Pitching to do an Intro to WOL Circles talk

This week I attended my first tech-related meetup session - in Leeds, a city in the north of England, UK. 

It was a presentation about Agile and Knowledge Management in an Agile Meetup group. The group is one of several Meetup groups run by a recruitment agency.

My reason for attending initially was that I know very little about agile and I have personal and organisational challenges in managing personal and organisational knowledge.

But then I found out that the venue was a co-working space and my mind started racing about the possibility of a WOL Meetup group starting.

There was a recent thread asking about the existence of any WOL Meetup groups in the UK. See post.

At the start and end of the evening I had a chance to quickly introduce myself to the owner of that agency and a lead consultant specialising in Business Analysts and Project Managers (my core services throughout my IT career to date), what I do, what WOL is (very superficially) and asking if they would like me to do a talk on WOL Circles.

I was asked to send an email explaining WOL Circles and what I would talk about.

In the spirit of Working Out Loud and helping other people pitch doing similar talks, see below the content of the email that I sent that same evening. I am hopeful for a positive reply. If anyone has any feedback on my pitch, please feel free to comment.

If such a talk by me is of interest to you, let me know.

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Subject: Offer of a Meetup Talk for your consideration

It was great to meet you earlier tonight at your Leeds Meetup event. Thanks for hosting the event and for the food and drink,

Per brief chat with you, I would love to do a talk for you and your tribe(s) on a new approach to personal learning internal or external to organisations.

The talk would be an Introduction to Working Out Loud (WOL) Circles and a call to action.

The talk's objectives would be to explain WOL Circles and to motivate and enthuse people to start their own circle as soon as is practicable after the talk.

I would include in the session people simulating being in a circle in groups of 5 doing a couple of WOL Circle exercises to get a taster of what it is like being in a circle.

WOL Circles are groups of 5 people meeting IRL or virtually for 1 hour a week for 12 weeks, working through freely-downloadable circle guides and working on a personal goal that the person is passionate about, is learning-related, needs the input of others to achieve and can be completed in 12 weeks.

.......

The approach was developed by John Stepper in New York and has been used for at least 5 years now. It is huge in Germany. See this recent blog post about WOL meetups in Germany and other countries. I am not aware of any WOL meetups in the UK thus far and I may be interested in starting one.

I am now in Week Three of my 6th WOL Circle since doing my 1st Circle in Q1 2017. You can see my recruitment approach in action via this LinkedIn post from 30 December, after posting that, we were able to start 3 circles of 15 people who responded to that invite 14 days later. Some might call that "agile"😉.

One of the members of one of the other circles from the Netherlands posted this about me on LinkedIn today:

I am a WOL advocate and keen to promote the approach.

All my WOL work is done in my own time including being admin and community manager of a community of learners in a dedicated Workplace by Facebook community.

A few days ago we saw what may be the first job ad listing "Working Out Loud" as a desirable skill.

As part of the talk, I would give a summary of my personal learning journey that led me to here, some of my WOL Circle highlights and a rapid explanation of the tech that I use (all free!).

What do you think?

Happy to chat about this and/or take any questions and open to any and all suggestions from you.

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