these sessions are given by people who are confident and competent presenters. Other colleagues then get nervous and think they don’t have enough to contribute, and it’s hard to persuade them otherwise, even though I am explicit all the time about how presenting WIP in an informal way is great. Haven’t experimented with “theme is X, who’s got something?” but that seems like the next logical step. Good luck!
@sophie I think we found that 1 or 2 people doing a deeper dive each time worked better than more/everyone sharing little bit. I think it's hard to take in context from too many different projects
@sophie we’re doing a weekly engineering all hands (~10ppl) and 1–3 folks or teams share what they are currently struggling with, and we all try to tag-team figure it out, or we share something cool we learned this week. I try to not dominate this, but I do throw in the occasional “this is what I think web stuff should look like” ;)
@sophie we switched to this from a monthly “somebody prepares a thing” type of meeting because that was usually more of a talk into the void thing with little interactivity and usually weeks-off relevance to anyone’s work. The new format is super interactive and fun. And I get to do my soapbox occasionally.
@sophie Oh, I know that feeling! When I worked at FutureLearn we used to have a regular "Front End Catch-up", and (particularly in the later days when there weren't so many other front-enders) I was always trying to figure out ways to make it feel less like "compulsory class sharing time"...
@sophie ...I think things that helped were:
- Having a Trello board where anyone could post FE-related topics for discussion in advance, which gave us an agenda
- Posting a reminder on Slack a couple of days before
- Making it clear that any topic was welcome - from questions (eg. bringing a problem), to show-and-tells, to proposals (eg. here's a new thing we should try)
- Having a hosting rota so it wasn't always the same person hosting
@sophie To be honest, while I love *almost* everything about being remote, this particular catch-up was one that never quite worked as well remotely as it did in pre-Covid days when it would be a roomful of people having an interesting chat. Pre-Covid it was a meeting that I used to genuinely look forward to!