Running a session — and the capstone
This guide is for the member who agreed to facilitate: the course sessions, the capstone, and eventually your group's real assemblies. It assumes no training and no title — in most small groups the facilitator is simply whoever holds the pen and the clock this month. That is fine. Facilitation in this course is not a personality or a profession; it is a short list of auditable moves, and anyone willing to be checked against the list can do it.
The job in one sentence
Make the room visible to itself — nothing more. Everything else in this guide is that sentence applied under pressure. The full argument is in Module 2; here is the working card. Copy it out and keep it in front of you while you facilitate:
The three legitimate moves — all mirrors
- Name where the room agrees — so settled ground stops being re-argued.
- Name where the room divides — so the real question gets the airtime.
- Name amendments as they form — so live proposals don't evaporate into the talk.
The three hard limits — each turns a mirror into a hand on the wheel
- Draft nothing into the ballot. Ballot text comes from members; "tidying the wording" is authoring the question.
- Weigh nothing. No "the stronger argument seems to be…" — ranking reasons is the voters' job. It is, in fact, the vote.
- Cast no vote in a poll you facilitate. Every summary you wrote becomes suspect the moment you are also a contestant.
And the test for any move you're unsure about: could both sides have written this sentence? A summary the room's strongest opponent and strongest supporter would each sign as accurate is facilitation. A summary only one of them would sign is advocacy wearing the chair's hat — cross it out and try again.
Running the course with a group
The course works self-paced, but it lands harder as a group — the discussion topics in each module are written for a room, and the capstone needs one. Three delivery patterns cover most groups:
Delivery patterns
| Pattern | Shape | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Five short evenings | 45–60 min each: (1) Primer + Module 1 · (2) Module 2 · (3) Module 3 · (4) Module 4 + Module 5 · (5) the capstone. Members read the module beforehand; the session is discussion topics, the quiz together, and the demo stage on a shared screen. | Groups that already meet regularly — bolt one session onto each meeting. |
| One half-day | Morning: Primer + Modules 1–3 with breaks (about 2 hours, reading aloud replaced by a 10-minute spoken summary per module from a member assigned in advance). Early afternoon: Modules 4–5 (about 1 hour). Then the capstone (60–90 min) while everything is fresh. | Groups gathering people from a distance, or wanting to start deciding this season. |
| Self-paced + one session | Everyone works through Primer + Modules 1–5 alone over a fortnight; the group meets once, for the capstone only. The facilitator checks the readiness list a few days out. | Groups that struggle to meet — but hold the line on the capstone being live. An assembly cannot be run alone, and neither can the practice for one. |
Session mechanics that matter more than they look
- Assign the reading, not the summarising. If one person always explains the module to the others, that person becomes the course — and later, too easily, becomes the process. Rotate.
- Do the quizzes together, out loud. The wrong options are written to be plausible; the argument about why they're wrong is worth more than the score.
- Show the demo stage before discussing each module. Thirty seconds of Fernside doing it saves ten minutes of abstract description.
- End every session with the discussion topics — they are where the course meets your group's actual history, which is the part nobody else can teach.
Facilitating the capstone
The capstone page carries the full script, the readiness self-check, and the pre-baked practice question; this section is your side of it. Run the readiness check days before, not minutes before. Then hold the clock firmly — the single most common first-run failure is a deliberation step that swallows the poll, the dissent slips, and the seal, leaving the group with a lovely conversation and no record.
Capstone timing — facilitator's cues
| Step | Time (60 / 90 min run) | Your cue |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Frame and lock (demo stage 1) | 8 / 10 min | Read the form aloud; take wording sharpening only; declare it locked and read the decision sentence one final time. From here, protect the terms. |
| 2 · Positions before speech (stage 2) | 8 / 10 min | Enforce the silence until every pen is down — kindly, and completely. Then call the read-around; no interruptions, including from you. |
| 3 · Deliberate (stage 2) | 18 / 30 min | Your three moves, on the visible tracker. Give a five-minute warning, then read the final wording back from the tracker. Do not extend — the window was set at the open. |
| 4 · The poll (stage 3) | 8 / 10 min | Hand the count to the recorder. Check quorum out loud before the responses; announce all four totals in the same breath; have the arithmetic written, not gestured. |
| 5 · Dissent onto the record (stage 4) | 8 / 10 min | Objectors write their own slips — protect them from being talked out of it, and protect their wording from helpful editors, including you. |
| 6 · Seal (stage 5) | 8 / 10 min | The recorder leads; you confirm the read-back happened and sign where the checklist says. Then the Debrief Sheet — before anyone stands up, especially line 6. |
Keeping it neutral when everyone has a stake
In a big organisation the facilitator can be an outsider. In a group of nine, you are a member: the meeting time being moved is your evening too, and the garden plots are yours as much as anyone's. Pretending otherwise is the one move that never works — the room knows. Neutrality in a small group is not a state of soul; it is a set of visible, checkable behaviours:
The working protections
- Declare your stake at the open. "For the record, I'd personally prefer the earlier time. I'm facilitating, so I won't argue it and I won't vote." Thirty seconds, and every later summary is read against a declared position instead of a suspected one.
- Summarise only from the cards and the tracker. If a line in your summary can't be pointed at — a card, a spoken position the recorder noted — it doesn't go up. Invite the room to check: that audit is your protection as much as theirs.
- Apply the both-sides test out loud when challenged. "Would Elena and Ana both sign this sentence? No? Then help me redraft it." A facilitator who redrafts on challenge builds trust; one who defends drafts spends it.
- Hand the count away. The recorder counts; you never touch the tally of a poll you chaired.
- Rotate the role. The strongest structural protection there is. If the same person facilitates everything, their small biases compound into the group's constitution. Facilitate the questions you care least about, and pass the pen on the ones you care most about — declaring a stake that strong is the cue to swap roles for that assembly.
One rule has no small-group discount: the proposer never facilitates. Every other role can double; that one cannot. A room too small to separate proposer from facilitator for a given question should borrow a facilitator from a neighbouring group for it — which is, incidentally, how federations start making friends.
When the room wobbles
Six situations account for most of what goes wrong in a small assembly. None of them needs charisma; each has a procedural move that works precisely because it is procedure, not personality:
Troubleshooting
| Situation | The move |
|---|---|
| One voice dominating. | Return to the cards: "That position's on the tracker. Let's hear a card we haven't heard from yet." The cards exist so airtime isn't the currency — spend them. |
| Silence being read as agreement. | Never infer consent from quiet. Name the option explicitly: "Standing aside is a real response — it's on the poll sheet, and nobody owes the room a fight." Some silence is agreement; some is a member deciding whether an objection is worth the social cost. The poll's four boxes are how you find out; your inference is not. |
| Scope creep mid-window. | "That's a second proposal. It goes on the tracker as one, and it gets its own form after this closes." The locked Proposal Form is your authority — you're not shutting the idea down, you're filing it where it can actually win. |
| "Can we just vote?" | The window was declared at the open; hold it — and say why: "The window protects whoever hasn't spoken yet. We close at quarter past, as set." Cutting deliberation short on the majority's fatigue is aggregation wearing deliberation's clothes. |
| A last-minute amendment. | Module 2's rule: amendments are written and visible before the close, or they wait for the next proposal. An amendment half the room never saw poisons everything sealed after it. |
| The proposer defending every point. | Remind the room — and the proposer — that positions are answered by the poll, not by rebuttal: "You've answered the question they asked; you don't have to win the exchange. The count settles it." Proposers who must win every skirmish teach members to stop raising objections, which is how a group goes blind. |
The AI-facilitator option — and its checks
Village Assembly offers an AI facilitator that does the mirror-work continuously: grouping stances, surfacing agreement and division, flagging amendments as they form. If your group uses it, your job does not disappear — it changes from writing the summaries to auditing them, and the standard you audit against is exactly the card at the top of this page. The AI operates under the same three limits: it drafts nothing into the ballot, weighs nothing, and has no vote. It also runs on the group's own machines, so the deliberation is never shipped elsewhere to be summarised under someone else's terms.
Two caveats belong in the open, as Module 2 puts them. First, a summariser can steer — every summary chooses what to foreground, and a machine's choices can tilt a room as surely as a chairperson's, more quietly, because the tone never wavers and nobody's eyebrows go up. Second, compression loses someone's nuance, and it is reliably the quietest someone. The protections are procedural, and as facilitator you are the one who enforces them:
The checks — run every time
- Every AI summary is shown to the room, attributed as machine-generated. Members must know which mirror they're looking in.
- It stands only after members could correct it. Read it out or put it up; ask "does anyone's position appear wrongly, or not at all?" — and wait long enough for the quiet ones.
- Trace-to-source: any line that can't be traced to something a member actually wrote or said is struck. Same rule as your tracker, no exemptions for fluent prose.
- Humans seal. The AI never closes the poll, never applies the rule, never seals the record. Those acts are the group's, made by named people.
After the session
Three small duties close a session well. Confirm the record owner has everything — a sealed record nobody can locate next month failed at the last step. See the Debrief Sheet filled in before people drift, and read line 6 back to the room: the first real question, and its filing date. And pass the pen — say now who facilitates the next one. A group where facilitation visibly rotates has learned the deepest thing this course teaches: the process belongs to the room, not to whoever runs it best.