Radical Inclusion Facilitated the World Banana Forum
This is the World Banana Forum, a multi stake holder network of people who are involved in different parts of the banana supply chain – from small Latin American farmers or unionists to the large retailers like Wall Mart, and also NGOs, Fair Trade organizations etc. The meeting was organized by a team working for the FAO who had already reserved the rooms and made an agenda, when they were sending out an urgent request for facilitators. A very tough assignment considering all the conditions: rooms were not at all suitable for collaborative work, a big group about 190 people- three languages, a very ambitious agenda and little time to get organized. Two facilitatours from Radical Inclusion (Holger Nauheimer und Juliane Neumann) accepted the challenge.
One of the main objectives of the gathering was to start a collaboration between the members of the forum who had met in the past only to present their statements, but felt that it was time to actually talk to each other. The key topics had been identitfied and heterogenous working groups were supposed to get started on the topics.
Our concern as facilitators was especially the sustainability of the event and therefore to produce a proper documentation that could be used and accessed also after the meeting. We set up a basic wiki (pbworks.com), created pages for each thematic group- one in english and one in “international”, what ended up to be in Spanish and we introduced the tool in the beginning of the conference. Each working group, sometimes 30-40, people had a person from the organizing team to support the group work and most of the time that person helped to get into the page, explained the basics and sometimes even provided the computer. However, major part of the break out spaces was self-organized, in a semi Open Space Technology format.
As its often with wikis, there is a small hurdle in the beginning, but at the end of the conference there were already over 50 active users. It shows that a wiki is a great tool enabling bottom-up documentation of semi-structured meetings.
(images: freshplaza.it)
