A graffiti jam to learn about open/inner source. The result

A few weeks ago, I introduced a graffiti jam to learn about open/inner source. in a nutshell, we wanted all attendees to a company retreat to enter a street art mood and start creating a whole wall of graffiti with a common theme. Take your time to read through the objectives, materials and plans. Here're a few comments on the result

Materials and physical organization

The ideal layout would have been a continuou vertical surface, on a wall. That was not possible, unfortunately. The room had two wings, so eventually second-best organization was to put the continuous roll of paper on tables, and on the bare floor where there were no tables.

Crayons were used for drawing; an idea would have been to give different colors to every team, but eventually every team got any color they wanted; that way, it was a bit more difficult to actually check or visualize the interaction between the teams, but you can't always get all you want.

For tagging, colored post-its were used; again, all colors were available for every one, so no color-coding for different teams.

How did it work?

In general, rather well. A post-experience poll, answered by around 1/3 of attendees, manifested they liked it. One of the objectives of this experience was to show how street art was similar to software development, or at least graffiti jams were, in the sense that you need to work as a team to reach an objective (graffiti need to be finished in a fixed amount of time, 45 minutes in this case), and you have to use the substrate (brown paper) as well as everything else you've got (all kinds of physical materials, in the same sense that you need to use a specific language and framework when you're on a team).

People started to use all kind of things for their area in the "wall".

White paper, postits, even cardboard were used: the white cap of this mountain is actually a torn piece of paper. Origami was created for planes, and the postits were also used to create a group of clouds:

The teams included all kind of people, and one of the attendants mentioned that they thought it was going to be impossible to achieve something in such a short time, but self-organization and imagination actually made it work. So one objective achieved, at least.

The second objective was to make public art, in the same way inner source projects are public, and make workers appreciate what others have achieved through tagging. In the graffiti world, tags and the main piece form, all together, a work of art, but in this case I was curious about how people accomodated these tags and created something that could incorporate spontaneous collaboration (something that is essential in open source, as well as in inner source). Unsurprisingly, some teams created specific areas for these tags

But other "taggers", like this one, ICU, actually tried to tag where it could be a nice part of the "work"

So, tagging == appreciation level up achieved.

There was, however, a third objective that did not really work out, that was the collaboration part between teams. I didn't see any significant amount of collaboration or negotiation between adjoining teams, or actual mixing of the paintings. There was usually a gap between teams, with art not flowing to either side; that way, it didn't look like a wall, but as a collection of individual products or teams. You can't always get what you want, I guess.

Concluding

Besides what happened above, I received some feedback from the users. It is very likely that this experience is not for every one. Some people dropped out early, and some simply don't like to work in a group that way, they express their creativity individually, and if possible in solitude. In these times where remote work is common, and even encouraged, some way of accommodating them should be probably made, maybe through videoconferencing, maybe simply leaving specific "solitary" spaces for some people, at the wings, for instance, or simply created elsewhere and then incorporated in the whole work afterwards.

Trying to achieve collaboration between teams is another challenge. Maybe giving a bit of more structure could help, like assigning roles within the team, or self-assigning them, or designating some areas for collaboration, so that the teams do have to think how to fill it.

Incentives might also help, but I'm not sure about that, it could be counter-productive, or even create perverse effects. The idea here is that the whole crew participating in the experience is able to appreciate the whole "wall" that has been created.

In general, I think it was an interesting experience that achieved most of what I set out to get, and it was a bit of fun on the side.