In the meantime...

Last week, the RFCLG team spent two days in Tifton, Georgia – moderating two forums at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, using the NIF issue guide “Coping with the Cost of Healthcare: How Can We Pay for What We Need?” And in reviewing our notes from these two events, I have a feeling that this may take longer to blog about…so here is something to consider in the meantime.

At each of our public forums, we assign one of our team members to be the recorder. He or she is charged with capturing comments from the discussion. These comments are helpful to participants, so that as the discussion progresses they can always look up to see what has been said. Notes are also useful when we reflect on the forum later and strive to become better moderators and participants in future forums.

Using a website called Wordle, I created a word cloud using the notes jotted down at our Tifton forums. The word cloud gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text – thus those words that appeared most often in our notes are the biggest in the cloud. To take a look at what people were saying in Tifton, check out the Wordle here.

Back with more thoughts soon.

Post by Jan Levinson, Coordinator, Russell Forum for Civic Life in Georgia