Personal feedback following the first Steering Group meeting.
One potential difficulty was raised: a small group of people can have a useful conversation, but it can be hard to open this up. When a new person comes in, they have not shared the conversation and been part of the journey, so you have to start the conversation again from scratch in order to include them. My hope is that each conversation will start with a clear statement of what the conversation is about; this statement can be revised, expanded, clarified and corrected in the light of the conversation, so a new person coming in only needs to respond to the introductory statement in order to fully and appropriately participate in the conversation. I referred to this in one of the introductory documents as 'refactoring', but that piece of computer jargon is possibly unhelpful. In any case, I hope that the participants of each conversation will work to make their conversation accessible to new people - without the need to continually repeat themselves and without the new person needing to plough through all 73 previous comments before they can say something useful.
One of our aims is to encourage people to do something useful, not just sit back and criticize what other people are doing. Two comments were made: firstly, when we are talking about social action in Bristol, there are many good organizations we can encourage people to get involved with; and secondly, many people are already doing a lot as individuals, outside the organizations. It seems to me we want to encourage both kinds of response, but when someone is helping another person as an individual and not part of an organized group, they still need various kinds of support - and the lack of structure can mean it is much harder to recognize what is needed, and harder to access the support. We possibly need to think more about how individuals can effectively be supported.
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