Weekly Events - March to May 2022 Review

Twitter creates conversations 

For Ministry of Testing's weekly events initiative, Twitter now creates both tweet and voice conversations.

Twitter Spaces has been a huge success. I've been fortunate to co-host with Jo Richards about Regression Testing, dig deep into how blogging helps your career with Nicola Lindgren and encourage a whole load of people to ask Leigh Rathbone anything about leadership. Sadly these recordings only exist for 30 days on Twitter.

🐦 Do keep an eye out for more as well as Friday's #TestYak — something of a last-minute idea that appeared from a thesaurus check for the word "conversation". Who knows what we'll talk about yet many tune in and a good number of people come up on stage to ask a question or bring up an important topic. It's a good way to round off the week with the community. 

This audio-only format appears to work well and we've noticed people returning to more than one along with incredible "tuned in" numbers. We’ll definitely run more Twitter Spaces so keep an eye on the events page and follow the Ministry of Testing Twitter profile. And if you want to co-host on a topic you're interested in or be available for an Ask Me Anything, send me an email.

Taking the challenge

Mark Winteringham (OpsBoss) tasked me with wrapping 99 Minute Challenges into the weekly events initiative. After the success of the first round of challenge experiments, Mark and I created six more. You can find them on the Events page. Six excellent community members put themselves forward to facilitate and will have the opportunity to tweak them for next time and then, if they choose to, create a new challenge from scratch. We thought this approach would be an interesting way to help community members get started with facilitation and design their own challenges. We shall see how that all goes over the coming months. Exciting! 

"99 Minute Challenges are online, live challenges facilitated by a helpful community member. A challenge aims to help you develop testing skills that will benefit your day-to-day life. You have 99 minutes to complete them in small groups, so you get to learn with others. They emulate real-world scenarios where you apply your own know-how to tackle each challenge. This will help you develop your testing skills and self-directed learning habits through practice and reflection." – Sarah Deery (LearningBoss)

Noted by some

The first-ever Note Takers on Exploratory Testing led to twelve of us reading and writing notes in real time. I couldn't help but smile as all these notes appeared on the screen as we sat in silence. And the group debriefs where we review the notes and share thoughts together, were engaging. We managed to read and take notes on two articles. The next one is about Aspiring to Lead, at 1pm BST on Wednesday 1st June. ✍️

A warm welcome

Joining a community for the first time can be overwhelming. The first "Welcome to the Ministry of Testing Community" session aimed to alleviate some of that feeling. Seven new community members joined and shared high positive sentiments during the mid-session check-in. Very cool to have people paired up and chatting throughout the session. And lots of good points were shared during the group debriefs. I'm yet to book the next one and aim to find a time to better support those on Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST).  

Put the kettle on

☕️ I love Lean Coffee. And Ministry of Tesitng's version is called Thursday Testing Tea. Yet I don't think I can continue to organise and run them just by myself. Ideally, I find a small group of people in the community to run these every two weeks or so. They'd share responsibility for organising dates/times and promoting the event. And Ministry of Testing would provide the platform to run it all. And for sure we'd promote it too. If you're interested in running some Lean Coffees (Thursday Testing Tea!) please send me an email.  

It doesn't always go to plan

The twice a week TestBashX Brighton Drop-In's have been more of a dropout than a drop-in. Entirely my fault as I haven't promoted them other than by sending one email to attendees. I think for it to work I need to ask a small group of us to reconnect – using Gather. The idea behind this event is to help those who met in person to reconnect in a lighthearted online environment. Each drop-in so far has been me just virtually standing there by myself. Where's that violin? 😅

Create your own micro-event

If these sorts of events inspire you, I very much welcome you setting them up and running them yourself. Ministry of Testing can provide you with a platform and the tools to do so – we'll even promote it too.

Our ultimate goal for 2022 is for the community to have easy-to-spin-up options to start their own micro-events.

I'd like to support you and get you up and running. Feel free to book a time for us to chat about your micro-event ambitions. 😀🤝

- Simon, CommunityBoss