In my mind, when you choose to follow a plan that has cooperation or collaboration as the central unifying approach your intentions and approach is governed by your choice of these two concepts. I recommend (hope) that we in community round table style meetings, the planners don’t have both approaches in play at the event because that will be confusing and turn off attendees (i.e. The people who wear their resident hat will seek open dialogue, the agency representative person will seek problem solving and solutions).

I believe cooperation is the best course to follow for open forum, town hall style discussions.  If the choice is collaboration, I believe the event will end up defaulting to a agency driven agenda that has the usual need, problem solving, solution, outcomes etc as the over riding discussion and we won’t get very far in the goal of fostering community – engagement conversations.

Looking at Jarache’s matrix below, I see the open forum roundtable events as something that is attempting to tap into emergent (forming) dialogue and it resides in the complex, Networks, Emergent, Cooperation level. Choosing a cooperation approach will require us to structure the round table event with a well framed invitation, clear dialogue, positive, inviting, driven type questions, size of small groups discussion, reporting back to large group etc.

What do you think, cooperation or collaboration?