Griet Hellinckx shares the story of how a lockdown initiative for self-organized circles grew into “CoronaCircles”; a weave of circle practice and technology.

CoronaCircles – The Story of a Lockdown Initiative for Self-Organized Circles

A few days after the beginning of the global COVID-19 lockdown, Gerriet Schwen, a 24-year old German student, invited some facilitators to an online brainstorming session, focusing on the question, “How can the power of community and sharing support people during these times of the Corona Virus?”. A few people joined Gerriet with the intention of combining the powerful tradition of circle work with the current possibilities of video conferencing.

I was one of those people; as a teacher, facilitator, trainer and mentor I’ve worked with young people and adults for several decades. I also brought my experiences of several ways of council. The Circle Way provided an essential point of reference as well as Circles of Wisdom, a methodology I have been developing. The core team was also joined by Michael Hoenninger (Germany), who is training at the Eschwege Institute, a place where there is a focus on the teachings of nature, rites of passage and the way of council.

The core team easily agreed to offering online spaces where people could speak from the heart, listen to each other, and formulate what is important to them. Referring to the definition of Circle as it is described in The Circle Way guidelines, it is clear that “what transforms a meeting into a circle is the willingness of people to shift from informal socializing or opinionated discussion into a receptive attitude of thoughtful speaking and deep listening”.

We felt inspired to see what circle elements were a minimum for people - with or without circle experience - to get a taste of its power in these challenging and complex times. We set up a light structure that we felt would allow people to feel comfortable, consisting of the following steps:

• A short welcome

• A moment of silence,

• Then three rounds:

1. Who and where am I?

2. How am I doing? What do I need? What touches or inspires me?

3. What do I take from this CoronaCircle?

The difference from other communication platforms or social media chats lies in the fact that you join a meeting with a clear structure, so ideally it provides you with an experience of what becomes possible when there is a space for focused sharing and attentive listening. It offers people the opportunity to talk about their own experiences and challenges without interruption and to listen to others accordingly. Many people have only rarely experienced being listened to without interruptions or comments. Intentional deep listening provides skills that are badly needed in these times. So it was no surprise that the CoronaCircle project was welcomed and endorsed by torch holders of different dialogue and circle traditions.

We offer the guidelines in three different ways to make sure they are available to everyone and can help create a safe-enough space:

• as text on the website,

• in short videos, and

• in the emails that are sent out when people decide to host or join a CoronaCircle.
  

It is important for a host to hold the space and make sure that people honor the guidelines and don’t start a discussion or an argument. We had expected that people with some hosting expertise would step in first to offer others the opportunity to experience mindful sharing and listening, gradually empowering them to host circles themselves. This did not happen as often as we had hoped so we became aware that self-organization has its limits and that confident hosting is a skill that needs to be nurtured.

The team set out without a budget, but with a lot of idealism, feeling that this was our small contribution in addressing the global crisis. We decided it should be a free user-friendly service, available for anyone and expected to be able to get it all up and running within a short period of time. With this aim in mind, we participated in a 72-hour and a 48-hour hackathon. A hackathon is a design sprint-like event, in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on software projects. We understood that the goal of a hackathon is to create functioning software or hardware within the time available. We had no idea what we were in for! For us non-techies it felt like a crash course, learning new vocabulary, finding our way through the jungle of thousands of experts that could potentially be of help, while at the same time becoming aware of the challenges and risks of our endeavor. People from all over the world joined us at some point to work on the technical realization and to offer us feedback and even legal advice. It was often an interesting challenge to give them a taste of what we intended by using some of the principles dear to our heart!

In the beginning we intended CoronaCircles to be a German-speaking offer, but when we found ourselves co-operating with people from France, India, Italy, Nepal, Switzerland, the UK and the USA it made sense to have it be both in English and German. It was quite an amazing and inspiring experience to join forces with all those people and get a sense of everyone’s situation in their own country in this state of emergency.

Although many hours of hard work were put into our project, we had no finished product after the first hackathon. During the second one we searched for people who could tackle the issues for which none of us had the expertise. However, again we ended up with an unfinished creation. Finally the project got financial support from Sagst, a German foundation. This allowed us to invite Arne Bollinger, a man with self-organization skills and a strong background in front end programming who, with the help of another IT-colleague skilled in backend programming, developed the platform’s present technical structure.

After the platform was online, we received a grant from The Circle Way that enabled our IT-team to distill the plug-in and make it available to anyone anywhere in the world. In computing, a plug-in is a software component that adds a specific feature to a computer program. When a program supports plug-ins, this enables customization. The plug-in that was developed for CoronaCircles can be of interest to any project where scheduling and invitation management of video conference rooms is important. Feel free to use it!

The learning curve about creating and hosting digital dialogue spaces in times of physical distance has grown exponentially. Although we have added the term “Zoom fatigue” to our vocabulary, many of us have experienced that these virtual spaces can be useful for collective reflection and sense-making. CoronaCircles are self-organized circles that meet just once or repeatedly in the same constellation. The registration is kept user friendly. It potentially brings together people who might not normally be in touch with each other in everyday life, allowing them to look beyond their own horizons. As such it can promote inclusion and empathy. Especially in the beginning we received very touching feedback from people who joined a CoronaCircle. Those constellations in which people from different continents took part strengthened the awareness of this lockdown being a global challenge, while at the same time pointing out that although everyone is affected, it is not correct to claim that we sit in the same boat. However we are in the same storm. As the storm is not yet over, we warmly invite you to offer or join a CoronaCircle and let other people know about it.

Thank you to everyone who was involved at some point and helped us to manifest the vision of a free, open source platform for self-organized circles. Join us at CoronaCircles!

The Django App

For those with some background in IT: We developed features for the self-organization of events, the automatic creation of a video conference room and the distribution of the invitation. We combined these functions in an open source Django App:

• You find the Git repository at Github

• The package on PyPi

• The complete source code of our website can be viewed here

Griet Hellinckx was born near Brussels and moved to Germany at age 22. As a teacher, facilitator, trainer and mentor, she has worked with children, young people and adults for nearly 40 years. She sees the present situation as a wake-up call that helps us become aware of the fact that we as humanity are one - globally interconnected with one another as well as with Mother Earth. She takes a keen interest in forms of networking and spirituality that encourage this awareness and support both individual and collective healing, growth & wise action. Accordingly, she has been involved in schooling relevant skills, developing new formats and networking.