Judging by the responses of many of the 100 or so local folks who recently journeyed together to Madison, Wis., the trip was good for a lot more than the beer and brats.

It was quite a crowd: local government officials including the mayors of Chapel Hill and Carrboro; university leaders up to and including Chancellor James Moeser; lots of business people and representatives from cultural agencies, community groups, social service organizations and others.

They went to Madison because that city, although much larger than Chapel Hill, is in many other ways quite similar to this one. It’s a college town — the University of Wisconsin-Madison — with its downtown center nestled up against a rapidly growing campus. The university, as it happens, has spun off a big satellite research campus. Hmm, that idea rings a bell.

By all accounts — the ones that have reached our ears, anyway — the trip was a good learning experience. The big group split into smaller ones that focused on various issues, and the participants no doubt brought back a lot of specific ideas regarding matters large and small.

For example, Madison’s largely successful approach to its homeless population and panhandling issue — it uses a proactive program that sends outreach workers onto the streets to meet one-on-one with the homeless, and it enforces an ordinance that closely limits where panhandling can take place — seems directly applicable here. That’s the kind of specific, targeted effort we can adapt.

But beyond that sort of detailed idea, there were a few broader lessons the trip produced.

One was the great value to be gained simply by removing people from their usual routines and giving them the opportunity to share experiences and talk outside the normal channels.

During the day-to-day, most interactions between, say, university representatives and town officials take place during official functions, held in a chamber or board room, under the narrow confines of a meeting agenda. Everybody quite naturally slips into the customary well-worn — and often at least somewhat adversarial — grooves.

But on a trip like the one to Madison, those same people find themselves together on a plane, a bus, a sidewalk, a restaurant. It’s far more conducive to free and frank conversation, and to finding common ground.

Madison offered another far-reaching lesson in that city’s establishment of a truly collaborative planning process that involves not only town and university officials but neighborhood representatives. Discussion among the various parties occurs frequently and early in the process of any significant university building project.

According to both Madison residents and the local folks who made the trip, those discussions have built trust between the city, its people and its university.

“They understand that power relationships are not as important as being good neighbors,” said Elmira Mangum, associate provost at UNC.

That’s a lesson we would do well to absorb here, where relations between town and university, particularly over issues of growth, have more than once been marked by mutual distrust.

Everybody seemed to come back invigorated and brimming with commitment to take the relevant lessons and put them to work here. The test will be whether that energy and commitment can last over time.