Attendees

Agenda

• Past Pre-Summits
• Strengths & Weaknesses
• Ways to Improve

Notes

Past Pre-Summits

• Basic Idea: Same day as gov workshops where we focus on Brigade discussions. Flet like it was primarily programmed by CFA.
• Basic Agenda
  • Welcome & Presentation. Here is the 2016 Slide Deck
  • Un-conference. Presubmitted and voted on sessions.
    • Didn't love this. As Dawn pointed out. Newbies don't really know what to do and Returning attendees need more action oriented workshops.
  • 2015 and earlier, lightning talks were sprinkled throughout pre-summit (like Congress). In 2016, there was just the Summit lightning talks at a bar. I didn't love it. It was hard to talk over people there to drink and socialize.
• Basically, it was a smaller version of Congress that was primarily programmed by CFA. NAC was only a month old so we didn't have much input in it.

Strengths

• We got to meet each other right at the beginning and build on those connections throughout Summit. This become especially important because there isn't a Brigade Track during Summit.
• Every time we get together we remember that we aren't in this alone. That connection is priceless. Our shared struggles and triumphs are priceless.

Weaknesses

• Self-directed content hasn't really helped us in the past
  • As Dawn put it: The self-direction of the content in the moment actually does a disservice to the participants because no one in the session have had enough time to think through the topics and structure it in a consumable fashion.
• Same conversations over and over. This is tiresome.
  • Workshops need to be interactive and focused on actions.
• I don't remember any output on sessions. We were left to take our own notes and little to no follow up on sessions was created.