I’m going to send you over to Dwight Towers blog (again!) – not for his usual righteous anger about the lack of participation in activist meetings, events and movements, but for some bona fide participation-building inspiration. In his post Gay marriage rally and movement building he gives us the speech he would have made had […]
One of our jobs recently was to provide some mentoring support to groups organising an Open Space in the wake of 6 Billion Ways. I spent an hour with people from FoE, WDM and the Jubilee Debt Campaign talking through how they might use an Open Space format with anything from 20 to 200 people. […]
I recently left a comment on Dwight Towers blog. It turned out to be quite a long one and had the makings of a post in its own right. So I’ve taken it and made it even longer. The problem as posed by Dwight: there are also some people [and their track record goes on […]
Towards the end of last year I spent a day with a small group of folk planning a bike ride to Palestine. The plans are now complete and the group is now P.E.D.A.L. an acronym that stands for their aims: Popular resistance movements Environmental justice Direct action on BDS Art and culture Linking stories of […]
Nip over to Political Dynamite for a quick preview of this weekend’s 6 Billion Ways event. Carl’s been busy mentoring a handful of the organisers in facilitating the Open Space session on Sunday. Meanwhile I’ll be in Dorset, working with the Threshold Centre, a co-housing project, on their consensus process. More on that next week.
Lynn Walsh has posted on expectations with a nice link to some wise words from Craig Freshley, whose Group decision tips I look forward to browsing when I have more time. Craig writes: when we have expectations of others that don’t pan out it often leads to resentment which often brews discontent which often causes […]
Just a quick nudge towards Adrian Nixon’s recent post Facilitating Virtual Meetings on his On Facilitation blog. Some good and detailed tips on using Skype in particular, but I imagine many of them are relevant to other VoIP applications. Lest we forget that other applications exist, and allow Skype to become the new Hoover, I’ve […]
In the process of planning yesterday’s Steiner school meeting I worked with the existing core group and they in turn shared the plan with a couple of other folk involved in the meeting. One or two revisions came back to me. Nothing unusual there except that, if I’m honest, one of them frustrated me slightly. […]
I’m not long back in from facilitating a 2 hour ‘information meeting’ for the Steiner School Leicestershire Interest Group. As meetings go it was relatively straightforward – no crucial decisions to make, no deeply embedded history of conflict and so on. The group’s very recent, and I got into conversation with them about building their […]
The debate about clicktivism (online activism) is raging on… is it an effective substitute for good old-fashioned face-to-face activism? does it encourage shallow, almost meaningless engagement? is it the way forward? are local groups a thing of the past. All good stuff. Political Dynamite have just uploaded a clicktivism post sparked by 38 Degrees recent, […]
