Assembly Facilitation Guidelines
Lessons from decentralised organising emphasise the value of cultivating clear and flexible processes that help us have better meetings.
While these types meetings can feel formal compared to our everyday conversations, they can help us cultivate intentional collaborative spaces to practice relating well across our differences.
One of the well-established facilitation tools for creating collaborative spaces is to adopt a structured ‘container’ that starts with an opening circle to signal our move into this deliberate collaborative space and ends with closing circle that will bring us back to more familiar ways of conversing.
For our initial assemblies, we adopted a structured container to support as all to take turns co-facilitating assemblies. As we co-create our agreements and processes, we can also adjust these Assembly guidelines and add more examples. Since then, we have added additional processes (such as a ‘check-in round’ that includes an opportunity to express ’twinges’).
The Agenda for each Assembly is shared by the Process & Strategy Crew on our Loomio forum in advance (along with any links to current discussion), and meeting notes are added to the same thread within the following week.
Facilitation Container
Opening circle
- Acknowledgement of Country
- Arriving ritual
- Arriving circle prompt
- Check-in rounds
- Statement of intent
Standing items
Main Agenda
- The specific details and order our agenda will change, as the examples below illustrate, yet we hope to cultivate a rhythm that allows for time to discuss upcoming decisions as well as an activity to help us to build skills relating well together and practice navigating conflict productively. Any emergent items for discussion will also be added here. Given the length of time required, facilitators may want to add a break and/or an energy-raising activity.
Closing circle
- Leaving circle prompt
- Closing ritual
Examples
Example Check-in Round Prompts
Expressing ’twinges’ prompt: “I’m going to allow a few minutes of silence to reflect on our experiences in this collective since the last assembly; please share any twinges you’re holding into that silence”. (Reminder, if needed: A twinge is something someone is having feelings about big or small, we share these to help us practice bringing even the most minor discomforts or awkwardness into the awareness of the group. The point is to name the twinge and have it witnessed, not fixed or solved. For example: I feel disappointed that there wasn’t much engagement in the social activities I tried to organise; or I felt uncertain about whether or not to comment on discussion thread about our values because I found the instructions confusing and didn’t know how to ask for clarifications)
Sharing-context prompt: “Thinking about things that will impact your well-being and focus between now and the next assembly, please share how you are feeling about your capacity to participate in the Brassica Collective (along with any relevant context you’d like others to be aware of)”
Example Standing Agenda Items
- Confirm date/time for next Assembly
- Confirm roles for next Assembly (e.g., co-facilitators, scribes, etc)
- Crew report-backs, peer Q&A, and time for participants to opt-in/opt-out
Example Main Agenda Items
- Discussion of upcoming decision proposal to adopt a conduct agreement for the collective (40 min)
- Facilitated activity eliciting ideas for acting on our Land back commitments - part 1 (30 min)
- Facilitated activity to help us calibrate our values as they relate to this project - part 1 (30 min)
- Facilitated activity using rounds of the 1-2-4-all facilitation pattern to explore possible ’themes’ for different houses within the collective (25 min)
- Facilitated activity exploring the critical uncertainties of our project - 100 min)