The experience has been awesome. The model has brought a lot more clarity to how folks can have agency during a virtual meeting. A lot more people can engage during an assembly than otherwise, with less talking over each other or folks feeling sidelined by a niche topic taking over.
Here’s a moment I loved from an assembly. Once when a particular proposal was getting off topic with many folks speaking up excitedly, I moved my cursor to action and then suggested we do an open comment round. During an assembly, any action like this needs to be voted agree or disagree by the group to be taken.
One participant moved their cursor to improvement and said, “Hey, I don’t think we need a round – I just think we’re off topic and we need to focus.” I said, “If that’s how others feel as well, let’s pass on this action and get back to the proposal.”
Everyone – even me! – moved our cursors to disagree to turn down my action and we got back to work with renewed attention. As the facilitator for this assembly, this was especially exciting to me as my goal with the model was never to decide what we should do, but to give the group ways to set their own agenda. A moment like this where the group can make visible and act on their collective sentiment is precious.
Other nice benefits: the terms clarification and improvement are showing up more broadly at Resonate, leading to better conversations and ideas. I notice here and there someone in our forum or a videochat saying something like “I have an improvement to suggest” or “I need/have a clarification on this”, mimicking how things work during assemblies.
Y’all mostly do sociocracy-style meetings among smaller groups right? I’m very inspired by sociocracy and am always looking to learn more about it. This assembly model uses some key sociocratic elements, but I can’t say from experience how it would work for a strict sociocratic meeting.
For a larger scale meetup at meet.coop – larger than “circle” size – I’m pretty darn confident this assembly would be worth a try. It was modeled in part after IWW’s union hall meetings so it has that “let’s get stuff done” attitude, but includes techniques like rounds and objections in line with consent decision-making for a less majoritarian vibe.
We’ve taken videos which would be fun to share, but unfortunately the built-in recording doesn’t include the cursors on screen. Since the cursors are key to the whole model, it would be truly great if they could be captured in the video somehow.
The only other hiccup is that if folks arrive at an assembly while it is happening, I need to reclick multi-user whiteboard on each presentation page to activate their cursor again. This didn’t seem to be an issue until recently, but it is tricky to keep track of.
Overall, assemblies have been a huge improvement in our collaboration and how we treat each other during meetings – I rarely feel like having a meeting any other way at Resonate.
We try to practice a sociocratic meeting style with check-in, some people take a role, like facilitor, note-taker, (task) card-updater, and we work ourselves through a collectively agreed agenda and check-out. When decisions are taken during the meeting we do so by consent, though our methodology isn’t very fixed - as we are a small group mostly, things are relatively easy. When groups get bigger, the methodologies are getting more important, to avoid exclusion or alienating people.
