From ICommons wiki

[edit] Involving the Community

Communities are obviously key - and important for iCommons

Probably a few types of communities that we are looking at (we are excluding the icommons community that comes every year for now):

1. The iCommoner who doesn't know that they are one - The people who are doing great work, but don't know about the summit and are not connecte yet, but are obvious participants
2. People who only interface remotely, who are not coming to attend
3. Last year's people

Once you have identified these domains, how do we get the right input from them and what is the right way

Last year this process was quite painful, so we need to find a better way. The stuff that ended up on the wiki was not so great. It was mostly people speaking about themselves and what they wanted to show.

• Select people who are competent at facilitating this discussion, who speak to a lot of communities and make sure this process works
• Have representatives from particular regions
• The facilitators get the conversation in their communities going and feeds back the results. Someone we trust to do this kind of mediation.
• It's important that everybody can participate and join the conversation, but there will be one person from each region who is responsible to iCommons to feedback the results and interface with the summit planning
• These point people would be putting out calls for ideas and proposals to their communities / and share ideas and conversations
• This is a way to get many more people to provide input and make sure the summit does what they want
• Also important that people are "doing", rather than just asking for something
• Now we need to come up with clear guidelines for these types of facilitators

After some discussion the group stated that there is Full Agreement that the process has to be entirely transparent

Comment / Discussion

• I think it is too complicated and I find the process non-transparent, because these point people already exist. A better model might be an academic conference - calls for presentations. Make it an open process that is time-tested and works with complete openness. The core thing is trust. I think "trust" the way it is used here means non-transparent. Make the calls open and public so everyone can see them.
• Reply: Absolutely. We want this to be open and not happening behind the scenes. Everything happens in the open - emails will be on the public list. It's just that a few people are helping to field responses and group things if they fit together.
• Comment: I think using "academic conferences" as the model is going to get us exactly the opposite of what we have been trying to design over the past 2 days.
• Comment: Are we making this process to complicated - it sounds like there is a lot of "process" that people will need to implement.
• Suggestion: Why worry about it. We have tons of place, open it up and let anyone do anything they like (with limitations). Have good facilitators available to do programmes on the fly, use experienced facilitators on site to then come up with the final agenda on the fly.
• Comment: Will there be some kind of filtering mechanism that is introduced if we have these mediators - will they be keeping some ideas out?
• Answer: The problem in the past has not been that there was too much (which would be filtered), but there was too little feedback. The mediator's role would be to motivate more people to participate and contribute more and not filter anything.
• Comment: We need to balance bureaucracy, and lack of input, and helping iCommons do the work
• Comment: When we communicate that there are these mediators it's important that we explain why they were chosen - and explain clearly what their role is, why we need them, and make sure everyone understands that. This is a question that goes further, not just this topic - we need to make sure that everything / all decisions that we are taking here need to be communicated clearly. [This point found agreement]