How do you share conference learnings with your colleagues?

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#1

This was a whole topic at the TestBash Manchester open space that I unfortunately didn’t get to attend as it clashed with so many other amazing topics :disappointed:

It’s also come up in the TestBash Manchester Slack channel

How are people managing to organise all the collated information so that it can be shared with their colleagues at work?

When I first went to Brighton I went for a blog post (great idea as I put huge thought into it) and a huge wall of text email to my colleagues (bad idea! I brain poured). People don’t read walls of text. People love when they can see how what you learned will apply to them. I used some of the games from TestBash Brighton to demonstrate this to my colleagues.

@marianneduijst had some amazing sketch notes from Manchester (I haven’t included them all here):

@constancehermit also has some beautiful images! Pretty cool likeness to @mb1

How do you share conference learnings with your colleagues? What hasn’t worked? Why hasn’t it worked? What has worked? Why do you feel they worked?

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#2

I like to try to talk about what I learnt during a team meeting. Although a few years ago I went slightly overboard and they had to stop me after about half an hour. I learnt to keep it to 10 minutes and share links through email/IM tools!

One thing I’m experimenting with (but haven’t actually done yet) is blogging. If there’s a talk that got me thinking, I’ll make a blog post with my thoughts (instead of “this is an outline of a talk I saw”. And if there’s a video online, embed the talk.

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#3

I like to share the main ideas that I get from the conference. If someone demonstrates interested in some subject, I talk more about the the subject.

Whenever is possible, I like to write a blog post about the event, with the subject, main ideas, and some references. But this approach takes a little of effort and time.

For me, a blog post and a conversation together works fine. A conversation is a nice way to share and, a blog post a nice way to register and maybe help another people later - 6months later, for example (when you will not remember nothing about the event).

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#4
  • Get all the slides or presentation material and store it internally.
  • Gather all the links to SlideShare, Youtube etc and put them on an internal page
    (probably not slack or yammer, but some more… persistent…)

Hold a brief (Lunch&learn / knowledge sharing) session, that highlights 5-7 of the talks that have the most impact on your way of working. Focus on that - not what what you enjoyed. I enjoy workshops with games, but we don’t do much gamification or play.

Try the activities - perhaps there are some small changes you can do based on the learning. If you can get support for it - do setup a change project. That is an actual effort to consistently change the organisation (See “organisational change” and “motivation for change” etc)

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#5

It depends.

If there’s a talk which I know to be useful to multiple coworkers I try to repeat it in a team meeting while using the original slides (if available). I may leave some parts out to speed it up a bit.
For all other topics I provide a brief summary in a powerpoint deck with links to the original presentations (recordings or slides)

Considering that I’m the only tester in my team I’ve noticed that the testing topics get more attention if I talk about them in an enthusiastic way rather than a wall of text…

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#6

I usually try to pick the top 3-5 most relevant talks and write up a blog post about why I found them interesting and how I see them as being relevant to the organization. If they’re available, I’ll include links to any presentation materials or recordings.

I’ll also give a short presentation during the QA Community of Practice meeting - keeping it under about 10 minutes and giving just the highlights. I like to focus on the ways I believe our group could implement new ideas from the conference. I try to make it about how we can use what I learned, and not just about the conference itself.

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#7

I was part of the conversation in Manchester, I found the whole thing really fascinating and it sent me on a journey to find and share how I like to maximise those great conference learnings. So much so I ended up writing for mot about it!
I’d really enjoy hearing what works for you too.

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#8

When a did a 1 day workshop on giving better technical presentations aimed at getting more women to present at tech conferences I summarised the day’s learnings into 3 sketch notes, I then put them into a prezi and gave a 5-10 minute lightning talk during a testers knowledge sharing session. I also wrote up a followup internal blog post that was shared and linked to damian conway’s instantly better tech presentations

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