Comments on: Better Formats For Group Interaction – Beyond Lectures, Group Discussions, Panels and Mixers https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2017/03/better-formats-for-group-interaction-going-beyond-lectures-group-discussions-panels-and-mixers/ Sat, 08 Aug 2020 03:47:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 By: John https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2017/03/better-formats-for-group-interaction-going-beyond-lectures-group-discussions-panels-and-mixers/#comment-22208 Sat, 08 Aug 2020 03:47:00 +0000 http://www.spencergreenberg.com/?p=1014#comment-22208 Some brainstorming recommendations:

https://conceptspace.fandom.com/wiki/Optimal_Brainstorming

]]> By: John https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2017/03/better-formats-for-group-interaction-going-beyond-lectures-group-discussions-panels-and-mixers/#comment-21887 Sat, 25 Jan 2020 05:58:34 +0000 http://www.spencergreenberg.com/?p=1014#comment-21887 Some other ideas:
* Robin Hanson came up with this scheme to prevent a few people from dominating a conversation: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/equatalk.html
* Map the structure of a conversation, e.g. on a whiteboard. Maybe a secretary or voice transcribing software could be helpful here. Or maybe you’d want to have the conversation be in Workflowy or some software which has a natural threading structure. (Speaking of which, hybrid digital/physical conversations seem underexplored. But anyway…) By mapping the structure, it becomes easy to answer questions like “why were we talking about this again?” and maybe notice if the conversation has descended into some unimportant subtopic and pop the stack a few times. This kind of topic prioritization hack can probably be combined with many of the other ideas on this page. (Another idea is to simply brainstorm conversation topics at the beginning and have people vote on their importance/tractability/neglectedness or something, and then write the topics that win the voting on big letters on a nearby whiteboard, or otherwise work to increase their mental availability.)
* Human Search Engines, a bit like reciprocity circle but much more chaotic. Give everyone 3 nametags and have them write keyword(s) they want to talk about, or a question they want answered, on each nametag. Then have a mixer. Maybe periodically pass out new nametags so people can update their attire with new topics they’ve become interested in, so it’s easy to scan the crowd and find conversations you think you might be interested in. (BTW, mapping conversations on whiteboards also helps with this. Another cool thing about conversational whiteboard mapping is you don’t have to interject to decide whether you want to join a conversation, and also instead of restricting yourself to conversations that are interesting at this particular moment, you can potentially join a conversation that’s been interesting to you at any point in its history.)

]]> By: Julia https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2017/03/better-formats-for-group-interaction-going-beyond-lectures-group-discussions-panels-and-mixers/#comment-14296 Mon, 13 Mar 2017 19:25:42 +0000 http://www.spencergreenberg.com/?p=1014#comment-14296 A note on the group dance: I wouldn’t recommend trying this with only the group if there aren’t at least a few people who have done it before, as it’s much easier to learn if there are some people who know what they’re doing. You could bring a group to an existing dance, but then you don’t spend much time together.

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