The All Hands Vs The Deep Funding Town Hall

All Hands & Town Halls

Shortly after the Deep Funding program started, in fall 2022 a community initiative was created around ‘Town Halls’ This was a grassroots initiative led by the community for the community. Since the format was meant to be a container for different kinds of presentations and discussions, we decided, in consultation with the initiators, to merge the Town hall with 2 other types of meetings: The ‘Awarded Teams meeting’ and the ‘Governance meeting’.

In hindsight, this merge turned out not to be unsuccessful. The short project updates we were having in the Awarded Team meetings didn’t find their way into the Town Halls and the governance calls tended to compete with contributions from community members or awarded teams, which was not ideal. Over time the Town Halls circled more and more around Governance topics which are interesting only to a smaller subset of the community. Besides these issues, we noticed that Town Halls were usually announced very late, sometimes with an unclear or unprepared agenda, making it hard to get a good idea of times and dates, if you are not already a frequent visitor. 

With this experience in mind, we are creating a new start, with an improved organization and 2 types of regular public events:

Event calendar:

First of all, the launch of this website features a prominent ‘Event calendar’. This is a long-held wish and we are glad it has finally arrived. Especially the possibility for anyone to schedule a slot well in advance and for others to see what has been planned in the weeks to come is important. People can mark events with topics of their interest in their agenda, and take scheduled events into account when planning a presentation of their own. We expect it will take some months for this to become mainstream but we are very happy with these possibilities.  

A new Event Circle

We have a new circle that is dedicated to Events. This circle will Coordinate all events, including Central Town Halls, and Open All Hands. When the All Hands and Central Town Halls are getting in good shape the team will focus on implementing and coordinating more globally distributed, Regional Town Halls, to expand our community further and have better visibility across different time zones and cultures. 

Event type 1: Town Halls  – re-invented

The goal of regional and Central Town halls is to make them center more around the onboarding of new teams and knowledge sharing with awarded teams. Expect updates on new rounds, presentations of completed projects, new Deep Funding initiatives, Pitch sessions for new proposals, changes in the processes or rules, and more. Also some governance updates, but short and concise.

Event type 2: Open All hands

With an increasing number of circles, there is an increasing need to have some cross-circle communication. In recent months we noticed that sometimes there was a large overlap between the topics and the audience, between the All Hands and the Next Town Hall. For this reason, we are restricting certain topics to specific events AND are making the All Hands open to all who want to listen in. 

This gives us a platform to dive a bit deeper into governance topics when needed without taking time away from other topics in the Town Hall. It also offers more clarity to the participants and enables people to visit (only) the meetings that align with their interests. 

For starters, the Open All Hands is a bi-weekly call. We will alternate between two formats:

1. Open agenda, usually driven by Deep Funding staff to discuss any actual topic
2. All Circle’s presentations. Every Circle offers a quick presentation of +/- 3 minutes stating their highlights over the past 4 weeks. This can be about achieved milestones, learnings, challenges, ongoing discussions, or requests for assistance from other Circles or individual Circle members.

After all presentations are done, we can have a few breakout rooms where Circles can go deeper into certain topics, or we can have a plenary session about some Circle-related topic. 

We will monitor this basic schedule and make changes as needed. Either structural improvements or Ad-hoc changes on special occasions or events.