Role Description
Congratulations!! 
As filler of a circle facilitator role, you run circle meetings. You create an inclusive space where everyone’s voice is valued and where things get done.
Aims: What you do
Basics
- Planning the agenda
- Facilitating circle meetings
- Making sure people are following meeting agreements
- Guiding the process of creating proposals and making decisions
Advanced
- Ensuring that everyone involved in decision-making is included and contacts those not present in the meeting to give input asynchronously
- Surfacing and guiding the process of addressing interpersonal and group tensions
- Training other members on the facilitator role
Domains: What you manage
- Meeting Agenda
- Prioritizing backlog items
Related Circles, Roles, and Policies
- Collaborate closely with secretary and coordinator role holders to plan meetings
The First 30 Days
1. Share your new role
Let people know about your new role as circle coordinator. This helps folks know who to go to for help and makes leadership transparent.
YPC Specific Directions
- Update the members and roles section of your circle’s meeting notes
- Post in #announcements (or make sure another member of your circle, does!)
2. Join Circle Role Holder Groups
Get to know other coordinator role holders! We learn so much from the community.
YPC Specific Directions
- Circle role holders group on Discourse. As part of this Discourse group, you become a forum leader. Read Understanding Discourse Trust Levels “Trust Level 4 - Leader” to understand your new forum powers.
- Circle role holders Google Group. As part of this Google Group, you get permission to do things like change the YPC Admin Calendar and manage Shared Drive members.
#governanceon Slack to have a community of fellow role holders to learn from and support
3. Become an expert in the top how-tos and policies related to your role
Your project/team/organization will have how-tos and policies related to your role. Learn and follow them, then make them better!
YPC Specific Directions
- How to use the meeting notes template
- Meeting Agreements
As you grow in your skills, check out all the docs
4. Ask your circle to give you feedback after you’ve been in your role for about three meetings.
- How am I doing with facilitating circle meetings?
- How am I doing with ensuring every voice is heard?
- How am I doing with separating my facilitator voice from my member voice? (Did you always know whether I was speaking as a member or as the facilitator?)
- How am I doing with supporting agenda planning as needed?
- Anything else?
5. Update this post to make it even better for future facilitators.
Learning Resources
- Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy video
- Meeting Facilitation in Sociocracy templates and examples
- Decolonizing Nonviolent Communication
Tips
Be clear when you’re using your facilitator voice versus your circle member voice.
Understand, explore, decide is your best friend.
Ideas for Improvement
Add tips
Credits
Please share this guide with credit to Sociocracy for All and Youth Power Coalition. Sociocracy for All trained us in sociocracy and we adopted their content for our youth-led context. You can add or change it all you want, just keep your work free for everyone to use.
The legalese
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.