I spent Saturday night and Sunday with a Dorset co-housing community – The Threshold Centre. Their numbers have soared in the last year, from around 8 people to over 20 so they felt it was appropriate to pause and reflect on their group decision-making process. 18 of the community came together for the workshop. The […]
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. […]
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. […]
It’s easy to point out all the potential problems for groups with hierarchical models of leadership. It’s less easy to know what to do about them. If you support groups, whether on a local or regional level, or as part of the team at a national NGO or community organisation what’s to be done? A […]
Went to a seminar hosted by the New Economics Foundation on Friday. It was partly to launch their new publication, Connected Conversations, but the main event was to experience the game of Democs. As NEF say, Democs was created so that policy discussion can be open to anyone. While traditional deliberative methods, like citizens juries, […]
I spent an hour and a half on the phone today to Jeannie and Steph, 2 of the facilitators that attended the Transition Network Dreaming Circle back in December. We were talking about meetings, more specifically trying to shape some meeting training agendas for transition groups. Very quickly the conversation turned to values, and how […]
Thanks once again to Dwight Towers for the lead to Chris Corrigan’s Facilitation Resources (which he in turn got from Johnnie Moore). A long and detailed list of approaches, specific tools and more. I haven’t found time to dig around in it just yet, but suspect I’ll be mining it for goodies for a while […]
On Saturday, I was one of a team of facilitators working at the Gathering Momentum event. The turnout was significantly higher than expected – maybe 70-100 people. They were a mix of individual activists, volunteers and staff from community groups, and NGO campaigners. A fair few were veterans of the GM campaign of the late […]
Carl and I met this week for a general catch up and planning session. He very kindly made the journey to Leicester and after an early lunch we adjourned to a local cafe and explored a wide range of topics. Naturally we had to cover the mundane stuff like finance, developing this website, publicising our […]
