Live from NPAC: Day 3

[again, too busy to post this day of…I’ll be back with a wrap-up tomorrow!]

One of the major features of the 2008 National Performing Arts Convention is the series of “caucus sessions” designed and implemented by an organization called AmericaSpeaks. At the first session on Wednesday we worked to define an overall vision for the performing arts community, at the second session yesterday we identified three major opportunities and challenges facing the field, and today we discussed strategies associated with those priorities. Tomorrow at the culminating “21^st-century town meeting,” we’ll get together in one big room and vote on the strategies we’ve identified.

Obviously, it’s an extraordinarily difficult challenge to achieve any sort of unity and still give 4,000 people an individual voice. The caucus sessions have been explicitly designed to maintain that balance, however, and the method is intriguing. Each caucus room is filled with tables that seat 8-10 people, preferably representing a reasonable cross-section of convention attendees (though since the process is essentially random, we have ended up with all-music tables, for example). A facilitator leads the discussion at each table, being careful to incorporate the views of every participant. At the end of the process, each table comes up with its own answer to the questions of the day, and participants self-select to share these insights with the rest of the room. Afterwards, a “theme team” collects the responses from all of the tables in all of the rooms, and teases out the most common threads. These results are then shared via newsletter format at the next caucus.

To be sure, it’s an imperfect process—cutting off the number of opportunities and challenges at three, for example, seems horribly arbitrary even if some kind of narrowing is absolutely necessary. Now I understand why the mainstream political process in this country is so fraught. But I’m impressed with the amount of thought that went into this. It’s extremely ambitious, and we’ll see tomorrow if it results in anything actionable.