Energy Forum: Our practice forum

The practice forum that participants at the UHD Center for Public Deliberation will be doing is The Energy Problem: Choices for an Uncertain Future. We have divided the 25 participants into two groups. Virginia York and Tom Workman will take responsibility for one group and Windy Lawrence and I are managing the second group. We scheduled the forum for first thing on the second day, but decided that we needed to first meet in the large group to make sure that all questions have been answered.

We had planned to give them time to work in small groups on late Friday afternoon to construct questions. Virginia’s method is to break into small groups according to the roles of the moderators (opening and personal stake, one of the three approaches, and the reflections) and have them individually construct three questions. They then discuss the questions they have written and explain why they chose those questions and how they would use the questions. In closing the exercise, participants pass their questions to the moderator to take home and consider prior to moderating the practice forum the next day. Since we ran out of time on Friday afternoon, we chose to take time this morning to make sure everyone is comfortable with their roles in the forum this morning.

Off to our forums!