Reflecting on the First Year of Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki: The Roadside Station of Learning

This is article is the entry for day 8 in the KINTO Technologies Advent Calendar 2024 🎅🎄

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Hello, this is HOKA from the Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki (Learning Roadside Station) Team.

It has been nearly a year since the team was launched, so I will be writing a blog post to reflect on its first twelve months.

Our Thoughts and Aspirations One Year Ago

The team was formed exactly one year ago, at the end of November 2023, when Kin-chan, Nakanishi, and I came together with the goal of making the company’s various study sessions more engaging and dynamic. Shortly after the beginning of 2024, we regrouped and created an inception deck. Here is the result:

As a "roadside station" where study sessions converge, we aim to enhance internal activities focused on learning and knowledge sharing.

• Internal communications
  • Keeping everyone informed about the study sessions being held.
  • Sharing what study sessions are like.
• Supporting study sessions
  • Providing guidance to those who have concerns, such as:
  • Wanting to start study sessions but not knowing where to begin.
  • Struggling to make their existing study sessions more engaging.

There are more details in the Tech Blog post about how it all got started.

What We Did in the First Six Months

We started by sharing updates on the team activities during KTC’s monthly all-hands meetings, commonly known as HQ meetings. I imagine the slide below has become a familiar sight to everyone in the company.

Activity summary

• Providing a space for discussing study sessions as a whole—offering advice on starting them, addressing challenges, and finding solutions.
• Popping Into Next Door Study Sessions – an initiative where the administration team visits various study sessions to engage and support participants. ​
• KTC Podcast: interviews with study session organizers! Sharing voices from within the company, capturing both the messages and the atmosphere of the study sessions.
• Tech Blog: Articles in the Tech Blog showcasing the various study sessions at KTC and sharing experiences of participating in them.

New activities — Part 1

After about six months, we started to see people supporting and advocating for our activities. We faced the challenge of making it easier for people to search for available study sessions. Fortunately, an engineer from the Mobile App Development Group developed a Slack-based search system to help solve this issue.

This allowed people to search for study sessions in the Slack channel by interacting with a character named “Manabyi.”

For more details, check out the developer’s blog post.

https://blog.kinto-technologies.com/posts/2024-12-04_manabyi/

New activities — Part 2

We also faced the challenge of making study session materials and videos accessible to everyone at any time.
As we were exploring solutions, an engineer from the Corporate IT Group proactively reached out and developed a SharePoint-based portal site for the study sessions. It is called the “Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki Portal.”

What was once a set of plain, unorganized folders has now been transformed into a YouTube-like experience. With all the videos and materials in one place, people can:
Watch recordings or review materials from study sessions they missed.
Rewatch a session they attended to reinforce what they learned.

Other Highlights That Made Us Happy

We began receiving requests from organizers seeking discussions on improving their study sessions. When we invited people to be featured on the podcast, they all eagerly agreed to participate. The term “Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki” was featured on a poster for a company-wide event.
Internal materials from group companies included information about Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki as part of introducing KTC. Less than a year after starting, we never would have imagined that our activities would be reaching not only our own company but also group companies. Whenever employees spontaneously express their appreciation for our team’s activities, it gives us a tremendous boost of motivation.

Joining the Developer Relations Group

In September 2024, Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki officially became part of the Developer Relations Group.

What is the Developer Relations Group?

In 2022, KINTO Technologies launched its Tech Blog and established a platform for engineers to share their knowledge through external events and internal study sessions. Delivering results through work is a form of output in itself, but we believe that study sessions and the Tech Blog also play a crucial role in providing engineers with valuable opportunities to share their knowledge and insights. The Technology Developer Relations Group has created outlets for output that can be described as being “between work duties.” When we launched Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki at the end of 2023, it created a learning forum that fit into the space "between work duties"—essentially, a space for input. This naturally aligned with the activities of the Technology Public Relations Group.
Notably, part of the group's founder, Nakanishi’s, vision was to support engineers' growth by guiding them from input to output. So, in a way, these two initiatives may have never truly been separate to begin with.

What the Manabi-no-Michi-no-Eki Team will do in the future

Please do check out Nakanishi’s TechBlog posts.

https://blog.kinto-technologies.com/posts/2024-12-03-the-next-goal/