Future of Facilitation LAB | Meet us at the Edge of AI
The question is no longer whether AI arrives in facilitation, consulting and coaching. It already has. The question is how we meet it: confidently, ethically, and without giving up what is genuinely human about our work.
This month's guest: Artem Zhiganov, creator of Harmonica — Harmonica explores a fascinating frontier: what happens when an AI facilitator conducts 1-on-1 qualitative inquiry at scale, maps the underlying sentiment clusters, and synthesizes the room's shared intelligence?
Artem also works on the Open Facilitation Library (openfac.org) — Open‑source building blocks for agentic facilitation, which writes facilitation methods as open, portable specs any tool can run, and the Citizen Infrastructure Builders Club (citizeninfra.org), building open-source tools for community coordination and democracy.
🧪 Before we meet: the 10-minute experiment
Everything we do at the LAB rests on one idea: at the edge, reading about a tool teaches you nothing. Using it teaches you everything.
Artem has set up a dedicated inquiry for this community: What is holding facilitators back from using AI?
You have a 1:1 conversation with Harmonica. All answers are synthesised into one map showing where we agree and where we split — ethics, data protection, skills, time, clients, ourselves. That map is the material we unpack live.
👉 Take the 10-minute Harmonica Experience by clicking here
You can stay anonymous. No sign-in, name field optional. Skip it and you appear as "colored animal 1". The map shows positions, never who said what.
Whether or not you make the live call, everyone who takes part receives their own synthesis report and the collective insight map.
On the day
Artem takes us behind the scenes of the tool, shares the insights harvested from your input, and we open an honest dialogue on where AI facilitation adds real value — and where the human edge must remain.
Got a prototype, workflow or experience of your own to show? Get in touch beforehand.
Who it's for
Anyone who works with groups, teams and organisations. You don't need to be an AI expert — the edge isn't where the experts stand, it's where nobody has the answers yet. If you're curious, you're qualified.
Our principles
Chatham House Rule — what's shared here stays protected
Experiment-first — trying out beats perfecting
As equals — we're all learners in a field moving faster than any curriculum
📅 Thursday 10 September, 12:30–14:00 CET · Zoom 🎟️ Free — register here on Luma
We look forward to seeing you.
Bianca Rohrbach Robin T. Sverd · Mingle Collaboration Linie 22 GmbH
P.S. Invite colleagues for whom this is timely — the LAB lives on different perspectives coming together.