Talk:Best practices on speed dating on Free Knowledge

Thanks for documenting this

This is a great explanation of how this works. I really appreciate that WMDE had this documented here, because too often people seek out ways to host events and this is a great model. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:12, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your words, I am happy to provide this information here, and thanks to my colleague Kasia who put it togehter. Now I am looking for a way to promote these best practices, because I am afraid that no one can find them here. Any ideas? How did you find out about them? --Nicole Ebber (WMDE) (talk) 15:27, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for publishing this, and yes, it is indeed difficult to find it in ways other than accident :( . One thing I would try to think in coming up with ideas when this is tried again, on how to deal with situations when more people want to speed date than you have time for? --Bence (talk) 21:01, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi Bence, this is a very good question. In fact, in DC we had time for 2 rounds of SD on three different days, so we could always tell people to come on the next day or wait for the next round. Another thing we did at some point was to allow 2 or (max) 3 people to take a sit in front of the "expert" instead of just 1, so that they were circulating in small groups and had mini-group-conversations. This worked just fine but I wouldn't exaggerate as the actual concept is based on face-to-face conversations. Another option would be to invite people to create additional conversation pairs on their own and integrate them into the rotation (however one person would have to serve as as spontaneous "expert"). A radical way would be the "first come first served" approach but that's not always easy to say:) Remember that this is an open format - should you have any other ideas how to solve this, feel free to share it with us. Cheers! --Kasia Odrozek (WMDE) (talk) 16:25, 31 October 2012 (UTC)