Originally I had planned two additional rounds:

ROUND THREE: Organizing Plans (one break-out group per a project)
1. What are the organizating structures required for each selected project?
How are decisions made? How is collaboration orchestrated? How are efforts managed? How do
participants communicate with eachother? What are the key required roles?

ROUND FOUR: Commitment
1. Each selected project is post on chart paper and participants are invited to sign up under various
roles, e.g. steering committee, technician, campaigner, supporter, funder.

But once the process was underway, I realized this was not realistic within the limited time. People also started leaving to catch trains and beat traffic.

I'm not sure the first round was that helpful either. It might have been better to just go straight to project ideas, assuming that participants would already know what projects would make effective use of their potential to achieve results, or maybe including defined resources and results in the preamble.

I also found the participants were quite tired from a long two days of group activity. We used an erergizer excerize that helped, but ideally the process would have been done earlier in the day.

This meeting was one of many in a series organized by community leaders and the City. A major difference at this meeting was the lack of grand standing and loud debate. Some of the 'usual suspects' that often dominated the agenda got frustrated with not being able to make speeches, while accepted the new 'write and dot' format.

It was obvious that a majority of women participated where usually men dominated.

Having the city host and endorse the dotmocracy process gave it greater legitimacy.

There were some concerns that I as facilitator was biased because I was also friends with Pedestrian Sunday organizers, but after promising that I would be objective and would not contribute or influence the content, there were no more concerns.

The 8 parallel questions seemed to work well.Â? I had to encourage people to give answers to the those questions that had less answers. I think this worked because their were many small groups who were all familiar with the topic and the questions were very accessible.Â?

After the final results were given to organizers and city staff, it is not clear how much they used them. Both city officials and community organizers commented that getting support and buy-in from a few power brokers was more important.

The City took the top 20 ideas to document in their own minutes. I took all the results and generated a complete report.Â? The turn around time was about 3 weeks. I think it might have been more well recieved if it was presented in print, given to more people, discussed in the local press and was given some agenda time in a follow-up meeting.

It took some real encouragement to get some members our of their chairs and dotting. There were also a few joke ideas posted that did not seem to discredit the process.

Having the dotmocracy wall close to the food table helped promote use, although it got rather crowded at times. The use of sticky-notes for comments worked but were hard to archive. Brighter lighting would have made it easy to read.