Last week, I went to Glasgow with my friend and DIYbio collaborator Bethan to talk about Speed Debating at the annual BIG event. BIG is short for British Interactive Group, and the event is a conference for science communicators to share best practice. (And there is also a little event…)
Bethan and I were invited to give a short session about Speed Debating, a format that combines debating with elements of (you've guessed it) speed dating. We first used this concept at an event for a science project - UCL iGEM 2012 - the details of which can be found here.
Our workshop in Glasgow
We began our workshop with a 15 minute talk about the aims, preparation, format and evaluation of a speed debate. For the rest of the session we staged a mini one-round speed debate in the room to let everyone experience the format, which we then followed up with a Q&A / discussion.
Why choose a Speed Debate?
As you can see from the slide, this created a pretty colloquial atmosphere! Combine this with some alcoholic beverages, and some interesting off-average remarks are guarantueed.
Audience - Who do you want to invite?
Rather than just putting up posters and publishing the event on the university's events listing and hoping for the best, we advertised the event in some special interest groups using social media such as Meetup.com. One of the groups we invited thus were the London Futurists, some of whose members I would (very affectionately!) describe as eccentric. They brought in some much needed opinions outside the usual spectrum and provided a lot of momentum for the discussions. In our case this worked really well, but a warning should nonetheless be issued: Highly controversial opinions can also be a risk and alienate attendees. Managing these is key (facilitation!), and I will cover one strategy for this later.
Format
Now a short walk-through of how we structured our speed debate. Clearly this can be adapted / customized depending on specific scheduling, access to experts, etc.
Large grey circles are tables, green circles are attendees, purple circles are facilitators (more later), other circles are other people with special roles.
Introduction: In the beginning, we introduced the format to everyone in the room. We felt this was necessary as most people were unfamiliar with the idea of speed debating, and we wanted everyone to feel comfortable with what was going to happen. Similar information was also on all our invitation material so potential attendees wouldn't confuse our fresh, exciting speed-debate with an old-school floor debate.
Short Food-For-Thought talks
We then had a few 5 minute expert talks to provide foor for thought and background information from different points of view. (It's also important to brief the experts on what they should expect from this evening. They're not debating, they're really more of a source of information.)
Debating!
Now the core of the evening began. In 15 minute rounds, the room discussed a specific question. When the time was up, everyone rotated to a different table, so that everyone was faced with a completely new set of people for the next round of discussion. This looked absolutely awesome in the presentation, but is difficult to show without movement. I'll try anyway and show you all the animation graphs.
So you can see that it was worth to have been there in Glasgow to see the magic! Anyway, about three to four rounds are reasonable. In our case, we had four questions that were thematically connected but deliberated different aspects of our project.
Q&A
To close the event, we felt that a shared group experience would be necessary. So we got the experts back on stage to answer questions that attendees wanted to share with the entire room and that experts would comment on. Some attendees also simply wanted to make a statement or share a new opinion they had formed during the rounds of discussions. I think this really helped frame the evening and provided a satisfying end.
Evaluation
As everone will tell you, evaluation is key. The whole point of the speed debating format was to get a lot more input from our audience for our project. So how did we collect this?
Mostly we used very simple strategies. For example, we recorded the Q&A session to have a record of the questions that were raised. We used a 2-axis scale for people to indicate their opinion at the beginning and at the end. On each table, there was a comments box. So whenever an attendee had a thought they wanted us to read, they wrote it down and put it in the box. I think many such strategies are possible. At our talk in Glasgow, we stressed the importance of not overwhelming people with evaluation. I think our array was probably a good mix: One evaluation was a public display, the other a private submission.
The last key evaluation method was the use of facilitators at the tables (remember those purple circles?). These were members of our team who (you guessed it) facilitated the debate at each table. Of course you'll need enough volunteers / staff to pull this off, but I think it's very worthwhile. Facilitators had three tasks:
1. Make sure everyone gets a fair time share in the discussion. (i.e. ask that one guy who keeps on talking, usually me, to shut up and listen ocassionally).
2. Make sure the discussion keeps on topic and doesn't go in circles.
3. Actively listen and note down interesting thoughts and interesting reactions to certain ideas, as well as the general mood of the table.
After the debate we had a short recap of the evening with all the faciliators and shared interesting anecdotes and experiences from each of our tables, which accumulated gave a pretty comprehensive overview of reactions to the questions.
Having covered evaluation, Bethan and I concluded the talk in Glasgow and continued with a demo and discussion. Clearly that's not going to happen now. However, if you're planning to hold a similar kind of event, I'd love to hear about your ideas and will do my best to answer any questions!
Postscript
Another tip: Consider your audience and phrase questions appropriately!
This is another potential pitfall I can think of:
Obviously you're going to need to use a different language if your speed debate is organised for a group of mathematicians as opposed to a mixed group consisting of members of the general public.
Our speed debates tend to be for the latter, in which case it is important that the questions to be deliberated are actually relevant and understandable to a general public group, whilst simultaneously not being patronising. Don't deliberate the relative advantages of one cloning strategy over another. Do create concise scenarios in which an ethical or social consequence of a technology is discussed.
For clarity of language, test your questions on your barber to make sure you're not using jargon (Unless your barber is in Bloomsbury, where he will likely have heard most scientific terms).
Bethan and I were invited to give a short session about Speed Debating, a format that combines debating with elements of (you've guessed it) speed dating. We first used this concept at an event for a science project - UCL iGEM 2012 - the details of which can be found here.
Our workshop in Glasgow
We began our workshop with a 15 minute talk about the aims, preparation, format and evaluation of a speed debate. For the rest of the session we staged a mini one-round speed debate in the room to let everyone experience the format, which we then followed up with a Q&A / discussion.
Below are some extracts from the talk, which will help you set up your own speed debating event.
- High levels of audience engagement
- Increased Feedback collection
- Having a great time - a more engaging, bottom-up format, in which everyone gets talking, is more stimulating, thought-provoking and ultimately more fun than a top-down debate in which the audience is mostly listening.
Location
We hosted the debate in a (thankfully recently refurbished) basement bar of our university union.
As you can see from the slide, this created a pretty colloquial atmosphere! Combine this with some alcoholic beverages, and some interesting off-average remarks are guarantueed.
Audience - Who do you want to invite?
Rather than just putting up posters and publishing the event on the university's events listing and hoping for the best, we advertised the event in some special interest groups using social media such as Meetup.com. One of the groups we invited thus were the London Futurists, some of whose members I would (very affectionately!) describe as eccentric. They brought in some much needed opinions outside the usual spectrum and provided a lot of momentum for the discussions. In our case this worked really well, but a warning should nonetheless be issued: Highly controversial opinions can also be a risk and alienate attendees. Managing these is key (facilitation!), and I will cover one strategy for this later.
Format
Now a short walk-through of how we structured our speed debate. Clearly this can be adapted / customized depending on specific scheduling, access to experts, etc.
Large grey circles are tables, green circles are attendees, purple circles are facilitators (more later), other circles are other people with special roles.
Introduction: In the beginning, we introduced the format to everyone in the room. We felt this was necessary as most people were unfamiliar with the idea of speed debating, and we wanted everyone to feel comfortable with what was going to happen. Similar information was also on all our invitation material so potential attendees wouldn't confuse our fresh, exciting speed-debate with an old-school floor debate.
Short Food-For-Thought talks
We then had a few 5 minute expert talks to provide foor for thought and background information from different points of view. (It's also important to brief the experts on what they should expect from this evening. They're not debating, they're really more of a source of information.)
Debating!
Now the core of the evening began. In 15 minute rounds, the room discussed a specific question. When the time was up, everyone rotated to a different table, so that everyone was faced with a completely new set of people for the next round of discussion. This looked absolutely awesome in the presentation, but is difficult to show without movement. I'll try anyway and show you all the animation graphs.
So you can see that it was worth to have been there in Glasgow to see the magic! Anyway, about three to four rounds are reasonable. In our case, we had four questions that were thematically connected but deliberated different aspects of our project.
Q&A
To close the event, we felt that a shared group experience would be necessary. So we got the experts back on stage to answer questions that attendees wanted to share with the entire room and that experts would comment on. Some attendees also simply wanted to make a statement or share a new opinion they had formed during the rounds of discussions. I think this really helped frame the evening and provided a satisfying end.
Evaluation
As everone will tell you, evaluation is key. The whole point of the speed debating format was to get a lot more input from our audience for our project. So how did we collect this?
Mostly we used very simple strategies. For example, we recorded the Q&A session to have a record of the questions that were raised. We used a 2-axis scale for people to indicate their opinion at the beginning and at the end. On each table, there was a comments box. So whenever an attendee had a thought they wanted us to read, they wrote it down and put it in the box. I think many such strategies are possible. At our talk in Glasgow, we stressed the importance of not overwhelming people with evaluation. I think our array was probably a good mix: One evaluation was a public display, the other a private submission.
The last key evaluation method was the use of facilitators at the tables (remember those purple circles?). These were members of our team who (you guessed it) facilitated the debate at each table. Of course you'll need enough volunteers / staff to pull this off, but I think it's very worthwhile. Facilitators had three tasks:
1. Make sure everyone gets a fair time share in the discussion. (i.e. ask that one guy who keeps on talking, usually me, to shut up and listen ocassionally).
2. Make sure the discussion keeps on topic and doesn't go in circles.
3. Actively listen and note down interesting thoughts and interesting reactions to certain ideas, as well as the general mood of the table.
After the debate we had a short recap of the evening with all the faciliators and shared interesting anecdotes and experiences from each of our tables, which accumulated gave a pretty comprehensive overview of reactions to the questions.
Having covered evaluation, Bethan and I concluded the talk in Glasgow and continued with a demo and discussion. Clearly that's not going to happen now. However, if you're planning to hold a similar kind of event, I'd love to hear about your ideas and will do my best to answer any questions!
Postscript
Another tip: Consider your audience and phrase questions appropriately!
This is another potential pitfall I can think of:
Obviously you're going to need to use a different language if your speed debate is organised for a group of mathematicians as opposed to a mixed group consisting of members of the general public.
Our speed debates tend to be for the latter, in which case it is important that the questions to be deliberated are actually relevant and understandable to a general public group, whilst simultaneously not being patronising. Don't deliberate the relative advantages of one cloning strategy over another. Do create concise scenarios in which an ethical or social consequence of a technology is discussed.
For clarity of language, test your questions on your barber to make sure you're not using jargon (Unless your barber is in Bloomsbury, where he will likely have heard most scientific terms).
