Skip to main content

How to Kick Off some knowledge meetings

I've gotten some questions about Knowledge Meetings after I presented them as one of our agile practices at FrOSCon some weeks ago. Here are some more ideas/thoughts on how to do them:

What are they?
One hour every week. Gather the whole team together, and learn something.

What should we learn about?
Anything that will be of interest to your team, work-related. Some examples:
  • This new open source library/project/technology we (can) use
  • New programming language
  • This cool testing technique
  • A certain module of the business application
  • The hardware architecture of our data-centers
  • Some applied computer science (algorithms and stuff)
What is the concrete contents of a Knowledge Meeting?
Anything that'll make you learn. Examples:
  • 10 minute lightning talks/ignites
  • Coding Katas, or Randoris
  • Longer presentations (try to not go over 30 minutes)
  • Lots of discussions!
  • Lots of live coding!
Remember:
  • Let people present the things they already know, but..
  • Give people time to prepare their presentations (1 hour per 10 minutes of presentation, as a rule-of-thumb, perhaps?)
How do I get started?
You need support from up top. You simply can't yank people one hour out of their working time every week.

If you don't get support from up top, you're gonna have to do it on a volunteer basis. I've written some strategy for this in my post about workshops. Over time, management will hopefully see value of the knowledge meetings, and start sponsoring them before people start leaving for companies that invest in people's knowledge.

Some tips

  • Give people plenty of time up front to prepare their presentation (one month)
  • Always have the knowledge meeting the same time, week after week
  • Point out a person to make sure the meetings go smoothly (prepare agenda).
  • Over time, let this "knowledge facilitator" role rotate.
  • If it gets hard using the internal knowledge to keep the meetings busy, increase budget: either give people more time to research/preparations, send them to conferences/courses, or hire in some externals to do the occasional gig with presentation.
  • If the knowledge meeting starts losing time to other activities, like retrospectives, try to get a new time appointed to it.
  • If you run out of content and discussion, cut the meeting short
So, I scribbled this together rather quickly, so let me know if I left something out, or if you've got any questions.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Felix H. Dahlke30/8/10 10:06

    Nice post, thank you :) Two further questions:

    1. You said there should be live coding, does that mean that everyone should sit in front of a PC? We don't have laptops so we couldn't go to the meeting room, and I've learned that meetings in a regular office are far less productive than in a meeting room.

    2. I know a few people that are not particularly interested in technology (probably add "anymore") - how to handle them?

    ReplyDelete
  2. tfnico30/8/10 10:22

    Thanks for commenting, Felix :)

    1. Hm! I have mixed feelings about this one. I'd say: for workshops, everyone can have a PC (you could perhaps make these LAN-party style). For live-coding in knowledge meetings, it should be one PC on projector. Perhaps your office can dedicate one PC to be a live-coding station?

    2. Fire them! I mean, it's their job to be interested in technology, right? Seriously though, if someone has no interest in the meeting, they can skip it. It's far more dangerous if people skip the meeting because they don't get time, are too stressed, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Felix H. Dahlke30/8/10 10:56

    Cool, thanks. I think you're a bit hard about 2, don't you have 50something co-workers? But it's a good idea to give them the chance to skip the meeting if they are really not interested.

    I think I was a bit harsh too: Everyone is probably at least remotely interested, I just meant that some just don't do non-work-related programming and are content with knowing a few languages sufficiently to get the job done.

    Sadly, not every IT company consists only of geeks, I would really love that :) I fear they are becoming a minority...

    ReplyDelete
  4. tfnico30/8/10 11:06

    Aha, now I read you. I'm talking about knowledge meetings in our own little Java team (18 people). The other departments, like management, QA, non-Java developers, they don't participate (with the occasional exception). So by definition, all participants are Java programmers. This allows us to really nail down the context for the meetings.

    If the team doesn't have a problem with it (some get nervous presenting for bigger crowds), you should of course open up/invite the other parts of your company.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Marquies30/8/10 11:08

    Thanks for these framework of a knowledge meeting. Do you have any experience with a distributed development team? 3 offices over 500km away from each other, think this need tools :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. tfnico30/8/10 11:12

    Hi Marquies, thanks for your comment.

    I have little experience with distributed teams, although I was at a shop once where they had heavy integration of tele-presence/video conference equipment. Every knowledge meeting was video-conferenced to their other offices. If you've got the money for it, set up some kick-ass TANDBERG equipment. If not, set up some PC's with webcam, running Skype or Oovoo at every meeting.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Felix H. Dahlke30/8/10 12:48

    @Thomas: No you got me right the first time, I didn't mean 50 devs, I meant 50 year old devs :) The team is not that big.

    ReplyDelete
  8. tfnico30/8/10 13:06

    I don't think 50 year olds should get any special treatment :)

    I think the key is to make it clear that participation is about contribution. The wise elders of the organization can contribute a lot! Not only in presenting/producing knowledge, but also commenting on youngsters' contributions.

    If they feel they don't need to participate because they are knowledge-full, then they've misunderstood the contribution part.

    If they are too busy to contribute, you've got bigger (management/organizational) problems.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Felix H. Dahlke16/11/10 11:17

    I found someone who was interested in the idea and together we introduced knowledge meetings in my team. Here's how we do it:

    - We do them every two weeks. There's not yet enough velocity for a weekly meeting.
    - We did them outside work hours because we didn't dare to ask. Attendance was pretty good anyways (~60%). After a few successful meetings, we moved it in work hours.
    - We made it voluntary. That way, people genuinely not interested in a topic don't have to feel like wasting their time. Makes for a friendly atmosphare, and attendance is still high enough.
    - We have a rather fixed structure: 1 10 min talk, 1 30 min talk and subsequent discussion. Might do some workshops/katas in the future.
    - There are few (if any) suggestions, so I just approach people and ask them if they want to talk about a topic. Today will be the first meeting where I'm not giving one, that's a big success :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...
6 comments
Read more

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...
1 comment
Read more

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Git-SVN Mirror without the annoying update-ref

This post is part of  a series on Git and Subversion . To see all the related posts, screencasts and other resources, please  click here .  So no sooner than I had done my git-svn presentation at JavaZone , I got word of a slightly different Git-SVN mirror setup that makes it a bit easier to work with: In short, my old recipe includes an annoying git update-ref step to keep the git-svn remote reference up to date with the central bare git repo. This new recipe avoids this, so we can simply use git svn dcommit   directly. So, longer version, with the details. My original recipe is laid out in five steps: Clone a fresh Git repo from Subversion. This will be our  fetching repo. Set up a  bare repo. Configure pushing from the fetching repo to bare repo In the shoes of a developer, clone the repo Set up an SVN remote in the developer's repo In the new approach, we redefine those last two steps: (See the original post for how to do the fir...
17 comments
Read more

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --...
12 comments
Read more