Collaborative Sessions

The workshop was inspired by techniques used in community organisations such as Transition Towns and Ignite, as well as academic experiments with collaborative research methods including unconferences. The basic idea was to try to avoid having our interesting and inspiring participants sitting in silent rows for much of the event. Instead we organised the event around facilitated interactions that let us collaborate and learn from each other in more fluid and intuitive ways. The major techniques that we used are described below, but we also made a number of other smaller tweaks to the standard conference format.  For example, rather than traditional Q&A sessions where very few people get to speak, we skipped questions altogther and discussed the keynote presentations in groups and linked the ideas back to our own work. This meant that the content was discussed in greater detail and in a wider variety of ways. We also included an introductions and expectations  session at the beginning so that people could start connecting straight away. Links between participants were also facilitated by having attendee biographies available on the website prior to the workshop and by producing a combined list of key influences (available here).

Information about some of the resources that were used to design the workshop can be found at the bottom of the page.

Affinity Mapping

The first collaborative session focused on drawing together some of the overarching themes and questions that emerged through the presentations. Participants used notecards to jot down important ideas resulting in over 100 cards. We used affinity mapping, a tool which enables groups to sort large amounts of information quickly and start to develop consensus around what are the key issues. Starting with a random card, each person identified for themselves where their card best fit.

A summary of the map produced is available below and can be downloaded in pdf form here.

See here for more info on affinity mapping.

Open Space

The second collaboration session of the workshop was a shortened version of Open Space, originally developed by Harrison Owen. The key text is Owen's Open Space Technology: A User's Guide. Inspired by the observation that it is often the conference coffee breaks that are the most productive and enjoyable, Open Space turns regular conferences on their head and does away with set agendas and discussions. Instead participants identify issues that they particularly want to discuss and then host a conversation on this issue. See here for an overview. Suggested topics and some of the group notes are just below.
  • The Historic Environment can be used to engage multiple communities. Join me to discuss these times past
  • Archaeology... as a metaphor, as a resource, as a source of poetics, as an approach or methodology
  • How does/might trans-local knowledge, experience and practice contribute to improvisation in challenging times
  • Temporalities of Practice and labour - how they intersect, how qualities are ascribed to people through temporal rhythms of practice etc
  • What is Social Memory?
  • The Role of Media Communications/Representations in time of communities
  • Cross-cultural Temporalities
  • Is there a Feminist Theory of Time? 
  • Must/should or can we do away with hope
  • Who gets/has the authority to try to 'fix' community identity? (AKA Power and time)

World Cafe

The final collaborative session utilised World Cafe. A technique also inspired by coffee breaks, but in this case, it is inspired by the leisurely conversations one has at a cafe with friends. The aim of this session was to bring all the varied activities of the workshop together in a focused, iterative discussion.  Working in rotating groups of four, the participants had three twenty minute sessions to discuss how 'time' and 'community' intersect.   See here for more info.

Resources

Here are some additional resources that were useful:
  • Robert Chambers, Participatory Workshops: A Sourcebook of 21 Sets of Ideas and Activities.
  • Impact Alliance's A Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Workshops. Available here [pdf]
  • This blog post by Nancy Dixon called  Guidelines for Leveraging Collective Knowledge and Insight
  • This list of stakeholder exercises [no long available online].
  • This link from People and Participation.net looks interesting, though I haven't checked through properly myself.