One Team Gov Finland —a look back before crossing borders into a new decade
The year is ending and it is now just about six months from our first unconference in Finland. This is a short recap of activities in Finland and a look ahead into the near future.
[N.B — if you’re interested to hear more about our plans for next year scroll down to the bottom of this post below the pictures of the day to find out more.]
Some stats and numbers
We started the event planning for the unconference on 15 March and had around 10 sessions of planning and preparations with the core organising team.
About our attendees and where they came from:
- 150 people signed up for the event
- 105 people attended
- There were 24 no-shows and 21 cancellations.
- Over half of the attendees were volunteers, 56 altogether, we wanted to make sure that we had adequate facilitators and volunteers for the expected 150 attendees and to make sure that sessions ran smoothly
- There were more than 60 different organisations present
- Over 30 organisations were from the public sector
- Over 20 were from the private sector
- & were from NGO’s
- 3 were from academia.
We had 3 rounds of sessions in 8 rooms which makes 24 sessions in total.
We had 5 sponsors who kindly paid for our breakfast, lunch, workshop materials, lanyards and volunteer t-shirts.
What was discussed
This was our first unconference in Finland and we were a bit anxious whether people would dare to pitch their topics. How silly was that?!
People were on fire! The session grid was quickly filled and quite a few ideas were saved for later (we gathered all the notes with topic suggestions and documented them here).
The conversations in the session were held in the language agreed by the participants (mostly in Finnish and some in English). You can find all the session notes from this session sheet.
Feedback
Just seeing the happy faces at the event was great immediate feedback for us. After the event we received really positive feedback and also very constructive suggestions for improvements from. You can read them here (Finnish).
There is also a longer post with feedback and ideas for improvement from one of the facilitators at the event (Hannasofia Hardwick wrote this although it’s published under my name.)
The unconference in pictures
You can find a whole collection of photos here but below are some to give you a quick walkthrough of the day.
How was it for you?
There were moments during the spring I didn’t think we would pull it off. Our core team was a very small group of volunteers who all have day jobs and who started out with no previous experience of organising unconferences — other than what some of us had seen at the London unconference.
We set out with no idea how to get the funding for the budget, how to do that without any official organisation behind us. (To clarify: there is no central organisation or an association that runs or owns One Team Gov. Just an international community of people who together want to make public sector better.)
Luckily people in One Team Gov work in the open and continually share their work with others. We were able to use a lot of the learnings, templates and other documents from previous unconferences, and we had an amazing group of volunteers who made the day successful for everyone.
When the unconference ended and we headed to “afterski” we couldn’t have been happier. First of all, we had done it. People came without really knowing what One Team Gov was or what the unconference was about.
We felt we had managed to make people feel something similar to what we felt in London: excited and energised from crossing silos, meeting new people and sharing ideas and insights to make public sector better!
What has happened since and what next?
After the summer holidays we got together in August to do a retro of the event and make some plans for the autumn. Since then, we have had fairly regular meetups in Helsinki.
These meetups have been mostly about learning new tools that can help us work more efficiently and inclusively. We have practised Liberating Structures in afternoon sessions every three weeks or so.
We will continue these Tools sessions next year and will look at new methods and tools together with topics of interest for the community (and the people who show up). Starting in January, we will start experimenting with weekly or bi-weekly lunch/breakfast sessions in Helsinki.
Most of us are Finns but usually there are also people who are not proficient in Finnish. But don’t be intimidated by either prospect, speaking Finnish or English.
We are inclusive and you can use the language you feel comfortable with. Puhumme siis myös suomea, ja miksei myös ruotsia, mikäli osallistujat niin toivovat.
Follow our Facebook group and Twitter account so you can join the conversation and our local meetups in Finland.
The whole global community can be found in Slack:
And of course, we have some plans to do another event next year…
Go Hanseatic, go Nordic, go global
So, for us in Finland this all started in the London Global Unconference in 2018. We had really no idea what One Team Gov was about but we came back from the event energised and excited.
That energy was obviously common to most attendees since the Swedes and the Norwegians also organised their own unconferences after the global one. And they had talked about doing a Nordic one together.
During our afterski session — well, actually the one after the first afterski — we came up with the idea of a Baltic Sea area event. We were quite exhausted from just having organised our first event in Helsinki but at the same time excited to continue and expand the movement across borders. So, “Let’s invite the Estonians, Latvians and other neighbours”. This immediately evolved into a Hanseatic Sauna meetup where both the “Hanseatic” and “sauna” are quite flexible concepts: anyone (who is guided by these principles) is welcome and nobody has to go to the sauna.
We have even talked about organising a global event in Helsinki in 2021 (crazy Finns). Well, let’s see how things work out. There’s the Nordic one first. It’s good to have ambitious goals which help make public sector better. If you want to make this happen, you are welcome to join in any event, big or small, and in any capacity.
We have had a couple of video meetings with the Swedish and the Norwegians about the Nordic event. The date for the event is set and it’s 12th of June 2020. Most likely it will happen in Stockholm, if we get the funding and a suitable space for the unconference. The exact theme hasn’t been decided yet. We have invited the Swedes and Norwegians to our Hanseatic Sauna meetup which will be dedicated to planning the Nordic One Team Gov Unconference. And naturally, it’s a great opportunity to connect with our Nordic friends in person and enjoy the warmth of Finnish sauna together in the dark and cold of January.
You can join us, if you want to help with the One Team Gov Nordic event. You don’t have to be Nordic or even “Hanseatic”. Just sign up for the Hanseatic Sauna in Helsinki 31.1.2020.
Take practical action and sign up here!
