Eleanor Greenhalgh

RITA Codes of Conduct are often collaborative texts. The creative process can be complicated as different people may have distinct perceptions and expectations for how things should be addressed. I’m interested to know what can be the role of a facilitator in discussing boundaries and reaching an agreement?

ELEANOR My approach to facilitation is informed by the training I had with Seeds for Change collective, who have a very good & strong theory of facilitation being balancing process with outcome. (I have referenced some of their publications in my thesis I think - defo worth checking out.) So, keeping people happy during the discussion by dealing with timekeeping & using 'soft skills' of empathy etc, but also ensuring you keep discussion on track so that you can reach an agreement at the end. Above all, the facilitator should not weigh in with their own opinions - ideally they would be neutral re: the actual topic being discussed.

A lot of the skills we use in mental health work are also useful too. Facilitation is of course NOT the same as MH work/therapy. But, 'technical' skills like paraphrasing and listening carefully for the 'meaning behind the words' are very important. And sometimes missing in contexts which privilege technical solutions. The questions you are exploring are social/ethical, not computational! And should be treated as such. Easy to forget.

As a mental health worker I think a lot about where responsibility lies. As in, can we "save" others? Where does decision to change come from? What should we do when someone acts destructively? This might be tangential to your research, but some approaches linked to below might be useful to inform an ethical approach to facilitating these discussions:

Carl Rogers on empathic listening: an influential therapist who took a "facilitative" approach to therapy, believing that the client already has the answers, and just needs help to discover, articulate and accept them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dLsgpHw5x0

Hanna Pickard on "Responsibility without blame": an approach developed for working therapeutically with personality disorders. But quite helpful in general as a way of approaching working with other people. Basically, we are only responsible for our own behaviour, nobody else's. And we can hold people responsible for their actions, without taking a negative blaming attitude. https://biomedicalodyssey.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2019/06/responsibility-without-blame-an-interview-with-philosopher-hanna-pickard/

R What processes can help to create collective documents? Is it possible to cater to everyone’s opinion, or will someone always have to be assertive and make decisions?

E This is a long-running and interesting tension in theories of anarchist decision-making. AFAIK it has not yet been resolved. Which is what makes it interesting! Especially as an artist - lots of things to play with. I would disagree though that in order to reach a decision, it relies on individual dominance/assertiveness. This is a way to reach an /appearance/ of decision, which is probably not shared by the whole group. To get real consensus relies much more on things like trust and a positive, supportive culture where people are ready to compromise. Again it is a social, not primarily a technical problem.

R In 2013, your research and Master thesis referred to various tools and projects that can help bring consensus for groups searching for democratic decision-making. Since then, have you seen other work that excites you in this area?

E I've been out of this world in recent years so can't help you here, but would be interested to follow your research and learn more about how people are approaching these problems at the moment. Please keep me updated!