How do you tell the story of a complex, emergent experience?

It’s a question I’m pondered for years as I’ve hosted numerous gathering using Open Space Technology, a process which supports people to self-organize around what matters to them. People consistently come away saying something like,  “It was life changing! You had to be there to understand.”

Last October, I helped organized  Experience Engagement, a gathering at the intersection of journalism and community on behalf of Journalism That Matters, a nonprofit that I co-founded with three journalists to connect the diversity of people who care about the role of news and information in communities and democracy.

As part of the work, we used a process, Developmental Evaluation, to get at that conundrum of the telling the story. The graphic above is a visual summary of what we learned. More of it is posted here.