Bennelong Mini Summit - Facilitators Network ideas get noticed in Canberra
Greg Jenkins spoke to 180 people at the Bennelong Mini Summit hosted by Maxine McKew in West Ryde on Wednesday April 30. Here is the text of his report to the Network’s Core Group. It seems that we were heard. Point 5 in Topic 9 was mentioned as one of the best submitted ideas in the governance stream. We get traction in Canberra.
“Dear Core group
Here is the submission that I put in to the summit on behalf of the network. Sorry for not sending it earlier. I just typed up what we wrote up at the meeting, sent it off and didn't think much about it.
Last week I heard about a local summit in the seat of Bennelong that was to be hosted by new member Maxine McKew. I called the number to get myself an invitation.
During the conversation with the organiser I mentioned our Facilitators Network submission, which I was asked to forward to Maxine McKew's office. This got me a speakers spot (one of 20) at the Bennelong local summit in West Ryde last night.
The topic area they gave me was on the future of Australian governance and the topic leadership. I had to reread carefully what we had sent to the summit and I have to say I was most impressed with what we came up with.
The meeting last night was opened by Maxine McKew. Senator John Faulkner Special Minister of state was also there. In Senator Faulkner's speech he mentioned the 3500 submissions that had come in prior to the main summit. He then mentioned enthusiastically one of the best ideas that got traction at the summit was one that had come in via written submissions. The idea he said was in the governance area and was for a web portal idea for people to make inputs on governance issues etc.
After he said this, I quickly glanced at our submission which I had printed and taken with me. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw that it was us that put in the idea. He was talking about point five in our submission for topic 9 - governance. The same idea was mentioned again and given a beat up in the introduction by Maxine McKew.
With such an audience I used my 4 minutes of fame, amongst other things, to talk about how the ideas in our discussion had emerged from people around small tables listening to each other. I compared this facilitated approach that we were using on the night and the one that I believe was used at the main summit where a few people came along with ideas to push. I took the opportunity to promote facilitated gatherings on a large scale where everyone's voice is heard.
In summary, even though our own summit meeting was an imperfect gathering, it was good enough to produce some really good ideas. More to the point it produced one of the main external ideas that got traction in the main summit. Imagine what we can do if we get our act together. I'm now connected with Maxine McKew's organising team and hopefully will have a greater role in the next local summit. Maxine McKew is also very close to Kevin Rudd. With a bit of luck and some lobbying real facilitators might get a role in the next big summit whenever that might be.
The immediate opportunities for us as facilitators is to get involved in local summits. Why not look in your electorate and see if you can get a gig on the back of our submission.”
Cheers
Greg
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