Allison Hewlitt, programme officer for Bellanet (www.bellanet.org) inside of IDRC is an experienced facilitator that is also engaged in multiple reflection spaces around Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing topics for the development community. She talked about what a participatory session is in the context of GK3 and according to her experience.

Interview summary:

What is a participatory, interactive session?

I see it as a session that can be online or face to face. In my mind I don't distinguish between interactive and participatory. I see a space where people are talking and also being heard. Animation comes to mind. If we talk about a physical space I see people's facial expressions, movement, energy. Is something you can see by observing both face to face and online.

What is a participatory session in the context of GK3?

In the context of GK3, the ideal session is to allow participants to take control of their own agenda, give people the opportunity to talk about the things that matter to them, to allow them to connect with other people who share their issues and topics, to decide what is it that they want to do going forward or not. I think creating those spaces is a very daunting tasks for a lot of people. What is more realistic in the case of GK3 is to provide different options for people to interact, to allow people to participate in different kinds of sessions where they can be passive listeners, or being more engaged as participants and individuals. Gk3 is doing what they can to do sessions more interactive and participatory and encouraging different formats. For example there is a push to start sessions with discussions from participants, rather than be simply by presenters who will only present their view and allow very little time for people to discuss what they think of the topic at hand.

What are common elements of successful sessions?

First is to recognize that different people interact in different ways. What I see in common is that not necessarily everybody is doing the same thing. While a session can be oriented in one way, maybe people are having side conversation, looking like they're not taking part, buy maybe they're having the best conversation they've ever have. People should not necessarily be doing the same thing. What is common is that there's movement: people get tired of sitting in one place, having different kind of environment and stimulus is also a commonality. Something also that is a shared space, be it online or face to face, where people can see what is emerging, a graphical or text representation to visualize what conversation are. Those are some ideas from the top of my mind.