Facilitating online communities/course mini conference/multimembership

This is a planning space for the miniconference event: Managing Multimembership in Social Networks.

Planning history
1. Sylvia Currie, Bronwyn Stuckey, Jeffrey Keefer, and Sue Wolff circulated two or three emails to work out a potential topic.

2. Sylvia reserves space in SCoPE and announces intent in Facilitator wiki for potential mini conference.

3. Sylvia circulates a Doodle to coordinate a meeting time.

4. Team met in FOC08 Eluminate room to discuss and settle on managing multimembership, drafting this preliminary timeline from our saved whiteboards:

5. Time line is distributed to team in email and some problems are noted, a second meeting requested.

6. Sue sends another Doodle to arrange 2nd brief planning meeting time.

7. Jeffrey requested clarification as to the time zones for the times listed on the Doodle meeting.

8. Sue, Jeffrey, and Sylvia met in the 24/7 room to review the time line (job jar), brainstorm guiding questions for the survey and seminar discussion, and set a schedule for upcoming meetings. The text chat and whiteboard were saved for reference.

8. Sylvia, Sue, and Jeffrey discussed having a survey to elicit feedback and engage in "guerilla social network" marketing (also known as spreading the word) about the session. Sue posted questions in our multimembership planning wiki so we can all edit. She posted 5 questions about multimembership in survey monkey as a place to start.

9. Sylvia, Sue, and Jeffrey decided we should try to meet weekly (as many of us as possible) to discuss and formulate preparing for this session. Jeffrey created a Doodle poll to track potential dates and times.

10. We refined the session description/title in SCoPE, then Jeffrey copied the information to the mini-conference wiki.

11. We agreed to document our progress in the wiki. That way we can keep our planning in common view, plus have something to refer back to should we decide to write about our experiences.

12. Sue designed the initial survey questions. They were reviewed by all, feedback given by email, then fine-tuned in during an Elluminate meeting. We will meet one more time to review questions.

13. We met for another planning session and updated the survey questions, format, and introduction. We did not update this wiki page until the following meeting. We are beginning to become even more aware of getting overwhelmed with how large a topic this is (or at least Jeffrey is feeling this way).

14. Jeffrey was then going to begin guerrilla social networking to advertise the #multimembership session.

15. Jeffrey posted a blog post on his own blog to summarize and advertise (market) our session. Jeffrey then sent out email announcements to several related distribution lists. These included the Yahoo Groups: Training-Ideas, com-prac, webcommunities, and onlinefacilitation. He also sent it to the Google Groups: WikiEducator, Facilitating Online Communities, and Connectivism and Connective Knowledge groups. Jeffrey is also posting to the CPSqare.org blog, a community of practice on communities of practice. Sylvia posted the event to calendars in the British Columbia EdTech Users Community, the Elearning and Marketplace Community, and SCoPE. She will be sending out a MicroSCoPE newletter to all community members (approx 2400), and is also sending out shorter tweets using both her personal and the SCoPE twitter account, prompting for participation in the survey and suggesting people mark their calendars. Bron is notifying members of her various networks about the event.

16. For an initial question for the VoiceThread, we discussed using the question "Think of a situation where you felt on top of your multimembership and how did you manage that?"

17. On October 26,2008 we had a "pre launch" meeting to check that we were ready to roll. We talked about
 * getting more voice thread examples in so that we have some stories to share
 * whether a juicy statistic from the survey might kick off a discussion
 * a list of questions mulling in our brains that could be used as discussion starters
 * whether we should meet mid week after the event has a few days running

18. Throughout, but especially during the first few days of the event we exchanged email to question and fine-tune roles. We noted "co-facilitation" can be difficult to manage. It's important to be clear on roles and expectations. Also, there is a blurring of facilitator and participant roles. We all wish to engage but are aware that there may be too much of us.

Debrief
How could the event have been facilitated better?