The small things during the past weeks

The last two weeks community builders have been very active in subscribing to different on -line communities. Now you can find us on: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ , http://www.technorati.com/ , http://myjeeves.ask.com/ , http://reddit.com/ and http://digg.com/. So, please fell free and us to your networks.

Another thing the the community builders had created is the webblog twins brother on google blogspot.

What else we had done during the past weeks?

We had updated the library and the project section on the website. The library had been expended with different resources about community planing, active participation and community development. So all the interested ones are welcome to visit it.

The project section now provides detailed information about the project which were developed and implemented before the community builders and actually lead us to the development of community builders. In the project section you will find not only reports about the projects, but as well the pictures showing us in action.

This much we had done besides the continues work on practical booklets and methods about which I was writing in the previous post.

What happen during the last month with community builders?

There is almost one month past after the seminar. It has been a quite busy month for team, so that we hardly noticed that Romanian summer is knocking on the door. The month has been passing in evaluating the seminar, writing reports, and thinning and planing the future steps of the community builders.

At this moment the team had established the theoretical part of the campaign builder tool.

Taking into consideration the results of the seminar we had agree on first of all on designing theoretical booklets that will cover the basic things that needs to be done in order to do a project for community and after that to go further with methods which will help to implement the theoretical part.

The 6th preparation meeting for seminar “Architecture of Youth Participation”

It's Monday 9^th of April. We meet for testing 2 session and if the time will allow, we plan to go further with the discussing other sessions.

The 1^st session what we stared to test was the Campaign Builder Plan. The session design contained 4 elements: vision, objectives, values and checklist. We went trough each step of the session and by the end of the process there was two important lessons what we find out: 1^st we realized that is a weak link at this point between the checklist and the session. The 2^nd thing was that instead of checklist we should add establishing the results of the campaign builder tool.

The 5th preparation meeting for seminar “Architecture of Youth Participation”

Sunday 11:00 we met and we started with going trough the entire agenda – discussing and testing sessions. Before going into discussion about the content and methods of the sessions we decided to split the session between us - who is leading each session in the seminar. After establishing this we started with session “Clarifying concepts” - the 1^st plan include to clarify 6 concepts and Ladder of Youth Participation. And Guess what the time what wee needed for cover all this was 4,5 h, this was the 1^st sign that we have to cut some element out of this session – we had only 3 h maximum what we could offer for this session.

The 4th preparation meeting for seminar “Architecture of Youth Participation”

Saturday 13:00 we met and the 1^st things that we discussed was that - we have to do something about the methods that we want to use, cause till now all the sessions are based on brainstorming, clustering, naming - this is too much the same. We have to to think of another solution to create a little bit of dynamic to the facilitation session.

We went thorough the result of yesterdays meeting once again and this time we united too things: Factors and levels of Youth Participation with Clarifying concepts. The reason of taking this decision was simply the limited time what we have in the seminar, so we had to prioritize and exclude some elements form the program. This is always so hard, when you think, you just simply wonder, how to do it, cause all is united. All plays the role in the entire process.

The 3rd preparation meeting for seminar “Architecture of Youth Participation”

It's Friday afternoon and we meet again. This meeting we deducted to establish the main things what the agenda of the seminar should contain. We structured the meeting on ToP (Technology of Participation) method and this time the open question for us was: what is necessary to implement a successful campaign.

The 3h brainstorming, clustering and discussion process brought up a lot of things. Some of them, such us Working Team, we didn't even imagined to tackle in this seminar. After we had clustered the brainstormed element and named the clusters we end up with 9 big elements: sharing experience, overview of campaign, clarifying concepts, campaign builder plan, methods, interest group analysis, factors and levels of youth participation, work team and steps and activities of campaign. We decided to implement 8 of them as sessions and one which refers to legislations and policies to leave for the website. The question was now in our heads was – how make out of this elements a session.

The 2nd preparation meting for the Seminar "Architecture of Youth Participation"

The 2^nd planing meting brought us back in the past in the beginning, We shortly went trough all the projects what had been developed in the frame of the public participation in the last 4 years. This process, made us to think about the lessons what we learned from each of the project and how we can implement the lessons in this project.

After analyzing the history and reflecting on the previous experience we started to think – what could be the critical issues in this project. The discussion expanded very fruitful and we discussed some things that didn't bumped in our mind before. In the end we placed the critical issues in the hurricanes on our plan.

Now was the time to think of participant core competences what they would need in order to be able fully participant in the seminar. Well the list came out a bit long one......indeed so many things to be aware when you work in a team.

The next step what we took was the brainstorming of results what we need to achieve with the sessions, so we could reach our vision. We brainstormed around 30 min and many different things came out. After discussing the brainstormed results we stopped the process, because we feel that we need more structure on participation campaigns. We decided to look more on different materials about youth participation and meet next day again.

Several hours latter we borough the topic of the seminar again in the center of our discussion. This time one of the questions was - do we focus on speaking about campaign, which is involving as well young people or we focus on the campaign which is aimed to involve young people? These questions brought us in deep discussion...in the end we agree to focus on campaign which involves young people as well. It was already 22:00 o'clock and we decided that it's time to go home and to meet tomorrow again to continue.

The 1st preparation meeting for the Seminar "Architecture of Youth Participation"

We started the preparation meting by preparing the meting by itself. Janina came up with idea to base the meeting on one of the graphic facilitation templates, so in the beginning we stared to draw and color the materials. I was joking that we are in the 2^nd grade of the kindergarten - I took the drawing part and Janina and Marius the coloring one, and before we reach to the thinking part of the preparation process the colors, crayons, rubbers and papers of the image were all over the office.

The structure is finished:

“Oh my god! these all elements we have to do today!” this was the 1^st impression what came into my mind when I seat down and took a look of the planing template what we need to fill in. The template including everything, starting from the vision till future challenges. Well it was still empty, so we had to start to filling it in if we wanted to move further.

The starting point of the process was to establish the vision - what we want to see after he seminar. The old, tested method of individual brainstorming worked out as well this time. For around 30 min we brainstormed individually the elements what the vision should include. Then we started to cluster them, of course the clustering part included a fruitful discussion – why this should go with that and not with that! After clustering the brainstormed ideas we moved further with rephrasing the clusters and to creating the final element of the vision - well this was hard, but in the end we were really surprised with what we came up. The vision included several elements, but the central element of our vision is: “Emerge thoughts create a learning path for enlarging the horizon, that leads to extraordinary opportunities in Youth Participation”. This one made US very proud and we decided to put it as quote in the seminar room.

After picturing the vision of the seminar we went further by establishing the mission – our boat for reaching the vision, and guiding principles – the waves who will help our boat to reach the vision.

The process of establishing the mission was a bit more easier then the vision, probably because we already spoke about it when we created the announcement of the seminar and many things come as well during the discussion about the vision elements.

Then came the turn to establish the guiding principles for reaching the vision....well this process brought up a lot of ideas and the team went into very deep discussion. But finally we reach a result with which we all felt comfortable and satisfied. After putting the final dot on the guiding principles we realized that the process took us around 4 h...well it deserved each min what we spend.

Well the 1^st step of the planning phase is done, we know were we are going, now we have to think how we gonna get there....but when you know were you want to reach it makes your path much more easier... now looking back at the process it seemed so light...and looking at the result it's hard to believe that the process were you create vision, mission and you think of values in which you believe will help you to reach your vision can be so light.....indeed when you are present in something fully and surrounded by people who feels the same, you don't realize the time what it takes...the effort what it takes, but you are in the flow – in the process which brings satisfaction about the results in the end and willing to continue....