Ticket procedure – What questions to ask participants

Local Teams Berlin
#1

When participants apply for their tickets we are going to ask them some basic questions to learn about their motivation. I started with this questions.

• Your name /or nickname
• Your background/field of interest
• Your motivation to join the OSCEdays
• Do you have a special project or challenge you want to work on during the days, or a special skill you want to bring (like coding, product design or knowledge about something.)
• How long do you plan on staying and on which days? (we expect you to stay at least full 2 days working with us, and we would prefer more. But exceptions can be made.)

@Alice_audrey replied:

"What do you think about adding something along these lines:

  1. what is your vision for an open source circular future?
  2. how do you waish to contribute to that?
  3. which area of interest/ skills do you want to being in?
  4. which area of interest/ skills are you looking for?"
Berlin ticket procedure - free but you need to apply?
#2

Mmh. I think

„1) what is your vision for an open source circular future?“
This is a way way to complicated question! I could not answer it. I don’t have a clue. We are about to figure it out, step by stelp. „The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.“ – Terry Prachett _ If someone has a vision there is room to tell us about it under „Your motivation to join the OSCEdays“. But i am not sure to expect one.

„2) how do you wish to contribute to that?“
Needs a vision and therefor see 1). And a vision-free version „How do you wish to contribute“ is already covered with:

„3) which area of interest/ skills do you want to being in?“
And this is a rephrase of „a special skill you want to bring (like coding, product design or knowledge about something.)“ But your way to saying it is better – shorter, more to the point.

„4) which area of interest/ skills are you looking for?“
I don’t get this. Or, of course i get this. But isn’t it a too specific information to ask for in a peferably short application? When you are a participant, what are you looking for? Or should you be looking for something? If someone is looking for something, he or she can express it under “Your motivation to join the OSCEdays”.

#3

Last year I was at fix Europe Campus in Schloss Wartin. And at the entrance of the conference they had hung up everybody’y profile incl. answers to specific questions and a picture. And they hung them up in a really beautiful and intentional way.

It feels like a pretty nice offline gimmick we might want to think about when it comes to bringing people together intentionally. Especially if we already are asking everybody some questions anyhow. Then we can think about asking everybody if it would be ok in the case they are selected that we print their texts and use them as “mini-profiles”.

If you guys also feel this could be a nice idea then I would recommend to use pretty short and clear questions.

Let me try to take @Lars2i and my questions to give an example. Maybe it could look somewhat like this:

  1. What is your Name and/or Nickname
  2. What is your area of interest?
  3. What is your motivation to join?
  4. Do you want to work on a specific project or challenge during OSCEdays?
  5. Which special skills do you bring in?
  6. Which special skills are you looking for?
  7. How long do you plan on participating at OSCEdays? (I would not print this one)

By the way what I mean with 6. is that people can find “matches”… you know maybe you have developed a really cool solution, technology and are looking for experts in implementation or so. Or maybe you have a really nice idea for a solution but need an engineer to assess it’s feasibility. So with this question you can state what specifically you are looking out for.

Maybe we can also add one funny question or one or two more personal questions which can allow people to show a bit of themselves.

How do you guys feel about this?

#4

I like the idea of ‘6. Which special skills are you looking for?’ but the wording is not too clear - I first read it as meaning ‘Which special skills do you want to learn?’

I guess it relates to a specific challenge or project that the participant is working on, so we should mention that in the question. Something like: 'what other skills or team members would be useful for your challenge?

1 Like
[TEAM] Challenge & Participants Curating (Community Management) Team
#5

Hi,

###The Wall
I think the wall of faces sounds like a good idea at first but it also sounds like:
(1) an awful pile of work (collect everything, layout it, print it …) – who is supposed to do this?
(2) a big pile of garbage in the end … Images, Papers, Glue … don’t know, if this matches with our event
(3) extra-expenses we might better avoid and use the money for something better

so at this point i am not a fan of the idea.

###Text for the application
Asking people for an application is good. But with short and simple questions. We just need an impression who is this. People that are really good will find a way to let us know. Just give them some free room to express who they are and their ideas for the event. Don’t take exams. Or we might end up getting people that are just good in answering application questions – those we don’t want. The real creative people will be drawn back by too many questions: “Why do you steal my time?” – They have better uses for their time. So rather than go to 6 questions I feel like going back to 4. (We don’t need to ask for the name. Smart people will figure this out anyway.)

How about this:

(1) What is your background & field of interest?

Someone can say “engineer” but if he is an engineer interested in “design” – he can say: “I am an engineer also interested in design”. That’s is the info we want I think.

(2) What is your motivation to join an event about Open Source & Circular Economy?

Yes, let them at least say one thing. They can say something very general like “Because is think it matters” but also something very specific and really interesting. Smart and interesting people will let us know I guess.

(3) What skills do you want to bring in? Do you have already something in mind, an idea or challenge, you want to work on?

These are two questions? Why put them in one point? Because the second one might be hard to answer for people if it would be just this question. Maybe there is no real challenge yet. Maybe they don’t really understood, what we mean with challenges. If we have the second question alone we will force a lot of people to write just bullshit or lie because they might think, that “No” is not a good answer. To have the skill part in the same question, gives people an easy way out – or in. And we still get the info, we want. Because in the skill, their lies their challenge. It might be invented from that skill.

(4) How long do you plan to stay and on what days? (We expect you to stay at least 2 full days, preferably more. Exceptions can be made.)

It is important to send that message here right away! Don’t apply if you can’t promise that!

. . .

I still don’t really get what you want to ask for with “Which special skills are you looking for?“ or „What other skills or team members would be useful for your challenge?“

Remember: This application is for just participants! Not challengers. It does not make sense to me, to ask this to participants. It could make sense if the question is something like: „What do you want to learn?“ I like that question. But i am not sure if it is worth a fifth question. But maybe we can combine it also with the 3rd.

So to sum up my current suggestions:

(1) What is your background & field of interest?

(2) What is your motivation to join an event about Open Source & Circular Economy?

(3) What skills do you want to bring in? Do you have already something in mind – an idea or challenge – you want to work on? What do you want to learn?

(4) How long do you plan to stay and on what days? (We expect you to stay at least 2 full days, preferably more. Exceptions can be made.)

Registration options on the main website and local subdomains
#6

Sounds good to me. Its pretty much what we did 2 months ago => call for contribution

1 Like
#7

Hi,
Alice, Lars and Sam happen to discuss this in a atom-world-meeting. We thought, that rather then sending an email people should download a document to edit and then upload it to our own-cloud-folder. Sam will create this form and possibility.

And here is a new version for the text and the questions. Sam will edit in the download-upload-procedure details and links.

Till we done, I opened up a new thread “TICKETS – apply for your OSCEdays Berlin ticket" topic where we can have the final text and procedure, it shows now the current version not the final one. Please comment on it here not there.

###CURRENT VERSION:

Hi,

The tickets for the OSCEdays event in Berlin are generally free of charge!

But there is a limited number of tickets because of limited space.

Therefore people have to apply for tickets.

HOW?
The OSCEdays are an event focused on creating rather than consuming stuff. So we are interested in people who are motivated to collaborate, brainstorm, develop, prototype, and discuss, together with the community, in order to creatively explore the possibilities of an open source circular economy. We’d love to have people from all fields and backgrounds – industry, science, grassroots, makers, students, +.

Please apply by downloading and editing this form and upload it to XXXX ----SAM WILL EXPLAIN MORE----

The form asks you to include an image of you (optional) and to answer these for questions.

##Questions

(1) What is your background or field of interest?
(2) What is your motivation to join an event about Open Source & Circular Economy?
(3) What skills do you want to bring in? Do you have already something in mind a challenge or idea you want to work on? Is there something you want to learn?
(4) How long do you plan to stay and on what days? (We expect you to stay at least 2 full days, preferably more. Exceptions can be made.)

We are looking forward to hear from you. If you have any questions, please post them in this thread.

Sam will add to the document a checkbox saying something along: “If you will be participant at the OSCEdays we will print this sheet and hang it to a wall so all the participants can learn something about each other.”

ah, Sam, and don’t forget a field for the email address and the forum nickname (if existent.)

#8

Why not using a form? Like limesurvey? it will be simpler. There is probably an open source plugin for Wordpress that will do it too. Downloading and uploading… makes it a bit annoying. Even for us, to use those datas. A simple form, everything is somewhere on a database, easy for us to reuse those information.

1 Like
#9

great idea! I made a test survey using the ‘Awesome Surveys’ plugin, [please complete it][1].
I don’t know why it has my name and a link to my website underneath the survey - I guess that wouldn’t show up when it’s embedded in another page though.

it wasn’t working for a while but it’s fixed now - seems pretty straightforward but there’s no way to upload an image as part of the survey.
[1]: https://oscedays.org/awesome-surveys/test-survey-2/

#10

Where does the answers end up?

If it runs through the wordpress - is there a way to differentiate between cities? … if other cities want to do the same.

#11

This form sends the answers to my email address, as I was the wordpress user who created the survey.
The way I can imagine it working is that each local team creates their own form (or adapts another city’s form) using their existing Wordpress login. Then they embed that form into their City subpage. The survey form can be pasted into another page as a simple shortcode.

This means that the application process is not automatically public. Is that how we want it or not? I hadn’t really thought about that aspect.

#12

hmm. yes. First i thought, people should post their applications to a public thread. But i am not sure, how many people will do that. So i always thought, their should be the second way to just send an email. And when it ends up in an email account, why not use a form?

Don’t know, maybe you can create a new account where more people can have access to and then create the form with the 4/5 questions we created (an email address has to be added). Publish it and then let’s have a test run?

#13

Any updates with mail-account and form?

#14

Mail update
from Pierre:
I offer emails since a month. It is still beta let’s say. So if you are not afraid to test it, let me know I’ll create you the mailboxes you need. (As it is experimental, things can break, yesterday, after a restart, I lost emails of one user. This shouldn’t happen again, I solved the issue, but I prefer to warn you.)
If you want a more robust solution, I can also just forward emails to the email you want. Like I could forward berlin@oscedays.org to your email address for instance.

I think the ‘robust’ second option should be fine in this case, right?

Survey update
Test Page
I haven’t looked into the css for the plugin, I can probably adjust some of the standard layout.
It seems that with this plugin it sends the results of all survey to one email address (currently mine).

#15

Cool thanks @cameralibre.
Following the other discussion about registering and mailing list, the best would be that people register when they answer the form so they have access to the forum in the same time. I was thinking that maybe we could use the registration on discourse as a form. We have the possibility to add users field that are required to fill when registering. Those could be the questions that are in the form.

While writing this I realized that registering on the forum does not necessarily mean that you are going to physically participate to the OSCEdays. So maybe not adapted. But I also think that it can be interesting to have those information in our profiles.

#16

@cameralibre

The form sends the content to an email-account, right? If we choose the forward option we would have to set up a seperate account anyway. And the berlin@oscedays.org address would not be visible.

So, what is the point of doing this at this point? I guess, i’ll set up an email account somewhere just for this year and this job of collecting applications. This account then can be accessed by the Challenge Curating Team.

#17

yeah, you’re right, it’s not necessary right now.

[TEAM] Challenge & Participants Curating (Community Management) Team
#18

I am in the process of setting everything up (first working draft/prototype). Should be finished tomorrow at noon.

#19

Hi @cameralibre @Alice_audrey @sophia @Frans @transitionmica

I created an application procedure. Take a look (a copy of the text to discuss is below.)

It is a form on a website. All answers go to a seperate account. I’ll give you and the whole challenge curating team access to this account.

@cameralibre - is have set up a new webpage for the form because the survey-plugin allows only to have one email-address where all the results are sent to. So why should berlin take over the whole oscedays.org. I gave you access to that wordpress already.

There needs to be a translation of that text to german once it is done.

##Copy of current version:

#Call for OSCEdays Berlin Participants (Tickets)

OSCED_SLIDERS_1501_72dpi_17.jpg700×264 26.1 KB

(deutsche Version verfügbar)

The Open Source Circular Economy Days (OSCEdays) is a global event on Open Source for a zero waste Circular Economy. This is the call for participants for the local event in Berlin from June 11 to 15.

OSCED_SLIDERS_1501_72dpi_4-1024x387.jpg1024×387 133 KB

##Become a participant

Are you

  • a scientist, a student, an engineer, a maker, a policy maker, a businessman/woman, an artist, an environmentalist or grassroots activist or just a curious person?
  • interested to work in interdisciplinary teams on diverse challenges exploring the possibilities of an Open Source driven Circular Economy for some days?
  • willing to engage with a local community of 150 people and a global community spread across the globe in diverse discussions, prototyping-sessions, documentation, implementation or other experimental actions?
  • open minded, willing to share, to learn and to invent with us new ways for a collaborative and truly sustainable future?

Then you are very welcome to join our OSCEdays Berlin event!

##Apply for your ticket

The tickets for the OSCEdays Berlin event are free of charge but the number is limited because of limited space and therefore people have to apply for tickets. Please click on the following link to fill out your application form:

#-> Apply Here

Collaborate in a local and global community unlocking new ideas and pathways for our future

We’ll check all the applications. It is our goal to create a diverse and productive community. We’ll inform you about your proposal 2 weeks before the event. But the best way to make sure to get a ticket is to sign up to this forum and start contributing here already.

Do you have more questions about the event, its ideas and goals? Please check the global event website and the Berlin subpage and Berlin category here in the forum. If you still have questions left after that, please post them in this thread.

###Want to propose a challenge?

Could you be interested in bringing a challenge to the OSCEdays? Propose your challenge and join the discussion.

hope to see you soon

IMG credits

#20

Hey, form looks nice, I would suggest to make very clear what part of the questions will be public and what not; in example have one question that shortly describes person, profession and interest (in one sentence? hashtags? keywords?) that we could also use with the picture and in further communications. And the rest more clearly for application only.