The Regional Dialogues of the American Leadership Forum of Oregon’s Urban Rural Connection Project (URCP) consisted of six Regional Dialogues with 30-45 seasoned leaders (called “Participants” here) coming together to share how they define and experience Oregon’s urban rural divide and the most pressing challenges in their communities.
At each of the Regional Dialogues, two members of the URCP Cohort sat with 5-7 of the Participants, with one Cohort member facilitating the conversation and another Cohort member taking notes.
The Dialogues took place in Salem, Lincoln City, Medford, Warm Springs, Baker City, and Portland. In all but Salem, each of the conversations were recorded. The authors of this report used both the notes and the audio recordings to generate this report. Admittedly, because Salem Dialogues were not recorded, there are fewer direct quotes from the Salem Dialogues.
The online tool, Temi, converted of audio recordings to text. While Temi's computer generated text was incredibly fast (taking minutes to transform hours of audio into text), these conversions were rife with errors and incomprehensible text. Therefore, the authors and other volunteers listened to the audio while reading and correcting the text. Notes do not associate names or titles with any of the comments and reflections made by Participants. In the five Regional Dialogues, where the conversations were recorded, each consisted of 5-8 small groups. The recording time for each of the groups was typically around 2 hours. This yielded approximately 70 hours of audio recording. One hour of transcriptions took between 1.5 - 2 hours to review, sometimes longer.
The report contributors went back and forth on whether to organize the report by Regional Dialogue or by issue. Ultimately, the decision was made to organize the report by issue to capture the whole of the issue from all perspectives. In the end, having a report sharing different perspectives around one issue was thought to bring more value than creating chapters about the six regions where the take-home message might be attributed to the challenges of that Region instead of around the complexity of an issue felt across Oregon.
Note also that a handful of Participants attended more than one Dialogue. People also attended Dialogues that were hours from where the Dialogue took place. Thus, a quote from a Medford Dialogue may not always mean that person lives near Medford. The authors occasionally attribute quotes to people when they live far away from the Regional Dialogue location.
In order to organize the text for the report, the author color-coded the text from each Regional Dialogue and then pasted text related to similar themes together in one document. This way, the author knew which Dialogue the sentiment was shared.
From there, the author attempted to sew the text together in a readable form, with attention to conveying the most critical comments in ways that could be understood in black and white. If it were not for the audio recordings, the authors (most of whom did not attend the Dialogues) could not have heard the exhaustion, concern, worry and even anger that Participants shared about their lived experience.