Adventures in Collaboration…Now with Technology!

by Sarah Allison

For the past few months, my Community Planning Workshop (CPW) team has been working to develop strategic plans for the Emergency Management divisions of Douglas and Coos County. We have gathered information from our steering committees (one in each county), research, interviews and a survey. In addition to the county-level strategic plans, we are also developing a regional plan with opportunities for the two counties to collaborate on common goals. Toward that end, we had a joint meeting this week with the steering committees from both counties to discuss regional opportunities.

The Value of Time

Our Douglas County steering committee is based primarily in Roseburg, and the Coos County committee is based primarily in the Coos Bay/North Bend area, so a physical meeting space would have meant several hours of travel for at least one of the committees, if not both. A two hour meeting would have become an all day affair. Instead, we used the tools available to make collaboration as efficient as possible. Each county had a facility with video conference capabilities, so we divided our CPW team in half. Two team members went to Douglas County, and two went to Coos. Each sub-team facilitated the people in their county, and we had remarkably effective interactions between the two committees virtually.

Moving Forward

Based on the conversations between committees and our previous information gathering, the team will now move into my favorite part of the project – synthesis. We will develop and polish goals and actions to help move these divisions in the direction they want to move. As an additional bonus, the tool of video conferencing may be included in the strategic plan as a way to maintain communication channels between the counties in the future!

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