The purpose of the public forum meeting to bring a community of people together to share thoughts, ideas, and information, in order in order to help individuals of their communities.
The steps for setting up the public forum
1. First, you have to consider the purpose of the public forum and the goals you wish to achieve.
2. Decide on a name, something easy that will make it easy for people to understand the public forum's goals.
3. Consider the layout of the meeting. You can either design the chair layout will be like an audience, or in a semi-circle, with a chairperson, treasurer, and secretary who oversee the public forum or will the meeting can be held around a table where everyone takes notes depending on how many people are attending.
4. Once you have decided the goal and design decided. The next step is to set the first agenda and the promotion. Therefore, you need put together a list of the things you wish to discuss that is an agenda of how you would like the meeting to go.
5. Consider the budget for the forum. For example, how much money do you have to hire a room, how big do you need the room, refreshments for the people attending the meeting, etc?
6. Organise the date and venue, remembering the type of audience you want to reach. For example, it is no good organising the meeting for workers, during working hours, as everyone is busy at work and will not be able to attend during the day.
7. Another point to consider is childcare, and other responsibilities that your community has. You have to think what time would be the best time to have the public forum to reach the people who you wish to attend.
8. One last point you need to consider, do any of the people attending have any special needs for instance are they disabled as it is no good finding a venue where there are steps leading up to where the meeting is being held.
9. Write a leaflet describing the public forum, and the purpose and the goals you wish to achieve, making sure you have all the details of when and where the meeting taking place or use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, email, newsletters, blog entries, etc.
10. The next step is to promotion and design posters, and type up informational leaflets to distribute.
11. See if local shops, newspaper, council, library, local radio will help with the promotion, or you could go door-to-door leaflet distribution to reach local residents (maybe if you contact the local newsagent, you ask the owner if the newspaper persons could post the leaflets at the same time as they post the newspapers).
12. Ask as many people as possible to contact you to let you know if they are interested in attending the public forum, so that you can have a rough estimate of how many people are going to turn up.
13. Book the venue, remember do not overboard with the venue, in the beginning because you do not know how many people are going to be interested in attending, it is better to start small and build up the membership of the public forum.
14. Organise refreshments for the attendees.
15. Organise your helpers on the day. Make sure people know what they are supposed to do on the day to make the day run smoothly and remember to thank them afterwards, as you might need them again to help.
16. Welcome your guests to the venue. Give people at least half an hour to turn up and offer refreshments, and let the attendees socialise a little. The best way to do this is as you welcome your guests, just direct them to the table where the refreshments are, so that they can help themselves.
The public forum meeting
1. Call the meeting to order by raising your voice by letting your attendees know that you are ready to start.
2. Introduce the people who are helping, for instance the secretary who is taking the minutes, etc
3. Start to go down the agenda, and discuss issues that interest the group.
4. Have a break after an hour, as people get bored easily, and let people have a walk about by letting them have more refreshments, and bathroom break, which is very good way of people sharing ideas that could help the forum develop.
5. Try not to take completely over the meeting, let people develop their ideas if possible, so that they can forge their relationships with one another and that will bring the community closer together. In addition, don’t let anyone else take over the meeting, to the point others feel intimidated in contributing to the discussion.
6. Ask what the members they like to see happen. Remember that a public forum is like an animal, which is unpredictable. It may start with one idea, but as the community is established, it can grow into something else. As long as the people happy, the information, and the goals you set out are getting across to help the people that you wish to connect with there is not really a problem.
7. Try to give enough time at the end to ask what date would be suitable for everyone to come together again, and ask the people what they would like to see on the next agenda and what tasks done before you meet again.
8. Make sure that you leave the room that you had your meeting is left in a reasonable state, afterwards by picking up any coffee cups left behind and tidy the chairs up. That way you will be able to use that venue again.
9. The day after the meeting, look towards finding the information that the members wanted to add to notes taken from the meeting and make sure that both the information and minutes are type up for the next public forum meeting.
10. Don’t forget to thank people for attending the meeting and remember to make sure you get people’s contact information, especially those who have volunteered to help you in your quest.
11. In addition, you can use social media, and video conferencing to help those who cannot attend personally, however their views may just be as important as those attending in person.
Advantages of public forums
1. A public forum helps people who have common interests to come together to help form contacts with people with similar ideas or problems and can become self-support groups
2. Attendees may come up with valid points that you have not thought of before and maybe you might need a little more time to research those points before proceeding on an action that would affect other peoples' lives. Feedback positive or negative is very important for everyone concerned.
3. It is easier to communicate in person to the very people who you wish to talk to on issues that are important to you and receive good feedback from people whom have had similar experiences.
4. It helps clear the air of any problems that have arisen over time and plan strategies to combat problems and make plans so that the problem do not arrive again.
5. People do not need to be computer literate or have access to the internet, to attend.
Disadvantages of real-life public forums
1. Interested parties may not be able to attend due to family, disability, carer responsibilities, and work commitments. Therefore, their views will not be included in the decisions that may affect their daily life.
2. Cost of venue, refreshments can become an issue as well as the cost of promoting the forum.
3. Disabled people may be too embarrassed about their problems to share their views when people watch them talk.
4. You may find one or two people try to take over the meeting and other people left out of the conversation, because they are too shy to speak.
5. People tend to think of good ideas once they have left the meeting and that means they cannot add that idea until the next meeting when it could be too late to implement.
6. People may get lost on the way to the meeting and after a while, they give up trying to find the place.
7. You end up with all the responsibility afterwards trying to reach the ultimate goal.
8. You may have to prepare visual aids so that the attendees will not get bored.
9. Remember some people will promise you the help you require; only to let you down at a later date, it is a good idea not to totally rely on one person to get a job done.
10. The number of people who do actually attend the face to face meeting, may not be fully representative of the people who you are trying to reach, therefore you may just making decisions based on their views and votes, when really the issue needs to be looked at by a wider audience.
11. There are those who do like to have meetings for the sake of having meetings that could drive people crazy especially if there is not really a good reason for them to be at the meeting. Therefore when you are putting your list together who should attend, you have to be kind and consider if these people do actually need to be there?
Here is an article I found on how to avoid pointless meetings -
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/meeting-tips/
Conclusion
People getting together, can be a very good way of reaching the goals that needed for your community. However, I also feel that it is a very good plan to use social media to engage and connected with the audience you are trying to reach too. Remember to use as many avenues you can in order to reach people because not one size fits all. With all that in mind, I will say good luck to your next meeting.
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