Three steps to organize a successful virtual unconference
Due to the new reality and corona restrictions, many of the usual workshops have to be run virtually. This article will provide detailed tips that you can use to organize an unconference in a virtual setup.
This post was written together with Maryanne Kmit, Yuliia Pieskova, Anne Aaroe, Renato Claudino, Jesper Ingvardtsen, Poul Mejlsted, kschutter, and Sven Kuehnel.
A little background
In SimCorp we have historically run a two day agile Unconference workshop every year for around 50 participants (mainly agile roles). In 2020, due to corona restrictions, we moved into the virtual space with a four half-day agile Unconference workshops.
In three steps this article describes how we did it, the learnings we made and the tools we used. We hope it will give you some inspiration to facilitate your own Unconference workshop.
Step 1 : The Unconference walls in the virtual world
One of the beauties of an unconference workshop is watching the physical space evolve over the course of the workshop. When we moved it to the virtual world, we wanted to bring this perception with us as much as possible. Very early in the planning process, we therefore knew that the online collaboration tool we chose should be able to represent the walls of the main room in some way.
One virtual board to mimic room walls
This unfolded into a space on the board where we, just like in a physical event, added posters for the different activities and events on the “wall”. In our case, Miro.
All the posters e.g., ground rules, agenda, introduction, feedback and icebreakers were placed on the board together.
As in our physical Unconferences, they were also beautified with color, frames and pictures to make the visuals eye catching and easy for new joiners to find.
Step 2 : The virtual marketplace
Our biggest challenge was to conduct a marketplace resembling what we would do in a physical sense. For example, how to mimic that all participants get in line and build the open space agenda together?
Here’s how we prepared all the phases of the marketplace
Get in line with your open space pitch
In a physical Unconference it’s easy — set the timer for X minutes and tell people to line up in a queue when they are ready with their pitch, which they have written on a sticky note. Everyone can see the line grow, which can also trigger others to join in.
To replicate the atmosphere in our distributed set-up, we invited people to generate topics on sticky notes in a shared brainstorming area. This way people could see that others were also pitching as well as what they planned to pitch.
When ready with a pitch, we asked the participants to move their sticky notes from the brainstorming area into the queue area. Adding a small image to illustrate the queue, was a “fun factor” attempt to generate the same queuing feeling as in a physical Unconference session.
Learnings: It might help to add queue numbers to the queue eg. 1, 2, 3, as we had situations where people didn’t place themselves next in line. It was harmless though, and a simple comment of “move to the end of the queue” helped.
Pitching the idea
Everybody with topics in the queue was given a time slot to pitch the idea, as usual in the Unconferences marketplace. We created a highlighted spot where the sticky notes were moved to as each person pitched, so the sticky note being pitched would be visible to attendees.
After each pitch a facilitator moved the pitch note to an open space slot for the day — this step would normally be part of the person pitching the idea, but we found that moving notes between the frames created unnecessary focus change. Therefore we ended up calling out the move, and had one facilitator silently moving the item while the main facilitator would welcome the next person in the queue to start pitching.
Finalizing the agenda
We anticipated that 50+ people would be too many to participate in rearranging the agenda as we would do in a physical room. We therefore started by only asking the pitch owners to rearrange. This however, turned out to be a nonissue, and the following days we opened up for all to rearrange the agenda. Some topics got moved back to the brainstorming area and others stayed at the agenda which had originally been silently created.
Doing it all again
As our online event spanned four half-days, we “only” had up to two open space sessions a day. We chose to only fill the open space agenda for the current day, in order to leave room for new ideas to emerge till the next day. The ideas from previous days that hadn’t made it to the agenda, could still be found in the “brainstorming” area from the day before and pitched again.
We repeated the same facilitation of the marketplace each day. Thus at the start of each day we would go through the marketplace phases described above. Both existing and new topics could be placed in the queue, pitched and moved to the agenda.
The repetition worked well in relation to facilitation and participation. It provided a routine enabling participants to focus on content and enabled us to facilitate without complications. All in all the marketplace part ended up taking between 15 and 20 minutes.
Step 3: The virtual open space breakout sessions
In a physical Unconference workshop, you would likely walk into separate rooms for the breakout sessions. Behind closed doors, your walls would be filled with conversation, post-its, drawings and more. The “only” thing to be brought back to the main room would be your summary of the takeaways from the session.
In our virtual setup, we used breakout rooms in MS Teams to run all the sessions that would have taken place in different physical rooms. The question we faced was: Should we “close our doors” and create separate virtual boards for each breakout session, or keep everything in the same virtual board?
There were pros and cons: building separate board rooms would enable participants to use more functions from Miro such as separate timers, “bring everyone to me” and voting functionality. However, the complexity of communicating across different virtual boards, e.g. setting joint timers or bringing the takeaways back to the main board, led us to choose only one Miro board for all the breakout sessions. For each breakout session, we created a smaller canvas (frame) on the main board.
We still wanted the feeling of moving from one room to another though. In the open space agenda, we therefore added links to the MS Teams virtual room and to the breakout session frame/canvas. This helped us keep the resemblance of the physical world.
Again we ensured as much repetition as possible, using the same layout each day and the same “breakout rooms” all four days.
One can say that “opening the doors’’ became a red thread throughout the workshop. The choice to keep the open space rooms (frames) close together, meant that bumble bees and butterflies could move with ease from room to room (or frame to frame).
In the end, we had a canvas filled with learnings from all the open space sessions. Each day we made the frames from the prior days available and opened up for today’s “take away frames” to be filled. Seeing how the virtual walls evolved over the time of the camp was remarkable.
Conclusion and takeaways
In comparison to the physical setup, in our virtual unconference experience the participants were more punctual in between sessions, perhaps due to very visible timers and the absence of a real coffee machine where people could chat and forget about the time. Also the ‘bumble bees’ and ‘butterflies’ could move effortlessly and discreetly between open space slots. This led to more cross-pollination and potentially also to an optimized learning experience.
On the tooling side the conclusion was very positive. We experienced no severe impediments. The breakout rooms in MS Teams with easy accessible links in the board worked well. The virtual board in Miro supported the co-creation of content as planned.
General tips and tricks when using Miro
- Use shapes instead of frames when structuring your board, if the particular area is not something you need to navigate to specifically.
- Structure your frame overview and reorganize as frames become less relevant, e.g., those from previous days.
- Remember to lock the parts of the Miro board that belong to the past, so that nobody can move all notes in the board by accident.
- Be aware if you have a frame and a shape at the same area, links will be hidden when adding the shape.
- Have a frame with all breakout meeting links at top of the frame overview, to make it easy for people to find the breakout sessions.
Finally, we believe the 3 steps mentioned above will support your virtual unconference to promote collaboration and to achieve incredible results. We’ve had a really good experience in our 2020 agile unconference workshop and we have raised the bar, despite the restrictions this year brought to us.
In our next physical agile unconference workshop — whenever it happens — our new challenge will actually be to achieve the same results as we could virtually.
Read more about the full experience of our agile event in our separate article “Remote event at scale? —Challenge accepted!”
