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 our collective meetings (i.e. CoMe, PlaMe, Social sauna & Project updates.) It is considered respectful to be on time (which practically requires being a bit early.) It may be nice to announce that a meeting is starting soon, but not necessary — time-keeping is seen ultimately as an individual responsibility (there should be wrist-watches that can be borrowed.) People are always empowered to start on time, even recommended to, to encourage punctuality.

Everyone is late sometimes. If it is still worth attending, try to reduce further disturbance by taking a moment to breath to be able to join calmly. It is not necessary to apologize, and doing so may itself be disturbing. Be aware that things have been said already, and don't ask people to repeat unless necessary.

We expect meetings to end at the time set initially. 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.