Conversation info:

We opened up the conversation while people were getting seated and began with: “Good morning audience! Do you have any specific goals for today?”

We received some interesting inputs from the audience who had taken their seats and logged in to remesh:

• Art is excluded from the agenda. Not that I disagree.. I’m curious to know why.
• Why does the success metric not include community engagement or social capital?
• How can local communities benefit/contribute to the 2016 RNC?
• Thinking about how we do a better job of collectively tell the story of Cleveland and why everyday people should care.
• How do we decide what we should focus our lobbying efforts to achieve?

We generally measure the usage with Thoughts and Choices, denoted on the platform as t:#,c:# — where # is the given number of each. Thoughts are actual text inputs, Choices are the number of times pair is chosen between. So for the above set, we had 5 thoughts and 32 choices.

Once everyone arrived and people took their seats, the panel discussion began and Dan encouraged the audience to participate via remesh with the speakers. Link here.

The first question posed to the audience: “What are we missing from the agenda, audience?”

The response was great, we had 40 thoughts and 623 choices! This allowed Dan to drive the conversation in a direction that the audience cared about by having the panel speak on the points that the audience agreed upon most. The top few thoughts:

• Reducing the likelihood of displacement and gentrification … How we can ensure income diversity in communities, even as median sales prices and rents rise.
• How can we better connect the arts movement in Cleveland to or schools, particularly in light of less arts programming in schools?
• How can immigration contribute to community development?

These questions kept the panel busy and we followed up with the audience by asking the final question of: “What is your number one priority?”

People had begun to understand how to use remesh a little more towards the end so we had some great responses, 29 thoughts and 544 choices. Some of the top thoughts:

• Quality education for everyone.
• Increasing happiness for the people living in Cleveland.
• Advocacy-wise? Collaborating with peers across the state to support pro-urban policy and pro-urban candidates for elected office.
• Healthy neighborhoods is my number #1 priority
• Job opportunities is number one because if someone is gainfully employed with opportunities for growth they will invest in housing and our communities.

Overall, remesh offered some great input to the panel discussion and helped guide it along. We’re excited that nothing broke, and that a decent number of people participated!