Hi Tom,

I'll chime in with my own experience. I started by taking Jeff's course.
If, or if not, you follow that path (or, at least read the book), then,
go out and start mapping everything in site; OpEd columns from, say,
nytimes.com, small meetings you're sitting in on, etc. Then, eventually,
take on a meeting as a facilitator. Let me tell a short story of my
first experience after graduating Jeff's course.

My first venture in that arena occurred when the principal of a new
charter school that was chartered to be integrated, thematic, and
constructivist, recognized that his teachers didn't know what that
meant. He hired me to "teach the teachers" how to be constructivist. I
sat down with them and QuestMap (Compendium didn't exist then), placed
in front of them printed copies of the charter, which had those words on
the front page, and typed in the first question: What does MCAA's
Charter Mean to You? After a bit of staring around the room, they
looked at their charter and spit our those words, which were added to
the map. I then asked, verbally, one more question: "What do those words
mean to you?" and shut up, mapping as fast as I could go. When things
slowed down, I used one of Jeff's tricks: I asked them to comment on a
node I just put up: did it reflect their thinking?

They studied the map for a while then announced: "We can do this!".
Three of the teachers asked me to teach them how to do dialog mapping.
Those teachers got it. I was using constructivist methodologies on the
teachers, and some of them figured that out.

Cheers,
Jack

TRflanagan@... wrote:
>
>
> Jeff,
>
> Thank you. Your video description
> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxS5wUljfjE] is very helpful to me in
> making a distinction between a powerful anthropological approach for
> supporting group dialogue versus more structured, designed interventions.
>
> Can you comment on the pathway that a mapper needs to follow to develop
> a level of skill to assure value to the dialogue group? Do mappers work
> in teams? I can imaging the as dialogue gets into an accelerated pace,
> the job of tracking the comments, the root questions (implicit and
> explicit), the pros and the cons ... can get very challenging.
>
> Also, can you comment on the evolution of a dialogue map as a dialogue
> pacing instrument to allow groups to be reflective even as they are
> being generative?
>
> Cheers
>
> t
>
> Tom Flanagan, Ph.D., MBA
> Director, SouthCoast Community Collaborative Design Studio
>
> SoCo Community Collaborative Design Studio is a project of the Community
> Foundation of Southeastern Massachusetts. Our mission is to build
> community capacity through demonstration and application of advanced
> collaborative design technologies.
>
> VOICE: 508-264-0066
> EMAIL: TRFlanagan@...
> WEBSITE: http://socodesign.wetpaint.com/
>
> "All democracy is local."
>