Kai Degner is mayor of Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. Before becoming mayor, he was also active (and still is, as you will see) in the civic participation community. He was elected about a month ago on what he refers to as a “process-based platform,” which means his basic promise is to change how government works.

His efforts are worth watching to learn more about how dialogue and participation can play out in real-world examples. Often, people criticize the field for creating heavily facilitation-based and consultant-heavy processes that are divorced from how people really interact. Kai is operating as an elected politician and so has real-world constraints within which he’s got to stick. His efforts have to be relevant and useful, otherwise they won’t go anywhere.

Over the weekend, he convened an example of collaborative, ground breaking work that should give everyone hope for what city government can look like.

Harrisonburg Sustainability Summit

About a month ago, Kai issued an open invitation for people to come to a citywide summit on sustainability (the first of what he says will be a series of summits on various issues). The wrinkle: he used the “open meeting” format to organize and execute it.

What’s the open meeting format? It’s an approach to meetings that some may find confounding. Essentially, there is no set agenda. At the beginning of the conference, all attendees brainstorm ideas they would like to pursue and out of this emerges an agenda of topics. People go to the sessions that interest them stay as long as they want, and move on to the next.

The whole process can be summed up:

• Use the Law of Two Feet: Move to where you are most creative and productive.
• Whoever comes are the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it’s over, it’s over

Here’s Kai inviting people, a great explanation of what hoped to achieve:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4151766&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

His point: This is “me as mayor convening a conversation for everyone that’s here.” I like that.

Success

The Summit itself was a success and I could not be more happy to hear about it. Kai developed a blog that became the organizing site for it, and served as a live agenda and report-out resource.

What’s more, mainstream media reported on the summit and did so in a way that was not the norm for such a thing. Usually, the media cover civic participation stories with an air of “isn’t that cute” underlying everything. “Look at those citizens, isn’t it cute how they think they have a voice?”

In this case, perhaps because a sitting mayor convened it or perhaps because it was so surprisingly effective — or perhaps for those and other reasons altogether — coverage was substantive:

http://ww2.WHSV.com/global/video/videoplayer.js?rnd=79588;hostDomain=ww2.WHSV.com;playerWidth=400;playerHeight=340;isShowIcon=true;clipId=3816434;playerType=POPUP_EMBEDDEDscript_EMBEDDEDscript

Even better, this approach to governance is hugely cost effective. In a recent email, here’s Kai’s breakdown of vital statistics and costs:

Stats: 7 Hours, 158ppl+, 120 orgs+, 34 sessions, 23 reports online in blog (as of now)
Budget? $16 for orange fabric. $14 for name tags. Everything else donated.

So, bottom line, for folks in other communities: You can do it, too.