Awele Documentation Reap what you share

Before getting into facilitation procedures, you should know that the facilitation of a forum comprises a number of different roles.

Ideally, a facilitation team comprises one person per role, but in certain cases, one person can play more than one role.

These roles are the following (Ø mandatory; # strongly advised; @ advised):

Ø facilitation

This is obviously the facilitator’s main role. Comparable to the chair in a face-to-face meeting, the forum facilitator introduces the discussion, gives the floor, asks questions, and keeps an eye on the calendar and objectives. This role can be shared by all the members of the Facilitation team in its aspects of raising questions, asking for specifics, and giving the floor,

but only one person should be in charge of monitoring the deadlines defined in the working calendar and making sure these are met.

This role is comparable to the person, in a face-to-face meeting, panel, or round table, who keeps an eye on the clock and makes sure all the agreed-upon discussion subjects are covered. We can call this person the “chief facilitator.”

Ø behind-the-scenes facilitation

Because of its importance, we point to this as a specific role although it is actually part of basic facilitation, and can and should be shared by all the members of the Facilitation team. It consists in contacting participants or potential participants through private messages to encourage them to contribute to the discussion.

Ø subscription and management of Web-based interface of the mailing-list software (in our case, "sympa,” see Chapter II, "… set up the tools for the forum")

Subscriptions, unsubscriptions, checking for e-mail errors, this is an indispensable task. The person in charge of it should also be able to publish the summaries on the Web site, as well as all the other elements that it was decided should be available on the Web site (see below, "setting up a collaborative Web site").

Ø moderation

Whether the forum is moderated “at the source” or “in progress” (see Chapter VI), this role is mandatory. Its purpose is to make sure all the participants comply with the working rules (see 2 Forum-rules.txt, 2 Layout.txt and, if needed, 2Translation.txt).

Ø translation

This role is mandatory when there is more than one working language. See Chapter III for the different translation options.

The person who fills this role must have the profile of a bilingual / trilingual facilitator, rather than that of a translator. Lightly edited translation (Level 1, see Chapter IV) requires having to make some quick choices in terms of the topics and the participants, which requires a strong involvement in the facilitation process. "True" translators find it hard to settle for less-than-perfect, as they are trained to provide good translations.

# or Ø writing of summaries

An e-forum is usually “open,” that is, new participants can join the discussion in progress. For such persons to be able to catch up quickly on the progress of the discussion, it is strongly advised to make summaries of the discussions available on a regular basis (weekly or bimonthly, or weekly and monthly, for example, depending on the duration and the pace of the discussion).

When “non connected” persons are participating (see Chapter VII) writing and translating, and sending of summaries becomes mandatory, because such persons will not receive all the daily messages, just summaries of them.

These summaries are published on the list but should also appear in a “summaries” section on the forum Web site, so they are quickly accessible.

Another factor is that forum participants, however long the forum lasts, are usually very taken by their everyday work. Summaries allow them to take up the discussion without having to read all the messages that escaped them.

# setting up a collaborative Web site

Besides the usual Web interface attached to a mailing-list software program (see http://www.forums.alliance21.org/info/babel for an example of the one provided by "sympa"), it is highly recommended to obtain the services of a Webmaster to set up a collaborative-type Web site, such as "spip." Awele's offers include setting up a spip Web site for you. The content of this type of Web site can be added to by anyone who is given the right to do so in a few easy steps without their having to learn any specific Web-related skill (html publication, for instance). It can be divided into per-language sections, each language section featuring relevant subsections : introductions of participants, the messages (or just their abstracts) contributed to the debate, summaries of the debate, reference documents, conclusions, etc. Keep in mind that the more complex and complete you wish your Web site to be, the more time-consuming this part of the job will be!

The forum facilitators can thus fill the different sections themselves with the ongoing content produced by the forum, thus providing participants with the possibility of browsing through the debate with a clear and pleasant tool to do so. At the end of the debate, the whole process is thus already organized and available to the public.

# regulation

This is actually one of the moderation roles, applicable in the case of moderation at the source (see Chapter VI). We present it as a separate role because it is important. Messages to a forum often arrive in “reams.” When a participant receives a lot of messages in one blow, it is very likely that he/she won't have the time to read them and will be unwilling to do so. It is therefore advisable, in order to facilitate everyone’s regular participation and therefore a true dialogue, for the moderator to publish the messages in their order of arrival, but at a rate of 3 or 4 messages / day at the most.

@ watchtower

This role is very useful in certain types of forum. It consists in monitoring the events relevant to the topic of discussion and informing the forum of them. This can be a role shared by participants who have volunteered to do so. It can be a "heavy" role (systematic proactive research) or a "light" role (information as it comes) depending on how important it is for your discussion.

These functions do not require one person per role. You will distribute the roles according to the number of people that make up your team. Here are some indications:

• Only one person is “chief facilitator.” His/her main role is to make sure, with regard to the participants as well as to the Facilitation team, that the discussion, and all of its components (translations, summaries, the introduction of a new topic, etc.) progress according to the time defined by the calendar.

• Only one person does the moderation and the regulation.

• Translation is intimately linked to the moderation: translation and moderation can, or even should be done by the same person.

• Only one person introduces and concludes the discussion on one topic, as well as encouraging the completion of discussion of a topic through occasional messages to point out, for instance, that such-or-such aspect still needs discussion, there is still strong disagreement on such-or-such a point, there is only so much time left before conclusion, etc.

• The Facilitation team as a whole can facilitate the debate in terms of the content, raise questions, and rekindle the discussion. The entire team is also in charge of contacting participants outside the forum (through private messages) to encourage them to contribute to the debate. This requires internal coordination. For messages from the Facilitation team to the forum, all messages should be sent for publication to the moderator, who is in charge of publishing them. Messages to participants outside forum should be copied to the rest of the team members to keep them informed and avoid two persons' doing the same thing.

• The watchtower role can be shared, or filled by one person.

With all this in mind, and as an example,

… if you have a team of two persons:

• one person is chief facilitator, moderator, and translator, and manages the mailing-list Web interface

• the other person introduces and concludes on the topics, writes summaries, plays the watchtower, and transfers the content to the public (collaborative) Web site

• all the other facilitation aspects are shared by both

… you can also get participants involved …

• for example, you can get participants, in turn, to write summaries, to introduce and to conclude on a topic, and/or to play the watchtower role.

Your role, as facilitator, is to make sure that all these roles are assigned explicitly within a team, possibly by involving participants of the forum.

What follows should go without saying, but we shall be explicit about it:

All the members of the Facilitation team should know and understand the debating topics in depth. If this is not the case, then it should be true for at least whomever is in charge of introducing, exploring, and concluding on a topic, but this does not excuse all the other members from having a good understanding of the topic and of what is at stake in the debate.