“I enjoyed the way the session was structured: how it allowed the agenda to naturally emerge from everyone’s preferences and how there was enough time for everyone to contribute without feeling hurried … I found it to be very welcoming.”
This kinda feedback is a joy to read and I’m grateful for it. When you experiment with something new you never quite know what impact it might have. Will it meet my expectations as someone who designs and facilitates these community sessions? And more importantly, will it help participants have useful and actionable conversations? Will people and information connections be made?
January’s update describes the process of how we decide what events to run and how we shape the event ideas. And here’s what happened in February.
Put another pot on
There were three Thursday Testing Tea sessions in February (along with one in January) which led to 17 participants in total. Using Lean Coffee has been a good format for diving into a lot of topics in a short amount of time and to help people build connections with each other. The sentiment was consistently positive during mid-session check-ins and I received positive feedback over email from a couple of attendees. It’s clear there is much to discuss and the topics varied considerably.
I’ll be honest, it’s hard to gauge the long term benefit for the individual and community. My assumption is that it will have a positive impact as I’m hoping someone might recall something discussed and apply it at some point in the future or maybe even immediately. Or perhaps folks will meet again in some format and, having already met for the first time during a Thursday Testing Tea, it’ll make it a little bit easier.
I imagine I’ll run more Thursday Testing Teas not every week, maybe once a month. And consider a request to move it to Friday too.
There’s space for many
Since January there have been more than 300 listeners and 40 speakers at multiple Twitter Spaces . Speakers are people who have joined the virtual stage to share their experiences and/or ask questions. And three community members have co-hosted. Congrats to Paul Farrell and Eva Podbrdská for co-hosting in February. It’s been a great way to amplify individuals and discuss important topics. It seems to be a proven format that works well and is straightforward to spin up. It creates a good discussion and we see a lot of the community coming back to listen multiple times too.
We’ll definitely run more Twitter Spaces so keep an eye on the events page and follow the Ministry of Testing Twitter profile.
A welcome welcome
The first Welcome to the Ministry of Testing Community session is planned for Wednesday 2nd March at 4pm. At the time of writing, there are 27 people signed up. The goal is to help those new to the community get a sense of what the Ministry of Testing is about, how it can help them and how they can help others. In particular, attendees should be able to:
- Describe what Ministry of Testing is and how it helps the software testing craft
- Discuss the importance of the Ministry of Testing Code of Conduct
- Name multiple ways to learn, contribute and connect with the community
- Connect with other community members with shared interests
I’m relying on the excellent Butter app to encourage pairing and conversations throughout. It’s all completely new so we’ll see how it goes. 
No new notes here
Last month I mentioned that we’ll likely experiment with Note Takers : “A joint note-taking session that revisits existing content on the MoT Platform, for Pro Members only. Simon to host a session on exploratory testing.” This hasn’t happened, yet I’m keen to make it happen and will put something live in the coming weeks. Ideally this runs at the end of March 2022.
Create your own mini-event
If these sorts of events inspire you, I very much welcome you setting them up and running them yourself. Ministry of Testing can provide you with a platform and the tools to do so – we’ll even promote it too. My ultimate goal for 2022 is for the community to have easy-to-spin-up options to start their own mini-events. I’d like to support you and get you up and running. Feel free to book a time for us to chat about your mini-event ambitions.
And please do reply to this post to share your thoughts or ask any questions about any of this.
- Simon, CommunityBoss