Pattern #79
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Spaces for Dialogue and Collaboration
Credits: My_inspiration – Rawpixel.com – Shutterstock
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Pattern Heart
Wise democracy involves people working together — talking, creating, learning, deciding, taking action… This requires space — physical space and spaces, online spaces, psychological space, space in people’s schedules, and cultural space that honors and makes room for such interactions. So ensure such space is available in each situation and in the general culture.
Some related patterns: 11 Collective Distributed Intelligence 13 Commons and Commoning 20 Cooperative Ownership as Stewardship 27 Enough Time 38 Generating Shared Orientation 41 Groundedness 53 Multi-Media Engagement
Spaces for Dialogue and Collaboration – going deeper …
This is an edited version of the video on this page.
This pattern is sort of self-evident, except it is often overlooked, and it’s been vivid for those of us who are trying to bring people together in the community, only to find out that there are not so many spaces available for people to come together in, to talk and to work together.
Very often there isn’t the right kind of space. Conveners who want to do the process World Café need to access spaces where there can be lots of little tables with 4 to 5 people around them. Conveners who you want to do Open Space have to have spaces where people can gather in side rooms or other designated spaces for sub-conversations. And, in general, we want to have space niches in the community for people to just be able to stop and talk. Cafes have that, park benches provide that. So having that kind of space accessible helps.
This is relevant for wise democracy, because you’re trying to have people engaging together in creative ways. You need space for that. You also need online spaces. People are busily creating online spaces that have capacities for very different kinds of conversation to happen online and that is still an ongoing and rapidly developing trend. People are asking what kinds of conversation are difficult, or hard, or easy online? Some people are making new software that allows new kinds of forums to be built, to do different things online together. That whole world is part of creating “spaces for dialogue and collaboration”.
Psychological space is another kind of space we need. If you are pushing people into focusing on their own lives or hating each other, you will not have the psychological space for people to be able to work together.
We also want spaces in people’s schedules. If everybody is being overworked, if there’s no help for mothers, if there is no relief for people who are working, you don’t have “spaces for dialogue and collaboration”. The children are scheduled from morning to evening, and there’s no real time for people to stop and have conversations that make a difference, to say nothing of organized conversations to make some political progress together in the community. So space-and-time is another kind of “space”, often taking the form of “events”.
We also want cultural space that says, “Hey, this is important to do.” You have a culture that says – like the Iroquois indigenous culture – “Let’s talk until there’s nothing left but the obvious truth.“ We want a culture that believes it is important to make space for sitting around talking to find the obvious truth we can all share, that has the space and time to allow that truth to unfold over time. This is another form of scheduling your space. It is not just, “Here is two hours to do it in!“ it’s like, “Sometimes we’re gonna need to just talk, and then carry on and talk some more, even though other things were there in the schedule, because we’re still working it out.“
Underlying all this (and easily taken for granted) is having the ability and right to meet in groups larger than two – commonly known as freedom of assembly. This includes the freedom to use public spaces.
So having a culture that says this is really important, is key to make space for conversations and collaborations. The Dalai Lama talks about “a culture of dialogue”. I think that’s a big part of the way we relate to each other, to honor that and to provide the resources for that. A wise democratic system would prioritize the provision of all those different kind of spaces.
“Democracy needs a place to sit down.” – Hannah Arendt
Video Introduction (8 min)
Examples and Resources
- Maker Spaces Link
- Co-housing
Link-Wikipedia - Sweden’s Almaden Week
Link-Wikipedia
Report Democracy Now - Online sharing and gifting sites
Link-Kindista
Link-Shareable-3 Platforms
Link-Shareable-12 Ways … - The White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia (Judy Wicks)
Link-Wikipedia - Libraries, churches and local groups providing space
Link-Speakternet News
Link-Treegroup - Spacious.com Link
Intentional community is a kind of space for dialogue and collaboration. Co-housing is interesting: it mixes your own personal or family space with common spaces.
Online sharing and gifting sites are spaces in which we actually share things and exchange things.
At the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, for example, patrons have been invited to dinners where homeless people told their stories and then everyone talked about that. The owner, Judy Wicks, also used to organize trips to places Americans are not supposed to travel to. She helped Americans connect up with people in these other areas, like Vietnam and Cuba, often partnering with restaurants in those countries. (There’s little of that going on lately since she sold the White Dog Cafe, but it remains a compelling idea.)
Libraries very often have spaces for people to have meetings; churches and local groups provide space too. We have an “Aging in Community” network that meets in a room free of charge in a mental health center once a month.
Very often there are issues of money, having to pay for space to meet. That is problematic for many people: particularly, the more grassroots the gathering is, the more problematic it becomes. So having a hotel in the conference center where you pay $5000 per day is not the same as having a “space for dialogue and collaboration” – at least in the wise democracy sense.
In some areas, when a school closes, you can go and use the classrooms.
I stumbled on a thing called spacious.com. Restaurants in New York open for dinner at 5 o’clock. So this group called “Spacious” has an arrangement with the restaurants. People can come and rent individual or collective workspace in the hours prior to the restaurant opening. When the restaurant is closed, staff from Spacious makes sure there is coffee available, and then when the restaurant opens, lots of people who were working in the spaces of the restaurant stay for dinner. So it is a win-win. This is interesting: you have spaces that are closed off – like after-hour schools and before-opening restaurants – and you open them up. Existing spaces are opened up either for-profit or by the community decision for the community.
There is a saying among professional developers in the education field that “teachers make the most difficult students.” While I take umbrage with the stereotypical nature of this comment, there is some measure of truth in it and I’ve seen it over and over. When faced with challenging and/or resistive teacher participants, I have come to realize that many have been the victims of what I now call, “professional development abuse.” Their “bad” attitude comes from a very honest, experiential place. Sometimes they have not been treated as professionals, been patronized, or been asked to throw the baby out with the bathwater and drop everything they’ve been doing (most of which was working) and embrace the latest pedagogical fad to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes their feedback has not been elicited or has been ignored afterwards. Sometimes they were expected to meet in dirty, cluttered, unorganized spaces with no food or beverages offered. Many times, they are expected to do the manual labor of moving heavy furniture or assist in the setting up of the space after the training was scheduled to begin. Usually, they would have been happy to pitch in, but resented having their learning time taken for such chores. Often it was obvious to participants that little prior thought, consideration and preparation had gone into getting ready for the day.
Another aspect of this abuse can be related to the space for the professional development. “Space,” meaning, time, resources and the physical space needed to not only learn about something new, but also to discuss, practice, implement, and review the new learning. I’ve found that maintaining a welcoming, respectful tone, honoring their time by starting and ending on time and being efficient with the timing and procedures of activities go far in showing respect and lowering resistance, as can putting effort into making the physical space attractive, comfortable, inviting, and intriguing. When thoughtful effort is put into the “space” for groups, it sends the message that their attendance and participation are valued and considered important.
Wow, Laurie! I have been outside of mainstream institutions for so long (for better and worse) that I had no idea this level of professional abuse was going on. I now suspect that it is present in some other professions, too. My impetus for creating the pattern was how hard it often is to find workable affordable spaces for grassroots citizen dialogue and deliberation in communities. You’ve added a whole additional dimension for me in this pattern. I can almost taste how amazing a change it would be if such generative spaces were amply provided for ALL conversations and interactions in communities and organizations through out the culture!
In my task for ISO to facilitate 5 regional workshops 2002 for Eastern Europe, Asia, Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and South & Central America I always had to require the host organizations (in Belgrade, Bangkok, Cairo , Nairobi and Bogota) to locate the workshop in the banquet hall of big hotels where they could offer round tables for 6-8 persons. This was such a strange requirement that when the Thai host wanted a high-level person to welcome and introduce the participants they forced the hotell staff to first arrange seating in rows, which is the custom in Asia, and then during the refreshment break change to the banquet seating. Nowadays everybody have accepted the round table seating. On the list of requirements there was also a claim for flip charts, one for each table. When I later (2010) had to facilitate a stakeholder dialogue in Barbados for the Caribbean region. the participants were all equipped with laptops and refused to use the flip charts. Instead we had the IT-skilled participants to arrange a wifi network with a slide projector which every table could connect to. This was a learning lesson for a person like me, and the explanation to why caribbeans are so advanced in electronic communication was the difficulty to always need to fly from the many islands to the one where a meeting was held..
What a fascinating example of the evolution of “spaces”, Folke! And I like your explanation of the speed of that evolution in the Caribbean.
I think some of the facilitation processes like World Cafe address this pattern. Juanita one of the founders talked about how she and her husband came up with World Cafe, it was out of seeing the kind of buzz that was created in a cafe. The conversations were more intimate and lively just out of being in a cafe setting. So they decided to design World Cafe using that cafe style of structure so when people entered the room it was like entering a cafe. I have had the privilege of witnessing them facilitating a World Cafe and it really works!
Yes, Susan, that’s a good observation. Not only the availability of space and its welcoming quality, but the arrangement of seats, tables, etc., can have a profound impact. Having all the chairs bolted to the floor in rows facing a podium or stage certainly communicates something very different about the upcoming communication than having movable chairs in small circles or around small tables!
This for me is a critical element to the success of any event. Space sets the tone. If it is inviting people will participate – if people do not feel comfortable – participation will suffer. Is it a neutral venue or does it favour one perspective over another?
So true! When I created this pattern I was thinking about how hard it is to find places for a whole community or conversation to gather, so just HAVING space is critical. But your comment reminds me of the GroupWorks group process pattern Aesthetics of Space https://groupworksdeck.org/patterns/Aesthetics_of_Space, in terms of a comfortable and inviting “tone”. And I want to highlight that there is a third alternative to the dichotomy of “neutral” versus “biased”, which is the positive inclusion of all perspectives https://www.wd-pl.com/56-multiple-perspective-view-v2/. Furthermore, the space can communicate a sense of welcome and comfort, not just physically but culturally, interpersonally, and in who is present (I recently learned the racial equity term “white space” – meaning a space filled with only white people, which makes non-white people feel like they wouldn”t belong or would have to put special effort towards being included as a peer), so there can be an equity dimension to space as well https://www.wd-pl.com/28-equity-v2/ There is SO much going on in this concept of “space for dialogue and collaboration”!!
And, even before physical space sets the tone, the invitation sets the tone and is part of the multi-layers of space-setting! How might the invitation be used to actually help shape the space into an inclusive and inviting one, especially beyond just the physicality of the space? What happens when we also begin to see the invitation as part of the space – and then think about how to structure and design it to welcome in what we want people to bring with them (all the parts of that)?
And THIS brings to mind the GroupWorks pattern on Invitation https://groupworksdeck.org/patterns/Invitation. The connection between some of these patterns can be very provocative/generative….