Community Collaboration: Air Quality Resource Teams
Click here to view the embedded video. This video, from Policy Consensus Council and Community Focus, depicts a community collaboration program established by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District in 1991. The program created Air Quality Resource Teams in each of the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area,

What Do You Do When Consensus Fails?
This is the nightmare scenario for any consensus process: After months of hard work by 20 or 30 participants, one or two holdouts, perhaps representing narrow or personal interests, block agreement and frustrate the entire effort. That is possible if the only route to agreement requires unanimous consent. There has to be a way to prevent the process from becoming the captive of a tiny minority. Otherwise, many conveners would hesitate to use a consensus-seeking p

Real-Time Online Video Meetings
Despite my share of disappointments with the latest “revolutionary” computer technology, I’ve become quite optimistic about online video meetings. In contrast to promotions about the potential of “game-changing” breakthroughs, the newly available services look not just promising but extremely useful right now. The previous post in this series dis

Public Outreach and Consensus Building Training Video
Click here to view the embedded video. This is a federal Department of Energy training film designed for DOE project managers. Because its purpose is real-world training, it avoids sugarcoating most dimensions of a difficult process. As a result, it’s one of the best introductions to the overall principles of community involvement that I’ve found online. Its main subject is the citizen planning process for the cleanup of a major nuclear site. From my own experience working with advisory groups of this sort, I’m sure that the process can’t

The Need for Collaborative Capacity
Increasingly, leaders and managers are looking to collaborative methods for dealing with contentious policy issues. When making a first attempt, they may well recognize that success takes a lot more than bringing people together to talk. They know they need guidance. The solution is often to call on a professional mediator or facilitator to design and run the process. That’s great for practitione