I first started thinking about meeting places with a lot of fellow-activists who were fed up with the panel of experts and interminable speeches, one after the other - the way that openDemocracy discussion forums can sometimes get when several people like me want to say everything they have to say at once! At the time it seemed very refreshing to organise a fishbowl discussion. You would still have three experts, but these would be having a running conversation between themselves, and there would be - crucially - a fourth empty chair and someone chairing. The discussion would get going, and at some point, the Chair would decide that it needed a change of direction, or some fresh provocation, and invite in a member from 'the floor' to occupy the fourth chair and put his or her question, or make his or her contribution. The Chair would decide when to make the empty chair available again, by tapping the newcomer on the shoulder, and the whole process would continue in that way. Thinking about it now it seems rather 'top-down'! However, it had several virtues. It got away from speeches. It opened up expertise to challenge, including the basic usefulness of asking, 'what on earth do you mean?'. It kept those in the audience who thought they'd like to contribute sitting on the edge of their chairs. It kept the theme going - the subject came first, not any one person's ego... Nowadays, I think we have different questions to ask ourselves about meeting places - more ambitious questions perhaps. One that interests me is the best way to meet in order to explore a complex issue. Given mass entertainment and attention spans, people are no longer prepared to sit through endless amounts of lecturing. This is a very good thing - but doesn't it mean that complex issues are neglected? One meeting format that works amazingly well is the Team Syntegrity non-hierarchical conference designed by the cybernetician, Stafford Beer. Thirty people meet who want to explore a complex issue. It is important that they have very different kinds of expertise about this. It can be very useful if they know nothing at all about it, but would like to. They have to be willing to spend three and a half days together for intense discussions. This kind of meeting is essentially a very high-drama replacement for a year's worth of regular monthly meetings by the usual executive committee, for example. They break the issue down into 12 topics through brainstorming and then break into small overlapping groups to discuss each topic. There will be five people developing a position together, and five monitoring their discussion and commenting on its progress. Others might observe. Intense listening in a small group is as important as anything said. By the third day, the same ideas are cropping up in very different topics, and gathering solidity as they go. By the end, participants feel as if a three-dimensional form of shared knowledge has emerged in their midst. Again, no-one can dominate, but here, you can almost watch a good new idea, however small, dropping into the system and getting taken up by different people from different points of view... It's very exciting. My third example of the best meeting-places I know is designed to tackle a challenge which is only submerged in the two previous meeting-places, but which is at the centre of this one - that is, conflict. For me all good meeting places have to be places where conflict can safely play out. This is important not just because jaw-jaw is the essence of a democracy but because conflicting ideas are the engine of all new thinking and creativity. As identity politics and multicultural lifestyles have become more and more important, we need new ways to meet - robust ways to meet that can survive and thrive on differences. A good place to start may be the conflict resolution process itself. Here, what is important is that people want to participate. Even the worst enemies can agree to this, if they are convinced that the meeting process has its own good intentions and may do something positive for them. Then it is essential that people are listened to in a certain way, as a prelude to them listening to each other. The first listening, which is done by a trained third party, helps each side to explore what has happened to them and why they are angry. If this works well, it helps each side open themselves up to the possibility of some truth or at least, reality, in the 'enemy version'. This kind of meeting can lead to transformed lives, as the participants move from a hardened, often aggressive stand-off, to a new vulnerability and a recognition of humanness in common. I can't think of a more important type of meeting. What interests me in this is that I think mutual vulnerability is the precondition for good meetings of every kind, not just the conflictual ones. A good meeting place - for me - is one where people can change their minds...

Where do you go to meet? When you compare a local meeting place and openDemocracy's global online forum, do different things happen in them? Do you share different ideas - or is the virtual space indistinguishable from the bar at the end of the road? If a meeting place can be where you arrive to pick up your kids and coincidentally so do other moms, and then you talk; well, then I'd have to say the conversations here are alot different. Although some of the politically oriented shouting matches I have had with my kids Dad may compare with a few of the threads I've read here.

ART? OR ENTERTAINMENT? Maybe the answer is a little of both By DAVID GORDON June 24, 2006, Milwaukee journal Sentinel Architectural critic Martin Filler charged in The New York Review of Books that "as cultural institutions around the world reinvent themselves as marketers of mass entertainment, the architecture they commission is reflecting that change all too clearly." Is the Milwaukee Art Museum guilty of such a charge? Since the Calatrava-designed addition to the museum has been adopted as the image of Milwaukee, the museum has been confronted with the question of whether there is a conflict between being an icon and an art museum. My response, in short: No. And yes. Read more... Message was edited by: sarahohanlon [Edited by: oD Forum Moderator. Fixed link.]

At Lift I am in the privileged position of being in daily contact with extraordinary talented artists/theatre makers who constantly "re-imagine their knowledge from the perspective of the user" (Jeremy Till) and create transformative processes, performances, artworks precisely because their work has begun in relationship to another. In the process of planning the brief for the Lift New Parliament we talked to many architects who were similarly inspired to work in that way - not scared of demotion in their role, but excited by the creative potential within the relationship of artist and user. The professionalising, corporatisation, funding and commercialisation of culture has sometimes enabled the public more access to the work of artists, but equally it has erected barriers between the artists and their audiences, between the architects and their users. The Lift New Parliament is an opportunity to explore different kinds of relationship, both in its making and its completion. We are all participants in our planet's future and we need spaces that reflect our capacities to be that and support the challenging, hopeful, rigorous conversations we need to have. There are plenty of places that I feel able to speak, but not many where I feel heard beyond my own community of friends, family and colleagues. So whilst we absolutely need to think of our existing experiences of where and how we talk, in the creation of this new space, we must also recognise that those existing forums can be inward facing. And it will be the artist that enables, elicits our imaginings - to create 'a space like no other encountered'. So my favourite space will be the Lift New Parliament that, when it opens in June 2008, has been shaped by many hands - the multiple, diverse and difficult users that Jeremy talks of and the artists and architects who are as excited by the critical need to be responsive and engaged in the process as they are about their own imaginings. Angharad Wynne-Jones Director of Lift