Category Archives: conflict transformation

Capturing Lessons from the Journalism-D&D Confab Call

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Last week, NCDD and Journalism That Matters (JTM) co-hosted a special Confab Call between journalists and public engagement practitioners, and it was an incredible discussion. We had just shy of 70 practitioners, journalists, and others from our network who participated, along with some distinguished guests.

Confab bubble imagePeggy Holman and Michelle Ferrier of JTM kicked us off with a discussion of some of the amazing potential of more meaningful collaboration between the D&D world and journalism professionals, then we launched into examples of what’s already been happening. Kyle Bozentko of the Jefferson Center and 45-year journalism veteran Doug Oplinger shared stories of how they collaborate to help Ohio journalists rebuild public trust in the press. Betty Knighton shared about how the W. Virginia Center for Civic Life has partnered with public broadcasting groups to help regular people explore the interconnections between hot current issues. We also discussed how journalists can provide a much-needed “community listening infrastructure” for public officials and many other critical topics in our break out group discussions.

If you missed the call, you missed an exciting and thought-provoking conversation. But don’t worry – we recorded it, and you can hear (and see) the whole thing again by checking out the recording below or here. You can also follow along with what was happening in the live chat during the call by downloading the saved conversation here.

We know that we only scratched the surface on this call, and that the conversation about how we can strengthen our field’s connection to the power of the media world will continue to percolate over the coming months and years.

If you want to delve deeper into this topic, we highly encourage you to register to attend JTM’s Elevate Engagement Un-Conference this May 18th-21st in Portland, OR where journalists and public engagement/D&D practitioners will all come together in person to take this collaboration to new heights. We also recommend checking out the recent NCDD podcast on the same topic here, or revisiting the D&D-journalism panel discussion that we hosted during NCDD 2016 here.

Thanks again to Journalism That Matters, all of our featured speakers, and the participants for helping make this a great conversation. We look forward to continuing it in the future and seeing the fruits of where it can lead our work!

Designing Dialogues for Understanding & Conflict

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The team at Essential Partners – an NCDD member org – often has insightful reflections about the work of dialogue on their blog. Today we wanted to share one of those reflections by John Sarrouf, who writes about how well-structured dialogue can help us bridge our divides like a road that guides us across difficult or dangerous terrain with a well-placed signs and a few simple rules. We encourage you to read the piece below or find the original version here.

Rules of the Road: Designing the Structure in Difficult Conversations

Every time I drive down an undivided highway, speeding along at 60 mph past cars whizzing to my left and right, I am amazed that this is possible – mostly without incident. I remember learning to navigate the winding Berkshire Mountain roads as my father taught me to decipher the dividing lines. Sometimes the line in the middle is double striped (everybody stay in their lane), sometimes solid on our side and dotted on the other (they can pass; I cannot), sometimes solid on the other side and dotted on mine (I can pass; they cannot). This delicate dance, silent choreography, all based on impulses channeled by well thought out structures.

These structures – yield signs, flashing yellow lights, or blinkers – that tell us in varying ways to slow down and pay attention: change is underway. An encounter is coming. These systems, while legally enforced, are mostly adhered to by agreement – a tacit understanding that these structures allow us to move gracefully and efficiently. I follow the guidelines because others are willing to do the same and because when we all do, we all stay safe and get where we are going.

Conversations are complex journeys, too. And the most difficult ones are also best navigated with some well-placed structures, offering a design that channels our impulses in constructive ways. Think of the simple difficulty of deciding who gets to speak and for how long. I go to too many meetings where the most powerful or outspoken people speak first, last, and longest, and where some people don’t get to speak at all. Without implicit trust that the design of a conversation will help them be heard, people spend most of their time struggling for an entry point instead of deeply listening.

Meet the elegant, efficient, and beautifully simple “timed go-around.” We start in one place and go around the circle allowing people to speak in turn for up to two minutes. People know that they will get a turn and that everybody else will as well. There are rules of the road. They can actually listen without worrying that they will be held captive. It’s like coming to a 4-way stop sign and knowing who will go next – people are less anxious, less likely to barge into the intersection.

Like the intersection, it might feel restrictive to wait, an impediment to getting ahead. But conversations are like journeys we are taking together – so If people feel left behind, you’re no further ahead. And the reality is, there is always some restriction on us, whether we know it or not – the question is whether we leave it to the old patterns of power and group dynamics (“Steve always interrupts me!”), or will we choose to be explicit, fair, and mutually agree upon structures like a timed go-around. Once new patterns are established, structures can be relaxed because people actually internalize them; they become embedded into a group’s culture of communication.

Essential Partners once facilitated a large gathering of the leading environmental justice advocates in the country. These folks are used to holding forth for long periods of time advocating for their cause. You might imagine the look on their faces when we asked them to limit their comments to two minutes, and to wait to comment until the circle came around to them. Early in the day we had to use chimes to indicate when two minutes were up; we even had to step in and remind people to finish. While frustrating for speakers, it was a visible relief to the rest of the group. By midday, we kept time, but did not have to cut anyone off. They had begun to limit themselves. Instead of feeling rushed, we felt greater spaciousness and ease.

The structure went from feeling like a restriction to serving as a container and ultimately to an internalized pattern of collaboration, listening, and flow. Just like the guiding lines on a winding mountain roads, some simple structures in difficult conversations allow us all to get where we are going safely, gracefully, and together.

You can find the original version of this Essential Partners blog piece at www.whatisessential.org/blog/rules-road-designing-structure-difficult-conversations.

Treating Tension Across Difference as a Positive

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As the week closes, we wanted to share an piece from the New Directions Collaborative, one of our NCDD member organizations. In it, NDC shared some useful insights into how they have changed their practices to make differences among participants in their programs and meetings into assets for learning in the face of discomfort. We hope you’ll check out their piece below or find the original blog post here.

Engaging Across Differences

Many of us are working hard to generate solutions to today’s complex and interrelated challenges in ways that are resilient and beneficial for all. This requires new and creative ways to bring people together who have not traditionally worked together.

This is hard work. As a facilitator, I had multiple experiences with groups where not everyone felt heard and the group did not reach its potential. This set me on a journey to understand how we can engage with difference and create spaces where difference can be generative and creative.

Critical to this work is creating environments where different perspectives and experiences within a system can be openly shared and all are equally valid and valued. It requires us to develop our capacity to respond to difference with curiosity, not defensiveness, and to respond to the discomfort that may result with a learning orientation, not withdrawal. When groups come together with this stance, new insight and possibilities almost always emerge.

Building relationships across difference is a necessary foundation. In our work, one way we explore difference is from the inside out beginning with engaging across internal differences in how we learn, process and communicate. Through experiential exercises we invite participants to engage in self-reflection about individual internal differences (such as our sense of time, or our patterns for processing new information). The purpose of this starting point is to establish an environment where everyone can participate in the conversation while shifting the entry point to one that is less charged.

We also introduce the Power and Privilege Progression to help us understand how internal differences are “preferenced” in systems and how power and privilege accrue as a result. Participants can begin to recognize systemic archetypes of power and privilege and build capacity to engage with the tensions around difference for the more emotionally and socially charged conversations around race, culture, class, gender, and historical oppression.

While difference and tension around difference can be thought of as negative, as something that slows us down and gets in the way of progress, our experience has been just the opposite. Acknowledging tension and getting curious about it can help us ask questions about whether an action we are considering has the potential to perpetuate negative aspects of the old system or to be transformative and create a better future for all.

You can find the original version of this New Directions Collaborative blog piece at www.ndcollaborative.com/difference.

From the Listserv: Is Dialogue Under Attack?

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In the past week or two, there has been a lively conversation about the post that former NCDD Board member John Backman shared on the NCDD Discussion Listserv. In the post, John shared an article he wrote asking whether or not dialogue itself has come under attack since the election in November, and since it sparked such a rich discussion, we thought we’d share the post here on the blog as well.
We encourage you to read John’s piece below or find the original here, then tell us, what do you think? Is dialogue under attack? If so, how should our field respond? If not, is there anything you think we in the D&D field should be doing differently in this time of tension?

In Mr. Trump’s Escher World, Is Dialogue Under Assault?

There’s been a lot of talk in the dialogue field since the U.S. presidential election. Practitioners are talking about the meaning of Donald Trump’s victory for dialogue efforts, our collective failure to listen to a wide swath of the American electorate, etc. Many have voiced the belief that we need dialogue more than ever.

And yet, ever since hearing this talk, something has felt off to me. I’m just starting to put my finger on it, and I’m surprised by how dire it feels. In a nutshell, if I’m seeing this right, the very underpinnings of dialogue are under assault.

Consider three of these underpinnings:

Words mean things. To state the obvious: dialogue depends on words. To understand each other, we have to agree on the meanings of those words, or at least understand each other’s meanings. If we don’t, how can I can begin to know what you’re saying?

Yet this very notion is going away. All too often Mr. Trump appears to use the first word that comes into his mind, not caring what it might mean or connote. He makes great use of “throwaway lines,” easy to deny or reinterpret later. Or he dismisses what he’s said as “locker-room talk.” It’s as if, in this new era, words really don’t mean anything, and we should dismiss the value of any given word or phrase. What kind of dialogue could possibly arise from that?

Believe your own eyes. There’s a reason police officers are now being equipped with
body cameras, or private investigators take photos of people in compromising positions. We believe what our eyes (and ears, nose, etc.) tell us. By and large, we should: they’re pretty reliable. So we consider video and photographs compelling evidence.

Yet so often, when confronted with video of himself saying something, Mr. Trump says, “I never said that.” How can there be any room for the give-and-take of dialogue once you get to “This evidence says you said x” / ”I never said x”?

The truth will set you free. While objective truth is a slippery concept—and often not the primary aim of dialogue, which may tilt more toward mutual understanding, conflict resolution, etc.—a certain dedication to the pursuit of truth can promote dialogue in compelling ways. If we aim for truth, we move beyond ourselves in pursuit of something larger. We hold our convictions more lightly to inquire what this truth might be. As a result, we are more open to hearing others’ perspectives on truth: the kind that come forth in dialogue.

It’s one thing to say we cannot ever arrive at most truths. It’s another to stop caring about truth entirely. Mr. Trump’s behavior implies that he is not concerned with the accuracy of any statement he makes. I hear this same sort of thing from some of his supporters. If we can say anything without caring if it’s true, what is our dialogue but babble?

Now weirdly, each of these corrosive trends has a healthy flipside. It’s good to take the words of another “seriously but not literally”: we do well to consider the context in which they’re said, the background of the person who says or writes them, the surrounding culture that shapes the meanings of words, etc. Similarly, it’s good to step back and consider that the “compelling video” might have a context of its own. (Plus, there’s Photoshop.) And we know the value of skepticism about truth claims.

But here’s the thing: in each of these healthy flipsides, there is one thing present that is absent from the current Trump-inspired manifestation: thought. Without thought, dialogue truly becomes babble.

I have no idea what to do with this. Perhaps we who care about dialogue will have to fight in some way for these underpinnings, to insist they be observed. Maybe we defend them at every point where we find them assailed. Maybe we simply do our own dialogue thing and thereby serve as a witness to its power in a world of degraded communication.

What do you think?

You can find the original version of this piece from John Backman’s blog at www.dialogueventure.com/2017/01/26/in-mr-trumps-escher-world-is-dialogue-under-assault.

What You Missed on the Confab Call with Not In Our Town

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NCDD was happy to host a very special Confab Call earlier this week featuring NCDD member organization Not In Our Town (NIOT). Over 50 people from our network joined us for a conversation with Patrice O’Neill, NIOT’s executive director, about how the history of NIOT’s history, its work, and how the dialogue events that NIOT hosts have helped catalyze broad civic engagement and stop the spread of hate in communities across the country.

We recorded the Confab as always, so if you missed it, we highly encourage you to list to the recording of the webinar by clicking here. You can also click here to read the transcript of the chat from the webinar where we shared a number of resources, links, and answers to questions posed during the call.

One of the most exciting possibilities that came out of the call was the clear opportunity for dialogue practitioners from NCDD’s network to support the towns and communities that NIOT works with in their dialogue events on hate and bullying. NIOT and NCDD are discussing ways to bring dialogue partners and a framework to local NIOT groups working long term to prevent hate and foster inclusion, but we want you to be part of the discussion too!

We’ve created a quick 5-question survey that we are asking our network to fill out so that we can find out who is interested in continuing conversations about NCDD-NIOT collaborations and collect your ideas about what that could look like. Please take just a couple minutes to complete the brief survey at www.surveymonkey.com/r/KRVC252 if you’re interested. We will have more on these collaboration opportunities soon.

In the meantime, if you want to connect with Not In Our Town’s work, here’s are some suggestions from Patrice for ways  you can get involved:

  • Host a NIOT screening in your community. Choose a NIOT film, convene key leaders and community members  to view the film and hold a dialogue about who is vulnerable to hate in your community and how people can work together to respond. The screening can lead to a more formal way to engage with NIOT. If your community has capacity, Patrice O’Neill or another NIOT representative can come to your town to present the film, ideas and help convene a NIOT group.
  • Engage with NIOT on social media. You can share stories and films of communities responding to hate with via NIOT’s on Facebook and Twitter.
  • Sign up for the NIOT e-newsletter. You can stay in the NIOT network loop and sign up for the occasional newsletter by clicking here.
  • Start a NIOT group in your community. If you have had incidents of hate or bullying in your town and you’re moved to take action, you can also work on helping start a NIOT group yourself. Learn more about how it works and what it takes by clicking here.

Confab bubble imageThanks again to Patrice and all of those who participated for a great Confab Call. We look forward to exploring the potentials for partnership and will keep you all updated on how it goes.

To learn more about NCDD’s Confab Calls and hear recordings of others, visit www.ncdd.org/events/confabs.

NIFI Hosts 10 Online Community-Police Relations Forums

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In addition to offering free copies of their new Safety & Justice discussion guide on community-police relations, the National Issues Forums Institute – an NCDD member org – is also hosting ten online forums to discuss the issue using their Common Ground for Action online deliberation tool, including two training webinars for prospective forum hosts. We encourage those in our network focusing on related issues to consider joining the forums or the training. You can learn more about the CGA forums in the NIFI announcement below or find the original here.

Common Ground for Action 2017 Forum Series

The Common Ground for Action (CGA) Forums Series is Back!

The 2016 CGA Fridays were a huge hit. Demand for trying the new platform and giving our network of moderators more practice was so high that we’re back at it for 2017. This winter, we will have a CGA forum each week, with some in the evening and Saturdays so more of our network can join in. If you’re a CGA moderator and want practice or a refresher workshop, we’ve got those too.

In February, the CGA Forum Series will be using the NEW Safety and Justice: How Should Communities Reduce Violence? issue guide. These forums will be part of our 2017 series of reports to policymakers on how people are thinking about issues.

  • Friday, February 3rd 12:00pm EST – Register
  • Friday, February 10th 4pm EST – Register
  • Wednesday, February 15th 7pm EST- Register
  • Tuesday, February 21st 10am EST – Register
  • Saturday, February 25th 4pm EST – Register
  • Monday, February 27th 2pm EST – Register
  • Saturday, March 4th 4pm EST – Register
  • Friday, March 10th 12pm EST – Register
  • Monday, March 13th 2:30pm EST – Register

NIF member Kara Dillard is also leading a webinar specifically about the Safety and Justice issue guide for moderators who want to hold CGA forums. Kara says the online prep session will “discuss each of the three options in depth, outline key questions to ask in the personal stake sections as well as in the options, and consider ways to help your participants reflect on this controversial topic.”

The workshop will be offered twice in February; you can register at the links below.

You can find the original version of this National Issues Forums Institute blog post at www.nifi.org/en/youre-invited-online-forums-and-moderator-webinars-choose-dates-february-and-march.

Citizen University Conference on “Reckoning & Repair”

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We want to make sure that our network has heard that the 2017 Citizen University Conference is coming up this March 24th-25th in Seattle. Citizen University conferences bring together key civic leaders from many different part of society around how to improve our country’s civic engagement and spur civic change.

NCDD members will be able to both contribute and gain a lot by attending, so we encourage you to register to attend. Regular registration is $250, with some scholarships and discounts available. We encourage you to attend!

The theme of this year’s conference, “Reckoning and Repair in America,” is quite in line with NCDD’s #BridgingOurDivides work, and we know NCDDers can continue the conversation about how we heal the division in our country in powerful new ways at this conference. Here’s a bit of how the organizers describe it:

Our theme for this year’s conference is Reckoning and Repair in America. We face deep divisions across the country. Now more than ever we the people have to step up: to reckon with injustice across ideological divides and to repair our frayed social fabric.

Join hundreds of change-makers, activists, and catalysts to learn about power, deepen your networks, and recharge your sense of purpose. With luminary speakers, master teachers, and lessons on civic power, the conversation will be rich and provocative. Join the movement to rekindle citizenship and remake the narrative of America.

You can learn more about the Citizen University Conference at www.citizenuniversity.us/conference. We hope to see some of you there!

Don’t Miss the Confab Call on Responses to Hate, Feb. 8

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In case you missed our announcement last month, we want to remind the NCDD network to register today for our next Confab Call, this Wednesday, February 8th from 1-2pm Eastern/10-11am Pacific with Not In Our Town (NIOT).Confab bubble image

Not In Our Town is an NCDD member organization that uses film and community-wide dialogue to support towns and schools around the country in formulating a response to hate crimes, bullying, and hate groups. The Confab will feature a presentation from NIOT’s CEO and Excutive Producer Patrice O’Neill on the work they do, how it has changed since the spike in hate crimes since the election, and how the D&D field can support the growing need for conversation on addressing hate and violence in our communities.

You won’t want to miss this opportunity to connect to important work of using dialogue to address. We highly encourage you to register today for this great call!

This call is part of NCDD’s ongoing #BridgingOurDivides campaign that seeks to highlight key resources and methodologies our field can use to address divides that the 2016 election created and exacerbated. The call will be a perfect opportunity to learn about how you can access and use the over 100 of films and discussion guides that NIOT has created to support dialogue and action around dozens of kinds of bullying and hate, all of which can be critical tools for the D&D community to tap into.

We are excited about the possibilities this Confab presents for seeding collaborations. Be sure register today for this great call!

Free NIFI Community-Police Relations Discussion Guides

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We want to encourage our network to learn more about the new Safety & Justice discussion guide from the National Issues Forums Institute. As NIFI and the Kettering Foundation – both core NCDD member orgs – prepare for their yearly A Public Voice event in DC, they are collecting reports from deliberative forums on community-police relations and criminal justice reform to show policymakers that deliberation is more than “bumper sticker talk” and media representations.
NIFI is inviting all those hosting discussions on this critical issue to share their data and learnings with them so that they can be included in the conversation in DC, even if those conversations don’t use NIFI materials. You can learn more about how to participate and get free discussion guides in the NIFI blog post below or find the original here.

Special Spring ’17 Offer: Free Safety & Justice Materials to First 100 Moderators

Recently, the relationship between police and the communities they serve has become the focus of intense scrutiny, conversation, and even protest. The issue is difficult to talk about – and yet, we must, or this
issue could tear our communities apart.

A problem like this requires talk, but not just any talk. We need deliberative forums where  community members of all ages, races, ethnicities, religions, and professions can get beyond the talking points and bumper stickers. Forums where they can share not just what they think, but why. Places where we can consider tensions and tradeoffs and see where we may have common ground.

But in order for there to be forums, there have to be conveners and moderators.

And that’s why your community needs YOU. To get people started, NIFI is offering 20 FREE hard copies of the Safety and Justice issue guide + copy of the starter video to the first 100 moderators who can convene a forum between January 1, 2017 and March 15, 2017.

Sign up for your free materials HERE.

NIFI is offering these materials in partnership with the Kettering Foundation. Kettering will analyze participant questionnaires and other forum information for a report to policymakers at the A Public Voice event on May 9, and in a full report on the entire forums series at the end of the year.

To qualify for this special offer, you must:

  • Host a forum on Safety and Justice between January 1, 2017 and March 15, 2017.
  • Ensure that each participant and moderator complete a post-forum questionnaire.
  • Send all questionnaires back within a week of hosting the forum (all questionnaires must be sent by March 15, 2017).
  • Collect participant contact information for additional A Public Voice and NIFI opportunities.

I am asking each of you to consider offering a forum to a group with whom you have contact and who you feel is interested in this issue – your church, a book club, a class you are teaching, a civic organization to which you belong, etc. You can make a significant contribution to spreading awareness of public deliberation and to helping to find a solution to this significant public issue.
– NIFI President Emeritus Bill Muse

You can find the original version of this NIFI blog post at www.nifi.org/en/2017-safety-justice-offer.

The Challenge of Populism to Deliberative Democracy

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As populism sees a global resurgence, it is critical for our field to examine what this phenomenon means for our work. That’s why we encourage our network to give some thought to the insights offered in this piece from Lucy Parry of Participedia – an NCDD member organization. In it, Lucy examines the way citizens juries in Australia might violate core tenets of populism, and encourage us to consider how deliberative democracy – especially approaches using mini-publics – may need to evolve to avoid being delegitimized by populist challenges. You can read the piece below or find it on Participedia’s blog here.

When is a democratic innovation not a democratic innovation? The populist challenge in Australia

The following article by Participedia Research Assistant Lucy Parry was originally published by The Policy Space on October 11, 2016.

Democratic innovation is burgeoning worldwide. Over 50 examples from Australia alone are now detailed on Participedia, an online global project documenting democratic innovations. In some states, ‘mini-publics’ proliferate at local and state level. South Australia in particular has wholeheartedly embraced the notion of deliberative democracy and has embarked on an ambitious raft of citizen engagement processes including several Citizens’ Juries.

According to Graham Smith (2009) a democratic innovation must (a) engage citizens over organised interests and (b) be part of the wider political process. Mini-publics operationalise these aims through convening a group of citizens who are at least broadly representative of the wider population to deliberate on a given topic.

Despite fulfilling Smith’s criteria, democratic innovations in Australia run the risk of becoming neither democratic nor innovative. Scholarly debate over mini-publics peaked over a decade ago – isn’t it time to move on? Moving on necessitates moving with the times and dealing with contemporary challenges. One such challenge is the rise of populism. Australian democratic innovations typically rely on premises that are fundamentally opposed by populism: random selection and expert knowledge. This populist challenge cannot be ignored, and theorists and practitioners must meet it together.

Inside the room

A Citizens’ Jury is a well-known mini-public format: a small(ish) group of randomly selected citizens who meet several times to deliberate on a given topic. Random selection underpins the process in two ways. It aims to produce a descriptively representative sample, making the jurors literally a ‘mini public’ (Fung 2003; Ryan and Smith 2014): a microcosm of the wider population. Random selection also relates to deliberative quality: bringing together a group of random citizens reduces the likelihood of the loudest voices dominating. As Australian research organisation newDemocracy Foundation points out, ‘governments inevitably hear from the noisiest voices who insist on being heard’; lobbyists, Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), Not-in-my-back-yards (NIMBYs) – call them what you will. Mini-publics are designed to foster a less adversarial, more nuanced debate with a group of random citizens.

I have observed Citizens’ Juries in the flesh and it is quite an extraordinary experience. Watching a room of disparate and diverse people evolve into a committed team negotiating technical topics like wind farm development leaves me feeling almost jubilant (I don’t get out much). When you are inside the room, watching the deliberative process at play, it really is wonderful. Australia is home to a number of practitioners including newDemocracy Foundation, DemocracyCo and Mosaic Lab, and it is undeniable that some great work is going on in Australia in this area.

But alas, the path of democracy never did run smoothly. Suffice to say that cracks begin to emerge when you are outside the room. If decisions are legitimate to the extent that they have been deliberated upon, then the decisions made by a mini-public suffer a legitimacy deficit, given the typically small group involved (Parkinson 2003). And although some recent Citizens’ Juries have sought to expand the number of participants, this diminishes the quality of dialogue (Chambers 2009). Furthermore, in the past 15 years a growing number of scholars have sought to move beyond the mini-public paradigm in deliberative democracy to tackle deliberation at the large scale – through deliberative systems (Dryzek 2009; Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012), deliberative cultures (Sass and Dryzek 2013) and deliberative societies.

Yet, the practice of deliberative democracy (in Australia at least) clings to the mini-public approach. South Australia is notable for its extensive citizen engagement yes, but is it really innovative? The Western Australian Department of Planning and Infrastructure undertook a similarly ambitious program of mini-public style engagements over a decade ago. This critique is not a reflection on the quality of democratic practice in Australia, nor is it a criticism of what goes on inside the room. It is instead a concern that further underpins the need for deliberative theorists and practitioners to work together.

Outside the room: the populist challenge

Remember those NIMBYs and SIFs that mini-publics aim to exclude through random selection? Their exclusion rests on the assumption that the quality and outcome of deliberation is better without those insistent voices. The aim is that through a process of deliberation, people will become ‘more public-spirited, more tolerant, more knowledgeable, more attentive to the interests of others, and more probing of their own interests’ (Warren 1992, p8). Producing deliberated public opinion involves weeding out weak and poorly informed arguments. Again, this is all very well if you are inside the room. If you’re outside the room, you may very well object.

And let’s face it, those objectionable voices are not going away. As Ben Moffit points out, ‘Populism, once seen as a fringe phenomenon relegated to another era or only certain parts of the world, is now a mainstay of contemporary politics across the globe’. The voices that a Citizens’ Jury wants to keep out of the room now have the room surrounded. If we continue down the mini-publics road, the very thing that allegedly legitimises mini-publics will also be its downfall. The assumptions underpinning random selection are that it is representative of the wider community; and that it facilitates better quality deliberation by bringing together everyday citizens rather than insistent voices. Whether these things are accurate or not is a moot point – what actually matters is how they are perceived by broader publics. It is sad but possibly true that for those outside the room, what goes on inside the room doesn’t matter. And I suspect that the argument that a Jury is representative and very well informed is simply not going to cut it.

Trust in the Australian political system is at a staggering low with very little trust in any level of government; mini-publics in Australia are almost invariably associated with a government body or statutory authority. Mini-publics rely on information presented by experts; populism rejects the knowledge of experts. With all the will and most independently-recruited-and-facilitated process in the world – people may just not trust it. And yet, even if there were greater trust in politics, the justification of random selection explicitly rejects populist public opinion – and vice versa. Bridie Jabour’s Guardian interviews with One Nation voters exemplifies this disconnect. One Hanson supporter is quoted as saying:

“I’m not a politician, I’m not an accountant, I’m not anybody who knows anything but I see stuff and think ‘that doesn’t look right to me’, the average Joe Blow feels things more than they actually understand or know, they feel things, they know stuff.”

The logic of randomly selected mini-publics goes against this. The question is how to respond; the populist challenge cannot simply be ignored or sneered at. Yet in a way, this is exactly what mini-publics can be perceived as doing.

The time is right

We are at a critical juncture in Australia. One option is to continue plying the mini-public trade and make extra efforts to engage more people in the process, and to better explain mini-publics to a wider audience. The question is whether we simply need to work on explaining ourselves better, or whether the populist challenge requires deeper reflection on the practice of democratic innovation and deliberative democracy. I am inclined toward the latter.

The challenge that populism poses should be seized as a catalyst to re-think the practice of deliberative democracy in Australia. Mini-publics are one of many worthy options; deliberative democracy is a far broader church – and democratic innovation even more so. Randomly selected mini-publics are not a cure-all. At best, they are an important piece embedded in a broader democratic process. At worst, they are a viable threat to the practice of deliberative democracy itself.

You can find the posting of this article on the Participedia blog at www.participedia.net/en/news/2016/11/13/when-democratic-innovation-not-democratic-innovation-populist-challenge-australia.