How to Run an Organized Town Hall Meeting

This resource first appeared in issue #118 on 16 Apr 2022 and has tags Working With A Research Community: Other, Working With A Research Community: Hosting Conferences/Events, Becoming A Manager: Meetings

How to Run an Organized Town Hall Meeting - Alexandria Hewko, Fellow

Town Halls are a pretty common format in our discipline, and… they’re often not great. They’re ad-hoc, mostly prepared talks, and so generally not super well-received (and, thus, not generally well-attended). Why bother if you can read the slides and the Q&A afterwards, right? We’re all busy.

Hewko gives some advice for running a town hall which is actually a community event rather than a broadcast from HQ:

Have a recurring meeting cadence
Have focussed objectives - what is the purpose of the series? And of this episode?
Collaboratively create an agenda
Record the meetings
Have a facilitator keep the schedule and encourage participation
Share new updates - don’t rehash the same stuff. People can watch the recordings for previous episodes.
Have lots of time for questions
Gather feedback regularly