I spent this past week at the second annual Code for America Summit, a showcase for Code for America 2012 projects and a meeting of the minds for the Gov 2.0 community. Code for America has been getting a lot of well-deserved press this past year, in part because of the amazing work they’ve done in just two years and also because of founder, Jen Pahlka’s fantastic TED talk. My colleague, Rebecca Petzel, had the pleasure of facilitating a strategy workshop for them last […]
Rebecca Petzel
The Skillful, Intentional Practitioner
Last week, our team was preparing for our September Delta Dialogues meeting. As part of our standard preparation, we went over the room layout and discussed how we wanted to configure it. We had arranged in advance for a room that was configurable (movable chairs and tables) and that had a projector and screen. The room was rectangular in nature, with the screen on the shorter wall of the room and it was protect by the soundproof walls in response […]
Our First Year
Tomorrow, on September 15, 2012, Groupaya celebrates its one year anniversary. It completely snuck up on all of us. We’ve had our noses to the grindstone this whole year, focusing on doing great, meaningful work, on learning as much as we can, on exploring innovative ways to make a greater impact on the world, and on living our values. It’s been incredibly intense and an absolute joy. We all feel very lucky to have had this experience together this first […]
The Facilitator’s Dilemma
I really loved Rebecca’s post on what she learned from facilitating our strategic planning process this past Fall. I want to riff on a point she made about the facilitator’s dilemma of sticking with the schedule versus letting conversations happen. Rebecca wrote: I sometimes got visibly anxious when one of our three-hour sessions was clearly not going to result in the outcome I’d designed towards. In one particularly tense moment, Eugene turned to me and said “Rebecca, I know we are not […]