Recently I lead a designing for participation workshop at Mozilla. This was based on the initial workshop created by David Eaves. David and I met, he told me the thinking behind the workshop and encouraged me to experiment with it. I wanted to add more the the thinking behind why designing for participation is important, who comes into open source projects, and what it means to manage a community. I had some advising from the Community Building Team as well. Additionally, I modified David Eaves’s designing for participation template for simplicity.
The content of the slides turned out well. I learned a lot about how to improve the way the workshop was facilitated – it was my first one after all. The biggest challenge is that the idea of designing for participation is not a blank slate. It requires implementation in peoples’ workflows where they have already established their way of doing things. So the workshop needed much more focus on what resistors people have and what the challenges are rather than what this idea of designing for participation is and why that idea is important. Additionally, people needed to leave the workshop with very clear action items – clearer than clear. We had many dialogues throughout the workshop that, as the facilitator, I let carry on because very early I realized that this workshop was going to be a way to figure out how to make the next ones better and less about actually teaching the material.
For the first time with a workshop like this, I made a survey using NPS to do some data gathering from the attendees. This will serve as a benchmark for future workshops. Feedback varied greatly and was not all positive, which was expected. I changed a lot and added different elements to the workshop as a test (and benchmark). Below is a link to the slides 🙂
seanbolton.me 