As an organising group we recognised that we were constantly in conversation with our peers, discussing the future state of development in SAP. The topics albeit slightly different, but the core theme the same.
We decided for our next Inside Track Brisbane event that we were going to change the format & move the debate from our own chats into a larger forum. Instead of the standard two talks made by presenters, we decided to switch it to an open forum discussion, where we encouraged community members to actively participate in conversation as a group. Our plan to help raise awareness of all the things going and provide support for those going through the journey…
Before the event
Prior to the event we setup an online form where attendees could submit questions or topics to discuss on the night. To keep everyone up to date on the submissions, we posted daily updates to our website sitbne.github.io on the event page we created (It’s honestly worth a look at the full list 😉..).
We categorised all of the responses into relevant groups, that we used to structure the conversation around. This also allowed us to prepare a few infographics into a presentation to support the discussion if required.
To make the session that much more interactive and to help us focus some of discussion specifically for the attendees present on the night, we setup a mentimeter presentation. If you’ve never used one, they let you run live questionnaires you can present in your session and instantly see the feedback. It comes with a generous free tier, which was more than sufficient for our particular session and size.
On the day we arranged the tables in a round fashion and placed ducks on each table that participants could use to indicate their intent to speak.
During the Event
We initially outlined a few rules of engagement around discussion.
Then jumped into the mentimeter to sound out the crowd. This was great as we’d not really anticipated the responses we got and as its live its bit of fun to see what people in the crowd are thinking. You can see the mentimeter presentation and results here.
We then went kicked off working through the topics/questions we’d received. Our goal as organisers was to try and help facilitate the conversation without overly interfering. We tried to engage as many in the audience as possible, keeping the conversation in line with the topics & without stifling discussion or letting things go too deep. Working as a team was key, as I needed their support to help keep things on track.
It was great to hear so many different opinions from so many different people. In the room we had employees from customers, service implementor’s and from SAP who all proactively added to the conversation. I think all equally benefited from the collective feedback. I know I did.
In the end, we did not quite get through all the topics we received, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Could we have gone on for longer…possibly. But I think after two hours of solid discussion, everyone was due a break & continue the chat over a beer.
Summary
Overall I think we hit the mark of what we were initially trying to achieve with this session. We received some really positive feedback from many of the participants. In fact it went so well, we’ll look to run this sort of format as an annual event going forwards, as it provides a great feedback loop for the community.
Feedback
If you attended and want to share your thoughts and experiences, please leave a comment below. We’d also love to know how we could make it better again.
Also If you have photos from the event, I’d also love for you to forward them to me, so I can post them up.