When you say “The workshops were highly successful in 2022”, what do you mean by this?
Frankly, I expected this post to have a lot more commentary on the results of any of these workshops. Whatever goals you had in running these (which, for most of these, remain opaque to me even after reading the workshops’ descriptions)—were they achieved? How did you evaluate whether the goals were achieved?
Separately, I’d like some more information on the format of these workshops. When you say “one weekly session”, what does that mean? A video chat? Something else? How long? How many? How many participants were in each workshop?
Thanks for the questions. I should have explained what I meant by successful. The criteria we set out internally included:
Maintaining good attendance and member retention. Member attrition this year was far below the typical rate for similar groups.
Maintaining positive post-workshop feedback indicating members are enjoying the workshops (plus or minus specific critical feedback here and there). Some workshops were more well received than others, some were widely loved, some were less popular, but the average quality remains very positive according to user feedback. (We try to collect user feedback at the end of each workshop.)
Demonstrated improvement over time in the recurring workshops. For example, we observed increased fluency with decision theory in the decision-making workshops month to month.
We are happy with our metrics on all these fronts, above expectations, which is “highly successful” by my lights.
The workshops take the following format: Each Guild member is placed in a cohort group according to schedule compatibility upon joining. Let’s assume for the sake of this explanation that you are in the Wednesday night cohort. The landing page (the pages linked in the OP) for the workshop is posted Monday. You check the landing page, and you have until the following Wednesday (>1 week later) to complete the pre-workshop reading or exercises. You then join the workshop session for your cohort time slot via the Guild of the Rose Discord video chat. A cohort session leader guides the members through the in-session exercises and discussions. In the past the sessions lasted one hour but we have more recently been experimenting with 90 minute sessions to good effect. The typical attendance varies depending on the cohort, since some timezones have far fewer Guild members. Workshops sessions are broken out into smaller discussion groups if too many people show up.
It is funny that I kept the commentary at the start of the post short and refrained from talking too much about Guild goals and policies and details not immediately relevant to the workshop overview so that the whole post didn’t come off as an ad … and I still got accused of posting an ad, so I should have just gone for it and laid out all the results in detail. Oh well, next year.
When you say “The workshops were highly successful in 2022”, what do you mean by this?
Frankly, I expected this post to have a lot more commentary on the results of any of these workshops. Whatever goals you had in running these (which, for most of these, remain opaque to me even after reading the workshops’ descriptions)—were they achieved? How did you evaluate whether the goals were achieved?
Separately, I’d like some more information on the format of these workshops. When you say “one weekly session”, what does that mean? A video chat? Something else? How long? How many? How many participants were in each workshop?
Thanks for the questions. I should have explained what I meant by successful. The criteria we set out internally included:
Maintaining good attendance and member retention. Member attrition this year was far below the typical rate for similar groups.
Maintaining positive post-workshop feedback indicating members are enjoying the workshops (plus or minus specific critical feedback here and there). Some workshops were more well received than others, some were widely loved, some were less popular, but the average quality remains very positive according to user feedback. (We try to collect user feedback at the end of each workshop.)
Demonstrated improvement over time in the recurring workshops. For example, we observed increased fluency with decision theory in the decision-making workshops month to month.
We are happy with our metrics on all these fronts, above expectations, which is “highly successful” by my lights.
The workshops take the following format: Each Guild member is placed in a cohort group according to schedule compatibility upon joining. Let’s assume for the sake of this explanation that you are in the Wednesday night cohort. The landing page (the pages linked in the OP) for the workshop is posted Monday. You check the landing page, and you have until the following Wednesday (>1 week later) to complete the pre-workshop reading or exercises. You then join the workshop session for your cohort time slot via the Guild of the Rose Discord video chat. A cohort session leader guides the members through the in-session exercises and discussions. In the past the sessions lasted one hour but we have more recently been experimenting with 90 minute sessions to good effect. The typical attendance varies depending on the cohort, since some timezones have far fewer Guild members. Workshops sessions are broken out into smaller discussion groups if too many people show up.
It is funny that I kept the commentary at the start of the post short and refrained from talking too much about Guild goals and policies and details not immediately relevant to the workshop overview so that the whole post didn’t come off as an ad … and I still got accused of posting an ad, so I should have just gone for it and laid out all the results in detail. Oh well, next year.