#shapeRMIT Catalyst Kit | Online collaboration guide
Purpose of this guide
The purpose of this guide is to act as a reference that enables #shapeRMIT Catalysts to feel confident and capable to independently use the #shapeRMIT online collaboration platforms to
●Get others excited about participating in #shapeRMIT
●Inspire others to provide their input into the RMIT five year strategy
●Support the development of compelling, well-formed ideas for action
Use it as a guide and reference manual to plan and implement your online activities as a #shapeRMIT Catalyst. It is best used as a companion to the Timeline & campaign guide.
What this guide is not
This is not a “how-to” guide for the average user of the shapermit.com platform. That material is covered on the Getting Started & Help page at
That said, we do encourage Catalysts to read the material on the help page first, as a way to become familiar with the basics of the tools we use.
About the Catalyst Kit
All Catalyst Kit documents are explained in detail and can be downloaded at
We also invite your feedback on all aspects of the Catalyst Kit in the discussion thread located at
How this guide is organised
General approaches to online communities and collaboration
The #shapeRMIT online platform landscape
How to establish and maintain discussion groups
About ideas for action
General approaches to online communities and collaboration
Challenge or Opportunity / ApproachDifferent people have different attitudes to the adoption of technology. At one extreme you have early adopters, at the other you have laggards. / ●No matter who you are working with, provide support at every step of the way to help them transition to new tools
●Remember that it’s a new way of thinking and working that they are adopting, as much as a new tool. Teach the process, then the tool
●Work with early adopters first, learn from that, and use them as ambassadors to reach the rest
●Some people just need time to watch others, so don’t push too hard on laggards
Some people don’t feel comfortable sharing online because of fear of consequences from their direct line management. / ●Remember that any critique can be framed in a positive way
●Ensure that you are considering the perspective of your peers or manager, before you frame your contribution
●Consider posing a “how might we” question rather than making a critique or posing an alternative
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. In other words, just because you start a discussion or an idea, you won’t automatically have people interact with it. / ●Only create new discussions or ideas if they are unique, and if you expect others will take an interest
●Once you’ve started it, use your networks to actively recruit a few “early adopters” who can help others see that the discussion or idea is worth engaging
●Accept responsibility to facilitate the ongoing conversation or collaboration, or make sure someone else will
The #shapeRMIT online platform landscape
Six ways to participate
There are six major ways to participate in #shapeRMIT via the online platform.
1. Events and workshops
Face-to-face events and workshops let you connect with your peers, imagine the future you’d like to see, and brainstorm ideas for action to shape the future of RMIT.
All events are listed on the News & Events page at
This page is curated by the #shapeRMIT project team, so you’ll need to get in touch with them if you want to use this page to publish your own events (e.g. workshops you run with your community, or a presentation you plan to give about #shapeRMIT). Contact them at and you can learn more about the team at
2. Follow the news
The #shapeRMIT project team is keeping a blog with lots of videos and images about the process as it unfolds. This is a great way to catch up on the story so far, and get a deeper sense of the how the RMIT community is shaping its own future.
As a Catalyst, you are the one making the news. Similar to events, get in touch with the #shapeRMIT team if you have a story you want to tell. It will certainly help if you take the time to write the content yourself, or produce your own video.
In general, be sure to encourage your community to check the news regularly and follow along, as an easy way to stay up-to-date with the unfolding process of #shapeRMIT.
3. Join and start discussions
The #shapeRMIT project team will be hosting online discussions about the priority themes already emerging for the strategy. You will also be able to start your own discussion groups if you wish. Our unique discussion tool will let you make proposals to your peers, for them to vote on.
The use of online discussions is perhaps your most potent means of rallying a group of people to shape the future of RMIT. Much of this guide will be dedicated to how to do this well.
4. Read the strategy
As the strategy continues to take shape through the work of the #shapeRMIT project team, we’ll be sharing more and more of that thinking.
●This evolving thinking will be published regularly on the “The 5 Year Strategy” page at
●To understand more about timelines for strategy development, read the “Timelines” section on the “About #shapeRMIT” page at
●You can also consult the Timelines & campaign guide component of the Catalyst Kit to deepen your understanding of how your online activities can fit in with the larger flow of the #shapeRMIT process
As a Catalyst, it’s important to encourage your community to stay tuned into the strategy, both its evolving content and the process for its development. This helps the ideas and insights they produce to have a greater impact, because they are more aligned with the established direction of the university.
This means regularly linking to the “The 5 Year Strategy” page and the “About #shapeRMIT” page as part of online discussions, when your participants need a reminder of the context they are operating within.
5. Create ideas for action
Ideas for action are structured proposals that can be put forward for consideration during the strategy process, and could become part of the action plans that will translate the strategy into outcomes over the next five years.
Through the #shapeRMIT project, the university commits to considering all ideas for action that are generated, making them transparent, and giving a clear response to all of them as to whether and how it can be adopted, and on what grounds.
As part of the unfolding #shapeRMIT process, we will open up an ideas for action feature on the shapermit.com website. This will allow participants to share their ideas openly, and change them in response to the feedback they get in online discussion groups and face-to-face workshops.
There is an extended section below on how we anticipate ideas for action will work at a process level.
6. Become a Catalyst
If you’re reading this, you are probably already pretty clear on what it means to be a Catalyst. If not, review the Role of the Catalyst one-page from the Catalyst Kit.
That said, we also need your help to recruit other Catalysts. If we’re going to reach the hundreds of thousands of people in the broader RMIT community, then we’re going to need thousands of passionate Catalysts like you.
Be sure to let people know about the Catalyst Kit, located at
About the shapermit.com online platform
The online platform at shapermit.com has been purpose built to support #shapeRMIT’s unique process and participant group.
It is a combination of two existing open source software tools, Collabco and Loomio. While this fact mostly doesn’t affect you or other participants, there some situations in which Loomio in particular gets mentioned throughout the site. In fact, much of the “Getting Started & Help” page is existing help text written by the team at Loomio.
Here’s what the different tools do.
●Loomio: Powers the discussion forums, which include Loomio’s unique proposal-based decision making function. We are also using Loomio to manage your user profile information and email settings.
●Collabco: Does everything else. It serves up the many informational pages on shapermit.com, handles the news and events feed, and will eventually support the ideas for action feature.
We’ve done our best to make the combination of the two tools seamless, but there are some points at which the distinction is visible. It may be helpful for you, as a Catalyst, to be able to explain this to your community.
How to establish and maintain discussion groups
As discussed above, discussion groups are powered by a tool called Loomio. The team at Loomio have produced a great video about how their tool works:
We encourage you to watch this video, as the most efficient way to understand Loomio discussions and proposals.
For text that covers the same information in much more detail, we have included all of the Loomio help on the “Getting Started & Help” page:
Reading through this help text is a great way to become a Loomio expert, which will empower you to answer questions that your community might have about the platform. And of course, encourage them to use the help page too.
The rest of this section is designed to give information that is specifically useful to a #shapeRMIT Catalyst that wants to establish and maintain impactful online discussions.
How discussion groups and discussions are organised
Discussions can be set up and organised in a number of ways, using the architecture provided by Loomio. The basic framework is as follows:
#shapeRMIT mainly uses groups and discussion, and not sub-groups. While sub-groups may become necessary as more and more people get involved, we’re trying to keep things simple for now.
All #shapeRMIT groups are organised into one of four categories, and can be discovered and sorted by these categories at
The categories are:
1. 7 Priority Themes:
The #shapeRMIT project team created one group for each of the strategy’s seven priority themes, and a handful of starter discussions within each group.
We expect these groups to be the most active of all, and we encourage you to initially guide your community to participate here. If there is not a discussion that suits, feel free to start one, but be ready to be a leader and moderator for it.
2. #shapeRMIT Catalysts:
Currently there is one “Catalyst Hub” for all catalysts to come together to share their ideas and tips, and to give feedback on the Catalyst Kit.
In the future, we expect that some Catalysts will want to create groups dedicated to their community, where they plan their campaigns and events, and think about how best to get others involved.
3. Workshops & Events
Often when the #shapeRMIT project team runs a workshop or event, we create a special group to help participants get familiar with the online tools. We keep these groups organised under this category.
4. Getting Started & Help
There is one group where we invite users to talk to each other and provide peer support about how to use the platform. This is also a good place to provide feedback on the shapermit.com platform.
In general, we encourage you to join existing discussions within existing groups.
If this does not suit, consider starting a new discussion within an existing group.
If you start a new discussion, consider it your responsibility to lead and facilitate that discussion. Guidance on how best to do this is provided below.
If you believe it is necessary to start an entire new group, please consider getting in touch with the #shapeRMIT project team before doing so, by emailing them at
Starting a discussion
It can be easy to overestimate the level of participation that any online conversation will have. Often we are tempted to start many groups and discussion threads, because we believe we need a structure that will maintain order when the masses come rushing in.
Instead, assume that no one will come unless you work hard to invite them in, and that they will not hang around unless you continue to make it easy for them. Online spaces that take off and sustain themselves without a dedicated facilitator are the rare exception (although we often hear the story told without the facilitator being recognised).
Therefore, before starting a new discussion, consider whether you are prepared to put in the effort to attract participants and facilitate them along the way. If you can’t commit to putting time into this on a regular basis, see if you can recruit someone else who will.
Once you’ve made the decision to start the discussion:
●Title: Give the discussion a short and memorable title that clearly explains the question you want to answer, the decision you want to make, or the outcome you want to achieve.
●Description: Give the discussion a description which provides participants with an understanding of the background of the discussion, and some ideas about how to contribute
●Invitation: Bring people into the discussion by emailing them a link, posting the link in social media, or using Loomio’s invitation feature
Facilitating a discussion
There are three key duties for a facilitator:
1. Keep everyone on topic:
If people take the conversation in a direction that does not fit the intended scope or is not productive, gently remind them of the focus of the discussion (which should be in the description for the discussion), and encourage them to start their own thread if they think their new topic is important.
2. Encourage looking outwards
Participants will often assume they have all the information they need. Before they arrive at conclusions encourage them to:
●Look for examples from other similar situations or organisations that might inform their thinking
●Look for existing research on the topic
●Review other similar discussions or ideas within #shapeRMIT
●Understand how their ideas relate to the Five Year Strategy
3. Summarise the discussion so far
Even simple topics can generate lots of discussion. Someone who joins the discussion later might become discouraged the task of reading through all of the comments so far.
To make it easy for new members to join, summarise the discussion so far using the description space at the top of the discussion page.
Be sure to highlight:
●Where the discussion started
●Any major ideas that were considered
●Any conclusions that were reached, or definitions agreed on
●Any dilemmas or disagreements that have already been unpacked
●What the focus of the discussion is right now
Maintaining a summary of each conversation is an ongoing responsibility of the discussion facilitator.
Using proposals effectively
Proposals are the feature that make Loomio discussions unique. They are how groups move beyond endless dialogue and towards converging on a decision or shared plan.
Be sure to read the Loomio help to understand the specifics of how proposals work:
Here are some key things to remember about proposals as a facilitator:
●Just like discussions, have a clear title and description that helps participants understand what you want from the proposal vote
●There can only be one proposal at a time, so work with the participant who started the proposal to set a shorter time if needed (default is 3 days)
●Sometimes it can help to start a proposal early in the discussion, just to test the waters are bring a bit more clear thinking to the discussion
●Proposals are a great way to invite participation from participants who are “lurking” in the discussion, but not actively commenting
Starting a group or sub-group
Starting a new discussion group should be considered as the superhero version of starting a single discussion thread within a group. A new group is only really necessary if:
●You know for certain that you will need to have multiple discussions under the same umbrella topic
●You have a purpose for your discussion that clearly does not fit the purpose of existing groups
●Your group needs to be private or invitation-only
Starting a sub-group should be done with the same considerations.
If you think you might need to start a group, please consider contacting the #shapeRMIT project team for advice first, at
In general your best bet is always to test your topic in an existing thread, and see if anyone responds to your comment. If a lot of people are interested, consider starting a fresh discussion thread within an existing group.
Only if your discussion thread then spawns multiple other potential discussion threads might a group be needed. It’s possible for the project team to migrate discussions between groups, if this becomes necessary.