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FAQ for Facilitating Small Group Dialogues Online Click here to volunteer as a facilitator for the ONLINE event.
Questions 1. What do you mean by "facilitator"? In this case, a facilitator is a role with the responsibility of maintaining a civil and productive online dialogue among discussion group participants. There will be an agenda for groups to consider consisting of proposals for the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan and the design of the World Trade Center memorial. The facilitator will introduce discussion topics, wrap up topics and move on the next, stimulate conversation, summarize group opinions and keep conflict and unrelated discussion to a minimum. Each facilitators will be assigned to a single group of 30 participants for the duration of the event. Adapting from the list of required skills described for the face-to-face Listening to the City meetings, a facilitator should have:
back to top 2. How many facilitators are you looking for?
We'd like to recruit 47 facilitators. Many more people volunteered to facilitate the face-to-face meetings in New York than were needed. We believe that will also be the case with the online forums.
3. Why should I volunteer to do this?
This is an opportunity to donate your time and skills to a great cause of national interest. The government agencies and the organizations responsible for rebuilding (and recovering) in the World Trade Center vicinity need and invite the input of local citizens. This event will help to provide quality input.
4. How much time should I count on devoting to this activity?
Since each group is limited to 30 participants and the member rosters will not change during the event, these "communities" will be much more stable than those found on most open online community platforms. We expect that most participants will post two or three messages per day and that each facilitator will need to log in two or three times per day for about an hour each time.
5. How are the participants chosen and assigned to their groups?
The details are still being worked out, but the goal is to have as much diversity as possible in each group. As people register for the discussion they will be asked to provide demographic information about themselves (race, gender, age, household income, where they live, etc) and will be asked if they live, work or own a business in lower Manhattan, are a family member of a 9/11 victim, work with one of New York's emergency services, etc. SGD software will be programmed so people in similar demographic or "special population" categories are spread through as many groups as possible.
6. What other responsibilities will facilitators have besides working with their groups?
Facilitators will be asked to keep a daily text log summarizing their activities and impressions to be sent through the Coordinator to Web Lab at the end of the event. They will also be provided with an email address for reporting social, technical or content problems as they are encountered online. These could include duplicate topics or other content needing deletion or editing. We expect that the Appropriate Use statement appearing at registration will filter out disruptive participants, but there will be an escalation procedure for dealing with them if necessary. Facilitators will not be responsible for enforcement.
7. How will the group interaction affect decisions made about the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan and the design of the memorial?
As with the face-to-face group dialogues at the Jacob Javits Center, the ideas and opinions coming out of the online dialogues will be seriously considered by "key city and state government organizations that have authority for developing the area." You can learn more about the connection between the face-to-face dialogues and the redevelopment at the Listening to the City Web site.
8. Will there be any training involved?
Yes, it will be brief but all facilitators will be required to go through it so they understand the technique used to formulate voting questions from discussion and to achieve the intended results. The online training format will be announced shortly, but for sure there will be a private online discussion area reserved for facilitators and the Coordinator where procedures will be explained and clarified. This forum will also serve facilitators as a place to ask questions and to share solutions during the event. There will be a brief "dress rehearsal" shortly before launch. The date of the rehearsal will be announced around July 22.
9. Will there be any other staff besides the facilitators?
The dialogues are being organized by senior Web Lab staff members who have run previous Small Group Dialogues (SGD), including executive producer Marc Weiss and Jed Miller, Director of Collaboration and Community. Web Lab will have 10 "monitors" reading posts and monitoring activity in discussion groups to keep tabs on how the overall event is progressing. They will be looking for common problems or difficulties and will help Web Lab evaluate the effectiveness of the format in achieving its purpose. They will not post in discussions that are being actively facilitated but will only observe.
10. How does SGD actually work? Web Lab has developed SGD over several years of trial and refinement to foster much higher quality discussion than is usually found online. SGD is both a technique and a technology (developed to provide tools to implement and automate as much of the technique as possible). The Listening to the City online discussions will use existing SGD technology but will modify the technique in several significant ways. For a detailed description of the technique and its history, click here and here. The main difference between past dialogues and Listening to the City is that the LTC dialogues have a specific agenda and desired outcomes, so they will be guided much more actively. Past groups have been primarily self-moderated by participants; half the groups in LTC will be directly facilitated, and the other half will be guided by email messages, newsletters, etc sent to participants at key points in the discussion, with monitors keeping tabs on individual groups and intervening only if needed. There are several examples of previous discussions archived, if you'd like to see how they worked:
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Just fill in your name, email address and a very short description of your online community experience, then click the Send it in! button. We'll contact you within 24 hours.
Yes, having read the description of the Listening to the City discussions, I would like to be considered as a volunteer facilitator. |
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