On what it actually takes for people to talk to each other, and what we are learning about the difference.

By Méline Laffabry

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There is a version of what we do that sounds straightforward. You bring journalists and NGO practitioners and community members into the same space. You give them a topic they all care about. You facilitate. Something useful happens. Everyone leaves having learned something, and that learning finds its way into how stories are told.

We believe in that version. It is why aidóni exists. But we have also learned, through the work of actually trying to do it, that the version is incomplete. Proximity is not dialogue. A room, or a video call, or a structured programme is a precondition, not the thing itself. The thing itself is harder to create and harder to sustain, and we think it is worth being honest about why.

What we keep coming back to is that genuine dialogue between people from different sectors and different positions requires three things, and they do not work independently. They compound each other. When one is missing, the others cannot fully function.

The first is trust. Not the ambient goodwill that comes from a well-designed session and a clear agenda, but something more specific: people need to know why they are in the room, what will actually be done with what they say, and whether the process has been designed with their interests in mind or primarily someone else’s. This matters differently depending on who you are. For a journalist, the question is often whether their editorial independence is genuinely protected or whether they are being recruited into someone’s communications strategy. For a community member or practitioner, the question is more fundamental: whether their knowledge will be heard as knowledge, or whether it will be translated, smoothed, and folded into a framework that was already decided before they arrived. These are legitimate questions. They do not disappear because the session is well facilitated.

The second is time. One conversation, however good, is not enough. Real exchange requires the possibility of return, of coming back to something that was left unfinished, of building on what was said last time rather than starting again from introductions. This is a structural problem for most convening formats, including ours. Events and programmes have beginnings and ends. Funding covers a defined period. The rhythm of institutional life does not naturally create continuity. What we are trying to understand is how to design for return even within bounded programmes, and what it looks like to maintain relationships across the gaps between them.

The third is stakes. Dialogue happens when people feel that something genuinely depends on it. Not performatively. Not the artificial urgency of a workshop format where everyone agrees that the issues matter, but actually. When a journalist is working on a story that will be published and needs to understand something they do not yet understand. When a practitioner is dealing with coverage that is affecting how their work is perceived and funded. When a community member has been misrepresented and wants to be part of changing that. These are the conditions in which people speak carefully and listen hard. They are harder to manufacture than a shared agenda.

What we have found is that when all three are present, the quality of exchange shifts. People stop performing their sector and start thinking in the room. Journalists ask questions they would not ask on the record. Practitioners say things about media that they usually only say to each other. Community members bring complexity rather than the simplified version of their experience they have learned to offer institutions. None of this is guaranteed, and none of it happens automatically. But it happens, and when it does, it is noticeably different from what a good event produces.

We are writing this not because we have solved the problem but because we think naming it clearly is part of the work. There is a tendency in the field of convening and dialogue to describe what happened in terms of what was designed, to report the intended outcomes as though they were the actual ones. We are trying to resist that. Not every session produces genuine dialogue. Some produce the appearance of it, which is a different thing and worth distinguishing.

What we are building toward is a model that takes trust, time, and stakes seriously as design problems rather than as background conditions. That means being selective about who we bring together and why. It means being honest with participants about what we are trying to do and what we do not yet know how to do. It means being willing to say when a format has not worked and to change it.

A room is not a conversation. But a room, over time, with the right conditions and enough honesty about what is hard, can become one. That is what we are working toward.