On Thursday 9th July 2020 the Melbourne Kanban meetup, the Sydney and Wellington Limited WiP Society meetup groups got together to conduct a Kanban Unconference.
In conjunction with my co-facilitators Ben Hogan and Silke Noll, we undertook to do a virtual unconference on Kanban with our meetup groups. An unconference is quite simple, we make up the topics on the day and there’s a few basic rules to it:
1. Whoever shows up are the right people.
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
3. Whenever it starts is the right time.
4. It’s over when it’s over.
Remembering the “Law of two (virtual) Feet” which means if you’re not getting or giving value in some way, you’re free to continue to move around.
Here’s the schedule we came up with:
Here’s a great shot of Ben facilitating the session:
We’ve done this before in person in the Melbourne Kanban meetup, but never done it virtually. We used VideoFacilitator and Mural for the tools and they were perfect for this kind of setup. If you’re thinking of doing an virtual unconference yourself, you should check these out.
I really enjoyed the session and I think my co-hosts also got equal enjoyment from it. Our attendees also responded positively to this. It’s more personal than a regular conference, and with everything being remote lately, we’ve been doing a lot of presentations in the meetup, so small conversations were a welcome change. It was so good, we’re thinking of doing this on a slightly larger scale in the future.
Here is a link to the output from the session: