This is a page to explore the facilitation of learning and inquiry, and of organizational life, to enhance whole person development, participation and collaboration.

Peer to peer, as a distributed mode of organization and way of thinking, expresses itself not only in a technological infrastructure, but also in modes of organization, and in ways to stimulate social processes that are congruent with it. There is a emergence of a wide variety of dialogical techniques to ellicit collaboration and collective intelligence. While this section mostly focuses on the human-relational aspect of facilitation, it will also monitor technological enablers to this process.

Not all relevant entries from the P2P Encyclopedia have been ported here yet: only the first four columns.

Introductions

1. For context and background, read John Heron's Introduction to Facilitation and his introduction to the revolution in learning
2. Rosa Zubaretta's Introduction specifically tackles the peer to peer vs. leadership aspects of Facilitation; also her (from Heb Shepard) distinctions between Primary vs Secondary Individual-Group Mentality are crucial as well.
3. Which tools to use for collaboration in business? - recommended overview table.
4. The specific p2p formats for conferencing are Open Space Technology and its offshoots in the technology world: Unconferences and BarCamps; we are very interested in developments around Open Sphere
5. In Transcending the Individual Human Mind through Collaborative Design, Ernesto Arias et al. explain why peer to peer learning design is essential in complex societies.
6. David Eaves warns that the cooperation of online communities is not the same as Collaboration which requires the resolving of differences, and that For Benefit organizations are community management organizations and not software firms.

Citation

Chris Corrigan on the fifth mode of organization:

"Within the Art of Hosting community of practice, we have been looking at a fifth organizational paradigm, which is something like a combination of hierarchy, circle, network and bureaucracy. Some of us have been looking at what these four paradigms have to offer, for examples, hierarchy offers order and clarity, circle offers an equal reflective space, network offers an immediate ability to connect with whatever is needed, and bureaucracy helps channel resources where they are needed, "irrigating" initiatives or parts of an organization.

Certainly, each of these has a dark side, but if the benefits are illuminated and then transcended, you get a fifth organizational paradigm in which all four can be somehow present and somehow something new is born."

Key Resources

1. General Facilitation Literature is compiled by DAR
2. An overview, with links, of facilitation methodologies by Chris Corrigan

On Online Facilitation

1. See the report Online Tools for a Sustainable Collaborative Economy.
2. There is a budding wiki on Online Facilitation.
3. The DAR group maintains a collection of Online Facilitation Links and a review of related Literature

Key Tools

1. Actions Options Tool: open source peer to peer organizing tool for activist organizations. Here is a screencast which provides a preview of AOT's features
2. Open Sphere, group facilitation method