A Quick Guide for Moderators of Community Conversations

Deliberative Questions

Global Horizons, LLC has provided NCSL with a quick guide for moderators of community conversations. The following information provides a set of open-ended questions to help you facilitate meetings with people in your communities.
The guide allows a great opportunity to engage those citizens in conversations with you about their issues and concerns.

Personal Stake

• How has the issue affected you personally?
• Has anyone had a personal experience that illustrates this problem?
• Within your family circle of friends, is this an important issue
• What makes this issue real for us?

Value

• What things are most valuable to people who support this option?
• What is appealing about this option?
• What makes this option a poor idea – or a good one?

Fair Hearing

• What do you like most/least about this choice?
• It sounds like you feel strongly in support of/against this choice. What about this choice troubles/appeals to you?
• What is the strongest argument against/in favor of this choice?
• Phrased in a positive light, what seems to be most important to those who are attracted to this choice?

Costs and Consequences

• What would result from doing what this option proposes?
• What could be the consequences of doing what this option suggests?
• What costs are at stake and can we live with them? In order to achieve __________?
• Would you give up___________.
• What tradeoffs are you willing or not willing to make?

Tensions/Conflicts

• What do you see as the tensions between the options?
• Where are the conflicts that grow out of what we’ve said about this use?
• Why is this use so difficult to decide?
• What are the gray areas?
• What remains unsolved for this group?

Common Ground

• What direction seems best, or where do we want to go with this?
• What tradeoffs are we willing to accept? What tradeoffs are we unwilling to accept?
• What common ground can we detect in this group to provide guidance to policymakers?
• What are we willing to do as individuals or a community?
• What actions did you hear that you sensed we could not accept or live with?
• What seemed important to all of us?
• Have we come to some common ground to support certain actions? What are those actions?

Courtesy of Global Horizons, LLC
Growth through entrepreneurial thinking
Frank and Kimberlee Spillers
1413 Chestnut Street
Atlantic, Iowa 60022
712-254-1645
Global Horizons, LLC