Agknowledge Share Fair - Recordings of virtual and blended sessions

As I wrote in my last post, we recently supported 4 sessions from the Agknowledge Share Fair in Addis with options for remote participation.

If you hadn't have the chance to attend the event in Addis or online, here's where you can watch the recordings of the sessions we supported.

• (Introduction to) Liberating Structures (Fisher Qua) 
• Social Reporting (Pier Andrea Pirani and Pete Cranston) 
• Working with Virtual Teams (Nancy White and Ewen Le Borgne)
• Liberating Structures: Part 1 - Part 2 (Ewen Le Borgne and Pete Cranston)

Note, the videos are mostly unedited so use the navigation on the left end side of the Adobe Connect recording playback to skip through the different parts of the video.

As you'll see, it's not an easy job to combine onsite and online facilitation and ensure participation and engagement. But with practice, experience and the desire to experiment, a lot can be achieved to create participatory, blended meetings. 

Blending online and offline meetings - 5 short lessons from Addis Share Fair

Earlier this week, we supported 4 sessions from the Agknowledge Share Fair in Addis with options for remote participation. As well as giving people that could not travel to Addis the opportunity to participate in part of the event, for us this was also an occasion to experiment more with Adobe Connect and how to use it to support online and offline events - and blend them together.

In designing the remote participation, we had decided to try with different formats and modalities of e/participation.

• A webcast of a session from Addis via Adobe Connect, with online interaction carried out via chat and breakout rooms
• Two sessions where the conveners joined in remotely, and online and offline participants interacted in various ways from group chats to bilateral chats to small groups in breakout rooms
• A blended session with activities in parallel on site and with a fully blended group, with two people from Addis joining three online participants into Adobe.

We’ll be having a debrief with the rest of the team that supported this experimenting. And we’re collecting feedback from participants, to understand how they have experienced these sessions, and how they can be improved. But to get the conversation started, here are 5 quick takeaways from this recent experiments:

1. Online and offline have different pace and dynamics
   We probably all knew this before but experimenting to bring remote participation into a face to face meeting confirmed how interactions and exchanges have a very different pace, online and offline. In the former, the feedback loops are much slower.
2. Split the processes - and bridge in debrief
   Because interactions work differently online and offline, running the two in parallel is easier to manage. You can have the same activities F2F and online, but these may have to be facilitated in different ways. For example, you may go through a set of 1 to 1 chats between physical participants, while having a group chat with all virtual participants. The exchange and cross over between online and offline can be done in the debriefing sessions.
3. Blended ain’t easy
   It’s very different is when you try to have physical participants interacting in small groups with online participants. This requires a lot of preparation, and an optimum use of the technology, not only to avoid sound issues but also to make sure participants can interact using text, video and voice.
4. You need a team

Depending on the type of e-participation that you want to enable from a face to face meeting, you may need different people being part of your facilitation team: two facilitators (one onsite and one online), one technical host and, if the onsite facilitator isn’t experienced with blended meetings, one ‘blender’ who connects online and offline from the physical meeting room.

5. Always have (some) Plan B(s)
   Always be prepared for what can go wrong. For example, in one occasion we lost the video and audio feed from the room - it’s important to have ways to notify participants immediately, and be ready to fill in this gap with other activities.

We’ll keep on reflecting on this experience and experimenting with tools, approaches and facilitation techniques, and we’ll make sure we share our findings here. Let us know what your experience is with blended online offline meetings and what we can learn from other experiences.

Pier Andrea Pirani

Learn with us online at the ‘AgKnowledge Innovation' Process Share Fair

On 25 and 26 May, we'll be joining the ILRI communications and KM group in Addis Ababa and several partners in the AgKnowledge Innovation' Process Share Fair.

The focus of the event is on the "design and delivery of truly effective ‘process’ improvements that lead to applied innovation, social learning and value for money (in agriculture)."

While Pete will be onsite in Addis, I'll be connecting online; together we'll facilitate and host one session on social reporting. We'll also provide technical support and participate in the other 3 sessions that are open for online participants.

To help us organise we’ve set up Eventbrite pages for the four sessions currently open, so please register here (all times East Africa Addis Ababa/Nairobi):

• Mon 25 May, 10.30: (Introduction to) Liberating Structures (Fisher Qua) http://bit.ly/1S0DG4q
• Mon 25 May, 13:50: Social Reporting (Pier Andrea Pirani) http://bit.ly/1QWIJRM 
• May, 15.50: Working with Virtual Teams (Nancy White and Ewen Le Borgne) http://bit.ly/1HmYr4b 
• Tue 26 May, 11.00: Liberating Structures (Ewen Le Borgne and Pete Cranston) http://bit.ly/1Ftf0hi

We’re experimenting with different types of online engagement, from a simple webcast of a Liberating Structures workshop session to more interactive formats, with presenters both online and in the room, and participants able to interact equally with those physically and remotely in the room.

If you're interested in learning and experimenting with us, please do register for the sessions and join us online next week!