Screening of “Bring It To The Table” at NCDD 2014

Posted on October 4, 2014 by Sandy Heierbacher

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be screening the not-yet-released film “Bring It To The Table” at NCDD 2014 on Saturday night starting at 8:30 pm, and you’ll have the chance to talk with filmmaker Julie Winokur about her journey, and about how you might utilize the film.

Democracy is founded on robust dialogue, but somewhere along the line, politics replaced sex as the one thing in America we don’t discuss in mixed company. Bring it to the Table aims to reverse that trend. Filmmaker Julie Winokur traveled across the country with a small star-spangled table, inviting people to sit down and share the roots of their political beliefs.

Using humor and candor, Winokur explores the peaks and valleys of the American political psyche while she strives to bring people together about topics that typically tear us apart. The project, which has been featured on NPR and MSNBC, will launch a college campus campaign this fall.

Winokur will lead a discussion after the screening to see how to engage the NCDD community to use the film to spark conversations nationwide. Learn more about Bring It to The Table, and have your voice heard on how to use the materials moving forward.

Learn more about the project now at www.bringit2thetable.org.

About the filmmaker…

Julie Winokur, Executive Director of Talking Eyes Media, is a writer and documentary film producer whose work uses the power of visual media to catalyze positive social change. Her passion for social advocacy has produced multi-year projects including the films Firestorm (PBS and the Documentary Channel), Aging in America: The Years Ahead (PBS), and Denied: The Crisis of America’s Uninsured, which was featured on MSNBC.com. Winokur has appeared on behalf of Talking Eyes Media as a keynote and guest speaker for a variety of media training workshops, conferences, events, and educational institutions, including Columbia University, the International Center for Photography, and the American Medical Association.

Probability and Free Will

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

I am not, I suppose, a good person to debate free will with, because I am heavily biased in its favor.

I expect there is little anyone will ever say, do, or discover that will shake my opinion. A world without free will is a world I cannot abide.

To be fair, I imagine that no one will ever really know if free will exists. It is one of many deeper truths which elude our control. But, in the absence of true knowledge, I have to choose – if I may – a paradigm to operate under.

And I chose free will.

Benjamin Libet’s study of neural impulses famously found brain activity before the conscious decision to move. This arguably proved free will was a myth – the brain makes an impulsive decision and our consciousness efficiently rationalizes it.

While there are neuroscience reasons to be critical of this claim, more generally, I don’t find it compelling to argue that advanced brain activity proves a lack of free will.

I suppose, though, that this is much in the definition of free will.

I don’t think of free will as a carte blanche dictum that allows a person to act in any imaginable way regardless of their context or experience. Rather I think of free will like this -

If you flip a coin, there is a 50% chance it will land heads and a 50% chance it will land tails. No matter how many times you flip the coin, this probability will remain the same. The coin doesn’t care. Every flip will have the same odds.

Free will is the ability to affect that probability.

Perhaps a person has, if you will, factory settings. Default rules that govern whether you are more prone to fight or to flight. Those deep instincts can be difficult to overcome, but, they can be overcome.

Perhaps you can’t change every instinct you have, and perhaps you don’t always take the path you would have liked. But you have the ability to effect the probability of the outcome. It doesn’t have to be a 50/50 split.

And that’s free will.

NCDD 2014: Lots of things to get excited about!

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Sandy Heierbacher

If you haven’t yet registered for the NCDD conference (Oct 17-19 in Reston, VA), now’s the time to do it! The late rate goes into effect next Wednesday, and registration will be $550 rather than $450.

NCDD2012-wFranKorten-border It’s looking like we’ll reach our goal of 400 attendees (yay!), but we still a few spots open, and maybe one of them has your name on it.

But here’s an added incentive to register now. You can enter the promo code “25percentoff” at registration to save over $110 on the regular registration rate. This code is only good for 15 uses, so use it asap at www.ncdd2014.eventbrite.com!

As those who have attended know, the National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation is one of the very best places you can connect with top leaders and emerging leaders in public engagement and group process work, learn about the latest and greatest things that are happening in our field, AND have a lot of fun doing it.

Christine Whitney Sanchez had this to say about the last NCDD conference:

“Where else can you collide with social entrepreneurs, scientists, journalists, film-makers, business owners, academics, artists, students, engineers, actors, electeds, consultants, nonprofit leaders, public servants, graphic recorders, techies, videographers, philosophers, lawyers, executives and more who are also agents of transformation?”

NCDD conferences only happen every two years, so you don’t want to wait for the next one!

There are so many things to get excited about this year — here are just a few…

The schedule is just amazing. On the first day of the conference, for instance, you’ll participate in a fun collaborative network mapping process that builds on the mapping project we’ve been doing over the past few months in conjunction with leading organizations in the field and 10 awesome graphic recorders.
You’ll get to hear from some incredible leaders in D&D, including plenary speakers David Mathews (president of the Kettering Foundation) and Grande Lum, director of the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service.
Our gamification panelists include Josh Lerner, Executive Director of the Participatory Budgeting Project, among other greats. And our “short talks” presenters include field leaders like Carolyn Lukensmeyer, John Gastil, Tyrone Reitman, Sen. Les Ihara and Peggy Holman.
The session selection will leave you wishing you could clone yourself. The workshops cover topics like collective impact, working effectively with public officials, restorative justice, a deliberation “boot camp,” slam poetry for justice, strategies for developing effective university-community partnerships for engagement, how to use visuals to engage communities, participatory budgeting, how technology like texting and engagement tools are advancing this work, facilitating with grace while under fire, how Oregon is creating a statewide infrastructure for civic engagement, lots of inspiring case studies, and so much more!
We’ve got awesome field trips that are already filling up, a mentorship and scholarship program for young leaders, and lots of opportunities for networking.
Our Emcees, John Gastil and Susanna Haas Lyons, are absolutely top notch.
Our Showcase event during Friday’s evening reception will blow your mind, introducing you, at your own pace, to 25 incredibly useful online tools, resources, D&D methods, and other opportunities–and the leaders behind them.
We’ll even have a media room, where our videographer will be making clips of you FOR YOU to put on your site (so think about what you might want to say about your great work) and our photographer will be taking professional headshots you can use to beef up your image (both free!). We think these perks will be a great benefit to both our attendees and our field.
And we’ll be screening the not-yet-released film “Bring It To The Table” on Saturday night starting at 8:30 pm. Filmmaker Julie Winokur traveled across the country with a small star-spangled table, inviting people to sit down and share the roots of their political beliefs. You’ll have the chance to talk with Julie about her journey.
Our attendees are high calibur, accomplished, and frankly, an exciting bunch of public engagement professionals, students, funders, scholars, technologists, public administrators, artists and activists. You can scan all 370+ who have registered so far at www.ncdd2014.eventbrite.com (click “show more” a couple times to see them all).

I could go on, but I think you have the idea. The NCDD conference is truly a must-attend event for people involved in dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement work. I think our team has put together quite the event for you, and we look forward to seeing all of you soon!

science, democracy, and civic life

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Peter

(Arlington, VA) After a day discussing Civic Science at the NSF, I am inclining to this conceptual model:

Screen Shot 2014-10-02 at 2.37.46 PM

Note that none of these circles is conterminous with any other. I believe, for example, that one can be a good citizen in a context (such as a church) that is not and should not be democratic. I believe that some valuable science is not done in public or with the public, although it must be justified to the public if they are asked to pay for it. And I believe that there are worthy aspects of civic life that are not scientific. Nevertheless, the three circles overlap, and given our particularly dire problems–matters like the climate crisis–a democratic civic science must be expanded.

The post science, democracy, and civic life appeared first on Peter Levine.

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Posted on October 3, 2014 by PRumnejack

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Harwood: Is Focus on “Impact” Distracting from Change?

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We are pleased to share a thought-provoking blog piece penned by Rich Harwood, director of The Harwood Insitute – an NCDD member organization. Rich reflects on a significant trend in the non-profit world that is familiar to many of us, and how our thinking around it can change. We encourage you to read the piece below or find the original here.

The watchword for community change nowadays is “impact.” This little, two-syllable word seemingly insinuates itself into every discussion about change. In doing so, it has redirected everyone’s attention, but not always in the right direction. If we’re not careful, we’ll lose sight of our most precious mission: to help people transform their lives and build stronger communities.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for “impact.” Who isn’t? I’ve spoken before hundreds of funders at an Aspen Forum for Community Solutions conference, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on this topic, engaged in various roundtables and webinars, and developed thousands of “public innovators” to create collective change in communities across the U.S. and overseas. But the impact of this seemingly little word is not always so productive or positive.

My experience working with people in communities, with foundation leaders, with various national initiatives, and with a variety of others is that the deifying of this word has produced a cascading effect of collective responses that endanger our mission. Consider the kind of discussion that ensues when we all start to talk about impact:

Our frame instantly becomes that of metrics and measurement – in other words “data.”
We then lunge toward enlisting large numbers of professionals and organizations to sit around a table and develop the right answers to whatever the data tell us.
Then we generate committees and workgroups and initiatives to implement the answers.
Our focus is then transfixed on the mechanics of managing all of these moving parts.

On the surface, nothing I’ve written sounds blatantly wrong. And as I’ve travelled the country, I have become convinced – indeed, moved – that those of us engaged in this work are excited about it because we so deeply want change. We believe that we, as a society, can do better. We have come to the conclusion that only by working together can we build stronger and more resilient communities and lives.

But the notion of “impact” can drive and distort our mindset and behaviors in ways I doubt most of us either intend or want.

The word immediately drives us to focus on data, activity and the mechanics of change. In the process, we can lose sight of the actual pain and suffering of people in our communities. We can forget that people not only want to alleviate their pain, but they also hold aspirations to move their lives forward.

We can get so lost in the mechanics that we fail to actually build different community relationships, norms and practices that change how a community works together – not just now, but in the future. We can wholly buy in to our own plans and initiatives without paying attention to how change truly occurs in communities.

The idea of impact can cast a spell over us. It shapes what we do and say. But if we want to create impact – to help people transform their lives and build stronger communities – we’ll need to break this spell.

Let’s make sure that in our quest for impact we keep communities and the people who live in them as our reference points.

Civic Science

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Peter

(Arlington, VA) I am at the National Science Foundation for a meeting on Civic Science. According to the background materials,

Civic science is a method of inquiry into important contemporary issues that enriches democracy by bringing citizens from all backgrounds and disciplines – not just scientists – together in shared projects that analyze current conditions, envision a better future, and devise a pathway to that future. Civic science is both an approach to generating knowledge and a democratic practice. In civic science, scientists express democratic citizenship through their scientific work: they engage in democratic world-building efforts as scientists. … The fundamental scientific question of “how does the world work” is situated in the context of democratic inquiry into a critical question—“What should we do in the face of complex problems?” Civic science, thus, integrates its work closely with the “purposive” disciplines of arts, humanities, and design, which ask fundamental questions about what is good and just, encouraging us to envision and debate ways of relating and living as civic agents.

Civic science is like “transdisciplinary” science (e.g., NRC 2014), but expands and enriches such frameworks by closely linking the practice of science to democracy and to other ways of knowing and learning from arts, humanities and design traditions and fields. Similarly, Civic Science is like community based participatory research (CBPR) and social movement-based “citizen science” in that it focuses on complex, pressing, real-world problems, and values diverse ways of knowing. However, in ways that usefully challenge theory and practice in CBPR, civic science intentionally and explicitly aims to promote democracy by framing scientific inquiry as an opportunity for participants to develop their capacity to work across differences, create common resources, and negotiate a shared democratic way of life. …

Civic science draws from research and theory in three areas: science and technology studies (STS), civic studies, and complex systems theory. Together, they provide the rationale for civic science and point to the benefits of pursuing civic science as an approach for furthering knowledge and democracy.

The post Civic Science appeared first on Peter Levine.

Powers of Ten

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

You know that amazing 1977 science video Powers of Ten? If you haven’t seen it, go ahead and take a minute to watch it at the link. It might blow your mind.

Okay, well, maybe not, but this was just about my favorite movie when I was in elementary school.

I found myself thinking back to this video today after an engaging conversation with some of my colleagues about the power and role of network analysis.

With the advent of the Internet and especially of social media, the idea of “social networks” has entered – or become more prominent – within the popular lexicon.

These social networks have always existed, of course, but they now seem easier to navigate and quantify. In Facebook terms, I can tell you exactly how many friends I have, and I can also occasionally discover when two people – whom I know from different networks – know each other.

Perhaps more interestingly, the ghost in the Facebook machine has a birds eye view of everyone’s network. Not only am I individually acutely aware of the vast network of people who exist beyond my own, local network, but one could chart the social networks of everyone on Facebook as one giant, global network.

So, that’s pretty cool.

But of course, a social network of this type isn’t the only kind of network governing our world. In a social network, the people are nodes and the relationships between them are edges.

But we could zoom out a level – see where the powers of ten video comes in – and think about a community, not as a network of individuals, but a network of institutions and organizations.

And you could think of these institutional networks at different levels as well. The city I live in has a dense network of organizational ties, but we could also move outwards to look at regional organizational ties, or state-wide ties. We could look at national or international networks of relationships.

We could look at communication networks, transportation networks, relational networks, and many other types of networks operating at these macro levels.

And of course, we can zoom in as well. Thinking of an individual not as a node in a network, but as the network.

In a very literal sense, this could be the network of veins and arteries, the network of nerves, or other biological networks that keep us alive and functioning.

But we can also consider a person’s ideas as a network.

David Williamson Shaffer does this in his work on Epistemic Games. Professional training, he argues, is essentially the process of developing a specialized way of thinking – a network. A lawyer may have to learn many facts and figures, but more deeply, they learn an approach. A way to address and explore new problems.

Not only can you model this networked way of thinking in professionals, you can watch a network develop in novices.

Perhaps an individual’s morals can also be conceived as a network. This is certainly more appealing than concerning a set list of rules to follow – situations are, after all, complex and context in everything.

(While I’ll leave my zooming there, I do feel compelled to clarify that I don’t mean that to imply that we have reached the fundamental particles of human existence. I prefer to think of morals as complex, uncertain things rather than a simple, discrete point.)

So if you zoom in that far, if you consider a network where a person’s ideas are nodes – does that individual network have any connections beyond the person who contains them?

Perhaps.

Ideas are more free than blood cells, and just because I have an idea doesn’t mean you can’t have it to.

An idea may be a node within my network, but I am a node within a human network. I am a node within social networks and I am a node within institutional networks. Local institutions and, ultimately, global institutions, too – though you may not be able to spot my blip on that network map.

And that’s why I like the Powers of Ten video. Because all these different levels, all these different ways of looking at things – they’re not isolated. It’s no accident that atoms make stars.

And it is not only understanding each level that matters, it is understanding how all these levels are connected. How they build to form a whole that looks radically different from its component parts.

Understanding a single network is valuable, but understanding the levels of networks, and the network between them – well, that, my friends, would be a thing of beauty.

Please show your support of youth at NCDD 2014!

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

NCDD’s 6th National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation is right around the corner, and we couldn’t be more excited!

CPD_Students_Signs-border Part of the reason we chose our theme Democracy for the Next Generation is that we are committed to encouraging and cultivating the young leaders who are emerging in our field. We will have more students and young people joining us at NCDD 2014 than at any previous conference.

We’ve made this happen through our $250 rate for full-time students (35 students have registered using this option), and through granting an additional 50+ scholarships for students and youth that need help with registration, and often travel stipends and lodging too.

This was made possible through an anonymous donation of $10,000, but we have tapped out these funds and then some. We just couldn’t turn away the amazing young leaders who showed sincere interest in joining us, and passion about building their future careers in this field. Plus, we know this is one of the smartest investments we can make, for the conference and for our field.

Will you help show our community’s support for these emerging leaders by donating to the youth scholarship fund? At this point, we need to cap new scholarship requests (which keep coming in!) – unless we get your support.

So we are calling on our fabulous community to help us raise another $4000 to support the literal “next generation” in joining us in Reston, VA later this month.

Martins-Students-border-350px Please contribute to our student & youth scholarship fund today by completing the short form at www.ncdd.org/donate – NCDD, and all of these promising young people, could really use your support right now!

Your tax-deductible donation will go directly to helping us provide travel reimbursements, shared hotel rooms, and registration for the last batch of scholarship hopefuls. Plus anyone who donates $50 or more will have their contribution acknowledged in the printed conference guidebook.

Additionally, we are thrilled that NCDD Board member and Colorado State University professor Martin Carcasson is bringing a whopping 15 of his students to join us all the way from Colorado! Though we’re helping them with registration, Martin and his students are raising funds for their travel and lodging expenses through a Kickstarter-style campaign here. Check out their great video and support them as well!

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Monthly Archives: October 2014