Global Gathering 2020: Getting the agenda together!

International Processes
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Hi everyone,

In two weeks time we are getting together to start our global gathering. We’ve had about 40 sessions proposed which is super exciting! Now we just need to get them together into a kind of agenda and think about how the sessions will flow into each other. Of course, this is particularly challenging given the extremes of the timezones we are working towards.

I want to make some high level proposals here to see how this sits with everyone. There is much more in the works and more conversations happening in the #global-gathering2020 Slack channel so please join in there if you are curious.

Themes

The sessions of the gathering fit into 5 main themes:

Instance Sessions - Sessions organised by instances (eg India, UK, Aus) or regions (eg West Africa, Latin America) that will explore the context in these places and how OFN is used. Hopefully we’ll have farmers and users joining these sessions to talk about how they use OFN where they are. These sessions will be run at a time and language(s) that suits the local instance, so we will record them and subtitle later to make them widely accessible. This is an OFN Showcase!

Heart & Soul - This theme will include sessions to help us bond as a community. Listening Circles, Nature Witnessing, Farm Tours. The aim will be to run sessions at least twice through the gathering so that as many of us as possible can attend at least one. These sessions will help our beautiful community connect with our hearts. After all, OFN only exists because we are a loving community that bonds as humans! Let’s nourish this!

Sector - This will be a series of expert sessions, presentations and discussions on topics around OFN including logistics, trade, interoperability, regen ag. These sessions could be open to the public and help us to understand the wider context we lie within, now and into the future.

OFN Support - This strand will explore how we can bring together OFN support to leverage all the global expertise and really build something great together! This strand will include a number of Drop-in ‘How Do I?’ sessions, discussions around how we can best manage the user guide, and how we can build our collective support offering together. In this strand there will be a few sessions that continue across timezones and have asynchronous elements so that we can include the whole community. We’ll be discussing the proposals on Slack.

Organisation - A huge number of people submitted proposals for this series. Some sessions will be stand alone - like creating a Code of Conduct. Other sessions will happen in a long series as we present the current OFN organisational structure, explore what we love about our culture and what we fear as we grow, and develop async proposals about our future direction. More discussions about this will happen in Slack and I’ll present proposals on this thread to to try and be inclusive.

Timeslots

The gathering will take place between Sept 28th and Oct 9th. During this time Summer Time starts in places so our timeslots are just a giant juggle. D’oh! Should have seen that one :-/

I would like to propose 5 session slots per day. No one in the whole community will be able to attend every session, so we can plan things to be split over sessions in a way that means everyone can attend as much as possible. It will be tricky and we’ll all need to show as much patience and love as we can to make it work.

Session Times Sept 28th to Oct 3rd

Screenshot from 2020-09-16 20-29-48

Session Times Oct 4th to Oct 9th

Screenshot from 2020-09-16 20-30-32

Note that the session that can be attended by all of us, kind of, is a horrible time in Toronto AND Melbourne. I know you lot are used to this but it really does suck.

So my big questions:

  1. Can we try to have some sessions with EVERYONE attending in the middle timeslot? Can we do this in week 1 only? Which way should we shift in week 2 - later for Aus or earlier Toronto?

  2. Does anyone want to improve on this at all? Can we improve on this?

2 Likes
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Great work @lin_d_hop thank you :slightly_smiling_face:

Which countries have summer time endings in this period? UK doesn’t change until 25th Oct.

I can’t see an easy solution for the session times - let’s see what the Aussies and NAmericans suggest

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Hello,
Great summary, thank you
What about recording all the session?

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Apparently Melbourne changes… the tool I used says 1hr later for the second week for the AU crew

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Thank you @lin_d_hop - this is a major challenge - and just seeing it laid out like this is so helpful. Speaking for me - I am very willing to go to 5:00 am - that doesn’t help people west of me like @lauriewayne1 . But I’m also very happy to do a ‘relay’ somehow and repeat and share as best I can with other Canada and US folks. I’m also very willing to go late if that helps. (Honestly, an advantage of older age is that you don’t sleep anyway.)

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4:00 is more of a “yellow” for me and 6:00 is a green (not sure about @apb or Linda Yan who is also on the West Coast) - this might make the “middle” time slot a bit bigger and things a tad more palatable for Melbourne?

I love the idea of everyone attending at some points during each day!

I also love the idea of good notes and presentations/documents (rather than session recordings) for the sessions that will be repeated, ANDI think it’s nearly impossible to participate in a discussion while taking complete notes, so I suggest that those who volunteer to take notes may want to volunteer to do so for a session that they don’t plan to be as engaged in. I plan to volunteer to take “carryover” notes for duplicated sessions as I am able.

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Ditto what @lauriewayne1 said - the roosters start up at about 5am, so for me 6am is a green and 4am is a yellow…they also don’t care about summer time (or as I call it, “fake time”) but I believe the US doesn’t switch until November 1 anyway.

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@lauriewayne1 re Notes. We are going to record the sessions so I would prioritise just having attendees. If there is a note taker present then great, but already we are all stretching so much. The thought of someone just being spare to take notes seems unlikely. But we can try do collab note taking and use the recording as backup.

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and you can change Toronto’s 5:00 to a green. Its my regular rising time in the summer - and so I don’t mind.

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Since I will be more of an observer than a participant for most sessions, I’m happy to take notes for the ones I can attend! Unfortunately, I have teaching scheduled at the same time both Wednesdays. Perhaps I can coordinate with other researchers to do detailed note taking so we can try to cover all sessions?

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Thanks @gen.shanahan that would be amazing - you are SUCH a valuable observer :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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