Meeting culture

👥 We want to be efficient and respectful of peoples' time. We acknowledge the fact that in-person meetings are not the best format for all kinds of work and try to be accessible also to people who are physically distant.

Timing

We set clear starting and ending times for meetings. We consider it a practice of respect and reliability to be on time. Being on time actually requires being a bit early. While it can be nice to make an announcement that a meeting is soon to begin, it is not necessary, and we see time-keeping ultimately as an individual responsibility (we should have watches that can be borrowed.) The people at a meeting are always empowered to start on time, even recommended to, to resist a loosening of standards.

It should be known that it is generally disturbing to come to a meeting late (some more than others). Knowing that, people should use their judgement whether it is worth coming to a meeting late or not. If coming late, people are asked to take care not to further disturb by:

• calming themselves before entering the meeting
• not apologizing
• quickly and quietly finding a place
• carefully listening to catch up

We expect meetings to end at the time set initially. This is ultimately the responsibility of the facilitator, if the meeting has one. Extensions are possible, but should be proposed and consented in the meeting.

Hand signals

To make it possible to give silent feedback we use hand signals. Their use is to ‘comment’ without disrupting the speaker. We mostly just use:

• 🙌 raised & wiggling ("jazz") hands: agree, sounds good, etc
• ✋ raised hand: I want to speak (next)
• T "t-shape": technical point (speaker volume, time, language, etc)

Additional to the list above we sometimes use the so-called ‘temperature check’ to get an understanding of the feeling of the group towards a certain issue. To achieve that one person asks the group for said temperature check and then everybody wiggles their hands either downward (cold, no support, maybe even resistance), upward (hot, big support, enthusiasm) or somewhere in the middle.

Pads

Our main meetings (like CoMe or PlaMe) usually are backed up by corresponding online pads which contain the procedure and topics visible and editable for everyone. This means that people often bring laptops or phones to follow what’s going on. Facilitators in turn usually don’t readout everything or explain the format in the beginning, since it’s technically available already.