Brite Camp
Brite Camp empowers any Briteling to teach other Britelings about any topic.
When we hit about 60 people at Eventbrite, a friend (former teacher) and I looked around and said "Man, there are a lot of smart, articulate people here who know a lot about things I'd like to know about." We decided to ask some folks if they wouldn't mind spending an hour or so around lunchtime teaching the rest of us their mad skillz. We started out with practical skills, like Photoshop, HTML/CSS, Python, etc, then the Brite Camps started evolving to a broader array of soft skills and general knowledge/communication.
While we expected them to evolve more towards fun skills like photography (and expected to have to incentivize them to come with badges and such), they wound up coming back towards work-related topics (which ended up being more beneficial) -- for example, after an Amazon outage, our head of Ops did a talk on what that means and why we (largely) survived unscathed.
The Sales team was one of the first to give a group presentation of "this is what we do, how we do it, why, and how you can help," and that sort of began to form a template, to a point where many managers now require their team members to do a Brite Camp each quarter or so (certainly when they have important projects). It's sort of an ongoing appendix to the monthly All-Hands meetings -- the broad strategy & major accomplishments and challenges are laid out monthly, and anyone who wants to learn more about the various components attends the relevant Brite Camp.
And attend they do! The first Brite Camp had over half the company in attendance, and nearly every one since had at least a quarter of the company.
Back | Next: Hackathons
When we hit about 60 people at Eventbrite, a friend (former teacher) and I looked around and said "Man, there are a lot of smart, articulate people here who know a lot about things I'd like to know about." We decided to ask some folks if they wouldn't mind spending an hour or so around lunchtime teaching the rest of us their mad skillz. We started out with practical skills, like Photoshop, HTML/CSS, Python, etc, then the Brite Camps started evolving to a broader array of soft skills and general knowledge/communication.
While we expected them to evolve more towards fun skills like photography (and expected to have to incentivize them to come with badges and such), they wound up coming back towards work-related topics (which ended up being more beneficial) -- for example, after an Amazon outage, our head of Ops did a talk on what that means and why we (largely) survived unscathed.
The Sales team was one of the first to give a group presentation of "this is what we do, how we do it, why, and how you can help," and that sort of began to form a template, to a point where many managers now require their team members to do a Brite Camp each quarter or so (certainly when they have important projects). It's sort of an ongoing appendix to the monthly All-Hands meetings -- the broad strategy & major accomplishments and challenges are laid out monthly, and anyone who wants to learn more about the various components attends the relevant Brite Camp.
And attend they do! The first Brite Camp had over half the company in attendance, and nearly every one since had at least a quarter of the company.
Back | Next: Hackathons
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