Pixelache Helsinki 2014

Posted on June 2, 2014 by David Bollier

It’s probably too late for most of us to attend, but this Friday through Sunday, June 6-8, Pixelache Helsinki 2014 will host an international two-day trans-disciplinary event on “The Commons.”

Apart from keynote lectures planned in advance, the agenda of activities of activities at Camp Pixelache – especially the participatory workshops – will be an "unconference" -- i.e., determined by the attendees themselves at the beginning of the event. Attendance is free of charge.

The event will be held on Vartiosaari, a nature island surrounded by eastern suburbs of Helsinki. The organizers note that the island “is currently under-threat of full-scale residential development by Helsinki City Planning Department, and there is a grassroots campaign to protect its particular qualities, in which artists & cultural practitioners are involved. We are hoping that the occasion of Camp Pixelache can also provide a discussion forum around Helsinki-Commons issues.”

First of all, I love the logo for Camp Pixcelache (see below). Striking!

C2D2 Climate Change Deliberation Webinar on Thursday

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

NCDD’s sister organization, the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2), is hosting a great webinar this Thursday, June 5th, starting at 12pm Eastern/9am Pacific that we wanted to make sure you heard about. The webinar will focus on learning from a climate deliberation initiative in Alberta and will be facilitated by three NCDD members. You can read more about or find out more by clicking here, and make sure to register today by clicking here.

C2D2 Webinar: Climate Change, Dialogue, and Deliberation

This webinar will provide an opportunity to learn about the work of Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD). This five year initiative (2010-2015) brings together a group of researchers and practitioners who are exploring how citizen deliberation can contribute to shifting engagement and policy on climate change locally and internationally.

This webinar will be an opportunity to discuss in detail what is being learned about deliberative dialogue practice from the following three deliberations:

Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges, 2012 conducted in partnership with the City of Edmonton and the Centre for Public Involvement
Watershed Citizens’ Dialogue 2014, conducted in collaboration with the Oldman Watershed Council in southern Alberta
Energy Efficiency Choices, a virtual dialogue done in collaboration with the Alberta Energy Efficiency Alliance

In the spirit of the ABCD collaboration, the webinar will be facilitated by three of its members:

Dr. David Kahane, principal investigator and project lead, University of Alberta
Dr. Gwendolyn Blue, researcher, University of Calgary
Jacquie Dale, practitioner, One World Inc. and C2D2 Board member

ABCD’s work is funded by a Community-University Research Alliance grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as contributions from universities, governments, and NGOs that are partners. Deliberative events are co-funded with government, civil society partners, and further grants.

You can find the original version of this post at http://c2d2.ca/c2d2-webinar-climate-change-dialogue-and.

New Direction for GFSC in 2014

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

Our friends at Global Facilitators Serving Communities recently released a special update for NCDD on how their exciting work has been growing that we wanted to make sure our members saw. You can learn more below, and make sure to visit their newly remodeled website at www.globalfacilitators.org.

Reinvigorating and Refocusing are the GFSC directions for 2014

Reinvigorating: GFSC is expanding its Board as we transition to a more locally based post-disaster resource. Much of our activity has been in Latin America and Asia for the past few years and we want the Board to reflect that. We currently have one Board member from Latin America and are seeking at least one more from that region and two representatives from Asia.

Refocusing: One of our gifts is our volunteer force from Latin America. GFSC trainers Maria Francia Utard (Chile/Costa Rica), Michael Kane (New Orleans, USA) and Francisco Fernandez Colombia) have developed a complete virtual training module for applying the GFSC model for developing post-disaster community resilience. Our newest volunteers (see photo) successfully completed this online workshop and we welcome their continuing participation as trainers. Pictured are Livia Olvera Snyder, Nancy Acosta Castillo, Jorge Valdivieso Zapata and Mauricio Diaz Cruz (Mexico) and Lynda Rojas (Colombia).

The GFSC Board has been collaborating with the Chilean consulting firm Partners in Participation Latino America, on developing a relationship that can include the GFSC Psychosocial Recovery Process Workshop in its strategic objectives. This will provide the opportunity to offer the GFSC process to Chilean mining companies and other organizations interested in training their employees in a preventive model to support their communities in case of crises and natural disasters, common in some areas of Chile.

One of our Board members, Ximena Combariza, recently delivered a GFSC workshop in Spain at the request of a community there. GFSC is working with colleagues in the Philippines to incorporate its model in a school curriculum as well as in community centers.

As natural disasters seem to occur more frequently, are more devastating and affect many more people around the world, GFSC wants to partner with other organizations in local areas to collaborate and provide this kind of training. GFSC has provided its Psychosocial Recovery Process Workshop for communities in the Philippines, Taiwan, Columbia, Chile, and the United States.

We welcome suggestions on how we might best use and expand our global resources. Contact us at info@globalfacilitators.org.

Group Works Facilitation Training in BC, May 24

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

You’re invited to attend a facilitation training from our friends at Group Works this Memorial Day Weekend in British Columbia. The training will be a great professional development opportunity, so we encourage you to check out the announcement below or find out more by clicking here.

Deepening Your Facilitation Practice

Workshop in Burnaby, BC - May 24th

Calling all project leaders, teachers, facilitators, coaches, public engagement practitioners, non-profit board members, and others whose work involvesempowering people to participate in groups, workplaces, and communities in a more dynamic and effective way!

We invite you to attend a professional development session where you will have the opportunity to:Â

Reflect on your practices
Share dilemmas with colleagues
Get support on upcoming meeting design
Storyboard events - past and future - to identify opportunities for more effectively employing the patterns of excellent group process
Integrate exemplary patterns into yourr professional life and start to speak the shared “pattern language” of facilitation
Engage with others who care about these things!

We’ll be using the card deck Group Works: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings as our lens. While familiarity with the deck will be helpful, it’s not essential – you’ll recognize the patterns from your own practice and pick it up quickly.

If you participated in the last workshop Group Pattern Language Project offered in BC, we expect this session will be sufficiently different to make it worth your while to join us again.

When: Saturday May 24, 10:30am to 4:30pm. A simple soup/salad/bread lunch (vegan & gluten-free) will be provided.

Where: Cranberry Commons Cohousing, 4274 Albert St (at Madison just north of Hastings), Burnaby, BC.

Cost: Sliding scale $25-$150.

Registration

Please register in advance so your hosts can plan appropriately. Sign up at: http://groupworksdeck.org/event_reg/GPL_Reg.php. If you have any further questions contact Daniel Lindenberger at daniel@smallboxcms.com.

Pre- and post-event Work Sessions

The day before and the day after the workshop, we’ll be hosting work sessions for those committed to supporting this work in terms of growing the language, articulating potential new applications, and promoting and nurturing the project. Some of the issues we’ll be exploring are developing curricula for self-guided study of how to use the cards, new “e-versions” of Group Works, and outreach activities to spread the word.

Come participate and let others know too! This should be a great networking and peer learning opportunity. Hope to see you there!

Please share this invitation with other people you think might be interested in attending. If you’d like to participate or learn more about this, please email Dave at dave.pollard@gmail.com.

Ecuador’s Pathbreaking Plan for Commons-Based Peer Production: An Update

Posted on May 6, 2014 by David Bollier

The nine-month effort in Ecuador to develop a new vision and policy architecture for commons-based peer production is coming into much sharper focus. To refresh your memory on this project, the Government of Ecuador last year commissioned the FLOK Society (FLOK = “Free, libre, open knowledge”) to come up with a thoughtful plan for enabling every sector of Ecuador to be organized into open knowledge commons, to the maximum degree possible. The project has now released a transition plan accompanied by more than a dozen policy frameworks for specific social and economic domains.

The main document can be read here – and here is a version that anyone can comment upon. Here is series of specific sectoral policy proposals.

What makes the FLOK Society report so significant is its informed analysis of global trends in the production of knowledge and culture -- and its bold attempt to reformulate state policies to assure maximum social benefits flow from them. The “advanced” industrial economies continue to cling to archaic intellectual property regimes that ignore network dynamics and prey upon the value created by nonmarket communities. But Ecuador’s path-breaking project seeks to go beyond neoliberal economics and policy. Many of us are excited because the FLOK Society report is a comprehensive, sophisticated and integrated synthesis for moving to the next stage of commoning and peer production on open networks.

A guiding idea in this effort is Buen Vivir (Sumak Kawsay) or “good living,” an indigenous peoples’ concept that refers to a life that balances material, social and spiritual needs and satisfactions (i.e., getting beyond compulsive material growth and consumerism). FLOK Society researchers realize that Buen Vivir is impossible without Buen Conocer (Sumak Yachay), which is the idea of “good knowledge.” Ecuadorian President Correa himself has urged young people to achieve and fight for this open knowledge societ

Call for Papers for Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

Posted on April 6, 2014 by NCDD Community

We hope you’ll take a moment to read the post below about a great opportunity, which came from NCDD member Frances Sleap of Dialogue Society via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

In November this blog (to the delight of its editorial team here at the Dialogue Society) announced the launch of the Journal of Dialogue Studies. The Journal aims to promote in-depth academic exploration and evaluation of the theory and practice of dialogue. We hope it will be directly useful not only to scholars and students but also to professionals and practitioners working in different contexts at various cultural interfaces. The first issue is available to download free here.

The peer review process for the second issue is now in full swing and we look forward to the publication of that issue in May. Our editorial board is growing; most lately we were proud to welcome Prof. Ronald Arnett of Duquesne University, a real authority on theories of dialogue.

We are now calling for papers for the third issue, volume 2, issue 2. We warmly invite you to consider submitting a paper if you are engaged in any academic exploration of dialogue. The theme for the issue is ‘dialogue ethics’. We want to explore ‘dialogic ethics’ as conceived by theorists like Gadamer and Freire, to delve into the ethics informing dialogue practitioners and to consider ethical pitfalls that arise in the practice of dialogue.

We also welcome any submissions falling within the general remit of the Journal. It is not too late to contribute to the critical exploration of influential dialogue theories which we have begun in volume 2, issue 1 (guidance provided for that call for papers is still online here).

The paper submission deadline is July 11th, 2014, and we expect the next issue to be published in November, 2014.

Please do have a browse of the full call for papers online: www.dialoguesociety.org/publications/academia/981-journal-of-dialogue-studies-vol-2-no-2.html.

Please email Frances Sleap at fsleap@dialoguesociety.org if you have any queries or if you or your organisation would like to subscribe to the journal.

Montreal Symposium on Professionalizing Our Field

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We recently heard about an exciting conference happening in Montreal this July that we want to make sure our NCDD members know about. The conference, hosted by the Canadian Institut du Nouveau Monde, takes place during the IPSA’s annual gathering, and is part of the important conversation about the professional future of our field. Check out the announcement below or find out more at the IPSA’s conference website here.

The Institut du Nouveau Monde, a Canadian nongovernmental organization dedicated to public participation, is pleased to invite NCDD members to attend a symposium entitled “Developing expertise in the design of participatory tools: The professionalization and diversification of the public participation field”, that will be held in Montreal July 21-22, 2014 during the annual conference of International Political Science Association (IPSA).

The symposium intends to better understand the conditions involved in the negotiation of the participatory design by looking at the actors that initiate and organize public participation. What are the effects of this professionalization of public participation? Does it compromise or encourage the democratic aims associated with public participation? Is it better to use private consultants, to train public servants to oversee public participation, or to set up an autonomous public organization devoted to public participation? How does the approach that public participation professionals take affect their abilities to design effective public participation mechanisms? The approach chosen to answer these questions is a dialogue between researchers and practitioners for a heuristic confrontation of knowledge and experiences.

About twenty researchers are expected to participate in the scientific segments of the two-day programme (see “Panels” in the preliminary programme). Other segments of the Symposium, the “Round Table” and the “Open Space”, mean to engage with public participation practitioners. Our guest practitioners for the Round Table are:

Simon Burral, Executive Director of Involve (London, UK)
Carolyn Lukensmeyer, AmericaSpeaks Founding Member and Director and Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse (Washington D.C., USA)
Peter MacLeod, Principal and Co-founder of MASS LBP (Ontario, Canada)
Michel Venne, General Director of the Institut du Nouveau Monde (Québec, Canada)

You can view the preliminary program for more information.

Please don’t hesitate to forward this invitation through to anyone you think would be interested to come to Montreal to assist to this symposium. The more practitioners present, the more interesting the discussions will be!

Upon interest, there are two registration options:

Participation to this symposium ONLY (July 21-22th) costs $40 per individual (special event rate).
Participation to the ENTIRE IPSA Congress (access to all activities July 19-24) is $260 for early registration.

If you choose option 1, send an email to malorie.flon@inm.qc.ca and she will inform the IPSA secretariat to send you a special registration link.

If you choose option 2, you can now register on the IPSA website: www.ipsa.org/events/congress/montreal2014/registration. You will have to pay the association membership fee ($160 for a regular member, $50 for students). We hope to see you there!

You can find the preliminary program for this conference at www.ncdd.org/main/wp-content/uploads/IPSA-Prelim-Program.pdf. More information on the IPSA annual gathering is available at www.ipsa.org/events/congress/montreal2014/theme.

2014 Public Participation Interviews: John Lewis on Outreach

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We recently started reading a terrific interview series from the talented team at Collaborative Services on public participation lessons they have learned in the last year, and we wanted to share their insights with the NCDD community. The third interview in the series features the reflections of John Lewis of Intelligent Futures, who shares insights gained from the award-winning ourWascana engagement endeavor in Canada last year. You can read the interview below, or find the original on Collaborative Services’ blog by clicking here.

Multiple Entry Points into the Conversation Create Multiple Opportunities for Successful Public Participation

The uncertainty of change coming to a city’s crown jewel can cause an outpouring of different opinions. So how do you capture all of this input and make sure every voice is heard?

That’s the challenge one firm was tasked with in the summer of 2012, when it came to proposed change for Wascana Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan. Just shy of the Centre’s 50th birthday, the ourWascana Visioning Project was launched to collect citizens’ hopes and dreams for the future of Wascana and its beloved Centre. More than 3,300 citizens shared their 8,000 unique ideas during “ourWascana.” Their input is being used to create a sustainable future for this civic gem for the next 50 years.

This week as we continue our look at public participation successes we hear from John Lewis, President and Founder of Intelligent Futures and native Reginan. By providing multiple entry points into the conversation, Intelligent Futures was able to accurately collect public input and foster an open and honest dialogue during the ourWascana Visioning Project. Unique tools for collecting input such as sounding boards set up in Wascana Centre, a social media campaign and creative graphic design all contributed to the project’s success. ourWascana’s success was then reaffirmed on an international scale when it won the 2013 International Association of Public Participation’s Core Values Award for Project of the Year in the Member at Large category.

Today, Lewis shares with us his firm’s experience working on ourWascana, how their approach to outreach is evolving and some of the other exciting projects Intelligent Futures you should know about. We welcome his insights.

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Given your client list, Intelligent Futures is clearly a veteran outreach firm. How has your approach to outreach campaigns changed or developed over the years?

I think we have become more creative in how we give the community an opportunity to provide input. We use the term “multiple entry points into the conversation” a lot. Whether it’s in-person or online, we are trying to create as many ways for people to find out and share their thoughts as possible. I think we’re also getting better at catching people’s attention (in a good way). We know people are really busy and there are millions directions you can take your attention. Through graphic design, plain language and surprising tactics, we try to make our projects interesting, relevant and if possible, fun!

What do you think is the most important act a host can do to foster constructive public dialogue?

Be honest. If you’re honest and clear – about the parameters of the dialogue, about what is being done with the feedback or your experience in a place – you’ll end up with a constructive conversation. I think the projects that get into trouble are the ones that aren’t honest in one way or another. Honesty is the only way to erode the skepticism that many of these projects face from the outset.

What tools, methods, and strategies were used in the ourWascana engagement process and which were the most effective?

We used the “multiple entry points into the conversation” approach extensively with ourWascana, but the three most effective were:

Community “Sounding Boards.” This was a series of feedback boards installed within the park, allowing citizens to share their ideas within the space itself. It didn’t matter if you were attending a festival, having lunch or walking your dog at midnight, you could look around you and provide your ideas.
An extensive social media campaign. ourWascana came out of a celebration of Wascana’s 50th birthday and was looking ahead 50 years. We collected a variety diverse, surprising facts about Wascana Centre and created a #50thingsaboutwascana campaign that generated a lot of interest in the community that translated to interest in the project. Overall, the project campaign was so successful that we ended up with more Twitter followers at that time than Wascana Centre Authority. An interesting, but good, problem to have.
Use of extensive and creative graphic design. In order to generate interest as mentioned before, we took our visual identity and graphic design elements very seriously. We heard from a number of stakeholders that this was an important part of creating the project buzz, which obviously leads to more interest and responses. We especially heard good things about our “Wascana at a Glance” infographic that captured much of the diversity that makes Wascana Centre special.

A sounding board at the Wascana Centre (Credit: ourwascana.ca)

Were there any revisions to your campaign strategy once ourWascana was launched?

To be honest, not really. We took a great deal of time and care to plan the process, including extensive discussion and feedback from the Strategic Planning Committee of Wascana Centre Authority, and it really seemed to pay off.

Of the 8,000 ideas received during the community engagement process, more than 50% were submitted in person via Sounding Boards rather than through workshops or online. Were you expecting this type of response?

It is really difficult to predict the level of response. ourWascana represented our biggest opportunity to take all of our experiences and learn to date and apply them, so we certainly hoped we would receive great levels of feedback. Taking the time to understand the community and plan accordingly certainly helped.

Did any of the feedback surprise you?

Having grown up in Regina (and actually being married in Wascana Centre) I know the place fairly well. The only thing that really surprised me was how strongly the community feels about Wascana Centre. This masterpiece has been 100 years in the making and while any project gets excited about the change that can happen, it was really a validation of all the vision and hard work that created the place that exists today. People really want to ensure that is maintained and built upon in the future.

Credit: ourWascana.ca

Any time you propose a major design change to a civic jewel like the Wascana Centre, people are going to have very strong opinions. How did the ourWascana process ensure that every opinion was heard and considered?

ourWascana fed into the Comprehensive Review Project for Wascana Centre Authority, which will then lead to a review of the master plan for the space. Having said that, I have to give tremendous credit to the Strategic Planning Committee and Bernadette McIntyre, the Executive Director of Wascana Centre Authority. Throughout the process, they never wavered from our approach to have a completely honest, open conversation and to hold judgement and listen to what the community had to say. It was really remarkable to work with a group of people like that.

Do you know of any other communities that have used a model similar to ourWascana? Can you provide some of the best examples?

There are many communities that are shifting towards more creative and authentic community engagement. ourWascana was a hybrid of many approaches. Some of the folks we have drawn particular inspiration from are Candy Chang, Build a Better Block and Rebar Design Studio out of San Francisco. They are doing great things to make conversations about the future of our places more interesting, authentic and exciting.

Is Intelligent Futures still involved in the Wascana Centre Visioning Process today?

Not formally. We are still in touch with how things are going, but hope to work there again soon!

What are some projects that your company is currently working on that the public should know about?

We are working on a number of interesting projects these days. Two in particular come to mind:

ReImagining: This is a developer-led engagement project to redevelop a former inner-city golf course. Through this project, we are trying to set the new standard for how developers engage with the community. This project is a three-phase process over six months that is all in advance of a formal application even being made to the local government.

Sustainability reporting: We have recently completed our third installment of Pathways to Progress: The Cochrane Sustainability Plan Progress Report. After working with the community to create this award-winning plan, we have been leading the monitoring of progress, which has been really interesting. We’re trying to make the information as user-friendly and graphically appealing as possible, so that the information is actually used.

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Thank you John. It is great to see the community of Regina come together to take ownership of Wascana Centre and create the vision that future generations will enjoy for years to come.

This interview is part of a blog series from Collaborative Services, Inc. - a public outreach firm in San Diego, California that brings people together from their individual spheres and disciplines to improve communities and help people adapt to an ever-changing world. The firm uses inter-disciplinary efforts to manage and provide services in stakeholder involvement, marketing and communications, and public affairs. The firm’s award-winning services have spanned the western region of the United States from Tacoma, Washington to the Mexico Port of Entry.

We thank Collaborative Services for allowing NCDD to learn along with them, and we encourage our members to visit their blog by clicking here. You can find the original version of the above article at www.collaborativeservicesinc.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/multiple-entry-points-into-the-conversation-create-multiple-opportunities-for-successful-public-participation.

Water Cooperation and Political Security Go Hand in Hand

Posted on February 24, 2014 by David Bollier

A fascinating report produced by the Strategic Foresight Group, a Mumbai-based think tank, shows that cooperation across political boundaries in the management of water correlates quite highly with peace – and that the lack of cooperation correlates highly with the risk of war.

The report states its conclusions quite bluntly: “Any two countries engaged in active water cooperation do not go to war for any reason whatsoever.” The report offer intriguing evidence that commoning around water ought to be seen as a significant factor in national security and peace – and as a way of avoiding war and other armed conflict.

Trans-boundary water cooperation, as defined by the report, does not simply consist of two countries signing a treaty or exchanging data about water. It means serious political, administrative, policy and scientific cooperation. (Thanks, James Quilligan, for alerting me to this report.)

To give the level of cooperation some precision, the report’s authors came up with a “Water Cooperation Quotient” for 146 countries, based on ten parameters. These include the existence of formal agreements between countries for cooperation; the existence of a permanent commission to deal with water matters; joint technical projects; ministerial meetings that make water a priority; coordination of water quality and pollution control; consultation on the construction of dams or reservoirs; among other factors.

One of the most striking findings of the report: “Out of 148 countries sharing water resources, 37 do not engage in active water cooperation. Any two or more of these 37 countries face a risk of war in the future.” The regions of the world that face a higher risk of war – i.e., countries with low or nonexistent levels of trans-boundary water cooperation – are in East Africa, Middle East, and Asia.

This means that roughly one fourth of the nations of the world “exposes its population to insecurity in its relations with its neighbors.” It also means that water bodies that are not subject to cooperative management are suffering from serious ecological decline – reductions in the surface area of lakes, deeper levels of rivers, pollution, and so forth.

The report notes the particular cooperative actions that countries have taken to manage their respective water supplies. Singapore, with no natural water resources of its own, reduced its pressures on Malaysia by sourcing water from rainfall, recycling, desalination and imports. South Africa obtains access to water in a river that it shares with Lesotho, and in exchange is helping the less-developed Lesotho build dams that provide hydropower and economic development.

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