What began as a way to help me get out of the struggle of day to day support of our digital tools quickly proved to be much more. The concept is simple – schedule a lab on campus on a regular basis, let the masses know and get ready to spend some quality time answering questions, hearing ideas and providing support.
While this achieved the intended goal of empowering our users, a bigger and unanticipated benefit has come from Open Lab: I’ve built a community among our content providers. With that community has come a great stream of content, collective support and a network of advocates for my projects.
I’ll share how Open Lab got off the ground, what a typical session looks like, what you could expect and pitfalls to avoid.