Along with Patricia Kambitsch and Alex M. Chong, I co-organize the Visual Thinkers Toronto Show & Tell. It’s a small gathering of graphic recorders, sketchnoters, mindmappers, doodlers, illustrators, artists, students, and so on, and we meet on the last Tuesday evening of every month at OCAD University (100 McCaul Street). We’ve had six meetups so far, and we’ve been thinking about how to make the meetups even better.

The goals for the meetup redesign are:

Here’s the agenda from a past meetup:

The current approach is good. The open space is great for a multiplicity of topics. Still, there are a few challenges we’d like to address. It can be difficult to find a speaker – sometimes there’s a last-minute scramble. It would be great to get participants to be more actively involved both during and after the meetup, too.

This is what we’d like to try as the new agenda structure:

7:00pm	Welcome, brief introductions, plus “Share Your Work”. Before the meetup, people can upload things they’d like to share to the Flickr pool or e-mail it to me at visualtoronto@sachachua.com. I’ll compile the images into a presentation that will loop as people come in and settle down. As before, there’ll be a visual question posted on a nearby wall or bulletin board too.
	Overview of the Visual Thinkers Toronto meetup
7:10	Technique presentation and Q&A: In addition to accepting volunteers, we might also brainstorm some topics of general interest and then ask people to present on them (or present them ourselves). Group doodle: There’ll be a wide roll of paper and markers or pastels so that people can doodle during the presentation. This has actually been part of all the meetups, but it might be good to explicitly encourage people to get down there and draw things. (And it helps people remember!)
7:40	In focus: Brave souls share something they’ve worked on, optionally for feedback and suggestions.
8:00	Open space
8:30	Recap of the open space
8:40	Harvest: We review the group doodle and the open space, and people talk about what they’re planning to take away from the meetup.
8:55	Visual Thinking Exercise: We set a group exercise that people can do at home. For example, for emotions, it could be “Draw different emotions and share them with the group in the ‘Share Your Work’ section. For example, you can start with joy, sadness, trust, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, anticipation. Play with more!”
9:00	Pub night

Meetup communication plan example:

July 16 (-2 weeks): Meetup announcement, call for speakers and in-focus, and submission instructions for “Share Your Work”

• July 23 (-1 week): Meetup reminder, announcement of speaker, soft deadline for Share Your Work (unless I can find something that makes this easier to do)
• July 31 (+1 day): Notes, challenge reminder, and instructions
• August 6 (+1 week): Follow-up e-mail with notes and the challenge
• August 13 (+2 weeks, –2 weeks): Follow up e-mail with challenge results so far, meetup announcement, call for speakers and in-focus, submission reminder
• August 20 (-1 week): Meetup reminder, announcement of speaker
• August 28 (+ 1 day): Notes, challenge reminder, and instructions

Here are some theme ideas:

• Emotions (this is the next one we’re doing)
• Visual biographies
• Quick lettering
• Visual ways to plan your life
• What makes drawings funny?
• Working with colour
• Choosing the right visualization for your data
• Drawing abstract concepts
• Beyond the built-in charts
• Tool talk
• Fun with words

It would be interesting to do a survey so that we can learn more about people’s interests, prioritize topics, and see what other ideas we can draw out from people. =) Maybe after a couple of months with the new meetup structure, or if I have the mental bandwidth to do a survey?

I’ll keep you posted on how this meetup redesign works out!

(Curious about Visual Thinkers Toronto and want to join us at one of these meetups? Sign up at VisualThink.org!)