Peeking out from behind - how did it go?

What an amazing couple of days! I am of course talking about the IAF England and Wales Re-facilitation hybrid conference last weekend (Friday 13th and Saturday 14th May to be precise). Following on from my "before" musings, here is the "after".

I don't mind if I am blowing my (our) own trumpet here. The Leadership Team really did pull out all the stops to make this conference work. And I think it did. It more than worked - we got all kinds of great feedback from participants saying that they really enjoyed it, had some great conversations, met some new people, learnt some new things, had moments of inspiration and importantly (for those online in particular) felt like they were included. The sessions all went down really well and initial reflections are that there was something for everyone to get stuck into.

So I thought I would share a few thoughts on how we did it, what worked well (and some "could be betters").

The Programme

We had three parallel sessions each day - one online only, one hybrid and one face to face. We tried to balance these sessions out so that we had different flavours of sessions which included some tools and techniques, some that encouraged deeper reflection, some purely creative fun sessions....and lots more. You can take a look at the programme itself here.

We gave hybrid hosts some broad guidelines on how they could host their sessions, but left the fine tuning up to them. This meant that there were different approaches to hybrid so a few different things were tried out.

The Tech

1) We focused on getting the sound right. Although we were in a conference room that was set up to plug in microphones and all kinds of kit - we couldn't actually make this all work for us. There is a long backstory here which I won't bore you with, but suffice to say we weren't able to use the two in room microphones as they would've just served to amplify the sound in the room and not enable the Zoomies to hear us. We knew this in advance and brought two wireless microphones with us (HUGE gratitude to Paul Brand for this, as he bought them and made them work!). One was used by the facilitator and one by whichever roomie was speaking at the time.

2) We had three main laptops! Two of these were set up in the hybrid Zoom (one as the host and one as a participant) and one on the online only session Zoom. The reason for the two laptops for the hybrid session was that we wanted one to screen share from, to be "us" and to show on the screen to the Roomies. The other one showed us what the Zoomies were seeing and was also used to monitor the chat from so that the chat box wasn't up (distracting and not easy to read) on screen for the Roomies.

3) We had several cameras; a room cam showing the room (this was a Go -Pro type camera on a Gorilla pod), a facilitator cam showing the facilitator (a phone on a tripiod) and a roving cam for when a participant spoke (an ipad).

4) We had someone who knew a bit about tech and was happy to focus on making it work (again thank you Paul Brand).

5) In a couple of sessions (one lead by Adrian Ashton, another lead by Penny Walker) we had the opportunity to try out what it felt like with everyone on their own devices in the room. I was pleasantly surprised to say this worked really well (as long as us Roomies were disciplined about putting ourselves on mute!). For me at least it didn't feel like I was disconnected either but able to join in both worlds.

The people

We had lots of people making everything work, from setting up the face to face room, to letting people in and out of Zoom, to creating the raffle. In theory we had a bit of a rota, in practise there was often a much more organic approach to it all which I think held together because everyone was so invested in making it work.

We had approximately half the participants in the room and half on Zoom. Several of these were from quiet a few different countries including Ukraine, Morocco, Portugal and Spain. In all over the two days we had over 80 people signed up.

We started off in the hybrid session every day in the dedicated hybrid space, and then people were free to stay there or join an online or face to face session. We had a second room for all the in person workshops and a third smaller room that we had just in case, and was used for example by one person to host an online only session.

The Communication

1) We had a Whatsapp group for central communication

2) We had a Miro board to share all links, comments, photos etc

3) We had two Zoom links for each day; one for the hybrid session and one for the online only session. These were shared in advance through Eventbrite which is how participants signed up to be at the conference, and again on the Miro board and the Whatsapp group.

4) We had a Leadership Team Whatsapp back channel too.

5) We set up WonderMe each day for some informal networking (big shout out to Megan Evans for setting up and managing that).

What could we do better next time?

So in no particular order, there were a few things that didn't work so well and we will definitely learn from:

1) The screen with the Zoomies on was behind the facilitator or host standing at the front, meaning that it felt a bit odd not to see them in front of you. We did actually have another view projected to the side but this also felt a bit awkward. Next time we could have a laptop or screen in front of the facilitator too.

2) We weren't always quick enough with the roving (participant) cam or the mic, and having to get to the Roomie for their contribution does sometimes mean there is a gap in the "moment". More mics and cameras would probably be useful here. We were also asked to remember to keep this in landscape (not portrait). Also...we belatedly decided that keeping the participant cam on an object when not in use would be fun (thanks Caroline Jessop for that one!).

3) There was often a bit of faffing which I think may have been a bit annoying for the Zoomies who weren't too sure what was going on. I think perhaps someone to chat to the Zoomies and stay out of the faffing might have been a good idea, or perhaps an activity or some music!

4) The mics were solely used to ensure we had sounds going back into Zoom, but there was no in room amplification which meant that talking into a quiet mic did feel a bit odd. Also, even with 30 or so people in the room, a bit of room amplification would have been useful.

5) There was a bit of debate (and divided opinion) as to whether the speaker view should be pinned by us in the room from the host laptop, or by the Zoomies themselves. Since the cameras were not attached to any sound, Zoom couldn't do this automatically, so someone had to do it to be able to see a bigger version of who was speaking. We did a bit of both but are still unsure what is the best way forward.......

6) It would've been better if we had been able to get into the venue the night before, but 7.30am in the day was good enough this time!

But those things aside, from a Roomie organiser point of view it felt so good to be back amongst people, getting stuck in and having so many wonderful conversations. Nothing fell apart and there were good vibes aplenty!

So thank you to all my buddies in the Leadership Team, thank you to all the session hosts. thank you to all the raffle prize donors and thank you to the participants who trusted us to do a good job.

For more information on IAF England and Wales' meet ups click here and if you would like to join the Leadership Team to get stuck into more organising and shaping our activities in future, please get in touch!

Helene

Chair IAF England and Wales