Yesterday we held the first ever TorsdagsTrivsel ("Thursday of well-being" / "Thursday fun"). It was a remote event in WELO based around collecting passionate people, let them decide the topics and just run with it. The goal was to mimic the feel of an evening at a great conference, for those of you who have that experience.
How did it go?
Short version: Woho!!!
Long version...
Participants
We had fewer participants than expected. Given the reactions on the invite my very rough estimate was 20-80 participants but in the end I think we capped at 15 concurrent participants and 18 combined over the evening. In practice this was not a problem at all since 3-7 people per room with 4 rooms running in parallel at most, was absolutely perfect.
Topics
The group consisted of mostly testers / ex-testers but the topics and discussions didn't reflect that at all:
- Motivation, focused a lot on how to get out of your own dips in motivation.
- Communication, didn't attend, so no idea about what direction this went .)
- How to get teams to develop themselves
- Apply coaching to a role where mentorship is expected
- ... which later switched to Different interpretations of coaching and mentoring
- Sense making
- General meet and greet
- General questions about the tool we used
And given the people me and Göran Bakken have reached out to so far I would guess that that's a pretty good representation of what you can expect from future events as well (still just a guess though .)
Format
WELO is a virtual office tool I originally found thanks to Lisette Sutherland. When I reached out to the tool creators they generously set us up with an office for a couple of non-profit tech groups in Sweden that I'm part of and the event was run there.
The format itself was strongly built around the tool. The general principle was: To start a conversation simply name any empty room to the topic you want to discuss and wait for people to join. Since you can instantly see new rooms pop up you never had to wait long for people to join.
We have some minor feedback I'll forward to the developers (as expected with all these testers/ex-testers gathered .) but overall there were no notable hiccups; stuff worked and we'll definitely continue with this tool and format next time!
Next TorsdagsTrivsel
... and speaking of next time: TorsdagsTrivsel is a biweekly event so your next chance to participate is Thursday, 1st of April! Since the invitation has a guest link to the tool I will not share the actual invitation publicly but please contact me via LinkedIn, or any other way you know me, to get it.
Notice that the event and invitation is in Swedish but my hope with this post is to inspire people from other regions to try something similar as well. It was truly zero effort to organize and the feedback made it pretty clear that this is something we should continue!
If you have any questions, please reach out and see you in two weeks.
