SETT16 | A long day and communication

A long day. That might sound like something terrible has happened. It hasn’t. It’s just another long day, and today I ran yet another really long race of about 15 hours. To be able to tick off as much as possible and focus solely on SETT I’ve been working from home.

So what have I been up to? Well, I’ll get to that, but I also wanted to try to take you along on the journey up until today, when you got the history lesson in the previous post. We’ve been tinkering with this for about a month, but since last week we’ve shifted straight from first gear up to fifth.

Start

Everything starts with an idea. So we thought a bit about what we did last year. We located the highlights both from last year and the year before, when we ran Tänktanken Talkshow at Årstaskolan. A few adjustments and changes were needed. Since we’re doing this at a trade fair, we felt we wanted to shorten the actual programs. Partly because people generally prefer a half-hour program over an hour-long one. We also see this in statistics on number of listens/views — it tends to increase the shorter the programs are. But also because we’re running in a large exhibition hall. An environment designed for people to move around. Not easy, but nothing should be easy, right?

View from our shared Trello board. It’s starting to take shape and a lot is becoming ready. The small avatars under each card indicate those responsible.

Four formats

After some back-and-forth with Lärarförbundet we identified four different formats with varying lengths and content focus. These became:

Tänktanken Talkshow - 60 min

Tänktanken Talkshow is Sweden’s friendliest talk show focusing on personalities in the school sphere. Here we meet people with mixed backgrounds but one thing in common — they want to develop the Swedish school.

Tänktanken Barsamtal - 30 min

In Tänktanken Barsamtal school issues are discussed from different perspectives with invited experts and practitioners from the fields of school and learning.

Dagens Kodknäck - 30 min

Crack the new curriculum. Here exciting concrete examples appear from Årstaskolan’s work with programming and computational thinking.

Mikroföreläsningar - 15 min

Focused dives into the world of learning with interesting speakers. This is candy for anyone working with knowledge and development.

Guests? Who would fit?

The next step is difficult and time-consuming. Not difficult in the sense of picking out interesting people. But schedule-wise. Most of our invited guests are actually people who are already going to present at SETT. For practical reasons. We know they’ll be there. But we also have other guests who aren’t participating at SETT otherwise. All guests can at different times. And to add more complicating factors you also have to put together people whose skills complement each other in one way or another. To get a good mix in the programs. And besides that we try as much as possible to include guests we haven’t had before.

When we and Lärarförbundet finally felt satisfied it was “just” a matter of getting down to business and start inviting. Fortunately about 90% say yes straight away, so we’re grateful for that. It makes our work much more pleasant.

Communication

Since we need to be able to communicate between Årstaskolan and Lärarförbundet we’ve used Trello and Slack exclusively. Trello for planning, since it’s basically a digital board with post-its. Slack is used for communication, a searchable public chat (for those involved) where we have different rooms, e.g. #sett16-teknik or #sett16-planering. Of course it’s available on all platforms, from web to mobile. Something I find fantastic about Slack is that everything becomes transparent to everyone involved. I chat with one person about something and anyone who wants can look and chime in. And we avoid email. Email is worthless in every way.

This is what it can look like in Slack. In addition to text chat I post images, documents and videos so everyone has access to everything.

And we avoid email. Email is worthless in every way.

In about 95% of the cases I’ve also had contact with and contacted all guests via either Facebook or Twitter. It’s quick and easy for both parties to have a rapid conversation and ask questions.

So what have I done today?

I’ll continue the blog journey tomorrow (I hope) but already today I can sum up that I; communicated with our guests, communicated with everyone involved, created to-do lists and distributed them, finished the Tänktanken website, finished the Tänktanken app, created graphic profiles for the different formats, graphic material for PR (social media), pushed guests on social media, video and graphics for the broadcasts, test-ran Facebook Live, started building the Wirecast projects and a lot of other stuff. All these things also involve a hundred sub-tasks, so there’s plenty to do. :) I promise.

And the best part? It’s that I know everyone involved in the project is doing the same. I trust everyone 100%.

See you and talk soon! If you have questions or wonder about something, just post them in the comments or get in touch with me another way.

The whole series - SETT2016

Part 1 | Here we go again

Part 2 | A long day and communication

Part 3 | Both digital and analog work

Part 4 | Up to the last minute

Part 5 | Chaos as usual

Part 6 | Thanks and that’s a wrap