Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
executable file
·
46 lines (34 loc) · 4.36 KB

sansing-building-movement-from-home.md

File metadata and controls

executable file
·
46 lines (34 loc) · 4.36 KB
Raw

Building a movement from home

Chad Sansing

As part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mozilla hosted a series of "Movement-Building from Home" community calls designed to bring people together for peer-to-peer learning about running online meetings and practicing community care, personal ecology, and community management during and after the immediate crisis.

We wanted to support people new to online facilitation and movement-building. We also wanted to help experienced online activists scale up their work and welcome new community members to their online spaces. And we wanted to hold time and space for community managers and organizers to be together, to acknowledge their challenges, feelings, and stressors, and to celebrate their successes during anxious and uncertain times.

Throughout four weeks of calls, more than 100 live participants joined us to hold that space and share those insights, best practices, questions, and concerns. By engaging with one another and investing in each other, we developed a shared understanding of our work as a powerful example of collaboration for a healthier, more inclusive internet.

Here are the top three lessons we learned from our curious, generous participants.

Prioritize audience participation

Be sure to tilt the balance of each call or meeting in favor of accessible, peer-to-peer interaction over lecture and other kinds of more passive participation. Mix and match approaches like:

  • Silent documenting, or sharing thoughts by typing into a shared doc ahead of discussion
  • Small-group discussions like Zoom's Breakout Rooms, which help people share the spotlight and bring insights back to the larger group
  • Invitations to contribute affirmations like emojis and "+1s" and questions to others' comments instead of—or as well as—more direct responses to prompts and questions

Be responsive

Always invite feedback on your work so you can improve calls and meetings for your participants. You might:

  • Establish a feedback ritual at the end of each call, asking for responses to prompts like what worked, what didn't work, what surprised you, and what would you change?
  • Link to a survey at the end of each call or in a weekly emailed summary of your events to find out what people want more or less of in future calls.
  • Start each meeting by giving thanks for the feedback you got last time and highlighting a suggested change you're going to make for this call.

Provide rich content at a low cost of admission

Be clear about what you're offering participants and what you're asking of them. While people are working from home and balancing their time and responsibilities, it's important to help them make informed decisions about events they attend online and those they keep up with by other means (by newsletter, for example). You should:

  • Be clear about the platforms you're using and the steps you've taken to make them as safe and accessible as possible for your participants. Consider co-facilitating with someone else to build some diversity of voice and representation into the sessions, and alternate facilitation and platform-related issues or trouble-shooting duties during a call.
  • Limit the duration of your calls and your role in them. Don't schedule meetings longer than 45-60 minutes unless everyone working from home expects a more in-depth, workshop-like experience. Also, limit the amount of time you spend speaking or delivering content in favor of holding time and space for community conversation.
  • Design your calls and events to be low-prep or no-prep. Rely on peer-to-peer learning to provide most of the value in each call so that people don't have to study up or do homework to participate.

Stay engaged

If you're curious about more online facilitation and community management programming like Movement-Building from Home, you can keep up with all the latest news and offerings from the MozFest team on Slack or via our newsletter and on social media by following @mozillafestival. You'll also find recordings and notes from our calls on the Movement-Building from Home playlist.

It's crucial that we improve how we connect with each other online and take what we learn with us into a more humane and participatory digital future. That better future is one that we can only discover together.