Welcome, OpenGov Innovation Summits Facilitators

[Lisa Heft (Host / Chief Event Facilitation Coordinator)]

Hello and welcome to all of you who will be facilitating or consulting
on facilitation for your local OpenGov Innovation Summit Team!

In my role as Chief Event Facilitation Coordinator for the face-to-
face Summits, I will be sharing tips, best practices and
recommendations regarding the facilitation of face-to-face dialogue
events. My role is to be a resource to all of you face-to-face
facilitator folks.

As you may know, facilitation does not just mean showing up and
convening people on the day of the event. Your Team's careful
attention to all the many elements of pre-work - the full system of
each part of pre-work informing and informed by each other element -
can support the success of a dialogue event. And *not* attending to
those details can actually turn some of those well-intentioned
elements (food, site selection, documentation design, logistics, the
nature of invitation, the way you register people, your plan for
access and inclusion for a rich diversity of participants, and more)
into challenges that can actually impair the success of your event.
Some of you may already be working with your logistics or sponsorship
or technology team partners to share how face-to-face dialogue works
so that all elements are designed in relationship to the success of
face-to-face dialogue.

I'll share some more lessons learned about pre-work in future
messages.

I will also provide tips and feedback for the design of your dialogue
events - from what supports or breaks into the layering of the
participant's' thinking to why some meeting times are too short for
certain dialogue methods (like Open Space), to designs that work
really well when you only have a few hours for the meeting. From forms
of participant-driven (rather than facilitator-directed) dialogue to
participant-driven documentation design.

More about that later, too.

And finally I will help you analyze what methods (processes, designs)
may be the fit for your May event and provide feedback if you like on
the event designs you develop.

One of the basic rules of facilitation is to *not* lead with a great
method or technology or tool you'd like to use - but instead to first
do a thorough analysis of who, for what purpose, overarching
objectives, desired outcomes, time available, number of participants,
sites available, what happens before and after the event,
participants' capacity for post-event follow-up, context and culture,
issues of diversity and access, and more - before ever getting to the
'how' (the dialogue method or technology tool or process design). All
of those things inform selection of the right tool for the job. So
for example even if you love Open Space, or World Cafe, or methods
without names, or a certain kind of dialogue software - think first
about the whys and wherefores before you get to the 'how'.

Lastly - I will try to use proper naming for the tools and methods
many of us use for dialogue - for example I would not call something
Open Space if it is not the full complete form of Open Space. I
wouldn't say World Cafe - a process using questions - if it was some
other way of using questions. I don't tend to use the word
'unconference' because it means a different thing to everyone who uses
that word. Because as facilitators of all kinds it is important that
we communicate clearly and in universally-understood language and
terms - with each other and the groups and organizations we work with)
clearly.

I look forward to sharing thoughts and ideas, tips, 'what-ifs' and
'when-not-to's' and more with all of you remarkable facilitators.

Lisa