More than thirty years ago, when I was doing my bachelor, a frustrating group-work experience became a tipping point that made me change my major from Business administration to Economic history. We, a group of four young women, could not communicate, we could not cooperate and we could not produce a paper together. We split up the work in two parts, worked in pairs and we never talked to each other again. I become an Economic historian and a happy student again, and I thrived in a learning environment where I could do all my graded assignments individually.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, I thought, proverbially. I have learned since then, both as a student, researcher, teacher and bureaucrat, and I know now that no man is an island and that many hands make light work. Or, that it could be that way. Setting up a structure is wise, if you want people to collaborate and learn together, as failing to plan is planning to fail. Then it is just to get started. We all know that a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step. It could imply some risk-taking; it often does. A ship in the harbour is safe, but that is not what a ship is for. Enough of proverbs.

There is probably another axiom out there, expressing gratitude, that could emphasize my thankfulness for the two personal learning communities that have sprouted in and around me this last year, without much effort from my side.

The first one germinated in late March, when I posted a rather desperate question on Facebook. Prior to this, in early February, I had organised a creative workshop on how to make Lund University attractive for new target groups of students. It was a full day meeting where thirty participants from different parts of the university brainstormed, whined and dreamed, using a huge number of flipchart papers and formed action plans. Some weeks later, when it was time to plan the follow-up workshop, the pandemic was a fact. Teachers had no choice but to go online, but a lot of planned conferences and open seminars were cancelled. I did not want to cancel my workshop.

I posted my call on Facebook on a late Sunday evening and the comments came dropping in almost immediately: “use Teams!” “use Zoom!” “try Miro!”. I did not need tips on technical tools; I needed help to figure out how to create creative, positive and participatory meetings online. The same evening I also received a PM from a friend who was struggling with exactly the same question, and starting from there, we became a tight community of four dedicated process leaders who learned together. Some weeks we met almost daily, in short morning meetings over Zoom, where we talked and tried out ideas and tools.

My follow-up workshop was made online and it was great. My colleagues have successfully managed to transform their since long established five-day (IRL) course on participatory meeting methods to an online course. “I’m afraid I am too old to learn and use new technology,” one of them said in March. Well, it turned out she was not. We are not. One major reason why our personal learning community thrived is that we had a common purpose. We knew exactly what we wanted to achieve in our different meetings. We also had a common experience and a toolbox of participatory meeting methods, although we did not know how to transform them to an online environment.

My second personal learning community is PBL group number seven from this autumn, where we have played, laughed, learnt, and challenged each other. For my next blog post I will try to identify some of the things we did together to make it work, although I am well aware that it might be hard to replicate. To create a community from out of a bunch of different people is not an easy task.

Although I am an introvert, networking is what I do to make things happen at Lund University, and I miss the open spaces between meetings and people. I miss the coffee breaks and the sudden meetings in corridors. Not because I want to mingle – I am really bad at it – but we need the informal meetings to spread information and ideas and to establish new links in the already existing networks.

One of the participatory meeting methods that I have practiced before we all went digital is the Open space seminar. It was developed from out of the evaluations of a conference, where it was noted that the most interesting discussions took place outside the meeting rooms, during the coffee breaks. See https://openspaceworld.org/wp2/hho/ for the full story behind the method.

Two (or ten) heads are better than one