This is a short post about participant’s reflections on ALF Weekend Spring 2016
Projects
You can see a full list of the cool projects we worked on here in the ALF Weekend Spring 2016 Notes Doc.
Reflections
Here are some wise words from @abbyo
Gratitude for all the work our self-directed facilitators did.
Upgrades include a hard scrum a week in advance so that people can plan around sessions that are important to them, as well as stepping up our language-that-moves-things game (so cards don’t get on the board unless they have CHs, dates, and times)
Here are some wise words from @tomis
“Reflection: I think we may have a WIP problem with ALF Weekend. Next time, I think it would be nice to try a different approach. It feels like we’ve been doing ALF Weekend more like a digital Open Space conference, where we schedule all these conversations (which are important convos), instead of viewing it like projects that we want to complete. I’d be into having people self-select one topic/project, determine what “done” is, and then schedule work sessions throughout the weekend with your team members until it is done. Rather than having five or six topical conversations that all remain open after the weekend, we’d have maybe two projects that get fully completed.?
With low attendance, it didn’t make sense to have a big scrum — er, set the weekend — before the whole thing kicked off. It *does* make sense to try and schedule most of the sessions ahead of time, especially “key” sessions that are demanding or pulling most of our attendance. I *think* (since this is what ended up happening anyway) most of that work could be done virtually (people marking their attendance in various slots, and moving cards ahead of time based on where they see a time & attendance “fit”) — especially with the low volume we had overall.
I don’t know if this would still work if our numbers grew to even 15+ for a full weekend.
I also think we could go for shorter spurts — maybe 3 or even 2.5 hours at a time — 2-3 sessions back-to–back — with breaks in-between. It seemed like most people wanted a break after two consecutive sessions.
Visions
It was good to finally look over the input from the Network Visions Questionnaire, which is a project that was started at ALF Weekend Fall 2015. To summarize & get the information out there & easy to read, I will work on presentation based on key concepts and takeaways of the ALF Visions with Drew.
Holder
I attended the discussion part of the Holder conversation, but not the work of putting the peer review together.
Annual Report
This is the one session I CH’d for this ALF Weekend. I had a bigger-than-expected turnout, because a lot of our schools are non-profits, or want to become NPs. We started working on a list of Network accomplishments, and I encourage additionally interested parties to check out the template Trello board for starting an AR
here (ask to be let in).
Grant Applications
Tomis and I did some very preliminary work on grant apps. I have another write-up (like the one I used for our Annual Report Trello) that I plan to turn into another board for grant applications.
Reflections from @liam
I’ve written a separate post about my own participation which you can read over here (Slack me for password).
We had relatively low attendance, and those that participated worked primarily remotely and had other things going on that weekend. Including me. One of the take aways from the last ALF Weekend was “In-person events are the best way to experience an ALF weekend, if possible.” So we failed there.
Half the people participating couldn’t make the Set the Week meeting we had the Thursday before, so it ended up being kind of pointless.
We scheduled waaaaay too many things to work on, so we ended up jumping around starting a bunch of projects without creating much finished work.
More. . . .
If you have reflections you’d like to share, post a comment and I’ll include it in this post.