This page is intended to develop a guide for how to have better meetings in the hacklab. It is a draft - contributions invited. If you are interested and would like to discuss it further, you may like to add your name below.

• River

Would you like to learn how to run better meetings? I have been to a training session on this and found it worthwhile. It was run by someone who understands community organisations and was not unpleasantly corporate. If you would like to attend one please add your name below and if there are enough people I will organise it.

• River
• Marcin

• Consider that meetings and discussion have a cost in time and energy. What is the value of the point you are making compared to people's time? Could you use your and other people's time on something more important?
• Worse is better. Consider the 80/20 rule. 80% good enough is good enough. It's not worth another 80% effort on the same thing when you could use the time for something else.
• Appoint a meeting facilitator.
• Develop your skills in meeting facilitation, and participation.
• Try to see the bigger picture.
• Meetings should have a purpose.
• Send out an agenda ahead of time, so that the purpose of the meeting is clear to all attendees and they can come prepared if necessary. Ideally this should include a quick background paragraph/links on the topics.
• After the meeting has finished, create a quick list of actions and distribute to attendees.
• Discuss this action list at the start of the next meeting if there is one.
• Agree on a time limit in advance (eg an hour max) and try and stick to it: Better to have two shorter meetings with fresh people than one enormous mega-meeting that burns everyone out.
• If someone starts discussing something unrelated, keep note of it, and politely ask to discuss it after the current discussion is finished. Make sure to actually do so though! (even if its just to get more information and add to the agenda for next meeting).
• If you're presenting something, spend some time preparing in advance rather than going in “rambling”. I actually found making myself write brief sets of slides (yes, I know, slides, yuck) made me much better. It forces you to consider the way you are communicating your point to others, as well as helping spot and answer common questions in advance. They also give a single place for people to refer back to later, esp if you've provided useful links to further resources etc.

It has been suggested (at one of the meetings leading to the draft comfort & conflict resolution proposal) that we could record the meeting as a 'podcast'.

This might help widen participation as in 2020 we are not limited to text communications. However a recording would obviously need the agreement of everyone participating and possibly limited editing, rather like minutes do.

• https://seedsforchange.org.uk/resources
• All of “Yes, Minister”, and “Yes, Prime Minister”. (Available on youtube.)