Toronto

Through out the conference I had invited people to use the Dotmocracy sheets during their sessions.  While only one of th approximately 30 groups bothered to try (and they were too small, I did hear back from other participants that "we could have used your sheets in our session".  As no surprise, it is once again obvious that if there is no buy-in and facilitation for using a Dotmocracy process by a group leader, then the group is not likely to use it. As well group leaders are not likely to try something new without some practice before hand.

The passing of clipboards during the closing plenary did work ok because the lead facilitator announced and supported the process.  Take-up for writing new ideas was slow, I'd guess because:

1. Participants were burnt out from 8 hours of workshops.
2. Many participants were posting ideas via Twitter and the event wiki.
3. People were not bursting with ideas for "Next Steps". Very few people were interested in speaking orally to the question either.

But still once some ideas were written particpant did dot and pass while listening to the plenary. So the model can work.

In the future, I'd collect ideas for dotting through out the day, conducting dotting in the mid afternoon and just announce results in the closing plenary when people are tired.

This Dotmocracy wall in a conference did not work that well for a few reasons:

1. There was not time in the agenda that focused or introducing and kick-starting the process.
2. The process was not promoted effectively in conference materials or during plenary sessions.
3. The posted question was too difficult.  Although it was a conference on participatory democracy, I did not get the feeling that participants were brimming with suggestions for making it a reality and thus answering the question.
4. The process and conference over all was very academic, and thus people did not have any real stake in the outcomes.  Participants did not feel there would be any negative or positive impacts from the Dotmocracy process, so why bother?
5. The wall itself was not very eye catching in its appearance. Text was black on white and written very dry. Maybe more colour and snappy writing might have attracted more interest.
6. Workshops were scattered through multiple floors and spaces in the OISE building and thus the wall location did not have a frequent critical mass of people to participate.

Next time I would ensure there is at least 20 minutes set aside early in the agenda to kick-start the process and would also work with the conference organizers to ensure process was valued and well integrated with the conference plans.

Originally I had planned two additional rounds:

ROUND THREE: Organizing Plans (one break-out group per a project)
1. What are the organizating structures required for each selected project?
How are decisions made? How is collaboration orchestrated? How are efforts managed? How do
participants communicate with eachother? What are the key required roles?

ROUND FOUR: Commitment
1. Each selected project is post on chart paper and participants are invited to sign up under various
roles, e.g. steering committee, technician, campaigner, supporter, funder.

But once the process was underway, I realized this was not realistic within the limited time. People also started leaving to catch trains and beat traffic.

I'm not sure the first round was that helpful either. It might have been better to just go straight to project ideas, assuming that participants would already know what projects would make effective use of their potential to achieve results, or maybe including defined resources and results in the preamble.

I also found the participants were quite tired from a long two days of group activity. We used an erergizer excerize that helped, but ideally the process would have been done earlier in the day.

This meeting was one of many in a series organized by community leaders and the City. A major difference at this meeting was the lack of grand standing and loud debate. Some of the 'usual suspects' that often dominated the agenda got frustrated with not being able to make speeches, while accepted the new 'write and dot' format.

It was obvious that a majority of women participated where usually men dominated.

Having the city host and endorse the dotmocracy process gave it greater legitimacy.

There were some concerns that I as facilitator was biased because I was also friends with Pedestrian Sunday organizers, but after promising that I would be objective and would not contribute or influence the content, there were no more concerns.

The 8 parallel questions seemed to work well.Â? I had to encourage people to give answers to the those questions that had less answers. I think this worked because their were many small groups who were all familiar with the topic and the questions were very accessible.Â?

After the final results were given to organizers and city staff, it is not clear how much they used them. Both city officials and community organizers commented that getting support and buy-in from a few power brokers was more important.

The City took the top 20 ideas to document in their own minutes. I took all the results and generated a complete report.Â? The turn around time was about 3 weeks. I think it might have been more well recieved if it was presented in print, given to more people, discussed in the local press and was given some agenda time in a follow-up meeting.