Common Ground
From Common Energy UVic
Common Ground is Common Energy's process for facilitating collaboration and self-organization. This process brings networks of people together who are working towards creating effective climate change solutions.
The purpose of Common Ground is to engage a broad network in the planning process so that the plan is relevant, systematic, and has generated the support that it will need to be implemented. Bringing together people at the university with people from the region insures that the planning is relevant to the local context. Working across disciplines and generations creates a systematic perspective necessary to address the complex challenge posed by climate change. Collaboratively planning creates the support necessary to implement those plans by educating people and giving them ownership in the plan. Finally, collaborative planning creates new relationships between students, staff, faculty, and regional partners to implement the plan.
The Common Ground process is manifested most clearly in the style of conference we host and was used to initiate the collaboration that created the Progress Report and the final Guide.
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[edit] Evolution of the Process
Our process starts with a Conference Workshop to identify the Focus Areas for the plan. This is followed by an initial conference that gets this network to brainstorm ideas. The ideas and the people then form Working Groups for each of the Focus Areas. Collectively, this forms a Planning Partnership that breaks the complex problem into elements that can be researched and analyzed by the smaller groups. The process then cycles between the analysis and focused research of the Planning Partnership and the synthesis and creative discussion of subsequent conferences. This proceeds until a plan is created.
The plan includes a strategy for creating the governance body that will implement it. This governance body will vary depending on the local context of participants, established decision makers, and decisions making structures. As the governance body implements the plan it will use developmental evaluation to evaluate its actions and adapt its plans as they unfold in an uncertain and dynamic context. Common Ground, of varying scales, will be used as the plan is implemented to integrate planning, action, and evaluation in a continuous process that engages the network to organize itself.
A quick note on the development of the term - initially, we thought of Common Ground as just the conference style that we used (this is clear from the Finding Common Ground conference we hosted). As we have worked to develop the beyond climate neutral plan it became clear that the term was more useful when used to explain the entire process of planning and then implementing.
So, in brief: Common Energy is an emerging network, that wants to move UVic beyond climate-neutral, and will make that happen using Common Ground.
[edit] Conferences
Common Ground conferences use a variety of techniques and processes such as Open Space Technology[1][2] to get the participants to begin self-organizing to create and develop ideas. They are important opportunities for systematic thinking, cross-pollination of ideas, and peer reviewing evolving actions and proposals.
[edit] Planning Partnership
The Working Groups and Editors collectively formed the Planning Partnership that drafted the Guide to Moving UVic Beyond Climate-Neutral through the Common Ground process.
[edit] Full Process
The following is a timeline of the Common Ground process that was used to develop the Guide:
November 06: Connecting on Climate Change: a lecture and networking opportunity introduced Common Energy, the beyond climate-neutral goal, and the strategy and plan to collaboratively develop a plan to move UVic beyond climate-neutral.
January 07: Climate, Energy and Society: a lecture series from Dr. Andrew Weaver, Dr. Ned Djilali, and Dr. Kara Shaw that taught over a thousand people about the causes, consequences, and solutions for climate change.
February 07: Finding Common Ground on Climate Change: a participatory conference that opened the dialogue on problems and solutions in six key focus areas: food, energy, buildings, business, transportation, and finally civic engagement and governance. The conference introduced the processes core question: how can we do more to solve the problems of climate change than we do to cause them?
March 07: Working Groups Launched: Conference participants joined Working Groups for regular meetings to develop solutions in their areas. These groups continue to meet to the present day to plan practical actions to move UVic beyond climate-neutral.
June 07: Going Beyond Climate-Neutral: Planning for Climate Change Leadership with the University of Victoria: a progress report on the Working Group’s ideas to date was released to communicate the strategies as they develop and solicit feedback.
October 07: Going Beyond Climate-Neutral Conference: a major participatory conference with presentations on the beyond climate-neutral solutions from the Working Groups and extensive feedback and collaboration with participants to improve them.
Winter 08: Written Feedback from Campus and Community Members: Working Groups solicited and received extensive feedback on the beyond climate-neutral solutions from faculty and regional partners.
Spring 08: Building on Progress: A Guide to Moving UVic Beyond Climate-Neutral: This report synthesizes all of the planning and feedback to date.
[edit] External links
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