miniTAG top tips

  • July 17, 2017

This post was written by John Adams, Chair of IATI’s Technical Advisory Group after the miniTAG meeting, London (28 June).

I want to encourage you to try a new concept in the IATI community – the miniTAG.

A miniTAG is a small-scale face-to-face meetup of IATI people to discuss a 

particular topic.

It could be:

5 people meeting up over beer and bratwurst in Berlin to discuss CSV downloads.

20 people in a hipster coffee place in NYC talking about UN agencies and pooled funding.

8 open data enthusiasts in a Freetown cafe learning about how IATI could help them understand development in Sierra Leone.

…and many more…this was our meeting in London on June 28.

[image: @siemvaessen]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

A very few guidelines may be helpful

  1. miniTAGs should be open and welcoming to anyone with an interest in IATI or development data.
  2. Focus each miniTAG on one topic that is of interest to that community
    Write up a short blog or Discuss post to tell us what you have learned
  3. Apart from those guidelines, it is up to local organisers to do something that works in your context and contributes to everyone’s understanding.

Oh, and there are stickers
If you’re planning a miniTAG, drop us an email at [email protected] and we’ll send you some stickers to use.

What did we learn from the first miniTAG in London?
The first miniTAG was held in London on 28 June

  1. Finding a venue is hard and needs some planning. You may want to use registration tools like eventbrite or a google form to ensure you are planning for the right numbers.
  2. Holding something at the end of a busy working day means that people will be tired, so don’t have too many speakers.
  3. Try to get a balance between group conversation and show and tells (we didn’t achieve this in London)
  4. Show and tell speaker format works well but do have rules like:

“Questions must be one sentence with a question mark at the end” (© Reid Porter)

If you have to use slides, keep it to two or three slides only.

So, I encourage you to go and give the miniTAG format a go, and look forward to hearing how you get on.