August 5, 2009 Participation Workshop

On August 5, more than 70 Austinites attended a Participation Workshop, to help City staff and the consultants develop a Participation Plan. The Workshop was conducted as a "conversation cafe," where participants worked around tables in small groups on four questions, changing tables and who they were working with for each question.

The Activity

Participants were asked to brainstorm answers to each question on small sticky notes, then decide on two priority answers to represent the table as a whole. Any answers that were not included as priorities, but which participants nevertheless felt were important could be marked with a star. This produced three levels of priorities.

The Results

Read the results of the Participation Workshop.

Asking "Who's Here?"

The Participation Workshop marked the first use of our "Who's Here?" boards, where participants are asked to dot vote to represent themselves demographically. These boards will be used throughout to monitor how well the process is reaching out to traditionally under-represented groups.

See who attended the August 5 Participation Workshop.

Participation Focus Groups

The August 5 participants were overwhelmingly white, well-educated, and middle- and upper-middle class. To complement the results of that workshop, City staff conducted two focus groups in late August, whose participants were scientifically selected to draw from the groups who didn't attend the August 5 workshop. These focus groups were used to test the results of the Participation Workshop.