The Big Yak

Saturday morning. The alarm rings at 5:30am. Time to fly to London for the The Big Yak!

The Big Yak is an un-conference about internal communications.

Professionals meet to share their experiences and discuss.

Un-conference means that there is no fixed agenda.

If anyone wants to talk about a specific topic, they can bring it up on a post-it, and the moderators put it in a timeslot.

There were 6 rooms, with 5 sessions each, so overall 30 sessions.

Sessions could be very small and intimidate, just a few people helping each other in a safe place.

Or they could be much larger, when more people are interested in a general interest topic like "The ROI of internal comms".

Most of the attendees were also on Twitter and tweeted live with the hashtag #thebigyak.

Some of my take aways had been around employee engagement, tools, surveys, Enterprise Social Networks, and people.

I met people in real life that I had only knew from Twitter.

I can really recommend The Big Yak.

If you are in London and interested in internal comms, do not miss it the next time.

It is free, it is fun, you can learn a lot, and you can meet like-minded people and connect with them.

Fuckup Nights and the Report Abuse Button

If you are already irritated by the first word of the headline of this post, you are not alone, and I am really sorry.

It is not meant as a profanity, but is mentioned for a legit reason:

"Fuckup Nights is a global movement born in Mexico in 2012 to share publicly business failure stories. Hundreds of people attend each event to hear three to four entrepreneurs share their failures. Each speaker is given 7 minutes and is able to use 10 images. After each speaker, there’s a question/answer session, as well as time for networking (beers)".

So it is actually a good thing, but the name might scare some people, especially in a professional environment.

Our Collaboration Platform has, as a process for governance, a link to report abuse right next to each piece of content. Anyone can click on it.

See as an example any content in the Jive Community . If you click on Report Abuse in the Jive Community, you get this pop up:

You can choose from a list of categories and add a comment:

Then a process starts. This process might change over time, but it is impotant that you have a defined process, and that you have defined the process before the launch of the platform.

So if you have posted about a Fuckup Night and anyone clicks on Report Abuse, you might get such an email:

Reporting an abuse happens in average a few times per month. To gain trust and demonstrate transparency, it is a good habit to monthly publish the numbers of Report Abuse per category and month on the platform itself.