[LRUG] My thoughts on the London Ruby Unconference

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

Thanks, John!  I especially appreciated your notes on inclusion/outreach
and group dynamics.

On the latter topic:  I attended Ruby DCamp for the first time this year,
which included two days of unconference/OpenSpace[1] sessions, and noticed
a strong tendency for a few confident participants to dominate
conversations, even when I made efforts to point out and interrupt that
pattern.  (I'm definitely guilty of that myself; it takes a very strong
effort to suppress my impulse to interject after every! single! comment!)
 In one conversation, I explicitly pointed that pattern out and followed it
with "...and I will not raise my hand again in this session" in an attempt
to prod the other white men in the conversation to back off a little.
I'm... not sure it worked.

One person did an impressive job countering this tendency by setting very
clear expectations at the beginning of each session they moderated (they
led several):

- they brought two tokens[2] to pass around, and asked participants to
speak only when they were holding one of those tokens;
- they kept a mental stack of who had raised their hand to speak, and
directed the tokens around the group accordingly;
- they suggested that people express support/validation using nonverbal
cues (they suggested the American Sign Language sign for "applause");
- once or twice, they interjected a "moderator note" that the group had
fallen into a pattern of having the same few people speak, invited the more
reticent group members to speak up, and asked people to reflect quietly for
60 seconds before proceeding.

These were, not coincidentally, some of the sessions I found most
valuable.  I led one session as well, and I used a speaking token, but
didn't do much beyond that, and noticed that the token tended to bounce
back and forth between two or three people, so once or twice I asked for
the token just to pass it to someone else who had been waiting for a
while.  I thought this other person's example was a good illustration of
the utility and importance of formal facilitation in creating an
environment where more people feel safer participating.

-Sam


[1] http://www.mindviewinc.com/Conferences/OpenSpaces.html
[2] If you try this, I recommend a brightly colored, *soft* throwable item.

On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 10:08 AM, John Cinnamond <jc at panagile.com> wrote:

> Hey lrug,
>
> If anyone is interested, I wrote up my thoughts on the London Ruby
> Unconference that took place over the weekend: https://medium.com/@
> jcinnamond/london-ruby-unconference-2016-2dc4b5ac8fb0
> <https://medium.com/@jcinnamond/london-ruby-unconference-2016-2dc4b5ac8fb0#.930eht2k3>
>
>
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