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.
A deliberating group is made up of randomly selected citizens from all walks of life. Just as we would see in any community group, these ‘mini-publics’ are made up of people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, communication styles and behaviours. We're exploring some of the most common types of behaviours we might see in a deliberative process, their impacts, and some guidelines for working with them effectively.
Get actionable ideas to transform your customer and community engagement approach in the evolving energy sector. Join our FREE webinar on Thursday, July 18th to hear from sector leaders representing Ausgrid, Energy Queensland and Jemena as they share insights into transformative customer engagement experiences. Plus gain ideas and tips on navigating energy engagement dilemmas from MosaicLab directors and co-founders Keith Greaves and Nicole Hunter. Don't miss this exclusive, interactive hour of engagement power.
We’re very thankful to be in a position to do meaningful work every day. Sometimes an opportunity comes our way that is extra special and this project to empower refugee women to build connections, confidence and a business plan for a new food focused initiative fit that description. As as the first official project under our ML Giving banner, we invested our time pro-bono to support this conversation, that was filled with learnings, challenges and a whole lot of positive impact.
Elevate your engagement on every level by asking the right questions! Learn how to cut through the complexity, guide participants to think deeply and ensure diverse people can contribute meaningfully. Quality questions equal quality outcomes. Join us on Thursday May 23 at our FREE Lunch and Learn webinar for tips and skills you can use every time you plan for engagement.
Power is always at play and often in surprising and unexpected ways. It’s your job as a project manager, leader, facilitator or engagement professional to notice and foresee power problems, address and prevent power imbalance and protect the integrity of your engagement process. In this deliberation disaster we let you know where power issues tend to lie, what you can do about them, and what your role is in tackling them.
Deliberative engagement aims to build trusted decisions. That’s only achievable if the people impacted by the outcome have access to information about the process. This isn’t as easy as telling your communication team to send out a media release or publishing a few social posts telling your community the panel or jury is happening. Your communication approach needs to be thoughtfully planned, aligning communication and engagement efforts and ensuring deliberative principles aren’t compromised.
Conflict - generally feared and constantly mismanaged, it’s one of the biggest challenges you will face in engagement. It’s also the most common challenge our subscribers submit to us. If you anticipate conflict, outrage or emotion ahead, this article is for you. Inside - how to avoid the three biggest errors we see made (and they are made a lot) and some simple, yet effective things you can do instead to navigate the situation instead of making it worse.
What are you asking your participants to help you with? Topic choice and how you craft the question, challenge or remit you put to your community is critical to a successful process. In this deliberation disaster, we explore the most common mistake we see made. Plus, there are free tips for selecting and communicating a topic that will result in better response rates, a more meaningful experience for participants and more useful outputs for decision makers.
Engagement processes must be accessible if diverse voices are going to be included. One of the many ways we can achieve this is through the use of interpreters (both for online and face-to-face engagement). If you’re working with interpreters it’s essential to collaborate with them and think carefully about how the session will be facilitated. We spoke to Bruce Song, a Mandarin interpreter whose worked with us previously.
We accept the very generous invitation of signatories to the Uluru Statement from the Heart to walk together in support of a Voice to Parliament. We believe that amplifying the voices of Traditional Owners in decision-making is critical to achieving a better future. We support the alteration of the constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice.
