Remembering (PART) of "Listening to the City"
National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation blog (Yay, Sandy!) published an article about the second anniversary of the F2F portion of "Listening to the City" gathering in NYC, a post civic gathering 9/11 about what to do about rebuilding.
The article recaps how the volunteer facilitators were recruited and responded. It is a lovely testement to volunteerism. My one sad moment was that it did not mention the online part, nor the cadre of volunteer online facilitators. I wonder why? Why do we separate the F2F and online elements of things this way? Is it accidental? Intentional?
As one of the LTC volunteer online facilitators, I confess I think there is still a small bur under my saddle. The experience with Weblab was challenging and some of us felt devalued in the process, as if we were some quixotic experiment to prove facilitators were not needed in the design. I deeply appreciate the value of self facilitation and hold it as a goal with groups I coach. I don't appreciate being a guinea pig to test someone's theory about small group online facilitation during something as emotional as LTC, particularly when it was not clear if this was or wasn't a design element. It felt like it. But we never really dealt with the issue because working with the folks in the groups was the priority and it took both intellectual and emotional energy. That was our focus, appropriately.
Seeing the online facilitators ignored in this article rekindled the itch of that bur. Is this rational? Probably not. But it is what I feel.
Here is a snippet from the article which does not even mention the online element:On July 20, 2002, 4,500 people gathered at the Javits Center in New York to discuss the redevelopment of the World Trade Center Site, and to rebuild a sense of strength and unity as a people, following the single deadliest attack on American soil in the country’s history.
Do they listen to the online facilitators?
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania, thousands of Americans flooded blood donation centers seeking a way to assist in the tragedy, to show solidarity with their fallen fellow citizens. Nine months later professional facilitators from across the country traveled to New York City to help guide thousands of New Yorkers through the process of dialogue and sharing around their values, hopes, and needs for the rebuilding of the site where the Twin Towers once stood.
That was Listening to the City. Now, two years later, we listen to them.
posted by Nancy White at 8:18 AM
2 Comments:
I was hired by WebLab to recruit and coordinate facilitators for the online version of Listening to the City. Nancy was one of my most prized volunteers and I appreciate her unhappiness with the "experimental" nature of her - and all of the facilitators' - involvement.
The thing is, WebLab had hosted several theme-based interactive events in the previous three years, but had never employed leaders or facilitators. All of their events had relied on emergent leadership. So in their partnership with America Speaks - who organized the F2F version of LTC - they agreed to have facilitators for half of the citizen groups, while continuing with the self-facilitating model in the other half.
I apologized then (and continue to apologize) for allowing the word "experiment" to be used in reference to the generous contributions of the facilitators. But it was also very interesting to see that in the unfacilitated groups, individual were learning by "watching" the facilitated groups, and adopted many of the more effective techniques in attempting to support their own deliberations.
It was also very interesting to see how the different techniques, background and personalities of the facilitators combined with the different collective personalities of the groups to bring about a wide range of responses.
Cliff, I just want to publically say, you were great during LTC and I know you were working hard to try and manage all the things going on -- organizationally, event, personality (and there were a lot of personalities).
There has been some interesting responses on the online facilitation list on yahoo groups speculating why the LTC folks have not said much (anything) about the online elements. It may be still hard to describe online events to the larger public. I'm not sure, but it is worth thinking about.
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