This Guide has a history.
In the first ten years of its existence, the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World, also called Alliance 21, developed and experimented a set of methodologies to facilitate the work of international work groups whose purpose was to produce collectively formulated proposals for achieving the necessary mutations to build another world in the coming decades. Since 2005, the Alliance 21 communication team in charge of implementing and teaching this methodology, has set up an independent group, the Awele Project, whose purpose is to spread all of its proven methodologies as broadly as possible in order to facilitate the emergence of global citizens' alliances around the world. The present Guide is part of this methodology.
Information and communication technology has been providing international workgroups for some time now with Internet-based communication tools: the World Wide Web, electronic mail (or e-mail), and “e-forums.” Though such tools have opened up unprecedented possibilities for sharing information and ideas, we need to keep in mind that access to them is still limited in many parts of the world and for numerous social sectors, and that widespread “literacy” in their use remains to be acquired. It is therefore necessary to see them as complementary to “traditional” working and communication methods: work on the field of course, face-to-face meetings, newsletters, working documents, individual and collective research, experience sharing, the often forgotten non-written forms of communication, etc.
By “e-forum” we refer to a single e-mail address that is common to all those who are subscribed, or registered to it. To subscribe to an e-forum, the only requirement is to have access to e-mail. All the messages sent to an e-forum address are received by all the people who are subscribed to it.
It can serve to conduct a public, open, multilingual, structured, international debate with expected results, or simply as the “permanent meeting room” of a work group for any specified purpose, whose members may be scattered geographically and speak different languages.
Last but not least, the methodology described here is designed essentially for participatory and bottom-up processes, so that results can be owned by all members of the group.
The present Guide is intended to help you as facilitator in this fundamental task.
The medium chosen for this methodology is e-mail-based, rather than Web-based, for two reasons:
However, the ongoing results (introductions of the members, contributions, summaries) as well as the working documents provided for all members can also be published on a specific, associated Web site, for easier reading and consultation per language section.
Some parts of the Guide contain the letter F followed by the name of a file in “text only” (.txt) or in Word doc (.doc) format, which indicates the existence of a separate file provided with the Guide. Such files contain information that you need, but that you may also have to provide to the persons subscribed to the forum after having customized them. They can all be downloaded from the Appendix at the end of this Guide.