NCDD’s staff is in the beginning stages of conference planning, and as we do each conference year, we’d like to hear from the D&D community about what you’d like to see, do and experience at this year’s National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation. Over the next ten days, we’ll be seeking ideas from the NCDD community via email, social media, the blog and a special conference call on April 28th at 3pm Eastern/12pm Pacific.

NCDD conferences look and feel a bit different each year because our events are experiments in collaborative planning, and our planning team is highly responsive to our community’s needs and energy.

• Remember the graphic recordings and maps of numerous networks within the field at the 2014 conference?
• Remember the “conservatives panel” at our 2008 national conference in Austin (with Grover Norquist!), where we dug into when, why, and under what conditions conservatives support dialogue and deliberation work?
• Remember Playback Theatre in 2004, the Catalyst Awards process at our 2012 conference, the showcases and networking sessions, and the great speakers and participatory processes we’ve featured at all of our conferences?

NCDD’s national conferences bring together 400+ of our community’s most exciting leaders, innovators, learners, and doers, for an event that enables us not only to network and learn from each other, but to tackle our greatest collective challenges head-on, and to set the direction for our field.

What we cover at our conferences, and how we cover it, is important for this ever-growing, ever-changing field — and we want your input!  Everyone in the NCDD community (members, past conference attendees, subscribers, social media friends) is welcome to participate.

To help you get started, NCDD’s staff and board would like to share an idea with you and get some feedback. For the 2016 conference, we can’t help but take notice of the extreme partisan rancor of this year’s Presidential election. We think making space at this year’s conference to discuss bridging divides across political lines, race, religion, and other tough policy issues is important. Sharing our stories of how we’re building these bridges is an essential part of this, to share with one another and to amplify our work. We’d like to hear from you whether this resonates, and what ideas you might have for how we should do this. (Plus the Board will send out more info about this idea soon!)

We’re also seeking more ideas. As you consider our intentionally broad framing question, “What would you like to see happen at NCDD 2016?”, think about…

• What do you think about the idea above?
• What topics would you like to see covered?
• What ideas do you have for awesome activities?
• What would you like to contribute to this year’s event?
• What could we do this year that might improve your work?
• What could we do that would help us move the field forward?
• What can we do while we’re together that we can’t easily do virtually?
• Dream big, or be specific… it’s all good!

Please share your responses to these questions in the comments below, via our discussion listserv, on social media, and via a special call we are holding on April 28th at 3pm Eastern/12pm Pacific. Sign up for the call to receive the call-in details.

We’re excited to hear your ideas and to get working on putting together another great conference!