How to facilitate a Gitcoin meeting

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CSDO - Strategy & Ops

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If you are the facilitator of either a CSDO or Workstream Weekly call, the below guidance should help you to ensure smooth operations. Tips in this document can also be inspiring for other calls, so fork this document and recycle what’s useful! 

1. Workstream Weekly Call 

The current facilitators of the workstream weekly call are:

If you want to be in this list, reach out to ! 

When people join, welcome them and share a check-in question in the chat, you can find inspiration here or here

Next up create 4-5 breakout rooms, and add people to discuss the question for about 5 minutes. How do you do this?

Hit the participants button

Then, hit the ‘auto assign to break out room’ button

If people join late, just hit the auto assign button again, and they’ll be ‘distributed’ again

Stay in the main room, and respond to the check-in question with the remaining late joiners

Close the breakout rooms after 5’ and call them back

Next - very important - make sure to start the live stream!

Make sure you have access as a manager to the Gitcoin transparency channel (you should be a manager)

IMPORTANT: You need to open the livestream here (on youtube) first

Hit the CREATE button and then ‘go live’

Now, hit the three dots and click ‘start live stream’

Here, you are NOT supposed to sign in, you should enter the live stream key, which you should have received via  - please reach out to him if you do not have this key (or ask your audience if anyone has the most recent key and can start this for you) 

‣ will take care of the steps with RED background

Share the slide deck in the chat, and also put the deck on your screen. Now, share your screen, by hitting the below button.

Note: ideally, share a window or a tab, and not your entire screen (unless you have a second one), so you can keep an eye on the chat and respond where necessary.

Note: for kudos, it’s best to not go full screen, so people can continue to edit. Once kudos are in you can go full screen, for everyone’s viewing pleasure

During the call you can boost the impact and keep people focused by

doing intermediary time checks

sharing crucial links in the chat that are called out and you see in the deck

calling out questions for workstreams you see pop up

You are responsible for time management - make sure every workstream has a fair amount of time for their updates and leave some time at the end for questions. If there are no questions, you can end the meeting early.

Before leaving the call, hit the three dots and press ‘end live stream’. The recording will be immediately available at youtube.com/@gitcointransparency

2. CSDO Call

More on the purpose of this call here, the current facilitators are

The various parts of the meeting are explained under the toggles below the headers in all meeting notes, but collected here for your viewing pleasure

CHECK-IN (5’)

When people join, welcome them and share a check-in question in the chat, you can find inspiration here or here

Next - very important - make sure the live stream is started! Normally our scribe Kyle will do this, but if he is not present, you should have this key yourself, see more in the workstream weekly explainer (here) on how to start the live stream. Recordings can be found here.

Share the meeting notes in the chat, you can find these here

ACTION ITEMS (10’)

In this category Kyle J adds the ‘next steps’ from last week - the idea is to very briefly go through these to hold ourselves accountable. This list should always be short as it refers to the last (few) meeting(s) only, and so should be the updates.

Ask the various owners if they followed up and if they want to keep this item in (for a check-in next week). If the item is well under way OR no longer relevant, the item can be marked as ‘done’, which removes it from the list.

Note: responses should be max 30”, if more time to discuss or actions are needed, invite the owner to add this as an agenda topic!

 AGENDA (40’)

Here you ask people to add missing agenda topics, in max 2-3 keywords and invite people to think about desired outcomes before we start.

If people have topics before the call, they can add them by duplicating the notes.

Topics consist of the category, owner and a 2-3 words description, a document can be linked under the toggle

Categories can be a quick request for action, a question, a decision, an announcement or a pulse check.

Some examples and guidance on these various forms (toggle 👇):

Request people to add flags 🚩 to indicate perceived importance (one flag per topic, per attendee)

You are the time manager and the goal is to cover all topics.

Ideally items do not take up more than 5’. Topics with many flags probably require more time, and you can add 5’ time blocks as needed.

As a facilitator always ask what the desired outcome is: bring the discussion back to what the owner wants as an outcome, and drive towards expressing next steps.

Note: What if a topic really needs more time?

Go async. Share a document in discord (csdo strategy or ops) and/or create a thread to ask for feedback or continue the conversation

Bring it to one of the upcoming biweekly strategy calls

CHECK-OUT (5’)

Invite team members to share in 2-3 sentences what’s on their mind now. How are they leaving the call? Any concern or question that needs to be answered outside of this call? What is alive for you right now? What did you like or didn’t like about this call?

Invite team members to add a quick score at the end of the notes on how well they think this meeting went! This helps us evaluate and improve