Stakeholder Workshop Dondo District

Thu Sep 25 08:55:17 PDT 2003

Open Space: Participatory District Developing Plan Initialitation
Sept 23, 2003, Dondo District, Sofala Province Mozambique
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I just came back from a one day Open Space in Dondo District (Sofala Province, Mozambique).
Dondo is about to produce a District Development Plan. They work together with an Austrian Development Project, which adopted a highly participatory rapid approach.

A stakeholder-balanced Planning, Preparation and Logistics (Equipa PPL Dondo) team had met 10 times. I orientated the team installation and coached them twice. They met 10 times and for a very intensive last day preparation session.  There were some additional coachings for Dona F. a national consultant. She is the animator and coordinator of the district teams and operational representatant of my client.

Today 140-150 participants (half of which had been personally invited according to the stakeholder analysis which the planning team had done, others came because they where informed by radio, public announcements and local community meetings) arrived at the building of the district administration. A wonderful mix. Absolutely the right people:

The following people met to discuss development problems of various stakeholders in the district and to make practical recommendations for actions or projects to me inicialized:

2 chiefs (regulos de maffambisse and savane).  6 children, 2 professors from Universidade Católica de Mozambique (UCM), 2 professors from the University for Pedagogics, 2 from the Provincial Government, 2 District Administrators from neighbour districts (distritos fronteiros), 2 admin. clarks from Buzi District (they run another type of particip. DD planning), 9 District Directors from the various sectors of Dondo (Agriculture and Rural Development, Health, Education, Plan & Finance,...), 8 people from NGOs and associations, 1 student from Beira-university (who says he tries to make sense of what he is studying for and heard in the radio about the Participatory Planning Event). Two municipality secretaries (vereadores)of and the president of  the "Dondo Town" Council, some people from the opposition party from Mafambisse District. The District Police Chief, some middle level management people fro bigger enterprises, some journalists, who participated in the same way, als all the others at the the "whole-system-1 day exercise". And the working climate was influenced to the best by of a real lot of women "from the interior", more than 60 camponesas, mainly from mafambisse and savane.

 The preparation had also had the function to intensify the communication with the stakeholder groups and had written a letter and produced material for public announcements at different level.

Lots of things went wrong: The transport logistics had forgotten a whole truckload of people from the interior, from an area which already feels permanently forgotten by the district administration. We started the Open Space Introduction 2 hours later than originally planned (which means for local conditions, that 1 hour delay had already been part of the plan). The logistics team had no real idea about the next steps, because  there had been integration problems of a new member, one of those who had been invited because if not invited he could have become a 'saboteur' as the first stakeholder analysis had shown, so instead of doing an Open Space on "What do we have to do to until the event" I could only 'simulate' the generation of the agenda with them. Well, and so on.

But then: The Administradora do Distrito de Dondo opened the space in a traditional way, motivating each and everybody to work together on the development and a better future for the District of Dondo. After my introduction on the steps to go the 150 participants generated about 140 working themes.

I had prepared a bulletin board for 4 timeslots and 17 breakout spaces. So the board was 'overwhelmed' by "temas de paixao". There came pressure to only allow one theme per person, but I had guaranteed in my opening statement that, that each and every voice would be heard and nothing would be decided by somebody else then them.  So we put the incoming pages with name and tema de paixao of each group convener all around the bulletim board.

I explaned the problem which whas caused by the richness in individual contribtuons. "You produced it, you solve it in a cooperative way. The solution it, to fold the 140 items together into not more than 3x17=51 working groups (the 4th timeslot had been lost, because the whole procedure was quite a slow one: I spoke a sentence in portuguese, then the translators  brought it to Chisena and Chindao, the two mainly spoken local languages).

This was the moment, when the client and the event convenor (district admin.) became quite nervous. The district administrators feet wanted to go out of the room with her, but could not, because she had invited everybody to come here. Her perception was: first a very late start, then a slow tri-lingual explanation of the daily program, of the logistics and on working steps from building the agenda on. Then: a quantity of first results, which had obviously not been forseen by the facilitator. Everybody seemed to be stuck. And then: from one moment to the other, like a tropical storm: A hell of working noise, everything went out of control; people running to and fro in front of the bulletim board. They cleared things rapidly: with 17 minutes everything was condensed to 32 groups. And off they went. Down to work.

I had to accept, that nobody cared any longer for the bulletim board, the defined timeslots were forgotten. I saw 6 big clusters of people working more or less all the time in the same configuration, but at 3 p.m. they fixed 20 reports on 20 different themes on the walls.

The market of results was a big event. Everybody here knows markets. But nobody had ever done a market during a meeting. They loved it. Some "sellers" invested all their everyday knowledge about market presentation. The fears of the district admin. and my client had evaporated When my "sino chinês" announced that everybody can now buy - according to his/her scarce resources of 5 MU's (monetary units = sticky dots) they really went to it. 18 group results were 'bought'.
Priority I:

The result of one group, which plans an integrated action for a really disadvantaged zone (from the "forgotten" Mafambisse) was the ladies hit: It got 42 red points, and 35 blue ones from the gentlemen. It is an action mix: building an orphanate; create an NGO, vocational training for joung people, improving the working conditions of teachers...
Priority II
A "men's" project. 34 masculine MU's for street and bridge building, only 6 womens MUs.
...
A great moment, when I perceived, that priority One had been given to a "tema de paixao" of a lady, who had come during the end of her group work to tell me that she has a good idea and a ardent feeling for doing something to resolve some of the basic problems in Mafambisse. But her group would not let her develop it, because there were so many other convenors there. And she felt so left alone with her "tema de paixao". I told her, that she does not perceive what the one law says. And then I pushed her a little (not really knowing why): You have 7 minutes left until the market opens. So if you really want to fight for your theme, be your own group and sell your result to the whole community, as all the others do. What she did. With 77 priorization votes she evidently stopped to believe, that she was left alone by the others. But she could hardly believe it. Well, that was her problem.

For the final circle one ot the participants lent me his crutched stick. (Since the necessary participation of the vulnerable groups of society was one of the results of the planning group, there were also some handicapped/challended people there). It was a perfect talking stick. People stood up and leaned comfortably on his crutch and talked about their (actually good) feelings. The circle lasted for three quarters of an hour. He was the last one to talk, took back his crutch and went then away, like all the others. But hidden in his crutch, he had all the good feelings of those, who had given their final words to the Open Space of everybody. Most of the participants got a copy of the digital fotos of the groups' result before leaving and going back to the "interior".

I have to admit one thing. Let's go back to the introduction. The explanation of the bulletim board is no easy for illiterate people. They have to read it in two ways: horizontally and vertically at the same time. So the procedure of explanation - trilingual - cost a lot of energy. I felt, that it went down and down. And people wanted to eat. So I skipped the explanation of the principles and the law at that point. After lunch I felt, we had to go to action. So the agenda was produced. I hoped to be able to explain the principles, laws, animals later. I should have known better though. When the market had digested the complexity of 140 themes, they did not care for me any longer, they simply went to work (This may partly explain the immobile clusters which I observed later on).

But there had been a good presentation of the givens. The message: this workshop will deal with your "temas de paixao" and "what you will not do, will not be done here" had come through. So - not as paradoxally as my first thought had seen it - I could perceive the principles and the law emerge during the ongoing group work. And of course there were both animals around. Simply because they knew what they wanted and of course also because the event was not controlled after the groups had started their work.

Today more than anytime before, I felt, how rubust a technique this open space thing is. I would call each OST practitioner , who forgets to explain the basic principles of open space, a hopeless case. But it worked anyway.

I am actually preparing 7 large group events for district development in 5 districts and 2 communities of Sofala province. For the first three ones, I had all the situational ingredients for OST. Tomorrow morning I have to get up at five o clock to go to Chibabawa and Machanga districts (7 hours to arrive there), to coach the two stakeholder-planning teams there.

I still feel the 'taste' of todays Open Space on my tongue.
Very sweet

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