Class meeting

Structure

Setting

We try as much as possible to placed in a circle, or around a table/group of table. There's visually no hierarchy during those class meetings. Most of them happened in the Aquarium with XPUB1 2024-2025 people.

Roles

Moderator: leads the conversation by being extra attentive to what everybody says. They're the one who indicates who's next in line to talk, and also do their best to keep the conversation in the subject.

Note Taker: In charge of taking notes in a pad, trying to make the notes as clear as possible for us to go back to it later on.

Assistant note taker: Assists the Note Taker, takes over them when they want to intervene in the conversation.
Time Keeper: Keeps an eye on the clock to avoid having one subject taking over the whole meeting.

The roles can obviously switch in the middle of a meeting! We tried our best to keep the roles as un-fixed as possible, making sure we took turns and rotated the roles.

Agenda

At the start of every meeting, we start by making a list of subject that we need to talk about, list them in order of priority, and allot a certain amount of time to each of them. If we aren't able to go through of the subjects of the day, they are pushed on the agenda for the next meeting as priority topics.

Rules

Staying calm and respectful
When we want to intervene, we indicate it showing our hand. If multiple people want to talk at the same time, we look around for the amount of finger people are lifting ☝︎= first to talk, ✌︎ = second to talk, etc. The moderator keeps an eye on that and tells people when they can jump into the conversation.
The Time keeper will remind the group of how much time we still have on the subject.
A pause is scheduled in the Agenda, but it's up to the group to decide to keep it or not, move it, skip it, etc.
We try to keep the meetings not much longer than 1h.
We show agreement by shaking our hands up, neutral by doing that lower, disagreement by shaking them down. That helps avoiding unnecessary repetitions of individual a (dis)agreement(s) on any given topic.

Notes

I really like that we implemented that. I know it wasn't for everyone, but it worked for me, and in the context of reading about structurelessness, it made a whole lot of sense to try and bring back some sort of guidelines to help out conversations flow more easily. I feel like maybe we did too many of them during the weeks preceding the SI25 event, but hey, that's how we learn!