Hi everyone!
Indri here from THINK-Research Team. As you know from the previous blog or our social media, we conducted our second workshop today. I will tell you our story. Actually, in today's morning meeting, we discussed our workshop title. It was too late. But the title supposed to be The 5.2 Sustainability & Resilience Workshop since this year's workshop would be our 5th Sustainability & Resilience Workshop. We conducted the 1st-4th Workshop in 2016-2019. So, if we will meet in the next workshop, bear in mind that it will be The 5.3 Sustainability & Workshop ^^
I will tell you our the preparation till after-event of this workshop. So, let's start with the preparation!
One month ago, we were contacted by one of the OGI staff and invited to co-host an event in the OGWeek. If you don't know what OGI is, I will briefly explain it. Open Government Indonesia (OGI) is a secretariat and a facilitator for the government (ministries and agencies), society, community, and Civil Society Organisation (CSO) to conduct national mitigation planning. OGI is a part of the Global OG Partnership, and Indonesia is one of the Steering Committee of that partnership. OG Week will be conducted in all countries. So, we attended the committee meeting on 16th April 2021 and discussed the timeslot and event details. It was such a good opportunity to know other organisations and what they are working on. We decided to choose a 2-hours timeslot on Thursday, 20th May 2021. Our consideration was that week would be a few days after the Eid Al-Fitr holidays.
OGWeek Meeting on 16th April 2021
Then, we discussed it internally and decided to make this workshop a continuation of our previous workshop (su-re.co Kick-off Workshop on 16th March 2021). We plan to have regular workshops every 3-4 months. So, stay tuned!
Our preparation continued to decide the workshop detail. We discussed the workshop aims, rundown, and the list of speakers and topics. We had some progress, but two months is a short period to report new things. So, we decided to narrow down our aim and questions in the FGD (Focus Group Discussion) session. For TIPPING+ (Enabling Positive Tipping Points towards clean-energy transitions in Coal and Carbon Intensive Regions) and LANDMARC (Land-use Based Mitigation for Resilient Climate Pathways), we are on the same stage, so we decided to collect narratives and modelling activities from stakeholders. Besides, for IKI (International Climate Initiative), we decided to look for potential partners in biogas installation and blockchain development. The main differences between this workshop and the previous workshop were the number of speakers and breakout rooms. We decided to add one room for the IKI project.
We had a problem when we were waiting for the speaker confirmation. Actually, it is a common problem if we invite formal stakeholders. Initially, we need to send the invitation letter to the Ministry, Directorate, or Office. Then, we will wait for the disposition from the Minister, Director, or Head of the Office. This process will take a long time. Usually, we get the notification one day before the event. However, we need to get the confirmation a few days before the event due to the publication materials. This problem can be solved by writing TBD (on the poster or description. To solve this problem, we set a deadline. When we didn't get a confirmation till the deadline, we contacted another option. Fortunately, we engaged with many stakeholders and had some meetings related to projects or other activities. So, I contacted a stakeholder whom I met in the meeting. It will be easier to contact someone who keeps in touch or you know before. We got a confirmation after a few minutes!
Our next activity is a dry run. We can do 2-4 dry runs before the event to check the technical details, presentations, or other things. For this event, we conducted two dry runs. When you have some experiences before, it will be easier for you. For the first workshop, we had 4 dry runs and long preparation. But, for this event, we just had three days for preparation and 2 dry runs. If you will be a presentation, it is better if you practice with a script and timer.
The workshop started!
130 participants registered for this event. However, only around 70 participants attended this workshop. It is normal. We already conducted more than 30 online events in the last 8 months, and we found that it will be around 50-60% of participants coming to the event. Around 10% of the participants attended our first workshop (the kick-off workshop), and the rests are newcomers. The positive thing that we learned from this workshop is that more participants joined the FGD session. Since we moved QnA and keynote speaker after the FGD session, the first workshop session was shorter. We had a smooth execution, and everything worked as we planned before. There were many insightful discussion and knowledge from this workshop. I think you will find them in our next blog post.
Thank you for reading, and don't forget to check our think page (https://www.su-re.co/think) to know more about our projects! :D