PlaceMatters’ work is focused on helping communities make decisions, especially around difficult issues and complex questions. We are, most fundamentally, process designers. Our role is to architect community decision-making processes that engage community members, give them the information and tools they need to understand the challenges and compare the trade-offs between options, offer them the space and support they need to contribute their own ideas and solutions to the conversation, and help guide all of that toward a clear, actionable, and durable decision. We spend about half our time on the think tank side of the equation, researching and exploring and tracking, and about half our time providing our services to communities around the country.
We’ve got a bunch of terrific colleague organizations doing similar work and exploring similar questions, and across this community of people committed to improving community decision making we communicate a lot. We share lessons learned with our colleagues all the time, we collaborate with them often, we read tons of blogs, we all participate in the same conferences, and we engage in focused conversations around research projects and important community questions. It’s great for us, great for the folks dedicated to helping communities in these ways, and great for the communities across the country that actually have to grapple with tough decisions all the time.
Interestingly, there are a bunch of other folks out there designing engagement processes. Museum folks design exhibits to engage their patrons. Architects and interior designers often aim to create buildings and spaces that engage visitors. Branded companies design campaigns intended to engage their brand evangelists. Nonprofit membership directors work hard to create deep engagement between their organization and their supporters.
But I can’t help but notice – despite how similar our basic challenges are – how little conversation occurs across these boundaries. Museum people, even the ones most focused on cutting edge engagement strategies (see the excellent Museum 2.0 blog, for example) by and large don’t talk with community process designers. Architects (A Daily Dose of Architecture is a nice architecture blog example) don’t generally talk with social networking experts. It’s actually quite difficult to cut across these boundaries, however deep your domain expertise might be. You have to realize that you are doing similar work in the first place, then you have to figure out where the important conversations are happening, then you have to figure how to effectively engage in those conversations, and, finally, you have to figure out how all of that actually helps you do your job better.
I don’t know what the answer is, but because our work is fundamentally so similar – design engaging, meaningful, participatory experiences – it sure seems like there are some great opportunities waiting to be uncovered.
