The Common Ground Network for Life and Choice Manual

Structuring an email dialogue
Organizing the Dialogue
Someone must assume the role of organizer to carry out most of the tasks that follow
(creating a listserve, recruiting, screening, confirming participation, enlisting a facilitator, etc.).
Someone with facilitation skills might do both roles. A "wanna be" participant might also, but
our advice would be as it is with other dialogues, to have a pair of participant-organizers, one
pro-choice and one pro-life.
Creating a Listserve
Listserves can be created in a number of ways. Search for Common Ground has its own
server which allowed us to create a listserve "in house." You may have that capacity. There also
exist private, on-line services that can create a listserve for you for free (e.g. topica.com.
onelist.com.) An alternative is to use the organizer's email address and send a mass email to the
group, thereby creating a list with all participants’ addresses on it. The facilitator then directs all
members to "respond to all" on the list when posting messages. The listserve option keeps
individual email addresses private, while the alternative does not. In our model we set up a
private listserve maintained by the Search for Common Ground network service provider.
Designing the Group
The dialogue may feature either a moderated group, where a moderator reads every
message before sending it out to the rest of the group, or an unmoderated group, where messages
are dispersed directly to all other group members. We used an unmoderated list to provide
spontaneity that is limited by a moderated format. Our experience bore out that the screening
and invitation process and the participation of an online facilitator make the moderating step
unnecessary. In this design, therefore, participants sent mail to a computer listserve address that
forwarded it directly to all other members on the list. The group's facilitator was simply one
member on the list.