Program Assembly
The program was assembled taking into consideration
Call for Proposal Speakers
Speaker Suggestion Sheet
For more on the process of Call for Proposals, see the previous section.​
The Speaker Suggestion list comes from a community generated list of suggestions for interesting speakers. Based on our theme and intended program content, we invite some of the speaker on this list to be contributors.
​>> See Speaker Invitation Template​
The program this year was formulated more so around which speakers people thought would be interesting rather than around specific topics.
note that this is an area that needs improvement
in the future, it might be better to choose speakers around specific topics we think would be interesting, rather than vice versa
​>> See Program schedule template​
Qu- Questioning
E- Envisaging
S- Selecting
T- Taking
The Questioning stage is the stage where different objectives for the event were outlined. This is a stage of general brainstorming about things like:
what basic topics do we want to cover?
what kinds of conversations do we want to encourage?
What are our objectives from this event?
It was in this stage that we decided on having talks and content of different levels, which lead us to the idea for Discovery, Advanced, and Experience sessions, so that attendees with differing levels of expertise could engage in conversations on a level they were comfortable with.
This is the part of the process where different proposals are formed for more concrete ways to achieve the broad goals outlined in the Questioning phase.
The Key Question of this phase:
Do this individually as curators OR work in pairs to create proposals?
Pros For Individual Proposals:
more divergence, larger variety of ideas are produced
Pros For Collaborative Proposals:
Some people lack the ability to be creative on their own, good to bounce ideas off one another
It was at this point where the idea of questions to underlie the program was created, and when the potential questions were gathered through Backfeed, community and curator input.
This is the part of the process where one or more of the proposals from the Envisaging stage are chosen for implementation.
After the Envisaging stage, we had about 12 key questions. During the selection stage, the curators and program team talked over and chose 6 key questions, which were then ultimately became the 6 tracks for the fest.
The Taking phase is the part of the process where whatever proposal was chosen in the selection phase is put into action.
In this case, we had 6 tracks to cover in 3 days, and a list of potential speakers to cover the content for these 6 tracks. This phase was by far the most involved of the process.
Note that it is at this point that the team broke up to work individually rather than together.
First, each curator was assigned a track. As mentioned before, there was one extra curator that acted as a general program coordination curator rather than managing a specific track.
Once each curator had their track, the Program Coordinator sent out a template outlining time constraints for their track. Each track got a recommendation of how many keynotes, panels, workshops etc. they had time for. This template acted as a set of guidelines outlining time limits for different types of content. It explained the maximum amount of keynotes, panels, workshops etc that each track could have.
After receiving their parameters, each curator was able to use the Trello card of accepted speakers to decided which speakers they wanted to add to the program for their track.
Each curator was given a deadline for a first draft of what their track content might look like.
After taking some time to brainstorm, we did a "speed dating" style conversation, where each curator was matched with another curator for 30 minutes to discuss intersections and overlaps between tracks and to give feedback. This was also intended to limit speaker overlap.
Finally, the program team presented their track proposals to the OuiShare Paris core team members. This allowed the core team members to give input on which topics they felt were missing, not developed enough, or over-covered.
The core team provided the program team with one individual feedback form and one for each track. After this point, the program team went back to rexamine and adjust macro structures and narrative for the event. This process was continued until the program was finalized about a month before the fest.
