Menu:

Praise for our approach to a public consultation meeting

22/02/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
It's always reassuring to have positive feedback, especially when it's public. We've been passed the latest copy of a newsletter reporting on the consultative meeting on parking, that we ran last month in a Yorkshire village. The editor describes a "very constructive evening which was excellently hosted" -

"Kevin facilitated the initial discussion, deferred and quelled any potential provocateurs effectively and brought them around to the main business of taking the comments from the surveys and turning them into ideas to either consider or bypass... I for one really expected it was going to be a complete bun fight, but was pleasantly surprised by the meeting’s tone and impressed by the way Kevin Harris facilitated."

Source: Spring 2012 edition, Dore to Door magazine.
Add Comment
 

Parking: taking the road rage out of consultation

08/02/2012

0 Comments

 
_
Picture
_We recently designed and ran a consultative process for a public meeting on the sensitive subject of car parking, in a large village on the outskirts of Sheffield.

Our work was based on numerous written remarks in open questions from an online survey, many of which suggested solutions and many of which expressed annoyance at inconsiderate drivers.

The process we devised sought to ensure that the meeting was participative and produced an outcome. Residents apparently were expecting a conventional public meeting in which councillors said something from the front, were shouted at by a few worked-up voices from the rows, and nothing much changed as a consequence.

Instead we ensured that people had the chance to shape their own agenda; had the opportunity to augment and comment, in groups, on every live proposition as it was passed round; using specially printed sheets which included a street map; and they had the chance to vote, at the end, on preferred options to address the parking problem. It was local participative democracy in action.

We have now been asked to carry out further analysis to support the outcome of the meeting.
Add Comment