Next steps of the OuiShare Fest program creation
Dear friends,
Below is an important update about the next steps of the OuiShare Fest program creation.
First of all a big THANKS to all your invaluable contributions to the program brainstorm. They have been of a huge help during the wonderful three-day sprint with Fran, Maiwenn, Taoufik and Khushboo to frame the upcoming months. Our main take-away is that most of you believe that after the critical success of critique, OuiShare has to turn its gaze to the future again and instigate a new project for the future, all this while setting the intellectual challenge for the year to come. Whilst we don’t have our definitive theme yet, we have a lot of ideas that are on the edge of something really cool. We’ll keep you posted!
The call for proposal is now ready and will be launched on the first week of November and be open till end of December. I’ll spare you the technical details (we will use Typeform this year, the integration with Trello and Mailchimp will be done via Zapier, etc.), but here are the main changes we would like to make compared to last year:
we decided that it does not make sense to have tracks, because by nature, we want topics at the Fest to overlap with each other. Therefore we’ve chosen 8 hashtags (=topics) that can be freely combined: work, education, environment, tech, business, society, finance, culture.
instead of tracks, we will have 1.5 to 3 hours of “big sessions”, each one being formulated as a question that combines at least two hashtags, that is to say two subjects. Please have a look at Tim O’Reilly’s Next Economy Forum to have an idea of what we had in mind
the former track leaders will become a general content curation team, of 6-10 people, that will be in charge of the call for contribution review and the curation of all the sessions, in close relationship with me. We are still in the process of defining exactly how, but we would like to launch a first Backfeed experiment of a few days to enable this team to emerge while defining the key questions that need to be addressed next year. In the next step, the tool could also enable this team to decide collectively on budget allocation and speaker selection. More instructions on this plan will follow in the next days. The curators will benefit from a small compensation for their engagement.
=> If you want to be part of the curation team, please say so and we’ll automatically add you to the Slack program channel and let you know the next steps.
=> if you want to propose a contribution to the Fest, please respond to the call that will launch next week to make it easier to access all proposals.
⇒ if you would like to propose a speaker (except for the first call for speakers that Fran posted on OuiShare Global) please go to the call where we have created an entry “I want to propose a speaker”. No speakers acceptance will be binding as long as it has not been validated by the curation and program team via the call for proposal.
We are all looking forward to having you involved again in the next OuiShare Fest! If you have any questions, please ask the team!
David De Belleville Tue 27 Oct 2015 10:34AM
Great work Diana & team!
Am I the only one to feel that an important #governance (public & private) hashtag is missing? I can see how citizenship related topics could fit the #society hashtag, but what about DCO (decentralized collaborative organizations) & participative governance? for example would cooperativism be in #business and governance of commons be in #society? x
Maud Tue 27 Oct 2015 8:08PM
+1 to have a governance hashtag, as it's not clear where we could fit some of the subjects.
Still great work team :-)
One question : what are your plans concerning the "experience" of the OS Fest, how do you plan to organize it and link it more closer to the content ? Is there some "job" related to it? Do you have already people working on it? Personaly I don't wish to take a lead on it, but I know OuiCare people could have some input and it would be great to know how we could contribute on that (as a Fest is not limited to great speakers, even if that's super important :-) )
Francesca Wed 28 Oct 2015 1:43PM
Here's a quick update on where we are with our theme, which we would like to announce with the launch for next week!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/OuiShare.Connectors/permalink/1177588078922862/
@maud we are still defining more clearly what he acutally mean when we say Fest experience, because we have very many people who say they want to get involved in this, but often meaning quite different things. In any case, experience will be completely part of the areas program and event production and not a separate thing as such.
@filippovadiana what is your take on the question of adding a governance hashtag? I'm not sure it's necesssary, because I think most examples mentioned here fit into one or 2 of the other hashtags we have.
Filippova Diana Wed 28 Oct 2015 8:52PM
Thanks a lot @maud1 @daviddebelleville. The reason why we didn't keep such hashtags as decentralization, governance and politics, is that they are not topics but rather lenses, angles through which the subjects are addressed. Also, they are both means to an end, and not the end itself -- from our last year's experience, we noticed a lot of propositions (and some sessions) were poorly framed because they concerned "politics" alone, for instance, not addressing what we actually try to achieve with politics.
David De Belleville Wed 28 Oct 2015 11:14PM
I'm not really convinced by the means/end dichotomy for the chosen hashtags. Not sure either why/how all chosen hashtags are subjects and not angles. But I don't need to. What matters is that the absence of #governance was not an oversight. xx
Etienne Thu 29 Oct 2015 10:18PM
I'm a bit sad of the hashtag too. Feels a bit.. old or boring.
Hope we can / could figure out something younger, fresher and more exciting or out of the box!
I've seen this hashtags everywhere in transition towns / open space technologies.
Also, having hashtags without a final theme is kind of strange..
Where is the vision?
OuiShare's vision?
Where is our strategy? our position? What do we see, what do we like, what do we hate, where are we bored and we want to see other stuffs? new stuff? revolution?
There's a lack of backbone, of verticality. What are the positive models we want to show? What are the one we tought were interesting but are not perfect? What are the one that we forgot or didn't see coming? How can companies jump into this culture?
Purpose -> vision -> strategy.
Then we can have some proper themes to adress / critic / show what we want / like. not a cloud of hashtag that don't give any vision to where the hype is, to what is trendy, what is clashy. We have the pleasure not to be computer, let's not fall down into search engine capacities and bring our creativity to create something exciting!
I'm very curious and interested to join the curation team & do the backfeed experiment especially if we can speak about this and change it.
About Backfeed I'm in touch with Matan who suggested I could be the link with OuiShare due to my experience on these topics.
Francesca Thu 29 Oct 2015 10:22PM
guys, I feel like there may have been a misunderstanding here: we don't plan to use these hashtags to structure the program in any way, but as Diana wrote, in the next weeks we want to work together with you to figure out the key questions with you, and then structure the program based on those, which she showed in the example of the O'reilly conference program.
The hashtags are only for the call for proposals that we are launching next week to help people attriibute their contributions to topics, to help us in scanning the proposals in the next step. I hope that makes sense to you? @etiennezoupic
We know we need to come up with some great questions we want to address that combine several topics, but we did not want to rush this and hold up the launch of the call due to that.
Etienne Thu 29 Oct 2015 10:33PM
got it. Thx for the clarification.
So what is the difference with last year? We had 12 tracks on 1 hashtag and this year we have 6 topics (questions) mixing 2 hashtags, correct?
;-)
Filippova Diana Fri 30 Oct 2015 9:46AM
Thanks @etiennezoupic for your comments :) A few clarifications below.
- We proposed a theme, "After the gold rush", and it seems it gathers excitement and positive comments
- "Where is our strategy? our position? What do we see, what do we like, what do we hate, where are we bored and we want to see other stuffs? new stuff? revolution?" That is exactly what the Fest is all about, quite explicitly, and these questions are constitutive of the event's soul and bones. I am not sure we need to repeat it every year, since it's the reason why people attend it.
- One thing I can guarantee you is that the program will not lack backbone, not the least because the program team members will not lack backbone, as well as our community and attendees.
Nothing is set in stone. The Fest is in May and not tomorrow, we'll have all the time we need to modify it, tweak it, adapt it. Yet we have to start somewhere! This first program structuring has not popped up from nowhere, arbitrarily, and is the main outcome of a three-day sprint session held by the core team:
Hashtags: The word hashtag is purely formal. You can call it topic or anything you want. They are there because we must make the call for contributions clearer and provide a better user experience both for applicants, curators and the team. There are around 250 to process, which is a lot. Applicants don't care about the états d'âme that has led us, in the past, to formulate the call in a way to show that OuiShare peeps are clever and witty, disregarding the struggle to fill it in by applicants. So this year, we make it crystal clear: these are the topics that will be addressed, please chose the one that describes your proposal in the best possible way. The reason why so many events use such classification is that it works.
Questions and sessions: there are not 6, but much more. A big session (typically 1.30 hour) corresponds to one big question that should aim at crossing different topics. The questions will be decided together by the content curation team, yet there will be a maximum number of spots defined beforehand. Hashtags -- used for the sake of clarity in the call - are only there to help people chose questions that cross several topics. The goal is to avoid questions such as "will governance be decentralised?" or "what is the future of work?".
Content curation team: contrary to last year, the team will be working together, as a team: 6-10 people compared to 24-30 last year. Even if there will be experts on some subjects, they won't be working only on their area of expertise, but will design and frame the topics and questions of the whole program. It will be working from now on, and not in the two months before the Fest. It will have a lot more decision power, including choosing the speakers and allocating the travel budget. There will be a small compensation, that we have yet to define and that we will share with you as soon as we can.
The vision: it's a collective job -- it's not up to the Fest core team to set it up. Our job is to frame the discussion, which we did by choosing the theme: what comes next after the collaborative economy has become mainstream, heavily criticized, and greedy (for a part of it)? I bet there are several visions that will emerge and I am hugely excited to see how the fest community will frame them.
That's what the Fest is all about: giving people opportunities to shape and communicate their vision in an original way, open to debates and discussions. Our purpose is to structure the program in a way to allow for these debates and discussions to be held and heard in a purposeful and productive way. I am not sure shouting out our vision on all roofs will make us wittier or more radical, since the most stunning visions are those exposed sotto voce
Joachim Lohkamp · Mon 26 Oct 2015 8:56PM
I really like the Next Economy Forum frame - it promises a very cool dynamic connecting people across all topics.
Awesome guys :)