Category Archives: member benefits

Discounted Registration for Master Class and Learning Exchange

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The post below comes from NCDD supporting member Rick Lent of Meeting for Results 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!

FutureSearch-logoTake advantage of two great course offerings from the Future Search Network. NCDD members can get a registration discount if they register early.

Change the World One Meeting at a Time: A Master Class with Sandra Janoff and Marvin Weisbord takes place Sept 9-10, 2014 in Philadelphia. The Master Class will explore the realms of practice beyond traditional models, methods and techniques, and go more deeply into personal and structural issues for leading interactive meetings. Together we will learn more about applying principles for meaningful, energizing meetings:

  • Working with polarized sub-groups
  • Using differentiation and integration as a key process in transforming group dialogue
  • Moving from individual intervention to system intervention
  • Knowing when and how to “just stand there” or when and how to actively intervene.

The Master Class will be followed by the Learning Exchange on Sept. 11-12. Join Sandra Janoff and Marvin Weisbord and members of the global Future Search community to explore how people are using the principles and philosophy of Future Search in meetings of all shapes and sizes in communities and organizations around the world.

NCDD members can register for both together for additional discount before June 1. You can learn more and register by clicking here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art of Hosting Trainings & NCDD Discounts

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We’ve previously highlighted the newest round of skill-building retreats from the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics team, and we wanted to make sure that NCDD members know it’s not too late to sign up for this year’s retreats. The next retreat will be taking place May 15th – 17th in Nova Scotia, followed by another in British Columbia this September 21st – 24th.

We are excited to announce that NCDD has been able to secure a discount for our members at the retreats! Teams of 3 or more NCDD members are eligible for a 15% discount on registration if you sign up as an “NCDD group”.  So if you plan on attending the AoH retreat, we encourage you to let the network know via our Discussion Listserv (find out more and sign up for the listserv here) so that you can connect with others interested in attending.  

We have been hearing very good things about the AoH retreats, and want to hear about the experiences our members have with them, so we also encourage you to consider sharing your reflections on the experience via our Submit-to-Blog form if you do attend an retreat.

For more information, or if you’re ready to register, visit www.aohbtb.com/nova-scotia.html for the Nova Scotia event or www.aohbtb.com/british-columbia.html for the British Columbia event. You can also learn more by checking out the new round of videos that the Art of Hosting team has shared on YouTube to help people get a better sense of the AoH gatherings.

We encourage you to watch the video below as a teaser on the retreats and sign up today!

Request your free copy of David Mathews’ new book The Ecology of Democracy

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Our friends at the Kettering Foundation are offering to send complimentary copies of David Mathews’ new book out to anyone in the NCDD community who requests one.

Ecology-coverAs you may know, David Mathews is president of the Kettering Foundation and former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Ford administration. I know him personally, and he’s an extremely kind, thoughtful, intelligent, and humble guy.

The Ecology of Democracy: Finding Ways to Have a Stronger Hand in Shaping Our Future is for people who care deeply about their communities and their country but worry about problems that endanger their future and that of their children. Jobs are disappearing, or the jobs people want aren’t available. Health care costs keep going up, and the system seems harder to navigate. Many worry that our schools aren’t as good as they should be. The political system is mired in hyperpolarization. Citizens feel pushed to the sidelines.

Rather than giving in to despair and cynicism, some Americans are determined to have a stronger hand in shaping their future. Suspicious of big reforms and big institutions, they are starting where they are with what they have.

From the introduction:

This book is about people who are trying to help our country realize its dream of democracy with freedom and justice. However, they would never describe themselves that way: it would be far too grandiose. They would just say they are trying to solve a problem or make their community a better place.

This book is also for governmental and nongovernmental organizations, as well as educational institutions that are trying to engage these citizens. Their efforts aren’t stopping the steady erosion of public confidence, so they are looking for a different kind of public participation.

The book is divided into three sections — Democracy Reconsidered (Part I), Citizens and Communities (Part II), and Institutions, Professionals, and the Public (Part III).  It is chock-full of ideas about how the work of democracy can be done in ways that put more control in the hands of citizens and help restore the legitimacy of our institutions.

The 230-page book can be ordered from the Kettering Foundation here for $15.95. A 16-page preview is also available as a free download.

To get a free copy of the book mailed to you, send an email to customerservice@ait.net with your mailing address and a note that you’re affiliated with NCDD.

Results of NCDD’s awesome Codigital experiment

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We wanted to share the full results of our 10-day engagement project, where we invited members of the NCDD community to share what they would like to see happen when our field comes together at the 2014 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation this fall in the DC area.

The level and quality of participation in this activity were amazing! It was exciting for me, and for the whole planning team for NCDD 2014, to see the great ideas that were shared, and to be able to watch as you honed and prioritized each other’s ideas.

Codigital-screenshot

As you can see from the image above, 122 of you participated, 95 ideas were submitted, 174 edits were made, and a whopping 5290 votes (or ratings) were cast.

Props go to James Carr and Codigital for one of the smoothest, most addicting, and most intuitive engagement experiments we’ve conducted for our community.  Codigital was kind enough to donate their services to NCDD for this project, and we are so grateful they did.

Check out the full results of the project here.  The project report contains all the ideas submitted (in the order the group ranked them) and overall engagement statistics. Planning team member Phil Neisser is working on theming the results, and we are open to others’ interpretations and reactions to the results — and to the process.  Please share your thoughts in the comments here.

The results of this project will be extremely useful to the planning team as we move forward in the planning process. Hopefully it is also getting many of you thinking about the most valuable ways YOU can contribute to the conference (our call for workshop proposals will be issued soon).

If you are interested in using Codigital’s co-creation tool, feel free to contact James at james@codigital.com. He can also be reached by phone at 303-884-1260 (Mountain time; he’s based in Colorado). In addition to online activities like the one we just ran, Codigital’s tool is used by groups before and during conferences to improve engagement through participation in interactive projects that gather ideas and perspectives, and co-create solutions reflecting the collective intelligence of the group. They are happy to partner with facilitators and conference organizers.

Register today for May’s Tech Tuesday on Ethelo

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I’m excited to announce our May “Tech Tuesday” event, which will be hosted by NCDD sustaining member Kathyrn Thomson and her colleagues at Ethelo Decisions, on Tuesday, May 27th, from 1:00 – 2:30pm Eastern (10 – 11:30am Pacific).

Tech_Tuesday_Badge

Set your calendars, and register today to secure your spot!

I’ve been spending some time with the tool and getting to know the team, and I must say I feel this tool has a lot of potential for the kind of things we tend to think of as only being possible with face-to-face deliberation, like framing issues and weighing all the options. This is very well worth a look.

The team at Ethelo has been grappling with one of the questions we at NCDD ask ourselves too: How do we meaningfully, authentically weave dialogic processes into an online space?

Ethelo’s leadership, an impressive group of designers, programmers, and communications professionals, have been working for the past several years to create Ethelo–a software tool that they believe is a radical new way of understanding decision making.

The team behind Ethelo Decisions believes that the human capacity for dialogue is a fundamental evolutionary need. Their software offers a way of weaving the in-person experience of dialogue and deliberation into an online platform that allows the deliberative process to continue and helps people weigh the issues, options and values behind their thinking and deciding. Ethelo’s data processing algorithm is designed to promote group harmony by finding and ranking outcomes that optimize satisfaction and minimize the resistance due to unfairness and polarization. It can be used for corporate board decisions, large scale community stakeholder engagement and for any process where you have complex, contentious issues and need people’s input to provide a solid, inclusive way to move forward on the issue.

Ethelo will be offering the NCDD community the chance to learn more about how their platform works on the May 27th Tech Tuesday, and we have extended the time a little to make sure there’s enough time for your questions, thoughts, ideas and feedback. Ethelo will also be presenting the NCDD network with a Beta version of a new tool they are developing for moderators, so stay tuned for news about that!

Ethelo from Ethelo Decisions on Vimeo.

Also – be sure to sign up for our April 22nd Tech Tuesday on PlaceSpeak as well!

Register for April’s Tech Tuesday event on PlaceSpeak

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I’m excited to tell you about this month’s Tech Tuesday event, which will be hosted by Colleen Hardwick, Founder of PlaceSpeak, on Tuesday, April 22nd, from 2-3 pm Eastern (11am – noon Pacific).

Tech_Tuesday_BadgePlaceSpeak is a location-based community consultation platform. Colleen will be talking to us about “geo-authenticating” online engagement, and will give us a demonstration of the PlaceSpeak software by walking us through several recent case studies. Register today to reserve your spot on this FREE Tech Tuesday webinar!

One of PlaceSpeak’s key features is the ability to consult with people online within specific geographical boundaries. Instead of engaging with an anonymous public, PlaceSpeak verifies its participants, while protecting their privacy by design. To do so, it uses a 2-sided model. Participants verify their digital identity to their address, and then are able to receive notifications of relevant consultations in their area, according to the setting preferences in their profiles.

Convenors (Proponents) set up and manage their topic pages in an easy-to-use and inexpensive interface. They map the scope of participation and select from a variety of features (discussions, polls, surveys, idea generation) to obtain feedback. They are able to export reports in a variety of formats, all spatially segmented according to the geographical boundaries of the consultation area.

PlaceSpeak is currently working on its Open Data strategy and has developed an API called PlaceSpeak Connect to facilitate integration with other software applications. They are currently looking for suitable pilot projects.

PlaceSpeak-logo PlaceSpeak is:

  • Changing the nature on online consultation with an emphasis on quality of feedback data as well as quantity of engagement;
  • Used successfully by leading consulting and public involvement firms including Stantec, Urban Systems, Kirk & Co., Counterpoint Communications, Associated Engineering, Dillon, Brook Pooni, and many more;
  • Building a growing base of participants beginning in Canada but expanding into the US, UK and Australia.

Tech Tuesday participants are encouraged to set up a free Demo Topic to become familiar with the toolkit. PlaceSpeak has published numerous case studies here. NCDDers might find their white paper about Overcoming Barriers to Online Engagement of particular interest.

If you’d like to join us on the 22nd, sign up today!

Tech Tuesday is an initiative from NCDD that focuses on online technology. Many in our field are curious about how they can use online tools to support their engagement work, and many tool creators are excited to talk us about their innovations. These one-hour events, designed and run by the tool creators themselves, are meant to help practitioners get a better sense of the online engagement landscape and how they can take advantage of the myriad opportunities available to them.

Deal for NCDDers on Tamarack’s Evaluating Community Impact workshops

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Many of us in the NCDD network are part of community-based initiatives for creating change, in local government, healthcare, poverty, education, and numerous other arenas. And while we know it is important to stand back and evaluate the impact we are making on these issues and how to do things better, we often don’t know how to evaluate the effects of our work in meaningful ways.

That is why we are pleased to invite NCDD members to participate in a great program run by our friends at the Tamarack Institute called Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes. This high-quality program is being offered this June in Halifax, and again in Winnipeg in November.

We are so impressed by the program and its potential to benefit our community of practitioners that NCDD recently signed on as a sponsor of the initiative. In fact, we are willing to subsidize part of the registration costs of supporting NCDD members (whose dues are in good standing) if you commit to sharing some of your learnings and observations from the workshop with the rest of the network here on the blog. If you are interested in learning more about attending with an NCDD sponsorship, please email sandy@ncdd.org for more information.

So what is the program all about? Tamarack describes the initiative this way:

Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes is a three-day workshop intended to provide those who are funding, planning, and implementing community change initiatives with an opportunity to learn the latest and most practical evaluation ideas and practices.

This workshop is best suited to those who have an interest and some basic experience with evaluation but are eager to tackle the challenging but critical task of getting feedback on local efforts to change communities.

EvalCommImpactBanner

There is a lot that goes into doing quality program evaluation, so the workshop focuses on covering key skill sets and topics for evaluation. The learning agenda for the workshops includes:

  • Models and dynamics of community change, i.e. theories of change
  • Evaluative thinking, utilization focused evaluation, and developmental evaluation
  • Program evaluation and the evaluation of community change evaluation
  • “Measuring” systems change, dealing with unanticipated outcomes, attributing outcomes to change activities and participatory sense-making
  • Evaluation Planning Tools and Outcome Evaluation Tools

You can get a taste of some of the content of the Evaluating Community Impact initiative by checking out Tamarack faculty member Liz Weaver’s recent article in Engage! magazine, Evaluation: An Essential Learning Resource.

We highly encourage NCDD members to find out more about the Evaluating Community Impact program at http://events.tamarackcommunity.org/evaluating-community-impact. The program was overbooked last year, so we encourage you to register today for the Halifax event this June or sign up for the Winnepeg event in November.

We hope that many of you will take advantage of this great opportunity and the chance to share what you learn with the NCDD community. Don’t forget to write to Sandy at sandy@ncdd.org if you plan on attending. We hope to see you there!

Should NCDD become the new steward of Conversation Cafe?

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NCDD is engaging our members and the broader dialogue and deliberation community on an important decision we’re facing, and we are seeking our members’ input, ideas, and reaction.

CC-walletcard2Our good friend Jacquelyn Pogue has reluctantly decided to retire from her stewardship of the process known as Conversation Café, leaving a powerful form of dialogue at risk. Jacqueline, as well as Vicki Robin and Susan Partnow (the co-creators of Conversation Café), approached me about whether NCDD would be interested in stewarding the tool, and I believe NCDD has the skills and resources to help.

In case you don’t know, Conversation Cafés are 90-minute dialogues usually held in public settings like coffee shops or bookstores. The format is simple (it fits on the back of a business card!), anyone can join, and the goal is to simply give people a chance to talk informally with neighbors around an issue of shared interest. We have a nice primer on CCs on our site here.

This idea intrigues me for several reasons…

First of all, I’m a big fan of Conversation Café. It’s an elegantly simple process that gets people talking to strangers about issues we usually avoid. CCs are quick, easy to host, low-resource, and are open source (no trademark or sensitivity about ownership).

Secondly, I’ve wondered for years if CCs could be leveraged as an entry point for citizens to experience other, more nuanced types of engagement, and as a stepping stone for broader and wider use of dialogue and deliberation.

And thirdly, the NCDD community as a whole struggles to be able to respond quickly to crises and conflicts as they arise, and to provide citizens with the tools they need to self-organize their own dialogues as needed. If NCDD were to shepherd a self-organized, open source dialogue method that is simple enough for anyone to use, we would be enabling much-needed dialogue to take place more readily and efficiently than is possible now.

So what do you think? Should NCDD move on this opportunity? And if so, how could we do it in a way that best serves our whole community? And if not, what concerns you about this?

Can you see Conversation Cafés being leveraged as a rapid response mechanism in times of national crisis? How best might we make this happen?

Invitation to join the new Transpartisan Listserv

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On behalf of all the founding participants, NCDD is pleased to invite you to join the new Transpartisan Listserv. Our intension for this moderated email discussion list is to provide a simple, safe communication channel where individuals and organizations that are active in this boundary-crossing work can connect and learn from each other.

The list is hosted by NCDD through a partnership of NCDD and Mediators Foundation.  The following amazing group of people are co-founding the list:

  1. Austin2008-NiceToMeetYouMark Gerzon, Tom Hast and John Steiner of Mediators Foundation
  2. Sandy Heierbacher, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)
  3. Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence Institute
  4. Steve Bhaerman, humorist and author
  5. Dr. Don Beck, The Spiral Dynamics Group
  6. Joan Blades and Debilyn Molineaux, Living Room Conversations
  7. Laura Chasin, Bob Stains, Dave Joseph and Mary Jacksteit, Public Conversations Project
  8. Lawry Chickering and Jim Turner, co-authors of Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life
  9. Jacob Hess and Phil Neisser, co-authors of You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong)
  10. Margo King, Wisdom Beyond Borders-Mediators Foundation; John Steiner’s networking partner
  11. Mark McKinnon, NoLabels.org
  12. Ravi Iyer and Matt Motyl, CivilPolitics.org
  13. Evelyn Messinger, Internews Interactive
  14. John Opdycke, IndependentVoting.org
  15. Michael Ostrolenk, transpartisan organizer and philosopher
  16. Pete Peterson, Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute
  17. Amanda Kathryn Roman, The Citizens Campaign
  18. Michael Smith, United Americans
  19. Kim Spencer, Link TV and KCETLink
  20. Rich Tafel, The Public Squared
  21. Jeff Weissglass, Political Bridge Building Advocate

The purpose of this listserv is to introduce potential colleagues to one another, to expand our knowledge of transpartisan theory and practice, and to showcase ongoing activity in the transpartisan field.

Please consider being part of the Transpartisan List if any of the following are true:

  • You are interested in learning more, and sharing what you know, about current efforts to transcend and transform unproductive partisan politics.
  • You want to meet potential colleagues who share your concern and are working to improve research, dialogue, deliberation, collaboration, and improved decision making across party lines.
  • You want to share what you (or your organization) do in this field that you consider “transpartisan” – conversations that break out of the narrow, predictable ideological exchanges.
  • You believe this subject is vital to our country’s future and simply want to learn more about how you might get involved.

You can subscribe to the Transpartisan List by sending a blank email to transpartisan-subscribe-request@lists.thataway.org. Together, we can ask the questions that need to be asked about this challenging field, and seek the answers as a learning community.

This listserv is one of several exciting transpartisan developments that will be rolling out in the next few months thanks to the leadership of Mediators Foundation – including a strategic convening of transpartisan leaders that will take place the day before this year’s National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation (October 16th if you’d like to mark your calendar!).

About a week from now, Mark Gerzon and others at Mediators Foundation will share some new resources that may be of interest, including:

  1. “Transpartisan:”An Evolving Definition
  2. A Map of the Transpartisan Field
  3. The Transpartisan Reading List 1.0

As Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in her Washington Post editorial on January 27th, “The Promise of Transpartisanhip”:

“At a time of paralyzing political polarization, partisanship has naturally gotten a bad rap. But a reactionary shift toward bipartisanship — toward an anodyne centrism — isn’t the solution. Passion, deftly deployed, is actually an effective political tool with which to advance good ideas. That’s the promise of transpartisanship.”

If you decide to join us on the Transpartisan Listserv, take a moment to read over the listserv guidelines first. The list will be moderated according to this set of ground rules, in order to ensure the list remains safe, productive, civil, and focused.