Awele Documentation Reap what you share

We saw in the previous chapter that all the members of the Facilitation team are facilitators, whatever their specific roles. All this being clear for the entire team, you can proceed as following.

Get the discussion going quickly …

As soon as the first subscriptions are made, proceed as for a meeting. You are “chair”: introduce yourself, briefly recall the objective of the forum and the calendar (agenda), and invite the rest of the team and all the participants to introduce themselves. You should in fact establish as an explicit rule that before any contribution, participants should have previously introduced themselves.

Eventually, publish a second message to the forum to call for the introduction of those who have not responded, but limit the introductions period and introduce the discussion quickly.

Ask the first questions and state the time that will be given to discuss them.

… recall the products and the deadlines

At the time of the invitation and in the “welcome message,” you have already defined the products of the work on the forum and their deadlines.

These could be to prepare a face-to-face meeting or to draw up a paper and an action plan in the framework of your topic.

Once the work is underway, it will be useful for you to recall these objectives regularly. For the different topics, you will be able to call upon participants willing to introduce and to conclude on topics,

but it will be your job to make sure you that these latter comply with the intermediate deadlines that you will have fixed together.

For example, you could be launching a discussion on the basis of one or several documents. In this case, you can request first reactions to these documents for a specific date.

… take up, rekindle, refocus the discussion, and summarize

The facilitator’s role is to raise questions, take up questions that have remained unanswered, seek consensus, try to make the discussion progress, challenge the people who remain silent, and provide periodic summaries of the discussion…

… make sure the working rules are complied with …

This is one of the most important, and perhaps fastidious aspects of the facilitator’s role, that of moderation:

to make sure that the discussion is accessible to all

For this, you need to make sure that every participant is aware of the working rules when they are subscribed (Chapter II, F Forum-rules.txt) and that they are complied with.

… for an organized discussion …

The objective is to build progressively and concertedly the information that will circulate in the forum, so that the participants of the forum can organize and capitalize the thinking and proposals.

For this, do not hesitate to remind participants to apply the rules, in particular those regarding the headings of the message (title, abstract), which will be essential for the ulterior capitalization and the overall legibility of the forum.

… but also for “basic” legibility …

Given that a good number of the persons subscribed to the forum can be more-or-less beginners in the use of this medium, “infringements” to the rules can be numerous and frequent.

Among these, you will find:

- use of a language not defined as a working language

- messages that are too long and/or not very clear

- attached files

- personal messages to other participants of the forum

- messages that are off the subject

- messages full of spelling mistakes, therefore nearly untranslatable with MT

- answers to messages uselessly including the whole message to which it is replying …

… and for a “cross-cultural” reading …

One of the your main roles is to facilitate understanding among participants. For this, you must take into account all the cultural and social backgrounds of the whole of the participants and must encourage participants to do the same. This involves, for example, explaining references that are specific to a country, a social class, or a professional context, in order to make them accessible to all.

… through moderation “in progress” or “at the source”

Moderation can be exercised in progress or at the source. e-Forum programs usually provide an option whereby the messages either are posted on the forum directly, or they can first be "screened" by the moderator. In the first case, the discussion list is set up so that a message written by a participant is directly published on the list. This is only possible for forums in a single language. In the second, the list is set up so that a participant’s message is first received by the moderator. In regular e-forum programs the moderator can choose to "validate" the message or not. In the "sympa" program provided by Awele (see Chapter II, "… set up the tools for the forum"), the moderator can also change the layout of the message to make it legible and check that the content is appropriate to the discussion in progress, then translate it before publishing it on the list.

s moderation in progress

We do not advise this form of moderation. You can however choose it for a work list that is limited in time and to a very specific workgroup with a limited number of participants.

In this case, facing all the problems mentioned above, and yet many others of all sorts and kinds, you have an educational duty. It is your job to send messages to the authors to point out problems and offer solutions. These messages will generally be private messages, discreet and diplomatic, addressed to the authors. However, you can sometimes judge that a problem is shared by enough people to justify pointing it out directly on the forum.

s moderation at the source

This form, where messages are “screened” by the moderator, guarantees that all messages addressed to the forum will be legible and relevant.

In this case, the messages sent to the forum will first come to your mailbox, and you will “validate” their publication on the forum, or not. This form of moderation also permits the “regulation” role described above (Chapter V).

If there is a problem, then you can send back the message to its author, explaining what is wrong and asking the author to correct it. In certain cases, this back-and-forth won't be necessary, for all you will have to do is correct the layout before sending the message to the forum. Nevertheless, for any problem regarding the content, do not act without the author's consent.

Moderation at the source can be perceived as a form of censorship, and it is important that everybody understands precisely what it is about. On no accountwill you intervene in the content of the messages.

Whatever the form of moderation, your educational job remains the same.