The Never Done Before Facilitation Festival inverts the conference model by letting attendees co-design workshops in virtual sessions. A €20 design pass filters for serious professionals and gives holders a seat at the table, avoiding the Boaty McBoatface problem of unfiltered public input.
Chapters
I am back with full energy and a gazillion of ideas after almost 2 weeks of pull-the-plug holidays, what I call the heartbreak, and it's amazing. And most of my ideas obviously are related to the Never Done Before Facilitation Festival, and I cannot wait to start the content creation journey together with our co-designers. This week on Thursday, we scheduled 2 sessions that we call fishbowl sessions, but you can be excited and curious where we have a virtual house full of co-designers, those who purchased the design pass to help us co-create the content. And the reason behind that is actually that when we decided that we want to turn the usual conference or facilitation festival process around, and instead of providing the lineup and providing the content of the workshops, rather ask our potential audience, the attendees, what it is they actually want to experience at such a festival. We went through a quite intense ideation process on how to do that. We thought maybe we can release YouTube videos and let the audience upvote, or we can have a public voting theme. And none of that felt quite real. And one reason was the learning from the Boaty McBoatface effect. And I don't know whether you heard about it. If you haven't, just Google it. The story is hilarious. It's basically a British government agency that thought that it was smart to crowdsource the name of a very prestigious research project. So they asked the internet to submit ideas for the name of a research submarine. And the crowd, the internet, thought it was funny to come up with the name Boaty McBoatface. And guess what? They won. So at the end, they came up with a name, with a kind of silly name to a very serious project. And what we learned about that is that we don't want to just ask the public. We want to ask those to create the content who are actually serious about joining and who are serious about the profession and the art and craft of facilitation. So that's why we thought it makes sense to ask for a small contribution. In our case, it's only €20 to have some skin in the game. So there are still some places left in our sessions on Thursday. So just visit our website in the comments and get your design pass to join the journey of experimentation, collaboration, and most of all, of facilitation. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. If you have questions, just reach out to me or leave your comment below. See you then. Bye-bye.
