Today, 12 September 2007, the management of the Holiday Inn Brussels airport decided to use the WikiWorkshops.com format for their upcoming advisory board. This groundbreaking format will drive the key objectives of the meeting in different ways and on many levels. WikkiWorkshops is a simple format and a paradigm shift; it fits the goals of this exciting project, wonderfully well.
The meeting invites about 20 participants that are regular clients, decision makers and bookers for corporate meeting space and hotel rooms. The meeting is one big brainstorm with preset questions. Some of those will be addressed as yes/no and multiple choice questions that will be answered by using the voting system or Audience Response System (ARS). Some other are addressed with time for personal reflection and pen and paper notes and other are reserved for group discussion. These discussions will be subject to note taking in a wiki.
Each table gets a topic and opens the appropriate page on a prepared wiki and the notes are collected on that page. The wiki home page shows all the pre defined topics in a list and the organizer prepares empty pages with a simple structure template. These notes, once saved can be shared with the group using the presentation laptop.
The wiki also has a few empty spots for a bit of 'Open Space'. Open Space means that the participants come up with a number of topics that were not addressed yet. The voting system (ARS) is than used to select the topics the group finds most important and than, depending on the time there is some or all can be addressed.
The result is immediate and the participants can add ideas even the same night. This wiki is in a way just the beginning of a process that continues as the hotel is being refurbished. Like the wiki is a co-creation of the project report, the rebuilding of the hotel becomes a result, shared by the group. The same evening or the next day, a technician can upload the pictures so the organizer can share these wit all the members of what now has become a little community.
To keep this wiki active, the management can publish pictures of the initial designs and share them with this wiki group via the wiki. Comments on pictures can be added, questions asked, ideas shared.
Other participants can be added and even the architect can write comments or explain parts of the project. The organizer can add a poll, copy and paste text from the wiki's into reports or briefings, use the wiki for presentations etc.
The wiki Workshop will take place in October and this case will certainly offer some new and exciting insights. not just for the Holiday in, but also for the book WikiWorkshops. to be continued...
Maarten Vanneste, CMM
REPORT CASE WIKI WORKSHOP # 001
October 3rd 2007.
This is the story of the birth of a new meeting format. I’m probably not the only person in the world to think bout how the new web 2.0 will influence our industry, but I do have the pleasure to be a privileged witness of what it can change, in a tangible way about how we will conduct some of our meetings and conferences in the future.
Today it is Wednesday October the 3rd. I find myself I on of the spheres of the Brussels Atomium, where Holiday Inn Brussels Airport will have a client meeting/dinner. The format of the meeting is unique; it is our first ever Wiki Workshop. 3 round tables are set up for dinner and three small standing tables have a laptop, connected to the internet. The clients will leave the Holiday Inn at about 6pm with a bus. It’s now 5:30 PM and I’m anxiously waiting to see how this evening will give birth to this meeting format. It is new for me, unknown to the participants and an interesting evolution for the meetings industry.
The concept of wiki workshops is using the principle of the wiki as a central tool. You probably heard of Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia created by and living inside a wiki. A wiki is a website where all individuals that register, can add, change, adapt the content. All you need is a PC with a web browser and an internet connection. No software is needed, no website skills required. The home page of a wiki shows a menu and you can ad an item to that menu to start your own page, linked to that menu item. In this case the wiki home page has a menu with three words, Earth, Wind and Fire. One name for each of the tables, for each laptop. Each page has a number of topics, pre defined by the organiser and space to write for the participants.
The evening has one goal, to gather as much ideas and questions as possible that can be incorporated in the refurbishing of the hotel. This is what I would call bottom-up education; where the organisation, Holiday Inn, learns from the participants. This is the opposite of top down education, where an organisation presents a topic to the participants. That top down education is tipical for most conferences and it is similar to the ‘old’ web, web >1.0 if you wish. The new internet, web 2.0. is where the participants make the content, not only corporations and organisations. Everyone works together and in a wiki, every-one can change every-one else’s work. A crazy concept? Maybe it is, but look at wikipedia and how complete and accurate it is.
The goal of this evening is to co-create, just like wikipaedia is co-created; made by a group of individuals from all over the world. You could call that a kind of a virtual meeting, remote collaboration of dispersed members of a group. Tonight we bring that virtual meeting back into a room with real ‘present’ participants. Is this our revenge for technology taking meetings virtual?
Whatever it is, the result of tonight should be an immediate and tangible document that can be used tomorrow by the meeting owner and next week in an architects briefing. This is fast, just the way we want it, and wikiwiki is Hawaiian for quick. That is what the etymology on wikipedia says. A wiki is a collaborative tool and the wiki we use tonight was prepared by a few people that worked on it from different locations, remember: it is a website. Tonight it go’s live for an audience of about 20 clients and tomorrow it will be used by the whole team working on this refurbishing project. It will continue as a note pad for ideas, a share point of architects drawings, pictures of furniture, etc.
The working format of tonight will be standing discussions with groups of about 9 participants around a laptop. Every discussion is based on a question and all ideas from that group work will be noted on the designated (Earth, Wind Fire) wiki page. The Earth note-taker will click on the Earth menu button and once arrived on the Earth page, will click the edit button. Than notes are taken under the question that is discussed. Saving after discussion will enable a ackstage computer to show the ideas on each page on a screen for all to see. And when inspired by the Earth’s notes, the Wind and Fire teams can add more ideas on their page. In between plates, people get up and do another topic, this movement will also keep people alert and awake. At the end of the evening, we hope to have a rich harvest of ideas and suggestions that will really influence the design and functionality of the new hotel.
Besides the 6 wiki moments, there are a few other techniques we use to get the brains going and make the bottom –up process work.
First of all, in the bus, that is actually riding to the Atomium, we have a facilitator that will hand out post-it notes for participants to write down expectations for the evening, and secondly some suggestions from the top of their mind. These will be sorted in groups on flipcharts.
The second tool we use are voting keypads (ARS). A truckload of questions wer prepared and most of them are multiple choice questions. Every individual of the group selects one of the options as their answer and results are immediately turned into graphs. A fast way of processing lots of questions.
The last tool is made for personal notes. A booklet is prepared with one question or topic per page and the rest of the page is for note taking. No discussion takes place and every individual writes his or her ideas down after some reflection. Specific open end questions were selected for this tool.
A mix of low tech and high tech, personal choice and discussion output, multiple choice and free text, sit down and standing work all make sure a lot of divers input can be collected.
After the meeting:
It is now 11:30. One hour ago the meeting ended. I am now home, looking at the wiki and adding some pictures. The results are stunning, the possibilities endless. The whole evening was boiling from activity up to a level we decided not to use the spare questions. The results are about 120 questions on which we got individual answers meaning about 2400 individual answers, almost 200 ideas on the sticky notes ,174 notes in the wiki and probably about 2 to 300 notes in the booklets. In total About 600 text notes and 2400 clicks. From 20 participants, over dinner. This is a lot, and we now face the task of sorting, analysing and reporting these results back to the organisation including participants, a group of architects and the board, including an interested CEO.
One of the questions asked the participants if they wanted to be kept up to date and this is where the wiki will play an important role. The wiki now has the notes and the Pictures. Next step will e adding the released voting results and processed sticky notes. Than the link and password will be sent to all participants so they can continue from office, hotel room or home. Adding ideas, commenting other’s or watching pictures etc. Any one from the group that registers is automatically kept up to date about changes made to the wiki. An email is sent out as soon as someone changes or adds anything. And every user can decide to limit that to one e-mail a day or switch it off. I just added a visitor counter to all pages (remember, I have no IT skills) so we can see the ectivity. The wiki also tracks all changes and allows for a few more statistics.
A follow up will nowe generate and direct more activity by participants. In that way, the group becomes a small community. It was good to see some of the regular clients sitting together, working on the wiki and not stopping, not even for the main course… These men normally don’t share tables for breakfast, but after tonight that probably will change. A community is born and so too a reason for more meetings
.
Collaboration in meetings:
The co-creation of this list of ideas is a clear example of collaboration at meetings. The mix of used media made it exciting and energetic. As a moderator together with one colleague, it did not take a lot of work to make these groups work and produce ideas. The first wiki moment generated 28 ideas and the number kept increasing with each topic. The last wiki moment generated 59 in about 5 minutes. What is important and needs to be addressed professionally is the preparation. Getting the right questions, parking the non essential ones in back-up, making sure all technical and technological meeting support works well, creatig an atmosphere, designing a look and feel and many more things need to be addressed before you can start. Using a wiki is a simple way of doing this and many other, more specialised technology is available to make this work faster and better, even for very large groups. The Meeting support institute (www.meetingsupport.org) lists a number of such companies. Some with a portable device, some with a table top solution. All of them are combining the professional preparation, a tool and in a few cases a number of professional and experienced moderators. Besides the tools we used for this night, many other options from concepts over games to technology are to be considered, depending on your project.
The meeting support institute welcomes all ideas, tools and services that can influence the content side of meetings. We at the Meeting Support Institute consider content to be the learning, networking and motivation of participants. Influencing those areas can be done before during and after by all sorts of tools. In learning we separate top down, peer to peer and bottom up learning. Collaboration or co-creation is on form of Bottom up Education and this case demonstrated its power.
Conclusion:
Web 2.0 today has infected the meetings industry. Collaboration will only increase as kids from the facebook generation are joining the workforce. Co-creation is here and it’s here to stay. Is it big business? Hard to predict, but companies like Synthetron in Belgium, Crystal Interactive in the UK, Spotme in Switzerland, nTag in Boston, log-on in the Netherlands and probably many more are ready to answer your questions. If collaboration is as big as the book Wikinomics (Tapscott, 2006) predicts, it may be wise to buy shares in these companies. If our industry wants to generate more ROI from meetings and increase the influence of meetings, this is certainly the way to go.
I look forward to many more wikiworkshops.
© 2007 Maarten Vanneste, CMM.