As 2024 wraps up, our facilitation team is sharing their standout moments. From mysteriously missing catering and questionable gong skills to a surprise bush trek under the stars, 2024 had its fair share of laughs, twists, and unforgettable memories.
The City of Melbourne views affordable housing as crucial infrastructure for maintaining a liveable, inclusive, and prosperous city. With a projected shortfall of 23,200 affordable homes by 2036, immediate action is needed to address this long-standing issue. While there is broad community support for affordable housing, acceptance often wanes at the neighbourhood level. To tackle this, a People’s Panel of 39 diverse community members was established to represent local perspectives.
A support facilitator studying psychology, our first team member based in NSW and a brand new participant recruitment coordinator... meet the newest additions to the MosaicLab team: Polo, Polly and Gus! Learn more about this trio of terrific team members and gain some insights into who they REALLY are through their answers to our fast five questions!
How should we plan for the new energy future while providing affordable services that meet changing customer and community needs? Two representative ‘Voice of the Customer’ panels in Queensland answered this question. Randomly selected, everyday customers deliberated and agreed on recommendations that electricity distributors Ergon Energy Network and Energex used to prepare Regulatory Proposals for the Australian Energy Regulator (AER). Delve into a tale of two deliberative customer panels, and gain ideas and insights you can draw on for your next project.
We believe in supporting emerging and underserved people and communities to have deeper conversations that lead to stronger democracies. ML Giving is the new name of the not-for-profit part of MosaicLab - a banner for the work we do that gives back. We’re focussing on furthering community inclusion and action beyond just getting input and instead moving into enabling local decision-making. Explore the principles ML Giving will operate under, and the kind of projects and conversations we’re supporting.
Effective engagement is inclusive of a diverse range of perspectives. In deliberative processes, this is critical, as deliberation is underpinned by representativeness. When one or a few voices dominate the conversation, this becomes difficult to achieve. In this article we consider some ways to navigate this common issue.
MosaicLab has had the privilege of working with many Victorian councils over recent months and supporting them to design and deliver deliberative engagement processes. An interesting and exciting element of this experience has been the high level of influence some councils offered to their community around the development of their community visions.
In this article we look at three different approaches. One council that set the level of influence at ‘empower’ from the outset, and two others that accepted their community’s vision statement in full.
Globally, 1,807 local government bodies, such as municipal councils, have declared a climate emergency within the past 5 years. But making a declaration is the easy part. Partnering with the community to come up with responses to such a momentous and complicated challenge is not something that every council is willing to take on. But those who do will be rewarded with ideas and momentum from the community that council cannot possibly achieve on its own.
In this article we share with you a story of a local council in Victoria who has partnered with their community to respond to the climate emergency together.
This one has been a long time in the making. Finally, we can announce that our latest 'Deliberation Ready' video is here. This edition is particularly exciting because, for the first time, we've interviewed participants from across multiple deliberative processes.
Together, these 10 citizens share their unique perspectives and provide candid, first hand reflections on their journey - the challenges, the surprises, the highlights and more.
Welcome to our February #MonthlyMyth post! Today, we're exploring a commonly held belief that prevents many organisations from engaging in a meaningful way with citizens around complex, technical or information-rich issues.
This one misconception can reduce an engagement process to a surface exercise without any real outcomes, create unintended and less than desirable consequences down the track and even prevent a potentially valuable engagement process from happening altogether.
So let's get into it - what can everyday citizens REALLY handle and should we ask them to handle it?
