By Marcia Kadanoff and the team at the Maker City Project
The goal of the Town Hall is to galvanize people locally, to get them excited and committed to advancing the ecosystem locally around Making and to connect what Makers are doing with the solution to local problems. The ecosystem is the set of organizations, institutions, individuals from the private and public sectors that are interested and engaged in work around a particular topic or issue.
With this in mind, here are some simply guidelines to setting up your Town Hall for Success.
Step 1. Understand where you are at in terms of ecosystem development – about 5-6 weeks before the Town Hall
Step 2. Identify/engage local champions to serve on the “Planning Committee” for the Town Hall – about 5-6 weeks before
Step 3. Invite additional stakeholders and attendees – about 3-4 weeks before the Town Hall
Step 4. Hold the Event – Day of Town Hall
Step 5. Follow up on Next Steps – Week of Town Hall
A step-by-step guide follows. FAQs are also provided.
—
Step 1.
Figure out where you are in terms of ecosystem development.
It may seem strange, but your first stop in pulling together a Town Hall is not the Mayor’s Office.
Instead, you are going to want to get started by making a list of people who are involved in the Maker movement in your city and town.
Develop a short list of the people you’d like to invite to be on your team to plan and execute the Town Hall (“Planning Committee”).
- A local Makerspace, if you have one – example: xxx
- A teacher, librarian, or educational advocate who understands the transformational impact the Maker movement can have on a community – example: Pittsburgh
- A church or community leader – example: Detroit
- A young person who is committed and excited about Making – example: Waxxx Washing
- A workforce development organization – example: xxx in New York
- A microfactory or innovation center – example: xxx in Louisville, KY
(All of the above examples are from the book Maker City, a practical guide to reinventing our cities. )
If you don’t have much traction with Making in your particular community, a good place to start to recruit people on to the Planning Committee may be by looking outside your immediate city or town to find resources that are operating within your region. You might look to the county community college, especially if there is a visionary on staff, someone in specializing in engineering, computer science, or another STEM field. Example: Elveria Community College.
HINT: We hate the word “Committee” because it implies a group of people that are all talk and no action. Commit to making your committee action oriented by making sure that every time you meet people walk away with action items the are responsible for.
Step 2. Identify/engage local champions to serve on the “Planning Committee” for the Town Hall
A high-impact Town Hall isn’t something you are going to be able to pull off by yourself; you need to get local stakeholders and constituents involved and engaged in the planning of the event itself.
About 6-8-12 weeks before the Town Hall, invite people to join you in 1-3 meetings where you will plan out what you want to happen at the Town Hall. Bringing together an ad hoc team like this can be daunting, especially if you don’t know many of the players. One good way to think about the team dynamics is that high performing teams go through 5 distinct phases:
- Forming
- Storming
- Norming
- Performing
- Adjourning
To learn more about each phase, see this presentation available on Slideshare. It does a good job of describing what happens at each stage and your role as a facilitator in pulling together the team.
One thing you and the Planning Committee is going to want to discuss is the desired format for your Town Hall. The word “Town Hall” conjures up a highly-participatory format. One format for a Town Hall we think worth consdiering is an Unconference, because this allows the attendees to define the agenda and encourages them to participate in conversations. People who attend participate; they are not members of an audience.
The Unconference methodology has been around for about 10 years and is well documented in the open-source community. Here are a set of resources you can use to better understand the “Unconference” format and how to set up your Town Hall for success.
How Unconferences Unleash Innovative Ideas
Ten Simple Rules for Organizing an Unconference
How to Run a Great Unconference Session
How to Facilitate Barcamp Unconference
FAQS
Hint: Do you need an outside speaker to make your Town Hall a success?
We think outside speakers, that is experts who come in from another geography, are not at all necessary to create a high-impact Town Hall. That said, if there is someone you want to specifically speak to their experience building out the Maker ecosystem from another city or town, reach out and ask for their help. Be cognizant of the fact that speakers who are coming from city or local government and/or from the non-profit community will require funding from you, to reimbursement for travel expenses; honorariums (payment that goes to the speaker themselves) is not typically a requirement and – in fact – can be a bit of a red flag.
A list of people who were interviewed as part of the in the Maker City book can be found here and may be a source of inspiration for you when looking to outside speakers.
In the Middle
In some cities, the word “Maker” is not new … it’s something that people have been talking about for a long time. Your community may have a Maker Faire, more than one Makerspace(s), and parts of the formal and informal learning community in your city or town is likely to be aligned around Maker education and/or vocational training. For example, in Chicago there are …
something you probably hear from some community leaders in your community. Therefore your goal at the Town Hall is to bring all the community leaders together at the Town Hall, to create a greater sense of connectiveness and shared desire for tangible action that moves the community forward. If your community is here, your Town Hall starts by tapping into the Maker advocates that already exist in your community, bringing them together to plan the meeting.
Relatively Mature
How to tell if your If your community has a well-developed ecosystem where the players already know each other, your Town Hall should focus on understanding what gaps there are in the ecosystem, any risk factors that exist that could undermine that ecosystem, and how to
Why Maturity Matters
It’s important that you focus your Town Hall around where people are at.
If your city or town is just starting out, be prepared to set the stage in your Town Hall by:
Defining what the Maker movement is all about
Resetting expectations
Talking about success
Link the movement to tangibles your community cares about – especially job creation and economic opportunity
If your city or town is in the middle:
You may want to cover the same agenda as above, just not in the same depth
For your town hall on bringing people together to create a set of shared goals in a co-creation session. Often the best shared goals recognize gaps in the ecosystem and lean in
If your city or town is in the mature phase:
Consider creating a map or listing that describes the local ecosystem
Focus your effort on co-creating a forward agenda
Step 3. Invite additional stakeholders and constituents
Each of the organizations on your Planning Committee should be able to identify individuals and other organizations to tap into when it comes time to invite people to your Town Hall. This is good because developing an emailing list takes a lot of time and effort and this is time and effort better spent in other aspects of your Town Hall.
A tool called Eventbrite is free or very low cost* and is what we typically recommend to handle invitations and track RSVPs.
You’ll want to author an email invitation that everyone can use and then ask the organizations on your planning committee to use that emailing as a basis of their outreach effort. In other words, don’t try to create a mailing list yourself for the Town Hall. Instead, depend on the organizations on your planning committee, many of which will have outreach vehicles such as re
Small cities and towns may have local newspapers that can get the word out about your Town Hall very cost effectively.
Select a date, location, and format for your Town Hall.
There are 3 potential formats we see:
- Talking Heads
- Panel Discussion
- Breakout Sessions
The best Town Halls we’ve seen don’t rely solely on talking heads and instead try to get more engagement going through what we call an unconference format.
Consider an unconference format …
Co-Creation
The term ‘co-creation’ has come up a lot and you may or may not know what this means.
INSERT DEFINITION
A graphic that details all the steps involved in hosting a good co-creation session is this one:
INSERT GRAPHIC
Remember that if your city or town is just starting out, a co-creation session may be appropriate as a follow up session to your Town Hall.
The role of outside speakers
We think outside speakers, that is experts who come in from another geography, are not at all necessary to create a high-impact Town Hall. That said, if there is someone you want to specifically speak to their experience building out the Maker ecosystem from another city or town, reach out and ask for their help. Be cognizant of the fact that speakers who are coming from city or local government and/or from the non-profit community will require funding from you, to reimbursement for travel expenses; honorariums (payment that goes to the speaker themselves) is not typically a requirement and – in fact – can be a bit of a red flag.
A list of people who were interviewed as part of the in the Maker City book can be found here and may be a source of inspiration for you when looking to outside speakers.
The role of the Mayor’s Office
You want to keep the Town Hall focused on your agenda as a Maker advocate. High-level officials can be a great augment to your Town Hall, to the extent that they understand the Maker movement and are committed and enthusiastic.
Under President Obama, about 100 mayors raised their hands and self identified themselves as running a Maker City. One way to see whether your mayor is likely to get on board is to see if they are on this initial list: xxx.
INSERT LINK.
Sometimes, it is not the Mayor you want to invite, but the Chief Innovation Officer, the Director of Economic and/or Workforce Development, or the head of the Chamber of Commerce. High-end business leaders can also play a role, especially to the extent they are involved in bringing advanced manufacturing facilities to your city or town and/or helping to upskill workers from legacy industries (coal, automobile assembly, etc.)
The Role of the State
State policy can be a powerful way to move the needle. The time to involve State officials in your Maker Town Hall is when you have a mature ecosystem you can point to, ready to take the next step in creating jobs and economic opportunity. A policy roadmap for a state can be found here, in a blog post that describes what Governor Gina Raimondo (D-RI) is doing to create economic opportunity in her state. This agenda was developed in conjunction with Brookings Institution. Contact us if you feel like your state is ready to think through policy options and we’d be happy to introduce you to the right people at Brookings.
Balancing Facts with Story Telling
It’s tempting to look for quantitative results from the Maker movement on economic opportunity, local productivity, and other outcomes. There are two things we can say about this. First, while there are some studies available, there aren’t a lot. We are just at the beginning of the learning curve when it comes to quantifying the change that the Maker movement can have on particular communities.
INSERT LINK.
Second, when it comes to persuading people to change, stories turn out to be more effective than facts. INSERT LINK
For these reasons, we encourage you to focus your Town Hall on storytelling and conversation.
Tangible Results to Expect
Focus on 3-5 tangible results to come out of your meeting. Most of the results you want are going to be commitments from community leaders (“stakeholders”) on what they want to see as a next step in terms of developing community around Making and deepening the conversations you started at your Town Hall.
A next step could be to hold a monthly meetups of the Maker advocates in your community, to publish a map and/or listing of all the Maker activity in your city or town, to reach out regionally to a major research university to see if they are willing to open up their well-equipped Makerspace to people in the community and if so under what conditions.
Here’s a list of 10 potential next steps you can choose from:
Feel free to write in your own next steps so other people planning a Town Hall can benefit from your thinking!