360 Learning at User Groups

September 2012 · Community, User Groups, Learning, Facilitating

Retrospective

This article reflects on the idea that learning at user groups is multi-directional: the speaker, the audience, and the organizer all learn in different ways at the same time. The key insight is that facilitation is an active craft, and that “360 learning” emerges when the group creates space for questions, pacing, and shared problem-solving.

Original text

First a small plug for my user-group community.

[Software Craftsmanship North America](http://mchenry.softwarecraftsmanship.org) (SCMC) is a group that meets once a month at [Follett Software Company](http://www.follettsoftware.com/) in the far-northwestern suburbs of Chicago. We’re a diverse group of individuals with members in their teens all the way up to the great grandparents of software development. It’s a lot of fun and we always learn something at each meeting.

There’s more to learn than just the topic at User-groups.

I think that user-group meeting topics are just the tip of the learning possibilities at user-group meetings but you have to take a step back to get the full picture.

Let’s paint the scene. Last night [Surya Gaddipati](http://twitter.com/suryagaddipati) was presenting on his work in building [LINQR](https://github.com/suryagaddipati/linqr), a [LINQ DSL in Ruby](http://www.meetup.com/Software-Craftsmanship-McHenry-County/events/79576612/). He was presenting to 11 software professionals who were mostly versed in Java and C++ programming.

Let’s look at the possibilities for learning within the group…

  • The speaker who’s creating a very cool set of utilities for Ruby was presenting on a very dense set of topics for the first time.
  • Many people in the audience were not .NET developers or Ruby developers so they were simultaneously trying to absorb the DSL concepts but also enough Ruby and .NET concepts for it to make sense.
  • As the meeting facilitator I learned a lot about the dynamic of the group.

This multi-faceted learning is what I think is very unique about user-groups. I’ll write a comparison of tech conference learning opportunities in another post.

What did the speaker learn?

  • Don’t try to pack too much information into one meeting.

Remember over the months and years you’ve spent learning or building whatever your presenting on that there’s almost no way to summarize that down into a one or two hour session. You need to choose to go deep or wide. If you go deep then you’ll need to pick one facet and just focus on that bringing in only enough to support that topic. If you go wide you’ll likely be discussing things in broad stokes, only giving enough detail for context.

  • Lean on your organizer.

If you have any trouble with technical aspects or with how to engage your audience, then speak to the organizer. They’re there to make sure everyone has a good time and gets as much value as possible. If you’re stuck then mention it, your organizer probably knows the technical difficulties already and can rescue you quickly. If your audience is a sea of blank faces sometimes engaging your organizer directly can give them a clue that you need some more interaction and they can help with engaging the group on your behalf.

  • Lean on your audience.

Most of the time the audience is very technical and has something to offer besides attention. If you do get stuck it’s also okay to say, “Ugh. I can’t remember how to set the color scheme on my Vim, does anyone know how to change that?” It’s hard to remember these kinds of things when you’re under pressure in front of a live audience. By breaking the “fourth wall” and asking for help you’ve let the audience in on you a little and they’ll often be more patient, understanding and engaged because you’ve let some of your humanity show.

What did the audience learn?

  • Know when the firehouse is open too wide.

Sometimes when there’s just too much information to be synthesized all at once audiences will typically kind of shutdown and become less likely to ask questions. This is your chance as an organizer to interject with a question or try to work with the speaker and audience to figure out what’s the right level of content for people to get value. If things are too high-level for the audience they’ll leave more confused but too low-level and they’ll get bored and just leave. I like to sometimes start with a question to the speaker and then turn it back around to the group to encourage feedback and interaction.

What did I as the facilitator learn?

  • You know your group better than your speaker does.

Even if you’re getting a presenter who’s a regular member of the group they’re probably not experienced in reading the body language of the people in the group yet. As the group leader you’ve had a lot more chances to see how your people react in different situations.

If you the group getting uncomfortable with the pace of a presentation then maybe take a moment to ask a question or make a comment that we might need to slow down a bit or speed up the presentation a little. I’ve interjected with “That’s neat. Can you show us an example?” or be the first to plead ignorance “I’m sorry I didn’t understand what you meant by ‘Foo bar baz’?”. These can give clues to the presenter and also break the ice for the other people in the audience to ask their own questions.

  • Save a struggling presenter.

Even if we’ve practiced our talks sometimes things go wrong. If the presenter seems to be stuck with a technical problem or just seems to be getting a bit nervous then you should give them a break and move the focus off them so they can recover.

If they’re having trouble with the keyboard or projector during a presentation and seem to be struggling to catch up that will usually escalate whatever their anxiety levels might already be from public speaking. Take a chance to get everyone who’s staring at them to look away. Mention that there’s still food, suggest a short break or start a side-conversation. That takes the spotlight off the presenter and then you can move in to help resolve the issue, offer a few words of encouragement and then prepare to resume the presentation.

Bringing it all around.

The concept of 360 degrees of learning is that everyone has a chance to learn, the facilitator, the presenter and the audience. The learning opportunities come full circle and that’s something that is easier to do in small groups that meet somewhat frequently. This 360 degree learning is something I didn’t anticipate when I started SCMC but something I’ve learned to value and is partly why I want to support user-group communities through UGtastic. When we have such opportunities to learn I can’t help but say, “User-groups? Fantastic!”.