Merging the Block Party, the Solution Club, and The Conversation
The Block Party is fairly structured, in that there are topics and presenters every couple hours or so. So the big question, both for the Friday Block Party as well as the Tuesday Solution Club, is “how do I get my chocolate into your peanut butter?“ (I use lots of metaphors).
What I mean is this: how do we “marry“ the relatively structured Block Party with the (at present anyway) relatively unstructured The Conversation?
Here are some preliminary possibilities to explore:
Option A: One possibility is that we move the “structured events“ scheduled on the Block Party into a breakout room. That would leave “the Lounge” available for it’s “primary purpose in life“ which is to serve as a hub, a landing spot… which is super welcoming, etc.
Option B: Another option is that we do the opposite of Option A, in that we continue to use “the main room“ for the scheduled Block Party activities, and we do the other The Conversation stuff in one or more breakout rooms.
Option C: Another option is that we simply “kick the can down the road“, in terms of either of the preceding two options (or even a different option), and “begin life“ simply merging everyone together into one big happy family. Why not? After all, the topics covered in the Block Party are all “super awesome“ in their own right.
Regardless of what we choose for the Block Party and Solution Club, here is a really important point: Since I, Jamen, will be hosting the Block Party as I usually do, then to the extent we want to use breakout rooms to “keep stuff separate“, then it will be vital that we have at least one additional host, maybe even two (for example, one to channel people to the breakout room, and another to lead/host within the breakout room, in the case of Option B)
Here is my personal take on all of this:
It feels to me like long-term, Option A is the way to go. That makes all the sense in the world when we have, like, thousands of people streaming in for the first time, and the main room really needs to be operating essentially like a high-speed triage routing system or something.
But until we have bigger numbers of people pouring in, I think Options B or C make more sense. And part of the reason for my thinking this is that the Block Party itself is actually super-cool, and may even serve as a form of “training camp“ for all of us who are co-creating The Conversation.
Anyway, lots of good stuff to ponder, I’m sure we will sort it out happily 🙂