The One Million Splotz of Glue Campaign

A dear friend responded to this effort with a “why” and a “it seems as if there is something missing”.

I realize that I may have launched too soon with an incomplete idea, but it has been an incomplete idea for six years. I have taken it as far as I can by myself.

Why?

As with the coffee cup project, I will answer this question later. I hope an answer will reveal itself. I do not know why I am compelled to do this, but I am.

It seems as if there is something missing.

What I originally wanted to do with The One Million Splotz of Glue Campaign was to use it as framework for facilitating community building workshops. I wanted to train young people (16 to 24 year olds) as community facilitators. Have them facilitate community building forums or workshops that asked the question, “What can we do to build community?”

The community facilitation would produce a “Community Building Todo List” a list of activities that individuals and groups could do to; learn more about their town and its governance, connect with others, build trust, and get involved. Answering the questions, “What can I do to build community? and “What can we do to build community?”

The workshops would group participants in four clusters - Learn | Connect | Trust | Act. Each cluster would have a young person team as their facilitators. They would facilitate a discussion about these four cornerstones of community building (Learn | Connect | Trust | Act) and how becoming knowledgeable citizens (for example) is an important part of making their city great. Then they would ask the participants to list what they can do to become more knowledgeable and connected, etc.

This brainstorming would happen on sticky notes because I heart sticky notes.

Participants would discuss their ideas and clarify actions. There may be an affinity clustering activity and a prioritization activity. Then the group would move on to the next cluster.

When completed the groups would come back together and see the completed list and I hope two things will happen. One is that they will look at this list and say, “we do most of this already.” And my hope is that they do and that they know that because of their everyday actions their city is a great one to live in. Two is that I hope that they will look at this list and see the range of activities that are happening and could be happening more and begin to wonder how the city would change if more of us did more of this.

The final activity of the workshop is the commitment making. Where individuals and groups build their Community Building Todo List and make a commitment to work their lists. They then commit to meeting again in six months to track and celebrate their progress, up date their lists, and share their experiences. During this six month work period the young people are tracking completed todo lists and facilitating community building activities acting as experts and guides. Answering such questions as how do I register to vote or better yet, file papers to run for city council? Keeping a calendar of commission meetings and bowling league meets (or whatever it is they call it).

The website would present the results of the workshops including the brainstorming and resultant todo lists. It would track the commitments and the answers to the Frequently Asked Questions that the young facilitators researched.

Now, six years later, I wonder how this could work in our Web 2.0 enabled world? If we could all work together to facilitate these community building workshops? I wonder if we could write or adapt a great community building facilitator curriculum, recruit caring people, and build a network to do this? I wonder if someone could build some sort of cool AJAXy thing that could facilitate the online building of community building todo lists so that anyone can put in their zipcode and see what is going on in their neighborhood or mine?

I wonder if I can get allies and mentors to help me unpack this incomplete idea?

What do you think?

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Posted on March 2nd, 2007 by Lloyd Y. Asato
Filed under: Backstory