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What Is a BILUMI Workshop?

A bilumi workshop is when a bunch of folks get together in the same room and add their opinions and research to the knowledge of our whole community. The workshop goal is decided by the host. There’s no shortage of options!

Why Host a Workshop?

Workshops are a terrific way to get folks motivated and involved in our community. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish when you have people all in the same place working on the same thing. Plus, it’s fun!

Let us Know!

If you’re interested in hosting, please email getinvolved@bilumi.org. Let us know how we can help you.

Here are some tips for planning a workshop (you can also wing it.)

Decide on a Location and Time

It’s a good idea to host the workshop someplace that has plenty of comfortable seating, like a living room, or a computer classroom. If you happen to have access to a projector, that’s also helpful. You should choose a date and time that are convenient for you and the people you plan to invite. If your friends work 9-5, you might want to select a time in the evening so they can join in. If you’re a student or teacher then consider an activity or class period.

Are you in the Boston area? Our raven puppets might be available to come by for a visit. Send us an email!

Decide on a Goal

A goal is nice. Helpful workshop goals could include rating reviews, writing reviews, adding companies and products to our database, or simply setting up everyone’s portfolio of interests. It’s easy to teach people how to use our system, but it’s helpful to focus on a single goal. We would also be happy to give you more suggestions via email.

Advertise

Advertising is key! Email an invitation to friends or make a flier to post on your favorite bulletin board. We can also send it out on the BILUMI mailing list, and advertise it on our web site if you give us some notice. Remember to include the date, time and ask people to bring their own laptops.

Pick up some snacks

Before the workshop, consider picking up a few munchies. Since our current focus is the chocolate industry, we like to have chocolate around, but you could also go with veggies and dip, potato chips, or whatever else suits your fancy. Maybe not so much the McDonalds.

At the Workshop:

Introduce Bilumi

It’s time! Once everybody has arrived and gotten settled, introduce BILUMI. Probably most people will already be familiar with our concept, but just in case, it’s a good idea to start off by talking about what bilumi is and the purpose of this project.

“Hi guys. Thanks for coming. Buy It Like You Mean It is a new kind of participatory non-profit that makes it easy to find out which brands meet all of our own individual socially responsible concerns. The data we’ll be entering into the system today will be used to help people shop according to their own unique values. So thanks again! I’m going to show you how to create an account and what we’ll be doing…”

Introduce the Goal

Next, introduce the workshop goal, whether it is to rate 100 reviews or to research and write 3 new reviews. Explain how to accomplish the goal. It’s nice to have a demonstration prepared so you can walk through it easily.

If you’re doing research, you may want to refer to bilumi’s research guide.

Dive in!

Take questions, and then dive in!

- Remember to take photos so we can all bask in glory afterwards. It’s great to send them to us, so that we can put them up on BILUMI!

Afterwards:

Congratulations on having successfully hosted your BILUMI workshop! Send us email so that we can write a blog post about what you did, and so we can include things you’ve learned in this document.

Stuff that would be helpful for us to know:

- What worked?
- What can we improve?
- What did we accomplish?
- Any other comments?
- Stories? Anything goofy happen?

Thanks for being part of BILUMI!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 10:32 pm by Sherri and is filed under Classroom, Events, Journal. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.