Networking Doesn’t Happen by Accident: How to Design Events for Connection

Everyone says “let’s make time to network.” Then nothing happens. People just sit with the three colleagues they already know.

That’s the problem we designed against for Day 2 of Wikimedia Europe’s General Assembly in Prague. Many of our network members already know each other, some of them for years. We wondered how to go from “good to see you” to actually solving something together.

Before we even got to Prague, we did our homework. We gathered what the wider Wikimedia movement already knows about running good events, so we, and anyone else organising one, don’t have to reinvent it every single time. That became our Events Playbook: one place to learn from, made especially for organisers who are not doing this as a full time job (which is, let’s be honest, most of us).

Day 1 covered the official business: reports, votes, strategy. Necessary, but that’s not where the magic happens. Day 2 was where we actually tested if good design changes what a room full of people do together. Here’s what we built, and what we would do again.

What we actually ran

• Participant-created agenda. No topics decided in advance. People pitched what they wanted to discuss, we clustered it live, and ran two parallel discussion slots. Nobody has to sit through a session they didn’t even ask for.
• Funding needs workshop. Every organisation named one concrete funding need, shaped it using a simple one-pager, and then found others who are chasing something similar. Less “here’s a grant deadline”, more “here’s who else needs what you need”.
• Collaborative development. Peer-to-peer support formats: pro-action café style rounds, where one person brings a real challenge and a small group coaches them through it. 

None of this is exotic on its own. What actually made it work was the design underneath, and that design borrows a lot from Bhav Patel‘s facilitation approach, the same one many of you will remember from the Movement Strategy track back in 2017-2019. If a room of 150+ Wikimedians can turn “what should our movement do by 2030” into something structured and productive, a General Assembly agenda is really a smaller problem to solve.

What we’d tell other organisers

• Structure is what creates connection, not luck. Informal networking mostly just reinforces the circles people already have. If you want new connections to happen, you have to design for them, not hope for them.
• Keep sessions under 90 minutes, and don’t stack them one after another. The break is often when half of the real collaboration is happening.
• Give people a reason to talk to someone new. “Find someone with a similar funding need” can work better than telling people to “Feel free to network during lunch”.
• Someone has to hold the room. Facilitation is key. Whether it’s a hired facilitator or a person from your own team who already did this before, structure without someone steering it falls apart quite fast.
• There can be too much of collaboration! We run a whole day of very interactive, collaborative activities and at some point this can be too much for some of us. Even if we love the format. So making the day shorter or including a less engaging session for mental recovery, would be our next step in improving the agenda.

Steal this

We didn’t invent any of this from the scratch, and neither should you. Why would you, when someone already did the learning for you? The Events Playbook has the fuller version: venue setup, facilitation choices, how to avoid the usual traps, all pulled from a decade of Wikimedia events so you don’t have to learn it the hard way, again.

56 participants from 26 member organisations came to Prague. Most of them didn’t need an icebreaker to introduce themselves to each other. What they did need, and what most events forget, was a reason to leave the room with something more than just a nice conversation.

Connect in real life

Experience some of the collaborative formats at our networking session on pre-conference day of Wikimania in Paris: Wiki Mixer is our event dedicated to connecting with others: meeting new people and getting to know each other through engaging conversations and fun activities.

–

What is Wikimedia Europe? Think of Wikimedia Europe as the affiliates’ joint platform in Brussels: one channel for policy, advocacy and capacity building, instead of 30+ separate ones. Beyond Brussels, we also help affiliates across Europe connect with each other, learn from one another and collaborate on shared challenges.