WikiProject remote event participation/Documentation/RemoteSocialEvents

We will use this page to track ideas and lessons learned around how to incorporate social events into your remote conferences and meetings.

Organizers: Lea Lacroix (WMDE) & Rachel Farrand

Ideas / More experimentation needed

Breakout rooms not using zoom
collaborative editing / wiki project working
We are looking for ideas around how to handle larger scale social events for 25+ people
Come up with better strategies for people joining late

Lessons from real events and test social events

"The Social Call" 24 April, 2020: 12 participants / 4 experiments
- Organizers: Lea Lacroix (WMDE) & Rachel Farrand
- What we tried:
  - Structured introductions
  - Show and tell
  - Unstructured time
- Lessons
  - Things went more quickly than we expected, come up with ways to extend an activity (open questions at the end?) or time fillers in case you end up with extra time.
  - The event started off feeling formal - consider strategies to help people relax
  - Add in time for “chat” in between activities. Don't just abruptly change from one thing to another. Allow for natural chatting.
  - Interesting details came out in the show and tell, things I didn’t even know about friends, etc.
    - People seemed to like this piece the most
  - Lots of people going idle during the call, family, making dinner, etc.
    - Decided if it is OK to only partly participate / multi-task, or specifically ask people to come prepared to focus only on the call
  - Lots of people joining randomly midway through
    - Same as above. In some cases it will be just fine if people join and leave as they like throughout a social call. In other cases you might spend a lot of time initially building up trust and comfort within a group and a new person joining could dissolve that effort.
  - Friendly space reminder!!
    - Make sure to set expectations around safe space.
  - Next time we should invite more women
  - Better transition to “social chat” time - not just awkward “talk now!”
    - Rachel's fault! Saying it in a slightly less abrupt or starting off with a soft question or comment way would have solved this
  - Consider timezones and setting expectations around drinking. Some participants already had multiple drinks and were continuing throughout this social event while for others it was morning or they preferred not to drink.

Brainstorming

Introduction round: say your name + 1 other thing (1 adjective describing how you feel right now, what you’re currently drinking, last thing you ate…)
Your superhero name is: how you feel right now + 1 random object next to you. Eg “Excited hairdryer”. Bonus: people show the object at the camera
A little pop quiz
Nail Edit collaborative pixel art game
http://www.tscheck.in/ random nice questions to build connection
Culture difference

General notes

Timechecks into chat
Organizers back channel telegram for logistics as needed

Relevant links

Questions & discussions

If you want to talk to the the organizers, ask further questions, feel free to use the talk page.