Idea Jam Recap: 60 Ideas, 12 Teams, One Weekend

Forty-one members, two rooms, one very tired coffee machine. Our first Idea Jam set out to answer a simple question: what happens if you take the people who talk about ideas in our groups every week and put them in the same place for forty-eight hours? The short answer is sixty ideas on the wall by Saturday lunchtime, twelve teams by Saturday evening, and twelve pitches on Sunday that the room voted on. The long answer is below.

Saturday morning: the wall

We opened with the silent-writing format our groups have been using online. Six minutes, every member, as many ideas as they could write. The wall had sixty-three sticky notes by the time the timer went, from the practical ("a shared calendar for the three local markets") to the ambitious ("a repair café that runs itself"). Three dots each narrowed it to eighteen, and a round of "which of these would you give your weekend to?" settled on twelve.

Saturday afternoon: the uncomfortable part

Each team spent two hours away from the building talking to strangers. That was the rule: no laptops open until you have spoken to five people who are not in this room. The market-calendar team came back with the phone numbers of two stallholders and a changed idea; the stallholders wanted a way to tell regulars when they would not be there, which nobody had written on a sticky note. The repair-café team came back humbled and smaller in scope, which they later said was the most useful afternoon of the weekend.

Sunday: twelve pitches, three minutes each

No slides were required and most teams used none. The format was the one from our forum's pitch thread: the person, the problem, what you learned yesterday, what you will do on Monday. The room voted on two things separately, "which would you use?" and "which team learned the most?", because we wanted to reward honest negative results as much as polished ones.

• Most wanted: the stallholder calendar, now a two-week trial with the Saturday market.
• Most learned: the repair-café team, who presented a clear list of reasons their original idea would not work and a smaller one that might.
• Members' pick: a kids' "invention afternoon" that one family-group team had already booked a venue for by the time they pitched.

What we learned about running it

Silent writing worked as well in the room as it does online; the quieter members produced a third of the final twelve. The go-outside rule was the single best decision; every team's idea changed because of it. We under-estimated how much time teams needed to decide who was doing what on Monday, so the next Jam will end with a written one-week plan per team, not just a pitch.

What happens next

All twelve teams now have a group on the site, and each has agreed to post a weekly update for the next month, numbers included. Members who were not there are welcome to join any of them. The next Idea Jam is being planned for the spring; watch the events calendar, and if you want to help host, reply in the Jam thread in the forum. Thank you to everyone who gave us their weekend, and to the coffee machine, which has been sent for repair.