World Bank Book Sprint Underway

Yesterday 17 people from around the world gathered together in Baltimore (USA) to write a book about Open Contracting. The group started with introductions and a scoping discussion, and after lunch we went straight into more scoping discussions and concepting.

Facilitating such a large group requires strategies quite different to smaller groups. Issues arise because the number of different minds at work means it is difficult to keep everyone pointing in the same direction. In addition the scope can creep and there can be additional difficulties of keeping everyone focused and attentive. Smaller groups are easier to manage by far so one strategy is to break the larger group down into smaller working groups which is what we did half way through day one.

We established 4 working groups – each dedicated to a specific chunk of the book. We will need to spend a lot of time in the next days ensuring that the groups don’t float too far apart from each other with their content. This will be done through review. Front loading these issues would end up confusing everyone and would take too long to work through.

Today (day two) we started on the book at 10am. First we created the Table of Contents and then started writing, So far everything looks great. 5000 words at lunchtime on the second day.

The Book Sprint is facilitated by Adam Hyde.