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 between Google,  Hyper Island & the IPA. 
   * Session format: Design Challenge & Learning Lab

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

Having graduated from our Google,Hyper Island and IPA partnership education which aimed to 'empower the nextgeneration 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 the mental philosophy of online web collaboration to the physical space of project meetings. We would like to teach attendees how to approachbusiness, products or projects they are involved in to organise themselves and collaborate in much the same fluid way as we do online. In short, we want to show people how they can forge the same collaborative relationships in the physical world as they do online.

How do you see that working?

Using some of the techniques we learnt through Squared, the session would be run as a workshop to create a handbook that will help participants form project teams and primarily make these teams productive and collaborative quicker. The exercises will be run as part of a large group but also facilitated in smaller break out groups. These exercises will take participants through the processes that reveal how they best work in a group. Going through these exercises will also impart the knowledge about how to run these processes in their own projects. While also providing participants with starter ideas onprojects they could begin together through one of the exercises focusing onideation, we will also 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!