On August 26 we broke Twine.
This was the first official edition of #eventprofsbreakshit and judging by the feedback, it did not disappoint. Despite some people's (Shawn and me specifically) hesitation in actually saying or spelling out the word "sh!t" (see what I mean), we were delighted to see so many positive comments from #eventprofs to the concept. Other than baby photos of my daughter on Facebook, this was the most love I had seen in comments in a while. I would be remiss not to thank MeetingsNet here for publishing a story about the #eventprofsbreakshit event and quite possibly multiplying our reach for the event.
So what really happened? And did we break Twine?
Over 200 #eventprofs signed up for the event and at the scheduled time approximately 100 #eventprofs gathered on the platform created by DoubleDutch's founder Lawrence Coburn and co. Having previously registered and answered at least a few deep questions, we joined with the objective of participating in more meaningful conversations with strangers, at least this is the promise of Twine. Lawrence calls it “engineered serendipity”.
Not all was smooth before the event with several people facing challenges in getting registered, but on the whole, most managed.
The check-in time for the event was tight, so anyone not joining in the first two minutes was sadly left out, making that 3 or 4-minute delay for a bathroom break and to start the next hourly meeting a big no-no. ☹️
Once we got started, we were greeted by a friendly and tiny video message from Anh Nguyen and Lawrence Coburn. Tiny because it was short and also because it appeared as a tiny window for those not participating from a mobile device.
But this would not stop us!
Swiftly after that, we were ushered to our first one-to-one meeting in a private video chat window with one of the questions that we selected during registration, presumably the one that matched us with the other person. For the next 9 mins, most participants chatted with a stranger guided by the deep question. And then, we did it all again with someone else, at least most of us did. There were some technical glitches, some cameras or microphones that would not work and some human error, and simply some people that did not show up leaving their conversation partners talking to themselves. ;(
Kudos to the small Twine team who was ultra-responsive on Twitter, openly engaging in conversations and replying to almost every comment. During and following the event there were some great comments shared organically on social media, but that was not all.
Participants answered multiple (maybe too many) surveys and revealed if they are full-on detractors or self-confessed fans and promotors of Twine. More importantly, an open Google Doc was the quick note/dumping ground for comments throughout and for hours after the event. This resulted in over nine pages of unadulterated chain-of-thought notes that offer an incredibly valuable source of feedback for Twine to take back to their development team.
While some private comments should not be repeated here, we will say that the comments ranged from, “I’m mad that this doesn’t work”, to “my partner did not show up”, and all the way to the very suggestive, “not enough foreplay...”.
So that was that, and now on to the next thing.
And yes, we will be breaking more #eventtech soon! All the spirit of community and innovating and we hope you can join us. Be make sure you sign up here so you don’t miss out.
In the meantime, take care of yourselves!