Practicing open facilitation
Sharing best practices for meeting learners’ needs
With thanks to An-Me Chung for helping develop & practice so much of the work.
As we look forward to working on open leadership this year, we also look back with pride on the web literacy work we’ve done with educators, librarians, and military families. In addition to the curriculum and other resources we wrote, we developed a set of facilitation practices that we want to share with our community before we get too far into the new year.
We also want to iterate on these practices and improve them as we engage with community members to develop the Open Leadership Map. They are important practices to keep them in mind as we support participants in our online mentoring programs, the Global Sprint, and MozFest.
It’s our hope that these facilitation practices will help individual contributors and users like you, as well, whether you teach a class, run an online course, or organize meetups or other events.
We’ve gathered the practices together in a gitbook called Open Facilitation. It’s by no means a complete or authoritative guide to open forms of teaching and learning. Instead, it’s an invitation to reflect on how we might apply the principles and practices of “work open, lead open” (#WOLO) to the learning spaces we facilitate in our communities.
The guide is broken down into several sections and subsections that include activities you can do on your own to move your facilitation forward towards an increasingly mindful, humane, and design-driven practice. Topics include:
- Envisioning open facilitation
- Decision-making
- Design
- Event prep
- Trust
- Care
- Failure
- Debrief
- Reflection
- Outcomes of open facilitation
Your feedback on the guide is warmly welcomed. What makes the most sense? What speaks to you? What seems unclear or confusing? What’s missing?
If you have a GitHub or GitBook account, you can log in to start a discussion about the book. You can also file an issue — which is like leaving a comment — on the book’s GitHub repo. We’re happy to receive feedback by email, as well. You can send feedback directly to curriculum manager Chad Sansing.
We hope you’ll join us on this learning journey and we appreciate your help in making the work stronger.
