We’ve received an account from someone who just finished facilitator training. They provide their thoughts here:
“I just finished a facilitator training session, and made some notes on things I thought people would be interested in:
Key documents are being drafted as multiple choice.
Regional assemblies are to suggest more choices which can be voted on at the conference. Regional assemblies will be late October to mid November. These suggestions will be added first before online portal contributions, open to any member to make, are looked at. Each progressive set of assemblies will be discussing the one created by the previous set.
Version 1 of the documents will be released next week.
“Purely consultative process” Regional assemblies will only make suggestions. Formal amendments will be made on an online portal afterwards, which will require a threshold of signatures to be discussed at congress.
Each facilitator will facilitate for groups of 8-10. The facilitator will work with a note-taker to record the suggestions made by their group, which will be submitted to the initial drafters of the documents.
Suggestions made by regional assemblies will be approved or denied by the initial drafters, there may be an exception for the organising strategy, with some arguing that this will be drafted by the first set of assemblies from the ground up. The constitution needs to be drafted by the centre due to legal requirements. Some want the raw data of the discussions at regional assemblies to be public, though there are concerns around confidentiality.
The first 3-5 assemblies have the venue confirmed and may be announced (Greater Manchester, Norfolk & Suffolk, East London will be first three) at the weekend. 15-20 is the aim to complete before the second week of November, to allow time for the formal amendment process.
Documents might only be uploaded 2-4 days before first assembly. There will be 30 minutes to discuss each document, with each small group “probably” discussing a separate part of each document.
Definitely some tensions palpable. On membership migrations, the facilitator said: “if it was down to me it would’ve been sorted by now”.
Many people assumed the rs21 Your Party tools proto-branch finder was official. When asked about it, the facilitator said “That isn’t official but fair play that’s quite a handy tool” ”