Introduction

Hello! I am Akeda, a member of both the Corporate IT Group and the Technology Public Relations Group, and of the Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki Team as well. (“Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki” literally means “roadside station of learning.”)
As a corporate engineer, I am usually doing things like on/offboarding related for IT equipment, and improving the processes and work within the groups.

In this article, I would like to share the story of how I, a corporate engineer, happened to get involved in the Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki project, and creating a portal that spontaneously collects videos from actively held in-house study sessions.

The Trigger: Is There No Way to Watch Internal Study Sessions Later?

As we have mentioned in several articles below, our company frequently holds in-house study sessions.

https://blog.kinto-technologies.com/posts/2024-04-23_学びの道の駅はじめました/

https://blog.kinto-technologies.com/posts/2024-05-21-学びの道の駅-iOSチームの勉強会に突撃/

After the sessions, the video recordings of them get posted on the in-house Slack channel. However, as a corporate engineer, I felt that the following points were internal issues.

• There are places in the company like Confluence, SharePoint, and Box for sharing document files, but no fixed place to store video content.
• In particular, although the study sessions could be beneficial to everyone in company, the fact that the video recordings of them only got posted on the in-house Slack channel made them difficult to find later.
  • The company-wide information-sharing channel is the main place that things get posted to and other work-related information and so on flows through it as well, so they were impossible to find through simple scrolling alone.
• Members who joined the company after study sessions had been held had no way of knowing that they had been held in the first place, let alone that there were videos and files from them.

Wondering what could be done to solve these problems, I came up with the idea of building a video platform and creating a place where the videos of the study sessions could all be gathered together.

The Beginning: I Tried Laying My Idea on the Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki Project Members

When I had the idea of creating a place for gathering together videos of the study sessions, I immediately thought of the Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki project. Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki is a “michi-no-eki” (roadside station) is an activity that "supports in-house activation centered on study groups where internal 'study groups' intersect." I selfishly thought that it would be nice if we could work together if what I want to do and their activities clashed, or if they were considering it.

As the saying goes, "strike while the iron is hot," I started by approaching Kin-chan, who is in the same groups as me, and is also involved in Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki. The response I got was an enthusiastic thumbs-up! (I remember being overjoyed about that.) After that, once the Corporate IT Group had gotten the green light to go ahead with the idea, I immediately went to discuss it with the other project members as well.

I think the back-and-forth on Slack at the time conveys how enthusiastic the Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki members were about it, so I will share it some of it with you here.
First, here is the discussion message from me.

Did you notice the amazing emoji reaction? Here is an answer I got with the same momentum.

Things moved quickly! After that, on the same day that we all got together, I was warmly invited to join Manabi-Michi-no-Eki. And so, we ended up all proceeding with the video platform together as members of the Manabi-Michi-no-Eki team.

Main Story: We Built a Video Platform and Rolled It Out Internally

I imagine the internal rolling out of a platform containing collected videos of company-wide meetings and in-group study sessions is something some of this blog’s readers would like to do themselves, so now, I will talk about what we did to achieve it, and pick out a few things to talk about why we did them.

What We Did

• Building a video platform

  • Utilizing the SharePoint site that was being used in the company, we gave (among other things) the video posting method a makeover.

• Deciding the video collection method

  • Collect videos of meetings and internal study sessions that are OK to publish within the company

    • Get the meeting/session organizers to upload video files and publishable files to the documents section of the SharePoint site

    • On the top page of the SharePoint site, use the “highlighted content” feature, and set a filter using the study session name.

      • Once the setup has been done, if a video with the same study session name is uploaded, it will get posted on the top page automatically.

• Spreading the word, and running the system

  • We announced the video platform and asked people to collect videos for it in the all-company meeting at the end of August

Q. Why Did You Choose SharePoint?

A.

• Because our company uses Microsoft365 for groupware.

There are various video platforms to choose from, YouTube, Vimeo, and Brightcove being prominent examples. However, using one of those would entail signing a new contract, and in the first place, one of the requirements was that we wanted collecting the videos of the sessions to be done by their organizers. Consequently, we opted for SharePoint, which everyone in the company is already familiar with.

Q. Why Did You Decide to Get the Organizers Themselves to Upload the Videos?

A.

• We wanted the organizers themselves to handle things like editing out the unnecessary parts.

• We thought it would be best if they decided for themselves whether to upload things to the video platform.

As third parties, we Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki members could have done the work for them, but we thought the organizers themselves were the most suitable people to decide whether the videos should also include things like the casual chit-chat before the study sessions started and things that would only make sense if you had actually seen them at the time, and to decide whether the videos should be uploaded to the platform in the first place.

Q. Why Did You Decide to Use the “Highlighted Content” Feature

A.

• Because it was simple and easy.

When we thought about how to get people to watch the uploaded videos, we presumed that the reach would be higher if people saw ones they were interested in via images rather than text, and could watch them on the top page rather than somewhere a few clicks away.

After that, we created several patterns for how to access the videos, and got Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki members to watch them. When we did this, we found that the format that would attract viewers’ interest the most was one where we could display thumbnails, and the videos would be grouped by study session and listed on the SharePoint site’s top page. The “highlighted content” feature lets you do all that, so that is what we decided to use.

Example of using it

Reference: https://support.microsoft.com/ja-jp/office/強調表示されたコンテンツの-web-パーツを使用する-e34199b0-ff1a-47fb-8f4d-dbcaed329efd

A cautionary note about using this is that filtering by study session name (= video file name) might not catch videos that have only just been uploaded. When that happens, please wait a little while, then try again.

Q. Did You Only Spread the Word about It That One Time at the All-Company Meeting?

A.

• We tell people about it every month in the orientation for new employees.

• We tell people about it in the monthly Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki and Technology Public Relations Group sections of the monthly all-company meetings.

As I said at the beginning of the article, there was an issue in that members who joined the company after study sessions had been held had no way of knowing that they had been held in the first place, let alone that there were videos and files from them. Of course, we addressed that here. By having these two sections, we are successfully making its presence felt!

In Conclusion: We Will Continue to Support Internal Learning in a Variety of Ways!

Since the all-company meeting, the number of accesses to the platform has not decreased significantly and study session videos are being collected. This reinforces my belief that the platform is addressing the issues I initially identified. So far, I have talked about the following three themes: the internal issues I perceived; how I found a strong supporter within the company in the form of Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki; and the main theme, how we actually built the platform.

One of our company’s good points is that it is tolerant about people taking on new challenges. I feel that this initiative really embodies that, and although I talked at length before getting to the main theme, I do believe (perhaps presumptuously) that I have gotten that message across to everyone who has stuck with this article up to here.

Currently, Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki is working as a single team in the Technology Public Relations Group based on a single project. We will continue to serve as a “roadside station” where internal study sessions come together and activities are conducted to support internal energization centered on them, and to tell you about those activities through things like the Tech Blog. So, please do stay tuned!