On February 18, 2011, over 80 community members gathered for a public forum called, “Making Public Meetings Work for the Public: A Forum on Finding Ways to Make Public Hearings, Forums, and Meetings more Civil, Constructive, and Productive.”

With the guidance of trained facilitators, community members working at small tables answered two important questions:

1. What does an “ideal” public meeting look like? and,
2. What are your recommendations for promoting constructive, productive, civil public meetings?

After sharing their tables’ ideas with the larger group, participants had the opportunity to vote for the recommendations they believed have the most potential to promote civil public discourse. The following ideas received the highest number of votes at the forum:

• Use a Third Party Moderator/Facilitator. A third party moderator can help maintain balance among speakers, ensure adherence to the agenda, and promote a safe environment for all parties. This moderator should be unbiased, confident, respected, respectful, and a good communicator.
• Give Notice of Meeting. To attract diverse participants with different views, meeting organizers should give advanced notice about issues such as time, logistics, purpose, and goals. Organizers should use multiple distribution efforts (including direct channels) and provide contact information for pre-meeting and post-meeting comments.
• Establish Ground Rules. Meeting organizers should spend time at the outset to explain the ground rules (such as speech time limits and rules of behavior), as well as the repercussions for violating the rules. These rules should be clearly stated to set the tone, create a common vocabulary, and establish a code of communication.
• Communicate Expectations and Factual Information Prior to Meeting. Organizers can enhance public discourse by communicating their expectations, defining the specific issues to be addressed at the meeting, and providing factual information about those issues ahead of time. Such data can help overcome informational disparities and enable non-experts to feel they have the knowledge necessary to contribute in a meaningful way.
• Offer Alternatives for Participation. By allowing citizens to call in, participate via social media, or engage through other channels, meeting organizers can gain a broader audience. Such alternatives may be especially effective in generating the inclusion and participation of those who cannot participate at public events, for example because they have small children or disabilities.
• Acknowledge all perspectives through video/storytelling. Using videos and storytelling at the meeting can demonstrate a variety of views. Doing so can help people feel that their voices are heard and generate understanding among those with different viewpoints.

The steering group (made up of citizens active in CNYSpeaks and FOCUS) that organized the forum is meeting later this month to go over these recommendations, as well as others we’ve received via this blog, and to discuss next steps.

We may hold more forums, or we may start working to take what we’ve learned so far and compile it into a guide for policy makers and others that host public meetings.

How would you like to see this initiative move forward? What do you think of the recommendations citizens put forward in February? What would you add or subtract?

Let us know here on the blog, on Facebook or Twitter. Also don’t hesitate to contact CNYSpeaks Project Manager Greg Munno at gregmunno@msn.com and 315-730-4621.

We got a great turnout at the CNYSpeaks / FOCUS Greater Syracuse forum this morning on how to host public meetings that are constructive, productive and civil. Thank you so much to all who participated and supported the event. We’ll be reporting back soon on what we learned.

In the meantime, check out The Post-Standard’s take on the event, and this piece from YNN. You’ll also enjoy CNYSpeaks Co-Director Tina Nabatchi‘s Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s Post-Standard.

Let’s keep the discussion going here online. It’s not too late for you to help us better understand the conditions necessary for meaningful and effective public meetings.

(Courtesy The Post-Standard) CNYSpeaks' Facilitator Sally Rock-Blake listens during a CNYSpeaks event.

Since the Arizona shootings, the discussion of civility in our public discourse has become more vigorous than ever and has raised many questions:

• What exactly is “civility”? Is it about pinkie-in-the-air politeness? Is it honoring difference as legitimate and making a good faith effort to find common ground?
• Do we even need civility to have a substantive and productive debate?
• What is required to have productive and constructive public meetings?
• How can public meetings be designed to help promote civility, and, perhaps more importantly, to allow citizens to express themselves in a substantive way that truly helps inform our elected representatives and other policy makers?

These are questions we’ve been wrestling with on this blog since this post first went up in a slightly different form last week, and that citizens wrested with on Feb. 18 during a free public forum.

Let’s keep the dialog going. Check out what others are saying in their comments below and please share your own thoughts.

Tell us how you define civility, or give us your take on any of the other questions above. Or tackle it another way and talk about a public meeting you attended that worked — or about one that got ugly.

Chime in any way you want. CNYSpeaks is listening!

Salt City DISHES is a quarterly dinner that features a variety of different public art proposals from local Syracuse artists.  The dinner audience  votes on their favorite proposal and all of the admissions money ($10-15 per person) goes towards funding the art project. At the next dinner, the previous winner presents their completed project to the audience and the audience votes on a new project for the next quarter.

Join us in supporting the local Syracuse art community this Sunday! Buy tickets in advance at Craft Chemistry, 2nd Story Cafe & Bookstore, and Sound Garden.

For more information, visit
Salt City DISHES

CNYSpeaks and FOCUS Greater Syracuse want to collaborate with YOU — the citizens of Central New York — to find ways to make public hearings and meetings more civil, constructive and productive.

(Mike Greenlar / The Post-Standard) Participants at CNYSpeaks events like the one pictured sit at small tables and work with fellow citizens and trained facilitators to brainstorm ideas and identify solutions to community issues. We'll be using this format on Feb. 18th to explore how we can make public meetings more civil and constructive.

Combative school board sessions and angry town hall meetings on health care have obscured the fact that public officials and citizens must work together to solve the complex problems we face here in Central New York and across the country.

Yet public officials are given little guidance on just how to structure public meetings to ensure that citizens are heard, and citizens have little guidance about how they should behave at those meetings to ensure that their interests are understood and that the meetings are safe and productive.

On Feb. 18, FOCUS Greater Syracuse will devote its monthly Core Group meeting to exploring this topic, with the goal of hearing from citizens about how they believe public meetings can be better designed to be productive, civil, and effective.

The forum, which is free and open to all, will run from 7:30 to 9 a.m. at City Hall Commons, 201 E. Washington St., Syracuse.

Participants will work in small groups with trained facilitators from the CNYSpeaks Initiative and the Maxwell School’s Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration to discuss questions such as:

• Why do people go, or stay away from, public meetings?
• What do public meetings that “work” look like?  What do such meetings accomplish? What processes are used?
• How should public meetings be designed to be more inclusive, productive and constructive?
• What are the minimum standards of behavior required of citizens — and officials — to have successful public meetings?

Please join FOCUS and CNYSpeaks as we tackle this important issue, and thank you in advance for helping us spread the word about this event. Again, it’s free and open to all. There is no registration required. The event will start promptly at 7:30 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 18, and be over by 9. Coffee will be served.

For more information, please contact FOCUS at (315) 448-8732 or CNYSpeaks at cnyspeaks@maxwell.syr.edu or 315-730-4621.

[Both CNYSpeaks and FOCUS are nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations. CNYSpeaks is funded by a Chancellor's Leadership Grant administered by the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University.]