Spokescouncils: blockades and briefings part 2

I’ve been pondering spokescouncils this week as I head off tomorrow to join the facilitation team at the Hinkley Blockade. Before writing the short briefing for participants I looked around on the web to see if it already existed. Whilst doing so I stumbled across some reflections by a facilitator on The Change Agency’s website (scroll down for article) gleaned from facilitation of the Australian Climate Camp, last year.

Since it’s been a while since I facilitated a spokescouncil, I read Tanya Newman’s ‘hot tips’ with interest and appreciation. As a minimum they should be of value to anyone organising a large consensus-based event, and to large group and consensus facilitators.

I’m slightly envious of the level of organisation. Looking back to my own first encounter with facilitating spokescouncils (at the 2005 G8 summit) it all seems a lot more shambolic and improvised – a haphazard throwing together of facilitators from the UK, the Netherlands, and the USA with varying levels of experience and no track record of working together (plus meetings involving 300-500 people and translation into several languages).

Hinkley should be fairly straightforward by comparison. I’ll be back to eat those words next week.

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More strategy resources – useful tools and techniques

The folk at The Change Agency have added some new resources to the strategy pages of their website. Some of the new resources are listed and linked below, but you might like to check out the pages if you haven’t recently.

• Mechanisms of change (233k pdf) – An exercise which explores the different ways social movements can bring about change and how these different mechanisms can help when selecting tactics.
• Vision gallery (229k pdf) – A tool for envisioning specific features of the kind of society participants would like to create, and facilitating development of a common vision and shared values.
• Tactics relay (259k pdf) – An activity to assist participants to think critically and creatively about potential tactics and to reinforce social change frameworks.

I also raided a corporate website recently for some visioning  tools: scroll down for History of the Future, which I’ve since used with reasonable success and will definitely use again.

Want to read more? See our previous post on strategy resources

https://rhizomenetwork.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/strategy-resources-useful-tools-and-techniques/