Monthly Archives: April 2014

News Clips

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Conventional wisdom indicates that the general (American) population is woefully uninformed about current events.

In a September 2013 news poll by Pew, “majorities answered 5 of 13 questions correctly.”

That doesn’t sounds so good.

But, of course, that one data point doesn’t really tell us anything since in their January 2013 poll, majorities correctly answered 11 of the 13 items. So, people may or may not actually be uninformed.

One of my primary sources of information is the morning news. And granted, I think the morning news is more “chatty” than the evening news, but I can’t escape the feeling that reporters are saying more and more about less and less.

In theory, I think it’s great for people to be deeply informed about issues. But in practice, most news coverage seems to only scratch the surface of an issue.

So why don’t we do this: condense everything that doesn’t need in-depth coverage as much as possible, thus saving time for everything else.

Since I’m thinking about a broadcast medium, I’d go with, say, a short visual and 1-2 words per story. None of this telling us what’s happening then interviewing an “average person” to tell us in their own words. Let’s have a few in-depth stories with expert opinions, sure, but let’s leave it there.

And we can definitely cut the promotion of up coming stories. No more, “find out what may be killing you…coming up next.” Or, “Up next – what a new study says about a good night’s sleep.” Then five minutes later, they take two minutes of your life to tell you that sleep is important. How is that helpful?

To get us started, here are some concise examples of today’s news. These are great and important topics, but – let’s keep it moving here people.

Today’s weather:

72°

Local news:

Yay!


United

National and international news:

Bad plan


Horrific


Panic! (potentially)

See? And now look at how much time we have to really dig into other issues.

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the political advantages of organized religion

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A piece of mine entitled “If Millennials Leave Religion, then What?” was published by the Religion News Service and picked up by the Washington Post yesterday. In it, I acknowledge the drawbacks of religion (viewed from a secular, political perspective), but I also catalog its advantages and argue that we don’t yet have a secular alternative that fills the traditional civic and political functions of churches and other religious congregations.

The piece had to be cut for length, which is fine (and I was able to select the cuts). But here, I would like to share one section that was deleted for length. In the published version, I alluded to the “depth” of religion. This is what I meant:

Mark Warren’s wonderful book about faith-based organizing, Dry Bones Rattling, begins with a vignette of Father Al Jost reading from the Book of Ezekiel to a group of Latina parishioners from poor neighborhoods in San Antonio. He chooses the version by African-American songwriter James Weldon Johnson: “Ezekiel connected dem dry bones.” Those lyrics derive from the Shakespearean poetry of the King James Version: “Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” Father Jost’s listeners might hear those resonances, or some might recall the Spanish (“¡Huesos secos!”) or the Latin of the Church in which they were raised.

In any case, the effects are palpable. The women are nervous before Father Jost speaks, but they respond “with a resounding ‘Amen’ and [stride] onto the stage to the sounds of a mariachi band … exuding confidence and collective determination.”

I propose that the original quality and the long history of Ezekiel’s poetry explain its political power. Secular equivalents must match this depth of resonance.

The post the political advantages of organized religion appeared first on Peter Levine.

Important 10-question survey for NCDD volunteers and contractors

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To all members of the NCDD community:

With our small staff and modest budget over the years, we’ve always relied on NCDD members to step forward as volunteers to plan the national and regional conferences, organize our online events, host our book clubs, contribute content to the website, create videos, provide each other with advice, and so much more.  We are a Coalition after all, and that’s part of our culture.

I hope you’ve noticed that NCDD has a lot going on these days — now more than ever before, from my vantage point. We have our new member map and directory, regular confab calls and tech tuesdays, lots of rich collaborative projects like Creating Community Solutions (the national dialogue on mental health project) and the CommunityMatters partnership, a news blog that keeps getting better and better.  And we want to keep up this momentum as well as the high quality of our activities and products.

NCDDSeattle-GRs-borderWe’re looking to create a go-to list of NCDD members we can tap into when we need volunteers — and when we have opportunities to contract with NCDD members.

There are many opportunities on the horizon for you to participate more deeply in NCDD.  We’ll need researchers and report writers, people who can theme and summarize the best listserv conversations and blog threads, people who can help us do systems mapping and geo-mapping, people who can interview leaders in the field for the blog, collect mini case stories for the Dialogue Storytelling Tool, share their own stories and cases, do graphic recording, help manage our social media accounts, and so much more.

Some tasks will be volunteer tasks, of course, but some that require a greater time commitment or a specialized skill set will be compensated.

If you’re interested in volunteering or contracting with NCDD in the coming months and years, please take a few minutes and fill out the 10-question survey that’s up at:

www.surveymonkey.com/s/ncdd-rolodex

This survey will help us develop a rolodex of great members who are willing to be contacted about volunteer and paid opportunities that arise, based on your skills, experience and interests.

Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation a key player in Thursday’s Text Talk Act

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We’re excited to announce that Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation is partnering with Creating Community Solutions to promote youth participation in Thursday’s Text Talk Act event! How cool is that?

BornThisWayFdn-Partner

We hope many of you are planning on participating on Thursday. For those of you still on the fence, please join in and hold at least one TTA conversation.  All you need is 3 people, a smartphone, and about an hour, anytime on the 24th.  Anyone can participate, though involving young people is especially encouraged.

If you are planning on hosting a Text Talk Act conversation on Thursday, do us a favor and add yourself to the Creating Community Solutions map! After logging in/creating an account on the Creating Community Solutions site, click on the “Add your dialogue to the map” button under the “Dialogues” tab — or just click here).

Learn more about Text Talk Act here, and sign up today.

NCDD is part of the collaboration running the Creating Community Solutions national dialogue effort aimed at tackling mental health issues in our communities, along with these other NCDDers:  National Institute for Civil Discourse, Everyday Democracy, National Issues Forums Institute, AmericaSpeaks and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. Check out all of our previous posts on Creating Community Solutions here.

Five Strategies to Include Community in Collective Impact

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As of late, our field and NCDD specifically has been looking more closely at “collective impact” models of creating change in our communities, and we saw an article from Rich Harwood, an NCDD organizational member and president of the Harwood Institute, on that theme recently that was worth sharing.

Rich’s article looked at the way that, though collective impact strategies are becoming more popular, the involvement of local communities is often left out of our thinking on how we create collective impact: “My chief concern here is that we sometimes leave robust notions of community out of collective impact discussions and implementation efforts. At times, the very nature of community seems like an afterthought, even a nuisance.” 

He says that rather than imposing collective impact strategies on communities, we have to ensure that the community and its civic culture are part of the calculations for how to succeed. What is civic culture? Rich says,  

Civic culture is how a community works—how trust forms, why and how people engage with one another, what creates the right enabling environment for change to take root and accelerate. It directly contributes to the degree of readiness and appetite for change among leaders, groups, and everyday people.

Each community has its own civic culture, and to make progress, it’s important that everyone understands and develops it.

As part of making sure that civic culture is factored into the ways we approach change, Rich describes what he says are five characteristics of a community’s civic culture that effective collective impact efforts have to address.

The first characteristic is community ownership:

…the success of collective impact depends on genuine ownership by the larger community, and that starts with placing value on both expert knowledge and public knowledge, which can come only from authentically engaging the community.

The starting point is to determine shared aspirations for a community and to know the challenges people face in moving toward those aspirations.

The second is selecting strategies that “fit” the community:

…organizationally aligned strategies will produce measurable progress when teams base them on data, evidence-based decision-making, best practices, and other inputs. But it is important to not confuse a commitment to rigorous analysis with developing strategies that actually fit a local context.

Collective impact efforts should actively use public knowledge to drive the definition of a common agenda and to understand what strategies are relevant to the community.

Third, it’s important that collective impact strategies create a sustainable enabling environment:

…it is critical to create the right enabling environment in a community. This means focusing on the underlying conditions in a community that allow change to occur—and for the community itself to change how it works together.

…These include different layers of leadership in a community, norms for interaction, the presence of multiple groups that span boundaries and bring people together, conscious community conversation, and networks for learning and innovation.

The fourth characteristic is a focus on impact and belief:

…the intense focus on impact alone is not enough to create that desired goal. Another necessary ingredient is belief… Belief, after all, is that intangible factor that prompts and prods people to step forward and engage… Belief arises when people feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. How we structure collective impact efforts can either enlarge or diminish people’s belief.

And finally, Rich writes that collective impact efforts that genuinely involves community have a story:

…traditional aspects of communications strategies are not adequate for addressing the challenge that narratives play in a community. This is the story the community tells about itself. And it is this story that helps shape people’s mindsets, attitudes, behaviors, and actions.

We took a lot from Rich’s insights and think that as we strive to innovate and change the way we engage with our communities for the better, keeping these five dynamics in mind will help us to do that better.

The full version of Rich’s article was published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and we encourage you to read the full article, which you can find at www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/putting_community_in_collective_impact.

Managing Extreme Opinions During Deliberation

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We are happy to share the reflective piece below from one of our newest NCDD supporting members, Donald Ellis of University of Hartford’s School of Communication. Donald’s post came via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Even during those heavy late-night conversations in college about God the guy with an unmovable opinion, who just couldn’t see outside his own boundaries, was annoying. Extreme voices, and the harsh opinions and rigid sensibilities that accompany them, are always a problem during deliberation or any attempted genuine discussion.

The practicalities of deliberation require manageably sized groups that are small enough for sufficient participation in genuine engagement with the other side that is not defused throughout a large network of people. In fact, smaller deliberative groups provide a more empirical experience one that is more easily observed and measured.

Originally, deliberation was associated with existing political systems working to solve problems through liberal democratic means that include all of the normative expectations of deliberation. The “rationality” associated with deliberation is most realistic for intact political systems.

Deeply divided groups – groups divided on the basis of ethnicity and religion – were thought incapable of such discourse. But in the last few years authors such as Sunstein and myself have made a case for deliberation and ethnopolitically divided groups on the basis not of rationality but of the “error reduction” that communication can provide. And as the empirical work in deliberation has evolved numerous practical issues focusing on how people actually communicate has been the subject of research attention. Moreover, researchers form smaller deliberative groups that are more practical.

One of the variables or issues that emerged from the research that the smaller deliberative groups make possible is the matter of extreme opinions. Deliberators in the true sense are supposed to be engaging one another intellectually for the purpose of preference formation, along with all of the normative ideals of deliberation. But in the “real world” of deliberation people behave differently and sometimes badly. Individuals with polarized opinions and attitudes are supposed to moderate them and work toward collaboration, but this is an ideal that is not often achieved. There are individuals who do not fully appreciate or respect deliberative ideals.

This difficulty of extreme opinions is particularly pertinent to conflicts between ethnopolitically divided groups where the conflicts are deep and intense. Conflict such as that between the Israelis and the Palestinians is characterized by highly divergent opinions and tension. People hold firm and unshakable opinions and discussions between these competing groups are filled with individuals who hold rigid and extreme opinions.

At first glance, you would think that rigid opinions would be disruptive and certainly damaging to the deliberative ideal. And, of course, that is possible. Research has shown that sometimes when groups get together and talk the result is a worsening of relationships rather than improvement. Efforts to reduce stereotypes by increasing contact with the target of the stereotype can sometimes simply reinforce already present stereotypic images.

Almost all decision-making groups of any type, deliberative or not, struggle with the problem of members who have extremely rigid opinions and cannot be or will not be moved. Subjecting one’s influence to the better argument is an ideal of deliberation and this is thwarted if group members resist exposure to the other side. Those with rigid opinions typically pay little attention to any collaborative strategy since their goal is the imposition of their own opinions. But the communication process can once again come to the rescue and at least increase the probability of moderation mostly through the process of continued exposure to information, ideas, and counter positions. And although it’s more complex than that the basic communicative process is the initial platform upon which change rests.

It turns out that educating people about how policies and positions actually work tends to increase their exposure to other perspectives and improves the quality of debate. This is one more weapon in the “difficult conversation” arsenal that can serve as a corrective and ameliorate the polarization process. Rigid opinions will not disappear but improving knowledge promises to be an effective unfreezing of attitudes procedure.

Finally: Open Source Broccoli and Kale

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The past thirty years have seen a massive patent grab to control agricultural seeds and the crops that are grown, not just in the US but around the world.  In the name of progress and greater yields, seed companies introduced proprietary GMO and hybrid seeds, slowly squeezing out seeds that are more common and shareable. This is exactly what Microsoft did in software, using Windows to marginalize competing software systems, and this is what bottling companies have done to water, trying to supplant tap water with heavily marketed branded water.

Some folks at the University of Wisconsin have launched a new effort to fight this trend in the seed market through what they call the Open Source Seed Initiative. The project last week released 29 new varieties of broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetables and grains, all of them licensed under the equivalent of software’s General Public License (GPL), which is what has allowed GNU/Linux to remain in the commons. 

The license, known as the Open Source Seed Pledge, lets anyone use the open source seeds for whatever purpose they want – provided that any subsequent seeds produced are also made available on the same basis.  The idea is to bypass the built-in bias of proprietary control in the patent system, and assure that the new seeds will be available for anyone to grow, breed and share in perpetuity, without the fear of someone imposing intellectual property restrictions on later uses of the seeds.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison news office quoted horticulture professor and plant breeder Irwin Goldman, one of the authors of the pledge, as saying:  “These vegetables are part of our common cultural heritage, and our goal is to make sure these seeds remain in the public domain for people to use in the future.”  Last week Goldman released two carrot varieties he developed, named Sovereign and Oranje, at a public ceremony outside of the university’s microbial sciences building.

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The Importance of Completed Conversations

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This reflective piece was submitted by NCDD member Katy Byrne, MFT Psychotherapist, columnist, radio host, and public speaker, via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

“We live in a time when there are so many sophisticated means for communication: email, telephone, fax, yet it is very difficult for individuals, groups, and nations to communicate with each other. We feel we can’t use words to speak, and so we use bombs to communicate.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, Calming The Fearful Mind.

Hairballs aren’t easy.

Why do we leave, abandon, disappear, walk away or never talk to someone again?

Those silly fights or sudden break ups, what’s that about? Twenty, thirty, forty years and vamoose… gone. What‘s up with that? Sometimes it’s a wife, a sister, a friend who just blows up and loses it. “Hey, what happened?” we ask ourselveswhile reading multiple emails with words in black and white.

Some of the past loves of our lives were important .Some died and we lost the opportunity for final closure. A few had unhappy endings. But don’t many of us have a couple past relations that were torn apart like a ripped sleeve?

As we age, don’t we want to be at peace with old friends or family? Don’t we want to feel complete with loved ones when we die? But it takes courage to reach out before it’s too late. It’s not easy to listen to unpleasant feedback or to risk speaking up.

I usually fear folks who yell or blame me. So, I excuse myself, “nuff of that…I’ve been around the bend and I don’t want to go there again.” Is it a way of letting myself off the hook? Or, is it time to let go? If I don’t step up to difficult conversations, who will?

Sometimes I still felt this edgy, lonely feeling inside about some people I cared for
who disappeared or maybe it was me who left them. So, what to do?

Hey, I wrote a book about the courage to speak up, but I have a helluva time doing it myself sometimes. I was writing about the importance of communication and self-responsibility, so I knew that I might have a part in these separations.

I wanted to risk knowing whatever I could about relationship rifts. It was for my own healing but also for the world – since splitting off from others and anger seems to be the problem of the planet. So I started a campaign.

With one old friend all it took was a phone call and we’re fine now. Later, I was a “wuss” with a relative and sent a hand-written letter using my skills to dwell on intention and wishes. I never heard back.

Another person didn’t want to talk about our break-up because she’s into meditation and love. I thought “what’s love got to do with it?” No, really I thought bridging gaps was love.

Anyway, to an old colleague, I said I didn‘t like doing this on email. Could we talk by phone? She insisted on computerized hairballs! So, I tried it, reluctantly.

Umpteen emails later we had different views of our split. She insisted it was nothing personal… just a new stage of life. I felt better that at least we “talked” about it.

Another acquaintance claimed he was just busy. I said, “Do you think there might be some other teensy, eensy thing, since I don’t hear from you anymore?” Bless his heart, he did finally send a loooooong  email saying he was surprised to find that even though it was twelve years later, sure ‘nuff… he did have unexpressed feelings but needed more time to sort through them. It kinda left the hairball up in the air, but at least I practiced bravery.

One old pal surprised me. He came over for coffee after my call and we told the whole truth- judgments, different perceptions and all. We talked it through and ended laughing with deep belly laughs– hairballs gone!

This old world is so full of blame and separation; can’t we do our part to mend it? What matters most?

John Donohue says: “Your way of life has so little to do with what you feel and love in the world but because of the many demands on you and responsibilities you have, you feel helpless to gather yourself; you are dragged in so many directions away from true belonging.”

I believe completion is better, can it always occur? Maybe not. But, do we have the courage to try?

Free online events coming up from the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation

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We’ve got some great activities coming up in the next few months, and I wanted to extend a warm welcome to everybody who works in dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement to participate. Our events are not exclusive to NCDD members (though we hope they’d make you want to join!).

Tech_Tuesday_BadgeThis Tuesday at 2pm EST (11 PST), we have a 1-hour “Tech Tuesday” event with Colleen Hardwick, who will walk us through a cool engagement technology called PlaceSpeak (learn more and register at www.ncdd.org/14552).

This Thursday you don’t want to miss the opportunity to participate in Text Talk Act — a project of Creating Community Solutions, a partnership we’ve involved in that’s part of Obama’s national dialogue on mental health. This innovative project uses the fun and convenience of text messaging to scale up face-to-face dialogue — especially among young people. Learn more here about our strategy this round for working with youth organizers.

Next month on May 27th at 1pm EST (10am PST), our Tech Tuesday focuses on Ethelo Decisions, an exciting new tool that helps people weigh options and make decisions about public problems (www.ncdd.org/14562).

And we’re excited that for our June “confab call” (on the 12th at 2pm EST), our special guest is leading scholar Peter Levine, who will be talking with us about his new book on the democracy movement, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. (Registration will be up soon for this special confab.)

You can see a list of all NCDD’s upcoming events at www.ncdd.org/events (including our national conference in the fall!), and you can always go to www.ncdd.org/tag/confab-archives to check out recordings of past confabs and tech tuesdays.

ThankYouImageAlso, I want to give a special shout-out to NCDD Board member Susan Stuart Clark, who is helping to manage the Tech Tuesday events, and to supporting member Ben Roberts, who is working with us to use Maestroconference with Tech Tuesday presenters who don’t have their own webinar protocol.  Thank you, Susan and Ben!!!

Utopia

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Coined by Thomas More, Utopia literally means “nowhere.” In his 1516 book of the same name, More described an imaginary island with perfect legal, social, and political systems.  The word is something of a play on words, as it’s homophone, eutopia, means “good place.”

Utopia has since been generalized to describe any perfect place. Colloquially, it’s often assumed to be a place where everybody is happy.

This image of Utopia quickly changes into an assumption of dystopia.

I mean, happiness is all well and good, I suppose, but the idea of a bunch of people who are always happy all of the time is downright creepy. It conjures images of drugged out masses, brainwashed or high on opioids, who claim happiness but who have only achieved a false shadow of that joy.

And then there’s the age old question – can happiness exist without unhappiness?

But if Utopia isn’t a place where everyone is happy, then what is it?

If you embrace pain, suffering, and sorrow not only as unfortunate realities, but as necessary ingredients to the good life – what does your Utopia look like then?

It may be good to minimize these so-called negative experiences, but would you really want to eliminate them entirely even if you could?

And once you’ve accepted these horrors into your world, then you’re really just left with a question of quantity and distribution.

Should you distribute the sorrow equally? Ensure that no one experiences more than a certain quota of pain? Quibbling over those details seems cruel and inhuman.

So where does that leave us?

Is Utopia a broken and cruel world, full of flaws and scars, scattered with joy and bursts of well-being? Is Utopia perfect in its imperfection? A world where nothing’s quite right, where the best we can do is fight like hell for a better tomorrow?

Is Utopia really just a constant, unending journey – an embracing of imperfection and a determined, tenacious fight towards unobtainable, futile, perfect?

Perhaps.

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