On August 11, I attended CaliforniaSpeaks, a massive town hall meeting about health care held simultaneously in eight cities in California. I was there as a guest of AmericaSpeaks, the organization that facilitated the event. The Mayor’s Office paid for my travel.
The reason I went is because we’re looking into using AmericaSpeaks for an education summit the mayor plans to host. The summit will be a one-day event, held on a Saturday, with approximately 500 people in attendance. This will be a very diverse group – parents, students, teachers, business and civic leaders and elected officials of all backgrounds. To accomplish this, we intend to employ the “21st Century Town Hall” model, in which a large group of citizens can engage in intimate dialogue and deliberations and, through the use of computer networking and instant electronic voting technology, find areas of common ground. The goal here is to find at least six shared values regarding education in the urban core, and from those a foundation of actionable ideas that we can build on.
AmericaSpeaks pioneered the 21st Century Town Hall Meeting model. So we thought it would be a good idea for one of us to see how it works behind the scenes. I’m glad I went. I was able to see things that would work well for our purposes, and others that might not work as well.
The event ran from 9 a.m. to a little after four in the afternoon. There were 4,000 people participating at locations across the state, 800 in Los Angeles, where I was. All eight sites were connected via satellite. At each site, participates were randomly placed at tables of 10, each with their own facilitator and laptop computer wired together on a network. Each participant was given a handheld computer with which they could vote on issues and ideas as they came up through the course of the day.
The day started with a lot of excitement. The Governor and several top legislators gave brief speeches on the need for a universal health care policy in California, and my sense from the reactions in the crowd was that the participants felt as though they were part of something very important, historic even.
Then everyone jumped right into conversations. At each of the tables, facilitators guided ten participants in a discussion. During the first discussion period, they asked each person to name two values they felt the sate should consider when crafting a health care policy. As they talked it over, their ideas were typed into the laptops and sent to a bank of computers at the far end of the room, where a “Theme Team” of facilitators read through them, identifying common theme.
Within an hour, the members of the Theme Team had identified eight values that were the most common among all the participants across the state. Participants were then asked to vote on their handheld computers for those they felt were the most important. By mid morning, 4,000 people had reached a consensus.
This process continued though out the day, until at the end they’d amassed an impressive amount of data and ideas about what Californians want from their health care system. It was truly impressive.
The day was not without its problems, though. I was among a group of about 20 people observing the proceedings, and most of us agreed that the facilitators seemed under prepared. We were told that the event was pulled together in two and a half month. So while it was impressive that the event came together at all, this underscored a need to take some time to pull together an event such as this.
Also, there were several demographics that were grossly underrepresented at the event, most notably Hispanics. Only 12 percent of the participants were Hispanic, compared to 32 percent statewide.
The event also seemed, from my perspective, to be politicized. The Governor and legislative leaders had a specific agenda, and they imposed this to some extent on the proceedings. They did this by limiting the number of policy options presented at the summit to those that would be introduced in the coming legislative session. One policy option – single payer health care – was not among the options, and there was a revolt of sorts among participants who wanted to make sure that this option was on the table.
There were also a few technical glitches, which is to be expected with such an ambitious endeavor.
The folks with AmericaSpeaks did a good job of adjusting to crises as they arose. In the end, a strong statement about single-payer health care system was included in the final report from the summit. And all the participants I talked to felt very positive about the experience. They felt their voices were heard, and that they had a chance in creating something good for their state.
- JM
