Festival2012/Submit/Guide to making web collaboration physical

Title of session: The Nonfiction Guide to Making Web Collaboration Physical and Community Building

   * Your name and affiliation: Nathan Miller & Squared, an independent partnership from Google,  Hyper Island & the IPA. 
   * Session format: Design Challenge & Learning Lab

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

Squared focuses on how to work collaboratively to think fast and creatively in a business landscape that is constantly disrupted by emerging technologies. Having graduated from our Google, Hyper Island and IPA partnership education which aimed to 'empower the next generation of leaders to drive industry evolution' in May, we feel that it is important to bring the skills we learnt in self-empowerment, community building, and creative idea generation to a wider audience. We would like to share theories around how to approach business, products or projects in a way which facilitates brilliant thought leadership and collaboration, both digitally and in-person.

How do you see that working?

Using some of the techniques we learnt through Squared, the session would be run as a workshop to collabortively create a handbook that will empower participants to form project teams, make these teams productive and collaborative quicker to the best of their ability at scale with the help of technology. The techniques and exercises will be run as part of a large group but also facilitated in smaller breakout groups. These exercises will take participants through the processes that teach them about using technology efficiently and making the most of the collaborative opportunities it presents as well as revealing how they best work in a project team. Going through these exercises will also impart the knowledge about how to run these processes within their own projects. While also providing participants with starter ideas on projects they could begin together through one of the exercises focusing on ideation, we will collaboratively create a shared document detailing participant experiences allowing the workshop participants as a whole to write a nonfiction guide to web collaboration in the physical space.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

As a larger group of graduates we have managed ourselves at 85 people but with a small group of facilitators we will be able to scale the focus of the workshop to any size presented to us.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

Almost immediately. Those who read the nonfiction guide that we will publish will also be able to learn these techniques.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

The process of the workshop will not only give participants the knowledge and techniques to create productive teams through self-insight but one of the techniques involving creative idea starters will also create some interesting ideas for creative projects that participants will hopefully want to take further. A range of creative projects inspired by the workshop would be ideal!