FAQ-Facilitators
From Digital-JumpStart
What is Digital-JumpStart?
Digital-JumpStart is based on the notion that members of our community should capitalize on the wisdom of the crowd and our collective experience with free and open source technologies, agile development, and tricky institutional relationships. This is not about experts and novices. It is about building a community of practice that allows for sharing and innovation. These sessions will be most useful for those thinking about online exhibitions, mobile content delivery, collecting stories or photographs from different audiences, or creating a digital archive. We expect to engage a wide range of participants representing small to medium sized institutions, those new to museum technology work, and seasoned professionals willing to share their expertise and insight with the rest of the community.
How do I participate?
You can participate in a Digital-JumpStart session by joining the conversation--first online in this wiki, and then in person by attending the session and participating in break-out groups. Each break-out group will have a facilitator, but the participants--their insights and interests--are the heart of the session.
What role will I play as a facilitator for a Digital-JumpStart session?
Facilitators are people in the museum field who have some degree of experience with an area of digital work. Your areas of expertise will be partial and overlappping, because no one holds all the knowledge about a particular aspect of digital work. More important than commanding expertise, however, is your willingness of to engage in conversation with participants and to enable the exchange of experience, knowledge, and resources.
Facilitators are essential to the success of Digital-JumpStart sessions because you help to start and manage the flow of conversation in small group break-out session. These small groups will be focused on a particular topic or area of work in which participants have indicated an interest ahead of time. Though the facilitator should have some experience with that topic, you are not expected to deliver short seminars on that material. Rather, you are present to solicit the thoughts, questions, examples, and insights from the whole group. Feel free to share your experiences, but the sessions are focused on open, distributed conversation.
In addition to managing conversations during small group break-out sessions, you will be responsible for capturing the work of the group through either note-taking or wiki-casting (if we have access to wireless) using the appropriate Discussion Topics page. You need not do this work all by yourself. Ask for help from the group to maintain a full record of the ideas and resources touched on in the discussion. At the end of our time together, we will go around the room and ask facilitators to report back to the full group about one major insight or concern of the discussion groups at the end of the session.
How will a Digital-JumpStart session proceed?
It is important that we make the best use of our limited time. Thus, Digital-JumpStart sessions are very simple. We will begin with very brief introductions for the topics and facilitators. Facilitators will be stationed at tables by topic. After introductions the participants will move to a table to begin discussion. After a period of time, we break and allow participants to choose another table. Finally, we will gather for a short plenary discussion of the work of the day.
What tools will I have at my disposal during a session?
Each small-group table will have access to a flip-chart and markers. We are diligently trying to get access to wireless for all participants during the Digital-JumpStart session. Short of that, we will attempt to at least have one internet connection per group.
How will we record our session findings or output?
Facilitators and participants can and should actively edit the Discussion Topics pages on this wiki. Those pages should reflect the questions of the group going into the session and the work-product of their break-out conversations. We encourage everyone to come back to these pages and to treat them as a living resource for those interesting in doing digital work in museums.
Additionally, everyone should feel free to tweet the session using #djump as a hashtag. We have set-up a TwapperKeeper archive to capture those tweets for future reference.
Join us May 23 at AAM!!
- Watch our introductory video
- Check the list of awesome Facilitators (growing every day!)
- Read the FAQ for Participants or the FAQ for Facilitators
- Check this cartoon that personifies the un-conference experience
- Learn more: What is Digital-JumpStart?
- Can't come to AAM? Try our Digital-JumpStart Help Desk
- Still have questions: Email us: sleon at gmu.edu or edsonm at si.edu
