Data Inventories & Effective Meetings
Overview
Under Construction
Learning Objectives
TBD
Preparation
TBD
Data Inventory Value
Documenting potential datasets (and their metadata) thoroughly in a data inventory provides numerous benefits! These include:
- Well-documented data inventory table make it easier for researchers to find and access specific data for reproducible research
- Documentation will help researchers to quickly understand the context, scope, and limitations of the data, reducing the time spent on preliminary data assessment
- Detailed documentation will speed up the data publication process (e.g., data provenance, the difference among methods, etc.)
Process Design
Good meeting design starts with understanding your purpose and objectives, as well as your participants. Once you understand why you need to meet (your overarching goal) and what you want to accomplish (the specific outcomes you are driving toward), you can turn to how you will accomplish your purpose (i.e. the agenda of activities, timings, and tech) and who will play what roles. You want participants to know their role and how to be at their best.
A good rule of thumb is to allow 2-3x as much time to plan a meeting as its duration.
Online Meetings
Online meetings benefit from all the same considerations as in person meetings, plus a little extra care and planning. Keeping your team engaged is doubly challenging in a virtual setting: our computers are full of distractions (email! notifications! internet rabbit holes!) AND as the facilitator, it’s harder to tell whether participants are engaged when all you have to go on is a small video window. Managing people’s energy and attention and creating opportunities for real human connection are real challenges. On the flip side, online meetings allow distributed teams to stay connected and can provide a dynamic and rich platform for shared work.
In addition to the general tips above, in online settings:
- Be thoughtful and equitable when scheduling across time zones
- Develop online meeting norms for your team and enforce them (e.g., use of chat, indicating you want to speak)
- Ask a team member to help you monitor the chat and assist participants with tech or connectivity challenges
- Encourage personal connection (e.g., with check ins, invitations to have video on)
- Check engagement regularly
- Provide breaks (bio breaks, silence, invitations to step away from the screen for reflection)
- Make video optional
- Take advantage of tech tools (breakout rooms, polls, shared notes, virtual whiteboards, recording, transcription, etc.)
Meeting Roles
It’s very difficult to both facilitate a conversation and engage fully in it as a participant. If you add taking notes on top of that, it’s sure to become overwhelming. So recruit some help. The number of roles you need to fill will depend on the size of the group and the complexity of the process. Online meetings particularly benefit from a team approach to facilitation. Share and rotate duties over time:
- Process facilitator - sets tone and pace, mediates conflicts, and ensures all voices are being heard, interpersonal dynamics are positive/effective, and group is staying on task
- Meeting chair (optional) - keeps an eye on the overall vision and progress of the meeting
- Timekeeper - may also be the chair or facilitator
- Tech Host - monitors chat, sets up breakout rooms, records meeting, troubleshoots technology as needed in virtual/hybrid meetings
- Notetaker - captures action items and notes, often in a google doc that can be viewed and added to by others; may also produce a meeting summary
- Scribe - captures important points that can be seen in real time by the whole group, usually on a whiteboard or flipchart
- Spotter - keeps a running list of who is waiting to speak (especially in large groups or intense discussions)
- Relationship monitor - tracks group dynamics and actively works to help everyone feel included and engaged on personal and social levels, may also be the facilitator
- Participation monitor - engineers opportunities for participation, quells interrupters, amplifies and credits the messages of quieter participants, may also be the facilitator
As you get to know your team members, you can start to match people to these different roles based on their skills and recruit them to help.
Alternatives to Conventional Meeting Structures
Differences in thinking and learning styles, disciplinary background, power, and other dimensions of diversity mean that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach for participatory processes. Nonetheless, we tend to default to a small set of traditional ways of sharing information and engaging people when we meet. These conventional structures are often either too limiting (presentations, status reports, and managed discussions) or too free-form and disorganized (open discussions and brainstorms) to effectively tap the wisdom of the group (Lipmanowicz and McCandless, 2014). To support the engagement of all participants, we need to break out of those traditional ways of meeting.
Books and websites like Liberating Structures, Gamestorming, and the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making offer dozens of alternative group processes (see Resources). Known as microstructures or knowledge games, these simple, fun activities are designed to include everyone, distribute control, and unleash creativity. One or more activities can be matched to your intended outcomes and arranged in a sequence to advance the team toward your overall goal. Liberating Structures offers a matching matrix to help you identify microstructures that could fit your needs and an app you can use to browse and assemble strings of activities. Gamestorming organizes their activities into categories (e.g. games for opening, games for decision-making) for exploration.
Harvesting Meeting Content
As you go, and definitely before your meeting is over, engage your team in synthesizing and capturing the information that has been discussed. This helps you to deepen understanding, document your workflow and decisions, and pick up easily next time. Use a consistent system - like a running notes document linked in the calendar item. Graphics or drawings can be a valuable complement to oral and written content in making thinking visible.
Consider using:
- Grids to organize information
- Conceptual models or mind maps to articulate shared understanding of complex systems
- Manifestos, abstracts, and other written collateral to distill ideas
When capturing notes, try to use people’s own words; if necessary ask them to distill long or complex points into a headline you can capture. Invite them to offer corrections if the notetaker didn’t capture what they meant.