Bai Bogah or Working the Floor is a formal Kristang Beginsel Lembransa or Creole-Indigenous Thinking Protocol. It is suitable for large-group discussion and initial-stage sampling about both closed-set and open-ended topics, and is more successful when autistic neurodiverse architecture (status-blindness) is mimicked by neurodiverse participants.
Group size: Large group (at least 5 to 6 people, if not more)
Time: 5 to 15 minutes
Steps:
1. All participants should be standing and/or in chairs or mobility devices with wheels.
2. A question, subject or topic of discussion is proposed or delineated.
3. Each participant slowly works their way toward talking to every single person in the room about the subject or topic, allowing conversation to flow, extend or terminate naturally.
4. By the end of the time, each participant should have been able to collect a sample of everyone’s opinion or perspective.
Autistic neurodiverse architecture: Participants should try to talk to everyone in an equal and balanced way, and ignore social status for the duration of the activity.
Purpose
This protocol helps participants to
- rapidly surface the full range of perspectives present in a room without privileging a single speaker or hierarchy;
- reduce premature consensus by ensuring broad sampling before synthesis;
- become aware of or “temperature take” collective or eleidi-level energy, vibe, direction or consolidated opinion;
- identify emergent patterns, tensions, and outlier positions early in a discussion;
- metabolise uncertainty through distributed, one-to-one exchanges rather than adversarial debate;
- build psychoemotional safety and mutual recognition prior to formal decision-making;
- prevent dominance capture by redistributing airtime across the entire group.
Application
This protocol is best used with
- moderate to large community gatherings, workshops, or assemblies where many voices need to be heard quickly;
- early-stage strategic planning before narrowing options or forming working groups;
- controversial or emotionally charged topics where direct plenary debate may polarise participants;
- cross-disciplinary or cross-generational groups where epistemic assumptions differ;
- situations requiring rapid environmental scanning or “temperature-checking” before moving into structured synthesis (e.g., clustering, voting, or facilitated plenary discussion).
Bai Bogah is particularly effective when the aim is not immediate resolution but comprehensive sensing: working the floor as a living network or as one might do at a Kristang party or important social function, allowing insight to circulate before it crystallises in a space where relational understanding and co-construction is a key and essential component of the development of knowledge.