Category Archives: NCDD confab archives

Audio of our July Confab call on “event closings”

Posted on by
Reply

Confab bubble imageYesterday, 50 NCDDers joined us for our July 2014 Confab call on “Event Closings” featuring four all-star practitioners: Lisa Heft, Adrian Segar, Tim Merry and Susanna Haas Lyons.

  • /
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.

On this Confab, we tackled a very practical challenge that many of you face, and that NCDD itself faces every time we plan a national conference: how to plan and execute effective closings at participatory events. All four of our featured guests have extensive experience closing large-scale events using approaches such as Open Space, World Cafe, Conferences That Work, Art of Hosting and 21st Century Town Meetings.

NCDD’s director, Sandy Heierbacher, reflected on some of the ways we’ve closed past NCDD conferences, and outlined a few of the challenges we’ve faced — like dealing with people filtering out to catch flights, not wanting to over-structure the closing but needing to accomplish various goals, expecting too much of participants after the event, and more.

Though the hour went very quickly, our presenters and participants dug in further on the companion Hackpad page. At www.tinyurl.com/confab7-14, you’ll find a rich conversation on what you need to take into consideration when closing participatory events and conferences (as well as many great ideas, best practices, and resources)! We recommend you taking a look, and adding your own insights over the next few days.

Learn more about NCDD’s Confab Calls and other events (including our upcoming National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation this October in the DC area) in our Events Section.

And just for fun, here’s the photo journal that was shown during our closing session at the 2008 NCDD conference in Austin!

Join us for our July 29th Confab on Event Closings

Posted on by
Reply

Join us on Tuesday, July 29th from 2-3pm Eastern (11-12 Pacific) for NCDD’s next “Confab Call.” Register today to secure your spot!

Confab bubble imageThis will be a different kind of Confab. We’ll be tackling a very practical challenge that many dialogue and deliberation practitioners face, and that NCDD itself faces every time we plan an NCDD conference. The confab will dig into challenges and strategies for planning and managing effective closings at participatory events.

We have four great practitioners who will serve as conversation starters: Lisa Heft, Adrian Segar, Tim Merry and Susanna Haas Lyons. All have extensive experience closing large-scale events using approaches such as Open Space, World Cafe, Conferences That Work, Art of Hosting and 21st Century Town Meetings.

The confab will be an informal conversation (no pre-planned presentations!) where our all-star cast of practitioners will share different strategies for closing participatory events (with an emphasis on larger events). NCDD’s director, Sandy Heierbacher, will share some of the ways we’ve closed our conferences in the past, and what some of our challenges and concerns are. For instance, for large participatory events like NCDD conferences, how can you involve everyone in the room in a way that is powerful and meaningful, without being too cheesy or taking too much time?

We’re encouraging members of our 2014 conference planning team to be on the call and participate by asking questions and sharing their own experiences, and we’ll likely brainstorm ideas for closing this year’s conference. We look forward to a fun, productive confab that serves both our community and the upcoming conference!

May’s Tech Tuesday with Ethelo Decisions

Posted on by
Reply

Ethelo-logoOur May Tech Tuesday event featured Ethelo Decisions (now available to NCDD members in beta),  a decision making tool that provides deeper deliberation about values, constraints and trade-offs in an online setting.

Ethelo founder John Richardson (Power Point file) and NCDD sustaining member Kathryn Thomson (Power Point file) led a presentation about the tool, providing a case study about a condo dispute and showed how the Ethelo algorithm works. Participants then split into break out groups facilitated by members of the Ethelo team and discussed questions and ways they thought of applying the Ethelo decision tool in their work.

Ethelo’s leadership have been working for the past several years to create a software tool that they believe is a radical new way of understanding decision making.  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 has a growing demonstration library if you’d like to preview how it works. Here are some links to different examples:

  • The Condo Dispute—condo disputes can take up so much time and energy, even on minor issues.  Click here to see how one contentious issue was resolved using Ethelo.   This one will take about 5 minutes for you to work through.
  • Group Holiday Decision—this one is also fairly quick to work through.
  • Comfort Cove Community Center—this is a more complex decision so you’ll want to set aside about 15 minutes to work through this one.

NCDD Members: Ethelo is providing free access to the tool for members (www.ethelodecisions.com/ncddsignup) and has planned regular training webinars throughout the summer. Visit www.ethelowebinars.eventbrite.ca to register up for an Ethelo webinar.

June 2014 Confab Call with Peter Levine

Posted on by
Reply

Last Thursady, NCDD hosted its June 2014 Confab Call with featured guest Peter Levine, the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

  • /
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.

Peter focused on his new book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, a primer for anyone motivated to help revive our fragile civic life and restore citizens’ public role.  If you missed the confab and are interested in learning more, you can now listen to the entire conversation — or look over the collaborative document participants created during the Confab Call — at the links below.

You can also learn more about NCDD’s Confab Calls and other events (including our upcoming National Conference in Reston, VA) in our Event Section.

June 2014 Confab Call with Peter Levine

Posted on by
Reply

Last Thursady, NCDD hosted its June 2014 Confab Call with featured guest Peter Levine, the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

  • /
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.

Peter focused on his new book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, a primer for anyone motivated to help revive our fragile civic life and restore citizens’ public role.  If you missed the confab and are interested in learning more, you can now listen to the entire conversation — or look over the collaborative document participants created during the Confab Call — at the links below.

You can also learn more about NCDD’s Confab Calls and other events (including our upcoming National Conference in Reston, VA) in our Event Section.

June’s Tech Tuesday to feature MaestroConference!

Posted on by
Reply

For our June 24th Tech Tuesday, we’re pleased to have Brian Burt, CEO and founder of MaestroConference, host a session that lets us experience major new changes in their platform and talk together about how it could support upcoming projects we each may have. Registration is open now, so reserve your spot today!

Tech_Tuesday_BadgeMany of you are familiar with MaestroConference, as we’ve used it numerous times for our online activities (our last two Tech Tuesdays, a couple confab calls, and a few special calls), thanks in large part to NCDD member Ben Roberts, who has served as our host for the calls. MaestroConference is also well-known in our field because of its alignment with group process techniques — including its unique ability to enable break-out groups to form on conference calls.

MaestroConference is the leader in “Social Conferencing” technology serving more than 5 million participants, and is launching a new “Visual Interface” which allows people to see the faces of the people they’re talking to, edit documents together, leverage crowdsourcing applications, exercise the “law of two feet” and more.

For our June Tech Tuesday (on the 24th from 1-2pm Eastern / 10-11am Pacific), Brian will host a discussion leveraging the new Social Webinar platform for conveners and facilitators about enhancing interactivity and engagement with virtual conversations. Participants will experience break out groups with peer advice to examine how conversations with scalable breakouts can include the voices you want at the table, and address any challenges you have found in the past with technology-supported engagement.

This FREE event will take place on Tuesday, June 24 from 1-2pm ET / 10-11am PT. You do not have to be a member of NCDD to participate in our Tech Tuesday learning events.

Register Here

Presentation from April’s Tech Tuesday on PlaceSpeak

Posted on by
Reply

For April’s Tech Tuesday event, Colleen Hardwick guided us through a presentation about the PlaceSpeak location-based community consultation platform. Colleen’s goal in founding PlaceSpeak has been to change the nature of online consultation with an emphasis on quality of feedback data as well as quantity of engagement. We want to say a big thank you to Colleen for her high energy presentation and for answering so many questions.

PlaceSpeak-logoOriginally piloted in municipalities in British Columbia, PlaceSpeak has spread across Canada and into the U.K., Australia and U.S. locations as diverse as Florida and South Dakota. In the April 22nd session, Colleen explained the features, process and benefit of “geo-authenticated” online engagement and shared several examples of public consultations on the PlaceSpeak platform. You can download Colleen’s highly visual PowerPoint presentation and also listen to a recording of the session.

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. If you are interested, you can contact Colleen Hardwick at colleen@placespeak.com or call PlaceSpeak at 866-998-6977.

Registration open for our June 12th Confab with Peter Levine

Posted on by
Reply

Confab bubble imageWe’re excited to have Peter Levine as our featured speaker on our next NCDD Confab call. Sign up today to reserve your spot on June’s Confab, which is set for 2-3pm Eastern (11-noon Pacific) on Thursday, June 12th.

We’ll be talking to Peter about his new book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. This is an important book for us to discuss, and you have time to get your hands on a copy before the confab if you’d like (here’s the Amazon link).  I especially encourage you to check out Chapter 7, titled Strategies: How to Accomplish Civic Renewal, which is what we’ll dig into deepest on the call.

WeAreTheOnes-cover

Peter Levine is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

Peter Levine’s We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For is a primer for anyone motivated to help revive our fragile civic life and restore citizens’ public role. After offering a novel theory of active citizenship, a diagnosis of its decline, and a searing critique of our political institutions, Levine–one of America’s most influential civic engagement activists–argues that American citizens must address our most challenging issues. People can change the norms and structures of their own communities through deliberative civic action.

Our confabs (interactive conference calls) are free and open to all NCDD members and potential members. Register today if you’d like to join us!

More about the book…

In the book, Peter illustrates rich and effective civic work by drawing lessons from YouthBuild USA, Everyday Democracy, the Industrial Areas Foundation, and many other civic groups. Their organizers invite all citizens–including traditionally marginalized people, such as low-income teenagers-to address community problems. Levine explores successful efforts from communities across America as well as from democracies overseas.

He shows how cities like Bridgeport, CT and Allentown, PA have bounced back from the devastating loss of manufacturing jobs by drawing on robust civic networks. The next step is for the participants in these local efforts to change policies that frustrate civic engagement nationally. Filled with trenchant analysis and strategies for reform, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For analyzes and advocates a new citizen-centered politics capable of tackling problems that cannot be fixed in any other way.

A little more about Peter…

PeterLevine

Peter graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. In the late 1990s, he was Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Levine is the author of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (Oxford University Press, fall 2013), five other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel.

He has served on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Street Law Inc., the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, Discovering Justice, the Kettering Foundation, the American Bar Association Committee’s for Public Education, the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

April 2014 Confab Call on “Text, Talk, Act”

Posted on by
Reply

Last Wednesday, NCDD hosted its April 2014 Confab Call with featured guests Matt Leighninger and Mike Smith talking about the innovative project known as Text Talk Act.  If you missed the confab and are interested in learning more, you can now listen to the entire conversation — or look over the collaborative document participants created during the Confab Call — at the links below.

  • /
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.

As part of our role in the National Dialogue on Mental Health project Creating Community Solutions, NCDD and our partners have been experimenting with how the fun and convenience of text messaging can be leveraged to scale up face-to-face dialogue — especially among young people.

The first round of Text Talk Act took place on December 5, and round two is coming up on April 24 (and we hope you’re planning to participate!).  Here’s what you can do to learn more…

You can also learn more about NCDD’s Confab Calls and other events (including our upcoming National Conference in Reston, VA) in our Event Section.

Archive of March’s Confab on Everyday Democracy

Posted on by
Reply

EvDem LogoLast month, as part of NCDD’s Confab Call series, we spent time with the staff of one of NCDD’s founding members, Everyday Democracy, exploring what Everyday Democracy has learned over the years, through their close work with community partners, about how to create dialogue and change.

We’re happy to share a recording of the the webinar, now available on the Everyday Democracy website, presented by Malik Russell, Everyday Democracy’s Communications Director, Carolyne Abdullah, their Director of Community Assistance, and Rebecca Reyes, Communications Manager.

More about Everyday Democracy…

Everyday Democracy helps communities build their own capacity for inclusive dialogue and positive change. Everyday Democracy’s ultimate aim is to create a national civic infrastructure that supports and values everyone’s voice and participation.

Because structural racism and other structural inequities affect communities everywhere, Everyday Democracy helps community groups use an “equity lens” in every phase of dialogue and change – coalition building, messaging, recruitment, issue framing, facilitation, and linking the results of their dialogues to action and change. They provide advice, training and flexible how-to resources on a wide range of issues – including poverty, racial equity, education, building strong neighborhoods, community-police relations, violence, early childhood, and community planning.

Look over the resources in the EvDem/Study Circles tag in the NCDD Resource Center to get a sense of the breadth and depth of work these folks do!