Engaging Students on Policy with Choicework

Posted on September 24, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

We wanted to share a post from our friends at Public Agenda on the usefulness of their Choicework approach for teaching and engaging students in discussion about public policy, even when they are jaded on politics. You can read more about the approach below or find the original post here.

Life on campus this fall will be very different from last year, when a forthcoming election enlivened debate from the dining hall to the lecture hall. But in an off year for national politics, how can you build your students’ interest in critical public issues?

Engaging students on public issues is not an easy task, and no wonder. It’s hard for most to connect with theoretical policy, especially when they see their political system as inept, broken, or otherwise unworthy of trust. For students enmeshed in social lives, academics, a job and, often, family responsibilities, talking about policy can seem even more hopeless. While many students may simply consider such matters as wholly theoretical abstractions far removed from the reality of their daily lives, we know they are not. Policy has the ability to change the answer to questions like: Will I have a job in my field when I graduate? Has technology forever changed the landscape of employment? What does the Affordable Care Act mean for me when I turn 26?

We’ve found that there are ways to make policy decisions come alive for students (as well as other members of the public). Together with the Kettering Foundation, Public Agenda developed the Choicework approach. Rooted in the theories of our co-founder, Dan Yankelovich, Choicework can be truly transformative for a few reasons. In the same way that storytelling can bring a news article, research or cause to life, Choicework roots policy approaches in finite and human choices, using accessible language and grounding the choices in essential values that people really connect with.

Choicework can make policy come to life. The point is not to choose one and only one approach; rather, by emphasizing the inherent choices and stakes in the issue at hand brings policy to life, Choicework helps students connect to it and envision how policy plays out in their own lives and the lives of others, and visualize other approaches and broaden the discussion.

In addition to Immigration, Public Agenda has published Citizen Solutions Guides on Jobs & The Economy, Healthcare, Education, The Federal Budget, and Energy. All of our CSG’s include introductory overviews of the topic, key facts, links to online supporting documentation, and illustrative charts and graphs.

Interested in experimenting with this approach in your classroom? Our nonpartisan Citizens’ Solutions Guides on some of our nation’s most hotly contested issues make great discussion starters in the lecture hall and are free to download. We’d love to hear your stories putting Choicework to use. Let us know how it works out!

Group Decision Tip: Credit the Group

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Craig Freshley

In principle, members of high-functioning groups are focused on the success of the group as a whole rather than on who should get credit or blame within the group. Harry Truman said, “It is amazing what you can do if you do not care who gets the credit.” Similarly, groups get more done when unconcerned with assigning blame.

Rather than spend energy accounting for past individual credit or blame, it is better to invest lessons from the past into future good group decisions. When I believe in my group I know that, over the long run, what is good for the group will be good for me—probably better for me than I could ever have achieved on my own.

Practical Tip: Give your ideas and efforts to the group without conditions, without lingering ownership. Welcome contributions from others without jealousy, without resentment. Show public appreciation for others in your group. Own your share of things gone wrong and credit the group for things gone right.

A mark of a high-functioning team is that each member wants to make other members look good.

The New “Slow Communities” Engagement Firm

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

We are pleased to be able to announce the launch of Slow Communities – a new engagement consulting service offering help to those who know that they need to “go slow to go fast.” Slow Communities was recently founded by Bill Roper, who served for 14 years with one of our partners, the Orton Family Foundation - first as Director of Programs, then as its longest-serving President and CEO. Bill, along with affiliate Barbara Ganley, is now offering his wealth of experience and knowledge as an engagement professional to foundations, non-profits, and municipalities as they work to build and sustain their communities.

Slow Communities will enlist the expertise of these experienced professionals in creative community engagement, planning and convening approaches, effective evaluation strategies and successful governance. In terms of the Slow Communities approach, their website has this to say:

We at Slow Communities have found that the knowledge you need is often right there in your organization, town or professional community, buried or overlooked. We help you to uncover that local expertise and experience by helping you to design open, creative avenues of participation and inclusion. Because perceptions develop quickly and are hard to dispel, careful planning right from the start will not only save you headaches and money later on, but will unleash incredible energy and opportunities for lasting success.

If you believe that great process is essential to great outcomes; if you believe in the wisdom of the crowds; if you want to build your town or organization’s capacity to steer change, then Slow Communities is the partner for you. Let us bring our innovative, effective and even (gasp) fun techniques and thinking to your town, foundation or non-profit.

We encourage you to explore the full list of services that Slow Communities will offer here, or check out their website at www.slowcommunities.org. You can also keep up to date on Slow Communities news by following their blog. We look forward to seeing how this exciting new service adds to our field, and wish Bill and Barbara the best of luck in their new endeavor!

An opportunity like no other – the Great March for Climate Action

Posted on September 19, 2013 by NCDD Community

This message and call to action was submitted by Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have field news you want to share with the rest of us? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Summary: In March 2014, the giant 8-month cross-country Great March for Climate Action will be launched. I believe it has truly profound potential for personal and social change, and is worthy of our support and participation. Dialogue and deliberation practitioners, in particular, can make a significant difference.

Dear friends,

If all goes as planned, almost six months from now – in March 2014 – one thousand people will depart Santa Monica, California, on a cross-country Great March for Climate Action. It will take them eight months – walking about 15 miles a day – to reach Washington, D.C. They will speak in hundreds of communities and venues along the way and be joined by locals for days or weeks. Once they arrive in D.C., they will swarm-lobby their representatives. Equally importantly, the lives of every participant will be profoundly changed and their roles in the world will evolve in ways they (and we) can barely imagine before this adventure begins. Above all, I believe they will co-create new, far more effective forms of social change.

I want to see that happen. I want this march to succeed in boosting climate activism to an entirely new level. I want it to produce hundreds of more savvy activists and hot collaborations. And I want you to consider joining it, to think about it seriously, as I find myself doing. It is worthy of the participation and/or support of every one of us.

Why do I feel so strongly about this?

The first reason is that climate change is, as the organizers note, not an issue, but a crisis – a Very Big Crisis, with many side effects and repercussions. Along with peak oil and other resource limitations – and the wars, corruption, and social and economic disruption those limits could generate – the climate crisis may be the defining fact of life for people living through the coming decades. The time for addressing all this was yesterday, and now it is today. The longer we wait, the messier it will get. The earlier we take creative action on it, the more profound and positive the transformational impact of our efforts can be. And, as my friend John Abbe (who became Marcher #22) said, “The time to act is now before it is more too late than it already is.”

The second reason I feel strongly is that 27 years ago I spent 9 of the most intense and transformational months of my life on the 400-person LA-DC Great Peace March. As I describe in the Prologue to The Tao of Democracy, that experience gave rise to the vision of possibility that became my life’s work on co-intelligence, wise democracy, and our collective capacity to effectively self-organize our communities and societies. This leads me to believe that the potential impact of such a mobile activist community will be at least as big from the exciting things that happen in and among the marchers, themselves, as from the marchers’ engagements with the places they pass through.

Mobile Activism

Early during my life on the Great Peace March, I wrote an article entitled “Mobile Peace Activism”. I explored the interesting ways that peace marches, bike-a-thons, cruises, and caravans get attention and build community. I’ll share here some of what I wrote 27 years ago exploring the question of why someone would go to all the trouble to organize or join a complicated cross country march instead of engaging in traditional action right at home?

“Novelty plays a role in this. Travelling out-of-towners bring new life and flavor with them — the spirit of other places and a sense of connection to those other places. Stationary people seem fascinated with why mobile people are doing what they are doing….

“It is easy to get into ideological, psychological, spiritual, emotional, organizational or tactical ruts when you are always confronting a desk or a book [or a screen!] or the same faces at every meeting. There’s something about moving to another place each day or week that rubs off on your whole way of thinking and feeling. Perhaps a certain responsiveness or fluidity can develop, making it easier to break out of fixed conditions, to think in new ways…

“Many of us long for a way to transform ourselves while we transform society, to enjoy life while we are saving it from destruction. Mobile activism tends to have transformative and recreational effects on the participants while at the same time achieving external objectives.

“Most mobile activities demand a high level of cooperative living just to keep moving down the road. This stimulates the formation of tightly-knit mobile communities with strong feelings of being ‘family.’ This is both a backdrop to activism and an actively-created part of it, a laboratory for building effective, loving, non-violent lifestyles. And mobile activists, in their trips from town to town, can weave together a greater sense of community among the local activists with whom they work.”

Perhaps most significantly, when hundreds of climate activists walk down the road together every day and live in tents beside each other every night, they talk. Among the things they will talk about are climate change, activism, strategies, deeper causes, long term nuanced consequences, how their grandchildren will live, and what really needs to be done about all that. Their diverse perspectives and information will churn together in a thousand combinations and novel configurations. The march will be a hothouse of new ways of thinking, feeling, and taking action. We could even say that it will be “the other greenhouse effect” – a hundredfold concentration and enrichment of the energy, thinking, and conversations we already engage in together for a few hours or days at a time.

Carrying on such intensified interaction for eight months cannot help but generate breakthrough initiatives and collaborations, transformed lives and lifestyles, new directions for the whole climate movement and every other movement. That’s what happened to me on the Great Peace March. My life changed totally and my work on co-intelligence was born. As I noted in my “Mobile Peace Activism” article, some of the most profound effects of mobile activism are “the effects that all those activists create once they leave the mobile activity and return home or involve themselves in other forms of activism.”

During the last decade I have often wondered if and when there would be a resurgence of mobile activism — of people taking the road instead of taking to the streets. I see it happening now, with this climate action march being perhaps the most ambitious initiative among many others.

Disturbances Transformed by Dialogue

Ironically, the most important thing that happened on the 1986 Great Peace March was that it fell apart two weeks after it began. The founding organization, ProPeace, went bankrupt and told us all to go home. 800 of us did. 400 of us didn’t. Instead of going home the remaining 400 of us talked… and the March was reborn in the middle of the Mojave Desert as a self-organized mobile community that generated its own collective intelligence and collaborative functioning woven out of complex voluntary leaderful activity with nobody in charge. It was held together by purposeful determination and rudimentary but dedicated conversational processes, most especially “talking circles” (which I prefer to call “listening circles”).

Many of my readers and subscribers are practitioners of leading edge processes like Sacred Circles, Open Space, World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search, Dynamic Facilitation, and dozens more. The Great March for Climate Action may not fall apart like the Great Peace March, but it will surely be filled with powerful, smart, assertive, value-driven people – exactly the kind of people who can make or break a giant collaborative enterprise, who can get in each other’s way or together generate highly functional activities, breakthrough insights, and innovative projects that change the world. This polarization of good and bad possibilities will become even more intense in the potent greenhouse of living and walking together day after day after day.

Perhaps the most significant factor in whether the best or worst occurs on this march is how much opportunity the marchers have for high quality conversations designed to support the emergence of breakthroughs, healing, effectiveness, and joy. That’s why I hope that dozens of practitioners who read this essay will join this march. Together they can convene and facilitate conversations that will vastly improve the march’s capacity to govern itself effectively, resolve its internal conflicts wisely, vibrantly engage the communities through which the march passes, and ensure the march positively affects the issue that may well impact more people and more issues – from water to democracy, from justice to war – more profoundly than anything else in this century.

That’s why I invite you – I urge you – to seriously consider what role you could play in support – or as part – of this remarkable effort. Depending on how we each engage with this opportunity, it could make all the difference in the world. Find out more about how to get involved at www.climatemarch.org.

Blessings on the Journey we are all on together.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Kettering’s David Holwerth on the Question “What is a Citizen?”

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

Kettering-Signs-border Our partners at the Kettering Foundation recently posted about a write-up on their own David Holwerk’s talk at Rhodes University in South Africa on how journalists talk about citizens. His remarks focused on the question, “What is a citizen?“, and how the answer is related to the role of the press in a democracy.

In the U.S. Constitution, the role of the press is given explicit protections, ostensibly because a free press that can cover whatever it wants is an integral part of a well-functioning democracy. Indeed, journalism is sometimes conceived of a service provided for citizens to be able to participate in an informed way in their governments. But in a time like ours when news is often hard to discern from entertainment — with celebrities, Twitter commentary, and the results of award ceremonies often getting as much air time air time as local political issues, if not more — what do the big stories in our press say about what journalists are thinking about what is is to be a citizen?

Holwerk delved into the question’s implications for journalists:

Holwerk said that it seems to be a universal article of faith among journalists that they serve the needs of citizens in democracy. But journalists seem much less certain about what citizens actually do, which raises doubts about the ability of journalists to serve citizens’ needs effectively. “Why do people need things?” asked Holwerk. When you need something, he said, it implies that you want to do something. “If need implies action, then what is it that citizens do? They vote. We give them the information they need to vote. Why? Are citizens only voters?”

These are the questions Holwerk has been grappling with for the past four years. At the Kettering Foundation many political scientists and theorists have some ideas about what citizens do. So Holwerk started to think, “You ought to be able to figure out what citizens do by looking at what journalists do.” But when you look at newspapers, watch television or listen to the radio, it’s difficult to find citizens there doing anything, he said.

Journalists and editors need to develop a broader, denser, more robust understanding of what it is that citizens do, he said, but the conversation seems completely theoretical in the context of American journalism.

His reflections were made all the more powerful because Holwerk was in South Africa, a country still relatively early on in its life as a democracy, where questions of citizenship are more regularly discussed in newspapers and the press. But when it came to actually answering the question, “what is a citizen?”, Holwerk offered an insightful answer that pointed to the fact that other people in one’s community

Holwerk’s definition of “citizen” is actually a definition of “citizens” – casting the word as one necessarily addressed to implying a plurality of people.

What is a citizen?

Holwerk said an obstacle to journalists everywhere is not having a clear definition of the word. The legal definition of citizen is someone who is entitled to full rights, including voting rights, in their native state, he said, but this is both too broad and too narrow for the purpose of journalism. Another definition is anyone with the ability to act, he said, but if merely having the ability to act makes you a citizen and you choose not to act, there is no need for journalists to act, and nothing to cover.

Holwerk’s definition of citizens is two people working together to solve a shared public problem. For journalists, if two people work together to solve a private problem, it’s not news, but if they find a solution that benefits the public, that is news.

This definition of citizen is, for me, one of the best I’ve ever heard. It gets to the heart of why we value things like dialogue and deliberation: at bottom, we know that we are in something together with other people around us, and we need to relate to and interact with them to make it work. And when we engage in collaboration with others around us for our common good, that is getting to the essence of what it is to be a citizen.

How do you answer the question “what is a citizen?” How does Holwerk’s definition strike you? And what does it mean for the journalists of our nation? Share your reflections with us in the comments section or in the NCDD Facebook group.

You can find the full coverage of Holwerk’s talk on the Rhodes University website here: www.ru.ac.za/jms/jmsnews/name,93835,en.html.

Take advantage of your 25% NCDD discount with the Future Search Network!

Posted on September 17, 2013 by NCDD Community

This post was submitted by Jennifer Neumer of the Future Search Network via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have field news you want to share with the rest of us? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Please join us this December 9 – 11, 2013 for the Future Search Training Workshop with Sandra Janoff. Save 25% off with your NCDD discount! We offer non-profit discounts as well!

Managing a Future Search – A Learning Workshop (MFS) is for facilitators, leaders, students and managers who want to learn how applying Future Search principles enables a community, company or organization to transform its capability for action. Participants will acquire the tools needed to organize and manage Future Search conferences with integrity in any sector or culture.

Future Search Workshop participants will learn:

How to manage a meeting in which the target of change is a whole system’s capability for action now and in the future.
Key issues in matching conference task and stakeholders.
A theory and practice of facilitating large, diverse groups.
How to keep critical choices in the hands of participants.
How freeing yourself from diagnosing and fixing enables diverse groups to come together faster.
Basic principles and techniques that can be used to design many other meetings.

Date: December 9 – 11, 2013

Fee: $1690. (SAVE 25% when you mention this special NCDD offer! Ask about all nonprofit, student and group discounts as well!)

Location: At the Crowne Plaza Philadelphia West in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

For more info, you can contact Jennifer at 215-951-0328, 800-951-6333, or email her at fsn@futuresearch.net.

Want to get a better sense of what a Future Search looks like? Click here too see just one example of Future Search being used around the world at a Youth Future Search in Ireland.

Future Search Network co-sponsored, and Sandra Janoff facilitated, a G8 Youth Summit in Northern Ireland in May, 2013. It was held in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in the same location and one month prior to the G8 Summit where President Obama and the other 7 world leaders met. 110 young people from across the country created a shared agenda. The youth voice, with their dreams for the future, was brought into the G8 Summit the following month. Their report was translated into each of the 7 languages.

Registration: www.futuresearch.net/frms/workshop/signup1.cfm

More info: www.futuresearch.net/method/workshops/descriptions-50748.cfm

Next Coffee Hour Call is at 8pm this Thursday

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Lucas Cioffi

Last week’s coffee hour was great, with just a handful of people we compiled a great list of resources and notes (these useful notes are also pasted below).

Whether or not you have participated in past coffee hour calls, your feedback on improving the design is welcome through this survey. If you are interested in participating on this week’s call, please add your name to the collaborative notes page for the September 19th call.

When: 8pm EST (new time) on Thursday, September 19, 2013

Dial-in number: 1-213-342-3000 Access code: 444839 (hasn’t changed since week 2)

Agenda:

5 min - Small talk as we wait for everyone to join the call.

5 min- Very brief intros (Name, organization, and location in one sentence. The question/topic that you’d like to discuss on the call in one sentence, if any.)

50 min- Free form discussion. I’ll provide very light facilitation to periodically bring up the questions that the group raised at the beginning of the call. If there are late-comers, I’ll ask them to introduce themselves when the conversation comes to a natural break.

NOTES FROM SEPTEMBER 12 COFFEE HOUR (link)

Question: What form could an international online dialog event take in the future if it was at sufficient scale to affect the international political conversation about a situation like the present one in Syria? I recognize that the moment for something like this has passed, now that the world is primarily talking about diplomacy and non-military options, thankfully. (Lucas Cioffi)

Answer: Perhaps these are some elements of a solution here: It would have to be large enough so that everyday citizens from various countries thought that the outcome is representative of their views. It would have to have multiple ways for people to participate, because people are busy and are available at different times of the day; some people are very passionate about particular issues, so they might have lots of time to participate, however people with limited time should still be able to participate in a meaningful way– i.e. it shouldn’t be a “tyranny of the minority that has lots of time on their hands”. (Lucas Cioffi).
- There are several online tools also working on other ways to mitigate the “tyranny of the minority that has lots of time on their hands” (Bentley)
Answer: What about forming a community of interest that allows for sharing of data, questions, criteria for making decisions at data.gov? Communities of interest can be critical to the solution, and Data.gov is a great example of how these communities of interest are collaborating. This helps get past they cynicism that people may have about government-initiated dialogue events. Existing communities of interest generally have momentum and legitimacy. Exploring the interrelationships between multiple communities is essential to solving inter-disciplinary problems. (Sarah)
Answer: Look at what the World Bank did in getting a discussion started about poverty: http://blogs.worldbank.org/category/tags/poverty (perhaps this is a better link: https://strikingpoverty.worldbank.org/ which was shared by NCDD member Tiago Peixoto who organized this at the World Bank) How to get one started about peace and security that is hosted by an entity also keyed into the formal decisionmaking process?
Answer: The online space should allow for digressions into many sub topics as necessary. One of the challenges is that issues like this are very complex and currently even threaded discussions get confusing after several levels and multiple threads can be on the same topic. This challenge is currently being tackled in several experimental online tools. (Bentley)
Comment: Having large numbers of people on an online tool quickly seems to get out of hand (i.e. newspaper comments). Large numbers of people do need to participate for credibility/legitimacy but that brings up the problem of structure needed for better participation. (Bentley)
Comment: Integration of in-person and online is necessary, because if something was filmed either live or recorded, it would seem much more “real” and can make it into mainstream TV news. (Lucas)
Comment: Need the analogy of a mute button for online dialogue for moderating the discussion. Also, http://join.me is a great tool for screen sharing with a free option. The easier the platform, the better the participation. (Steve)
Follow-up question: What organization(s) could host something like this? How can Americans hear about something like this and believe that it is worth their time? (Lucas)
- Answer: There needs to be a way for people to find out about public participation opportunities in general– in addition to this large-scale use case. Once the data for public notices is made available by local governments (coming soon, it seems) then the app ecosystem can take over and app developers can take the initiative and create apps to notify citizens. (Steve)
- Answer: It helps if the government says officially “we want to hear from you” or if there is a process for taking the outcomes through an official channel for action in government. That’s what I’ve noticed at the state and local level in MA. Skepticism of the public is high, so it’s a barrier to overcome– people may not think that the process is worthwhile. (Courtney)
- Answer: It can’t seem like a pre-determined outcome; there has to be an expectation that the conversations are open to new ideas. (Steve)
- The Manor Labs model which used Spigit was great both at allowing the public to raise issues and at informing the public of what others thought and fiscal or other data driven realities. So a model with both dialogue, ways of weighting issues an concerns, and moving certain input on for public decision, or returning it to the public with an explanation of why it wasn’t advancing (by posted video after deliberations by dept heads) is a model that might be adaptable.
- Some system of identifying an issue/question with the corresponding level on the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation would be one way of letting the public know the type of dialogue they were in.

Question: What are some of the alternatives to “town hall” meetings that are being effectively used to engage citizens in conjunction with more formal government decisionmaking processes? (Sarah Read)

Answer: Here’s an answer about what doesn’t work… Telephone townhalls (link to a Google search on the topic) seems to be a weak substitution for the in-person event for a few reasons: 1) they are quite expensive– around $3000 for a 90 minute call to auto-dial perhaps 10,000 residents of an area 2) they do not allow for dialogue; they are very similar to press conferences where residents get to ask the questions, however there’s a statistically low chance that any one individual would have an opportunity to get their question asked and 3) the format takes the form of leader at a podium rather than participants around small group tables having a discussion, however if MaestroConference was used, an organizer/facilitator can have a much more dialogic & participatory event. (Lucas Cioffi)
Yet that is a format many seem comfortable with and suspicious of actual dialogue: http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=176:bridging-the-gap-between-public-officials-and-the-public&catid=47:contributions&Itemid=89 And that is a question – how to help elected officials become more comfortable with more productive dialogue models
Answer: I’ve seen some different formats used at the state and local level for public officials to engage the public around a project for which they need public input or engagement. Usually these meetings are heavily facilitated (by a third party) and the officials make it clear from the start the purpose of the meeting and what they will do with public input. Or, they take a different direction and allow for the public to primarily engage with one another, with the public officials present and listening. (Courtney)
I agree that facilitation, pre-planning, and a clear link to what comes next (even if its more dialogue) all help dialogue!

Question: What is the difference between buy-in and ownership? (David Plouffe) Clarification (Lucas Cioffi): what is the context for this question– are we talking about ownership of a solution that comes out of a dialogue event?

Answer: One can buy-in without owning, right? For instance, members of a working group can buy-in to a decided action/next step, but they don’t have to own it – perhaps there is a convenor who owns it (Courtney)
Answer: Buy-in can be translated as showing up with some belief that the process will make a difference; ownership means being willing to be responsible for keeping it productive, following through in some way, and showing up again
Answer: Buy in can mean will allow the result. Ownership implies a co-creator in the results.

Question: What are some effective ways to handle an unruly participant at a town hall meeting? (Lucas Cioffi)

Answer: A lot of this comes down to how the meeting is structured, and how the process and ground rules are outlined at the outset of the meeting. If participants are provided the ground rules and explained the process outright, then those who are not acting in accordance with the rules/process can be reminded of that and there is a bit of pressure from the group (If we can abide, you can abide). There are tools too that can help – taking comments in multiple formats, to allow for more collection of input (e.g. written and spoken input), or focusing the meeting on dialogue in smaller groups, rather than in the larger setting (where there is usually more observed posturing). I took part in a public meeting where following a presentation from state agency staff, the public was invited into small group dialogues to raise questions, concerns, and exchange information that would be shared with the agency. Agency staff also roamed the room and listened in, were available to answer questions. Following, at the request of some members of the public, a more traditional “listening” session was held, where members of the public had two minutes at the microphone. Many people left at that point, because they felt they had been heard. That also quieted the more disruptive people, who no longer had the audience they wanted. (Courtney)
Answer: Structuring the participation as small-group discussion rather than audience vs. podium increases peer-to-peer pressure for civil behavior by creating a sense that the space is shared and by communicating from the outset that this is a place for dialogue and solutions rather than just complaints. (Lucas)
Reviewing at the outset “guidelines for discussion” and asking participants if they agree to follow or have proposed additions or concerns, makes it much easier to refer troublesome participants to more civil behaviors. And something else that I find really helps – if someone is venting (sincerely, not just to disrupt) it can very steadying to say something like “that is clearly very upsetting to you, and makes it difficult to discuss calmly. [Value/concern] is very important to you”. Once people feel accepted they can often listen and participate more effectively.

Question: Does anyone know of any measurement/assessment tools for classroom deliberations, particularly around STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) topics? (Sara Drury)

Answer: our system has recently put a lot of effort into creating a STEM school – site is here and if you contacted them I’m sure they would be willing to share: http://www.columbia.k12.mo.us/bee/staff/
Answer: The book “The Pedagogy of Confidence” has some great tools both for planning class dialogues and assessing them. Here is a PowerPoint that give an overview of the theory: http://msan.wceruw.org/documents/institute/Yvette%20Jackson%20MSAN%20Institute%20April%202011.pdf
Answer: These are simple assessment forms but could be adapted to your use: http://choices.edu/resources/assessments.php

Question: What online tools are in use by NCDD member? (Bentley)

Answer: NCDD members compiled this list of four dozen tools in use by NCDD members in 2010, but there is certainly room for updating that list or improving it by displaying it in a new format.
Answer: ICMA.org has a knowledge network related to local gov and some dialogue (Sarah Read)
Answer: Two sites that publish useful studies about online platforms that government entities can use for collaboration include the IBM Business of Government site, and the Knight Commission site which focuses on the information needs of communities in a democracy.
Answer: ParticipateDB
Answer: http://commons.codeforamerica.org/apps has nearly 700 tools for public engagement, and they are categorized.
Comment from several folks: Know where you’re starting and what goals you want to achieve, because one can get misguided if they have a tool and are looking for ways to apply it. The better way is to choose a tool after deciding on the session’s desired purpose (e.g., informational, discussional, etc.)..

Question: Is there anything like a recipe book that can help pretty much anyone become a good facilitator with online tools? How does one know where to start? (Stephen)

Answer: A Civic Health Workbook to help plan for effective public engagement: http://buildingdialogue.wordpress.com/about-our-civic-health-diagnostic-workbook/
Answer: A guide to helping people know where to start, and knowing what effective dialogue looks like: http://buildingdialogue.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/setting-yourself-up-for-evaluation/
Answer: http://buildingdialogue.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/dialogue-guidelines.pdf
Answer: How to move from data to wisdom: http://buildingdialogue.wordpress.com/?s=data+to+wisdom

Is Twitter Really the New Town Hall?

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Roshan Bliss

Our interest was piqued by two recent posts from the Gov 2.0 Watch blog (one of the blogs of the Davenport Institute, an NCDD org member). They have been posting recently about the ways social media can and is changing the way government interacts with the public, and we wanted to share two posts that provoke real considerations about how we should move forward with integrating social media into civic dialogue and deliberation.

First, Gov 2.0 Watch shared the post below on Lessons from Spain to be learned from the unprecedented use of Twitter in the Spanish city of Jun:

Mayor Jose Antonio Rodrigues, of the spanish town of Jun, has fully embraced twitter — and may have some lessons for other cities:

Because of this unprecedented Twitter integration into city governance, we have seen some great stories of what a “Twitter town square” can look like:

The mayor gathers city council agenda items via Twitter (@AyuntamientoJun) and displays a live, unfiltered Twitter feed during each public meeting.

Every town councilor has an individual Twitter handle; citizens have a direct line of communication with Jun’s leadership.

Residents can Tweet about issues of concern to the mayor, who replies publicly on Twitter about how these issues will be addressed, along with how and when the issue was resolved. For example, after exposed wires were reported, they were fitted with a proper cover in about 24 hours.

Jun encourages citizens of all ages to learn to use Twitter. Even older residents are active in civic life and engaged with others on Twitter.

You can read more here.

And that post was followed up by another that points to recent thought on the growth and evolution of social town halls from Harvard:

Stephen Goldsmith of the Ash Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School takes a look at how social media is evolving when it comes to public engagement with government:

Social media is the new town hall, where government leaders join residents in the constant digital conversation that occurs on Twitter and other sites. However, in addition to straightforward communication, social media offers much more in transforming how government works and listens. The use of social media is now evolving through four stages.

You can read about these stages here.

As we continue to see social media become a bigger part of our governance, dialogue, and deliberation, it will be crucial for our field to continue to explore, critique, and experiment with the ins and outs of its integration.

Do the above posts from Davenport raise questions for you or inspire reflections on social media and our work? Is Twitter the new town hall, or is it not? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section, or tweet them to our Twitter handle, @NCDD!

You can find the original Gov 2.0 Watch blog post on Spain here, and the original post on social town halls is here.

Journalism to enhance citizen-based deliberative democracy

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Tom Atlee

TomAtlee-border Practitioners and advocates involved with group process, dialogue and deliberation, public engagement, and deliberative democracy are aware that ordinary people, under the right conditions, are capable of generating public policy guidance that is at least as wise—and often far wiser—than what we typically see produced by government bodies. Such forums facilitate productive reflection and interaction among diverse citizens—often informed by fair briefings and diverse experts—to come up with creative responses to major public issues that make sense to a very wide spectrum of their fellow voters.

By promoting such wisdom-generating public conversations, journalists could enable communities to step beyond unproductive special interests and polarized debates to co-create their own shared stories of what is happening to them now and how they will shape their future.

The journalists’ role would be vital at every stage. They would make everyone in a community aware of public wisdom–generating conversations before, during, and after they happened. Citizens would know why such a conversation was happening and what it was about. They would know who was participating—perhaps they would even attend an event at which future participants were selected with some fanfare. They may have been invited to prior and follow-up public conversations in person and online. They would know what the experience was like for participants because those participants would be interviewed by news media. They would have opportunities to say what they thought about it all. Thanks to news media, they would know if and how the recommendations were followed, who was involved, and what the successes and failures were.

This is an expanded vision of journalism, but solidly within its tradition of empowering democracy. Public wisdom–generating processes are extremely empowering to citizens and whole communities. The stories of participants make great human-interest features. The engagements themselves are dramatic, because heat is generated when we have diverse ordinary people coming together to discuss hot issues. News outlets love conflict. But deliberative conflict is different from the usual conflicts that preoccupy the mainstream news media. Hot conflicts that evolve into creative solutions are very different from hot conflicts that are chronic, suppressed, or violent. Journalists can show citizens what a profound difference working together can make in our politics. Not because they are biased, but simply because they objectively report instances where people actually work well together on important national and community issues.

An exemplar of this type of reporting is the 1991 “People’s Verdict” experiment done by Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s leading glossy newsweekly. Maclean’s devoted forty pages to describing their remarkable initiative—PDFs of which are available online at co-intelligence.org/S-Canadaadvrsariesdream.html. Perhaps most significantly, Maclean’s devoted half a page to each of the dozen citizen panelists scientifically chose to collectively represent the diversity of Canada—including a picture, so that readers could pick who they identified with and who they thought was an “enemy.” They then provided twelve pages covering the actual conversation—a day-by-day, hour-by-hour, blow-by-blow account of the conflicts and the ultimate healing and collaboration—including photos of every stage, from arms folded in opposition to former antagonists hugging. Other articles in the issue described the process of participant selection, the facilitation method used, and background about the issues that were discussed. The group’s final agreement was printed on pages colored like old parchment, with the signatures of all the deliberators at the bottom of the last page, like those of John Hancock and other Founding Fathers at the bottom of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Robert Marshall, Maclean’s assistant managing editor, noted that past efforts—a parliamentary committee, a governmental consultative initiative, and a $27 million Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future—had all failed to create real dialogue among citizens about constructive solutions—even though those efforts involved four hundred thousand Canadians in focus groups, phone calls, and mail-in reporting. “The experience of the Maclean’s forum indicates that if a national dialogue ever does take place, it would be an extremely productive process.”

Well, that dialogue did take place. Following Maclean’s July 1, 1991 issue and the related hour-long Canadian TV documentary, spontaneous national dialogue and forums cropped up across Canada organized by schools, churches, and many other groups. Citizens had energy to actually heal the country and confront the country’s issues together. But then the prime minister was ‘hammered’ in a few of the forums and accused the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of fixing questions to make him look bad. He became a critic of the process, suspecting impure political motives by the process’s advocates. In the end, political agendas and personalities held sway, maintained their business as usual patterns, and the country as a whole returned to politics as usual.

Notice the several varieties of public participation we see here. We see the wisdom-generating archetypal participation of diverse voices in the mini-public convened through wise selection of typical participants. We see an often transformational vicarious participation of the broad public witnessing the deliberations among people they identify with and people they see as opponents unfolding in both print and broadcast media. And we see the direct mass participation in spontaneous and organized dialogues around the country. Another form of participation not present in the Maclean’s case, but present in other initiatives, might be called crowdsourced participation, in which hundreds or thousands of individuals offer their input, usually online.

In the midst of this appreciation, I want to focus for a moment on the biggest thing that was missing from the Maclean’s initiative: iteration. Imagine what would have happened in Canada if Maclean’s had done this same exercise again the following year. And the next year. And the next. Imagine that it had also reported on all the subsequent conversations, conflicts, citizen engagements, and activism that came out of those exercises. Talk about a catalyst! Nothing in such a repetitive exercise would violate objectivity or principled news reporting. But it would be a profound expansion of journalism’s primary function of promoting an informed citizenry and responsible, answerable leadership in an engaged democracy.

Versions of this could be done in any community, as well as at state and national levels. All it would take is journalists stepping into this new story of a more potent role for democratic journalism.

Citizen deliberations can produce excellent results—real public wisdom. But most of the public, if they have not been through those deliberations, can remain oblivious to that wisdom, or even can be swayed by well-financed public relations attacks into opposing it. Here again, the role of journalists is essential. They can help the public understand what went into the formation of that wisdom (as was done by Maclean’s) and can help increase general public respect for, and attention to, and demand for well-designed and realized citizen deliberations.

This should be seen as a major element in the emerging new ecology of journalism that will bring new life both to the profession and to democracy itself.

(Edited from Chapter 8 of EMPOWERING PUBLIC WISDOM by Tom Atlee)

All-America City Award to spotlight healthy communities

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Sandy Heierbacher

Our friends at the National Civic League (an NCDD organizational member) recently announced the 2014 All-America City Awards. This year’s awards will spotlight healthy communities. The year-round program will culminate in a multi-day peer learning forum and competition for civic activists and community problem-solvers to be held June, 2014 in Denver, Colorado. I’d love to see some of you enter your cities and towns into this year’s competition!

On August 20th, the National Civic League (NCL) announced the 2014 All-America City Award will spotlight healthy communities. The year-round program will culminate in a multi-day peer learning forum and competition for civic activists and community problem-solvers to be held June, 2014 in Denver, Colorado.

“We’re very excited about the spotlight on healthy communities,” said NCL President Gloria Rubio-Cortes. “It will highlight the important issues of our time and how people come together to address health issues.”

Rubio-Cortes invited applications from communities that are playing a leadership role in making their communities healthier by addressing obesity, health equity, disease prevention and health promotion, health access, healthy eating, regional transportation and other challenges.

To obtain a 2014 All-America City Award application, send an email to AAC@ncl.org or call 303-571-4343. Applicants may be neighborhoods, towns, cities, counties, or regions. Twenty applicants will be named finalists and invited to present their challenges and best practices to a national jury in June 2014 in Denver. Each applicant is asked to describe three community projects to address local challenges with one focusing on healthy efforts.

“For more than 20 years NCL has been a leader in helping communities become healthier,” said Rubio-Cortes, who noted that the 25th anniversary of the “healthy communities” movement would be celebrated in an upcoming special edition of the National Civic Review, NCL’s quarterly journal.

Immediately recognizable for the stars and bars shield logo found on water towers and city limits signs across the country, the All-America City Award is given to ten winners each year for community-based problem solving, grassroots civic engagement and joint efforts on the part of the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

The honor has been achieved by more than 650 communities across the country. Some have won the award multiple times. Learn more about the award program and follow events leading up to the June 2014 Denver event on our All-America City blog and the All-America City Awards Facebook page.

NCL is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that strengthens democracy by increasing the capacity of our nation’s people to fully participate in and build healthy and prosperous communities across America. Find out more about the National Civic League at www.ncl.org.

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