Category Archives: NCDD Events

Best Audio Clips from NCDD 2012 Seattle

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looking back badgeDuring the 2012 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation in Seattle, longtime NCDD member and supporter, John Spady (currently heading up the National Dialogue Network), spent a considerable amount of time capturing audio (and some video, as well). I reached out to him recently asking, of all the audio he captured at the event, what would he like to share with the community as we look back at the conference.

His first response was to insist that we share the short, personal audio from NCDD’s Director, Sandy Heierbacher, focusing on “Why We Do These Conferences”…

Along with this, his favorites include the audio of the plenary talks given by Carolyn Lukensmeyer and Eric Liu…

But he also wanted to make sure our community hadn’t missed the “bonus” audio (recorded the day before the NCDD conference and at the University of Washington) from Stuart Elway, regional public pollster in the Cascadia region…

…or the audio and video snippet (you can view the video here) from (then) King County Sheriff Steve Strachan who talks about the intersection of “Mental Health and Gun Control”. It’s a really a great piece, though if you watch the video you’ll need to be a little patient with the audio as it is a bit out of sync with the video.

All of this audio (and much more) is available on Soundcloud at www.soundcloud.com/natdialogue or from this blog post here on the NCDD website.

Will Friedman Interview from NCDD Seattle

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At the 2012 NCDD national conference in Seattle, NCDD member and filmmaker Jeffrey Abelson sat down with over a dozen leaders in our community to ask them about their work and their hopes and concerns for our field and for democratic governance in our country.

Today we’re featuring the interview with Will Friedman, president of Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that helps diverse leaders and citizens navigate complex, divisive issues and work together to find solutions. A leading organization in our field, Public Agenda is a long-time organizational member and friend of NCDD. Public Agenda sponsored NCDD Seattle at the partner level last year.

Keep an eye on the blog over the next couple of months for more videos from NCDD Seattle, which brought together 400 leaders and innovators in our field.  You can also check out Jeffrey Abelson’s Song of a Citizen YouTube channel and in our NCDD 2012 Seattle playlist on YouTube.

Will Friedman Interview from NCDD Seattle

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At the 2012 NCDD national conference in Seattle, NCDD member and filmmaker Jeffrey Abelson sat down with over a dozen leaders in our community to ask them about their work and their hopes and concerns for our field and for democratic governance in our country.

Today we’re featuring the interview with Will Friedman, president of Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that helps diverse leaders and citizens navigate complex, divisive issues and work together to find solutions. A leading organization in our field, Public Agenda is a long-time organizational member and friend of NCDD. Public Agenda sponsored NCDD Seattle at the partner level last year.

Keep an eye on the blog over the next couple of months for more videos from NCDD Seattle, which brought together 400 leaders and innovators in our field.  You can also check out Jeffrey Abelson’s Song of a Citizen YouTube channel and in our NCDD 2012 Seattle playlist on YouTube.

John Gastil Interview from NCDD Seattle

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At the 2012 NCDD national conference in Seattle, NCDD member and filmmaker Jeffrey Abelson sat down with over a dozen leaders in our community to ask them about their work and their hopes and concerns for our field and for democratic governance in our country.

Today we’re featuring the interview with John Gastil, Head of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University.  A long time member, friend and supporter of NCDD, John is one of our field’s most respected researchers. Many of you will remember John as our co-emcee at NCDD Seattle (with Susanna Haas Lyons). He has authored many books on deliberation, including Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement (with NCDD members Tina Nabatchi and Matt Leighninger), The Deliberative Democracy Handbook (with NCDD member Peter Levine), and Democracy in Small Groups — to name just a few!

Watch the blog over the next month or so for more videos from NCDD Seattle, which brought together 400 leaders and innovators in our field.  You can also check out Jeffrey Abelson’s Song of a Citizen YouTube channel and in our NCDD 2012 Seattle playlist on YouTube.

Awesome Interviews from NCDD’s 2012 Conference

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looking_back_badgeDuring the 2012 NCDD national conference in Seattle, NCDD member and filmmaker Jeffrey Abelson sat down with over a dozen leaders in our community to ask them about their work, their hopes and concerns for our field and for democratic governance in our country, and their ideas about how we might effectively combine forces to make a greater impact — questions that were very much aligned with our conference themes.

The result was a series of wonderfully rich videos focusing on the current state of public engagement in the U.S., all currently available here on Jeffrey’s Song of a Citizen YouTube channel and in our NCDD 2012 Seattle playlist on YouTube.

Over the next month or so we’ll be looking back at our fantastic event in Seattle, which brought together 400 leaders and innovators in our field. In a series of blog posts, we’ll be featuring Jeffrey’s videos along with other items from the conference. We’ll also be looking ahead to the 2014 conference, and asking you to engage with us about our next event!

This compilation video will give you a taste of the interviews and presentations that we’ll be featuring in the coming weeks…

Join us Sept 16th for an online town hall on veterans’ mental health

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I want to invite all members of the NCDD community to join us next Monday, September 16th, for a day-long online town hall (10am-7pm Eastern) on veterans mental health on the Civic Commons. This Creating Community Solutions event will be hosted by Congressman Ron Barber (AZ), and is part of the National Dialogue on Mental Health.

RonBarberJoin us on the 16th at www.theciviccommons.com/mentalhealth.

United States Army Veteran Matthew Randle will be joining Congressman Barber to help inform and inspire our online discussion, and NCDD supporting member Kim Crowley will be serving as our lead moderator for the town hall.

The Veterans Mental Health Online Town Hall will be a national conversation in which anyone can participate to discuss veterans’ mental health. Post questions, share your stories, and participate in this online dialogue with the Congressman.

This special event will be publicized heavily by our partners, and we hope it will draw in many more participants to the 6 discussion topics we’re already running at the Civic Commons on mental health, with a great group of volunteer moderators from NCDD.

Why a town hall on veterans’ mental health?

  • Because many of our veterans return home with battle scars that can’t be seen
  • Because families and loved ones sometimes don’t know what to say or how to help
  • Because an average of 22 veterans commit suicide every day
  • Because veterans might not know where to find help
  • Because we don’t often get the chance to talk about this important public issue civilly and openly online
  • Because there’s a lot we can learn from each other

For more information…

Visit the event page on the Creating Community Solutions site.  Or just join us on the 16th anytime after 10am Eastern.

Song of a Citizen Video Essays & Interviews with D&D Leaders

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Song Of A Citizen has produced a second series of dialogue and deliberation-related videos. The first was a series of Video Op-Eds with esteemed political philosophers, academics, and leaders of major deliberative democracy organizations (see the NCDD resource listing here). Those were filmed at various locations around the country between 2008 to 2010.

EricLiuVid-screenshotThe more recent series features Q&A interviews with key practitioners and other experts in the dialogue and deliberation community, filmed at the NCDD Conference in October 2012. Most of them are on the SoaC site, and all of them are on SoaC YouTube Channel.

Now that “Song Of A Citizen” has produced a wide range of interesting and informative videos with field leaders and experts, as of August 2013 they are seeking funding for new productions designed to resonate with the general public.

Making films and videos that reach and impact millions of people is actually SoaC founder Jeffrey Abelson’s strong suit, as witnessed by his 30 year background as a creative filmmaker, whose work ranges from prime time PBS documentaries to high profile MTV videos. More about that can be found at http://jeffreyabelson.com.

Video interviews on the Song of a Citizens site: http://songofacitizen.com/songofacitizen.com/Video_Q%26A.html

Song of a Citizen YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDlxTRB4Z8g&list=PLNmpXlQNJcSNo65iOeiSlBjxD16kZTBMY

Register for NCDD’s next Tech Tuesday event — on Zilino

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Our second “Tech Tuesday” event will take place on September 17th from 4pm-5pm Eastern (1pm-2pm Pacific). We’ll be taking a look at Zilino, a web-based solution that enables practitioners to host deliberative online forums and other types of well structured, well facilitated engagement processes.

Tech_Tuesday_BadgeThe webinar will be hosted by Tim Bonnemann, founder and CEO of Intellitics, Inc., a long-time NCDD organizational member and co-sponsor of the 2012 NCDD Conference. Intellitics is a digital engagement startup based in San José, CA that helps its clients apply technology to support, enhance and extend participatory processes.

Intellitics is currently working with a non-profit on the East Coast to translate their in-person citizen deliberation process (National Issues Forum approach) into a meaningful online experience using Zilino. This session will provide a brief overview of the tool and present insights from this ongoing project.

As with our first Tech Tuesday, we”ll be using GoToWebinar.  Please register today to reserve your spot:

Tech Tuesday is a new initiative from NCDD focused 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 to this community 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.

If you have an idea for a Tech Tuesday event you’d like to run (or a tool you’d like to see featured), email NCDD’s Director, Sandy Heierbacher, at sandy@ncdd.org — or leave a comment here. Please note that unlike our “Confab calls,” which NCDD runs, promotes, and archives, we ask Tech Tuesday presenters to run these events on the platform of their choice. This frees us up to hold more events, and allows the presenters to use the platform that makes the most sense for their tool.

Announcing NCDD Coffee Hour: Thursdays @ 12pm EST

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Join us this Thursday for NCDD’s first “Coffee Hour.”  These informal one-hour calls will give NCDD members an opportunity to connect with each other, bring up challenges they’re facing in their work, and who knows what else… we’ll see!  This is the start of an 8-week experiment to see if regular open-topic conference calls are useful to our members.

I believe that if we open up some informal space on a weekly basis for us to connect with each other, we’ll be pleasantly surprised by what happens.  As interest grows from week to week, we can improve the design.

CoffeeHour-mug-logoWhen: Each Thursday at 12pm EST
Dial-in number: (605) 715-4920
Access code: 616033

What to bring:
1. Bring your own topic related to dialogue/deliberation such as new insights you’ve gained or challenges that you’re facing where you would like the input from others on the call.
2. Mug of coffee or tea :)

Timeline:
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:
1. The minimalist design is intentional (i.e. no pre-set agenda, minimal planning, easily facilitated by other community members in the future) so that this can be self-organizing and sustainable community infrastructure for the long haul.
2. You are welcome to add your name to the list of participants on the collaborative notes page so others have an idea of who will attend.

Let’s have some fun!

Audio from August Confab Call with Rich Harwood

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We had a great confab call on Wednesday (August 7, 2013) with special guest Rich Harwood of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation. The call was facilitated skillfully by Marla Crockett, NCDD’s Board chair and a close colleague of Rich’s.

Earlier this year, Rich was asked to facilitate a series of meetings in Newtown, CT to help the grieving city decide what to do with Sandy Hook Elementary School, site of the horrific mass murder of children and school personnel last December. We asked Rich to talk to NCDD members about his work in Newtown, and the broader work he and his colleagues are doing at the highly regarded Harwood Institute.

Confab bubble imageUse the links below to listen to the audio recording of the call and check out other call-related material.

We had over 120 participants this week, with about half active the call’s collaborative doc at Hackpad.com, where they took great notes, introduced themselves, posed questions and shared links.  One of our participants even mind-mapped the confab conversation, and that link is on the Hackpad as well!

Through community conversations, constant innovation, and nationwide research, The Harwood Institute has developed an approach that’s helped cities, organizations, and individuals “Turn Outward” and build on public aspirations to get things done for the common good. Rich has worked in struggling communities such as Newark, Detroit, and Flint, Michigan and has created a group of “Beacon Communities” to develop a critical mass of public innovators. He’s partnered with influential organizations like United Way Worldwide, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the American Library Association in order to enhance their relevance and impact in the communities they serve.

His latest book, The Work of Hope, asserts that fixing our politics shouldn’t be our top priority. “The central task in our society is to restore belief in ourselves and one another that we can get things done, together.” It was that philosophy which guided Rich’s work in Newtown and brought about an emotional, yet harmonious, decision.