Gratitude for Fellow Traveller abundance
This is a little lab note from an online connection skill sharing session last week on the Virtual High Street. It is also to document a joyful example of how the lab and wider ecosystem is walking the walk of our GUIDEing principles: “connections matter”; “encourage abundance thinking and practice” and “create conditions for curiosity and experimentation”.
Last week Grapevine’s Sophie and Melissa generously shared their online convening wisdom and super powers. These are methods they have mindfully co-developed and tested with deepr over the last year.
This wasn’t just a random beautiful share. This abundance began a month back when Phil and Ben (of Juneau projects) hosted a Food For Thought for their fellow Time Rebels having sensed a desire in the group to reflect upon and share experiences about how to meaningfully engage with local people online.
The pandemic and lockdown has reshaped our convening and what skills and knowledge is needed as participatory practitioners and creatives.
This raised crucial research questions for Time Rebel Juliet about the qualities and design of participatory platforms. What conditions need to be nurtured for meaningful participation and what does that even mean/ look like/ feel like for different people? This has resulted in a Time Rebel shared learning enquiry led by Juliet around participatory platforms. As part of this enquiry Juliet will host a Food for Thought in June for fellow Time Rebels to share her journey and motivations for founding the Black in Architecture platform.
Following the original conversation about methods and approaches to online convening Jo pledged to ask Fellow Travellers Grapevine if they had any resources they might share given their learning about online convening. Responding with abundance typical of the Fellow Traveller network Mel suggested the Connecting For Good team at grapevine run a session for Time Rebels.
So Sophie and Jo got together to co-design the session — thinking about who, needs, framing, why, participation and fun! Sophie shared a generous invitation to the Time Rebels online — an invitation that was clear, warm and altogether super friendly. This was followed by a visual guide to the session illustrated by Melissa that helped manage expectations and framed the tone of the session. A really reassuring act that helped us be even more present. Joining our Time Rebel Slack channel Sophie asked for our suggestions for “songs that make you feel good” — and so together we built the beginning of a Feel Good playlist for the session. Sophie also asked for a Time Rebel to volunteer to read a poem as part of the session — Ben very kindly said yes! Que beautiful storytelling voice and lovely shared moment of calm in our day. Thanks Ben!
Meanwhile Holly got busy with her network weaving and invited our sister lab Wolverhampton for Everyone, (also part of our Fellow Traveller network) to join in the session. We celebrated this weaving, and the joy of a skill share and Midlands wide convening of Fellow Travellers across Coventry, Wolverhampton, and Dudley.
In abundant networks resources — like skills, time, ideas or peer support — are openly shared and so flow to where they are needed. Our experience is that this type of sharing and gifting culture results in even more sharing and other acts of reciprocity.
On the day seventeen of us — Time Rebels, CoLab Dudley team, Grapevine hosts Melissa and Sophie, Wolverhampton for Everyone team, Dudley CVS colleague Becky, and visiting grapevine detectorist Ellie Hale — all took part in a joyful and generous sharing of skills rooted in a clear framework of core conditions for deeper connection online.
Grapevine and deepr have tested dozens of exercises to suit different contexts and communities. Given we had only the one hour together we tried out just a few to get a sense of how this very mindful and intentional convening online feels like. The whistlestop tour involved … a warm and personal welcome, weather flavoured check in questions, interactive polls, collaborative playlists, collaboratively working through tech challenges, poetry reading and mindfulness, giggle out loud drawing on heads, energetic I spy type noticing games, lots of interaction and gratitude comments in the chat box and finally pledges about what we would all do/ use following our learning session in future convening.
The intentional design of the convening through the framework five core conditions (presence, accountability, equality, whole self, and autonomy) and the structured attention to before the convening, during the convening and post convening creates so many more moments and layers of connection. The result is so many more opportunities to interact, to be heard, to be present, to get to know each other, and forge bonds.
We are so grateful to Fellow Travellers Melissa and Sophie for sharing their knowledge, skills and time. And for doing this with such care, humility and a contagious sense of fun.
As we emerge into a hybrid participatory space that moves from online to real life and back again, we all need to get better at building inclusive, convivial spaces to connect and create together online.
Thank you both for openly sharing your wisdom and experience.
We will keep testing out our new skills and share our learning here. When ideas get stuck in silos they stagnate, or lose their relevance. When they are shared and set free they bloom and grow. I just love the abundance of Fellow Travellers!
