Article

by Jay W. Vogt

Published in New England Planning, March 2006 (a newsletter published by the Massachusetts and Rhode Island chapters of the American Planning Association)

Imagine that you are the state planner in charge of designing and implementing your state’s growth management policy. In twenty years 200 of your state’s towns have created comprehensive plans consistent with state goals. But so much progress has sparked some backlash, and now the legislature is directing you to revamp the program. You must put everything on the table. You need broad public participation. And you have six months to deliver the goods. Where do you start?

Sue Inches, Deputy Director of the State Planning Office in Maine, faced such a challenge in the summer of 2005. Maine’s Growth Management Act had achieved great things. But the state had changed substantially in twenty years. Growth pressures in some areas had intensified. Other parts of the state had stagnated. Many folks felt the state’s guidance was helpful. Others complained it was just adding red tape. The Maine Legislature challenged the Office to solicit public feedback on the Act, develop recommendations, and bring them back for review by February 1st.

Sue could have gone into a room, locked the door, and written those recommendations in a week. But she knew that would never win the respect or support of the people of Maine. Or necessarily produce the best thinking. She needed a means of engaging the public that:

1. Would involve as many interested folks as cared to participate
2. Would be open enough in its design to feel welcoming to people with staunch and opposing views
3. Would enable diverse groups of people to work together creatively, think outside the box, and generate fresh new thinking
4. Could be organized quickly and easily

Driven by these requirements, she chose a radically simple path for maximum public involvement - she convened a Maine Land Use Planning Summit using Open Space Technology.

The Summit posed a daunting challenge to the public - how to create the next generation of land use planning in Maine. Consistent with Open Space principles, everyone who cared about that challenge was invited to attend (and registration was free). A handsome invitation, designed in pdf format, was widely circulated around the state to policymakers, planners, town officials, consultants, developers, environmentalists, state agency staff, and citizens interested in planning issues. The Summit spanned two days in August at a conference center at the University of Maine. The center had space and dorms for 300 folks, and 125 signed up.

A forum in Open Space suits such a challenge because of its unusual design. It is a self-managed gathering, almost unlimited in size (25 to 1000), of people with common interests oriented toward a shared challenge or theme. There are no speeches, formal presentations, or panel discussions. Instead, using a simple process gently guided by a facilitator, participants create their own agenda, convene their own sessions, and generate their own proceedings.

The facilitator explains the four principles, and one law, which create the conditions for everyone to organize themselves with ease throughout the event. Individuals who have a passionate interest in an issue are invited to post their topic, assign it a time and place, and then convene a group discussion. When all issues have been stated and assigned, participants choose freely how to spend their time. They are responsible for their own schedules, for exchanging ideas, and for creating whatever outcomes each group may produce. There is no other agenda.

The 125 participants of the Maine Land Use Planning Summit, many of whom were antagonists in other settings, created their two-day agenda in sixty minutes. Four ninety-minute sessions over two days filled rapidly with about thirty or forty discussion topics, like “Thinking regionally, acting locally,” and “Should we abolish the Growth Management Act?” Each convener received several simple blank poster templates on which to record any proposals to the Legislature which emerged as a product of their conversations. With that, they were off and running.

This diverse gathering of Mainers formed, reformed, and formed again over the two days - debating, proposing, discussing, creating. Energy was high, and the response was enthusiastic. Some sixty discrete proposals surfaced and were recorded on poster templates. Upon review of all proposals at Summit’s end, a number of common themes emerged clearly.

Here, in Sue’s own words, are the Summit’s results:
“There are at least three big things we got from the event. The first is credibility with our constituents. We said at the beginning of the event that we were there to listen and then we listened for two days. Going into the event, the State Planning Office had little credibility with the planning community. As one participant put it, ‘We came here with our shotguns loaded, but we never had a reason to shoot them off.’ So we greatly improved our relationship with many people through holding this event.

“The second thing we got from the event was that people now believe change is possible. Prior to the event, I’d say we want to make improvements in the Growth Management Act, and the way we carry it out, and people would roll their eyes. Now the word is out. SPO is serious about making changes.”

“Third, we got many, many ideas to work with. We’ll be sifting through all of them and using them as the basis of our next phase of work, which is convening focus groups.” Thus the major themes that emerged at the Summit were refined through focus group feedback to become formal recommendations put before the Maine Legislature.

So, like Sue, consider a forum using Open Space Technology as a means of convening public conversations in challenging cases where you want to:

1. Involve large numbers of citizens
2. Welcome an extraordinary diversity of views
3. Appear as conveners, rather than advocates
4. Act quickly, and
5. Seek solutions outside the usual box of possibilities.

Jay W. Vogt is a consultant and has led over 40 forums in Open Space involving over 4000 people, in groups as large as 350.

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