Page 191 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

Technology can help dramatically with this process. Online documents like Google Docs can allow many groups to contribute to the same document at the same time. Otherwise, you will need to come up with a method for integrating all the different recommendations into the same document. The key point here is to write in bullet points. These are easier to add and delete as you work toward agreement. A word of advice: most groups’ first attempts to write recommendations will be fairly rough. At this time you may question if the project can succeed! Its ok, all groups do this. All that is required is to start the first writing task early enough (well before the last meeting) so that you can print what they have written for them to review between meetings. They will invariably find one part of the group’s writing is clear, simple and well argued and thus discover for themselves what they need to change in future versions. Generally three rounds of writing sessions, broken with reading breaks, are needed to get to a clear report.” 189