Making movements into educational events

EventMovement is an online platform that allows communities to come together to propose, design and plan events. It is a free and open community commissioning tool for events.

Anyone can propose an idea for an event on EventMovement in just a few short clicks. Then, each event idea goes through three phases. The Support phase, the Get Involved phase, and the Plan It phase.

In the Support phase, users promote their idea to their friends, colleagues and through social media in order to gain support for their idea. Supporters can start discussing the idea on the event’s campaign page and are kept up to date with how the plans are progressing.

In the Get Involved phase, the community of supporters who have built up around the event idea start asking and answering questions about the event. They do this by raising and responding to talking points. Anyone can raise a talking point, and they can be about any aspect of the event. Supporters respond to these talking points with answers and can vote on each other’s responses. In this way the most important talking points and design decisions bubble to the top.

The last phase is the Plan It phase. Here supporters can summarise all the activity and design discussions that have taken place so far into a single document. They do this by selecting talking points, and choosing the most popular answers to include in a plan. This plan is both a detailed description of a community co-designed event and evidenced support for that event to happen in the real world.

We ran a short test of EventMovement at Newcastle University Library over three weeks in the summer. 43 students proposed a total of 28 events, with topics including everything from workshops on academic writing and copyright law up to a library cat café and baking classes! Not all the events were widely supported, but many ended up with excited communities of interest that designed and planned events to happen in the real world. With help from the University Library, three of those events are planned for the next few weeks.

In the future we hope to deploy EventMovement on larger scales and with a number of different organisations and businesses. We’re really excited to see how EventMovement might change the ways in which events are commissioned in the real world!

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For more information please contact Dan Lambton-Howard.

Author: Daniel Howard