Featured D&D Story: KRIA The Icelandic Constitution Archives

Today we’d like to feature a great example of dialogue and deliberation in action, KRIA The Icelandic Constitution Archives. This mini case study was submitted by Eileen Jerrett via NCDD’s Dialogue Storytelling Tool. Do you have a dialogue story that our network could learn from? Add your dialogue story today!


ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project:
KRIA The Icelandic Constitution Archives

Description:
At the end of September, Build Up joined constitutional and legal scholars, government ministers, and democratic activists from around the world at the conference on Democratic Constitutional Design (DCD) at the University of Iceland hosted by EDDA Research Center in Reykjavik. We presented a tool, in partnership with the Center for Democratic Constitutional Design (CDCD) and the University of Washington, to support the continued process of constitutional reform in Iceland.

Iceland may seem like a strange destination, possibly far from the characteristics we’ve come to expect for peacebuilding processes. Build Up staff collectively have decades of experience supporting efforts by peacebuilders all around the world, but mostly in non-Western and global South conflict contexts. We don’t think Iceland sees itself as a conflict or post-conflict country — but as we learned more about Iceland’s citizen-driven constitutional reform process, we recognized that what Icelanders are doing around their constitution process is relevant to all of us.

We came to know this process in 2014 at our first Build Peace conference at MIT in Boston, where Eileen Jerrett presented her documentary Blueberry Soup, a beautiful film that introduced all of us to Iceland’s remarkable constitutional reform process.

Being able to amplify and broaden participation in peacebuilding processes, which often times including constitution making, is critical. Build Up feels there is a lot to learn from the organic process that Icelanders have gone through and continue to pursue in the aftermath of their 2008 economic crash.

The entire history of this process, including crowd-sourced inputs from common citizens and the innovative process employed by its authors… are in danger of being lost.

We are profoundly moved by Icelanders efforts to re-imagine their constitution, by truly making it a people driven social contract. Too often, the legalistic and technical complexities of a modern constitution makes it inaccessible to the people it’s intended to protect; it’s not a government’s document, it’s a people’s document. At the DCD conference, there were some wonderfully provocative discussions on a variety of forms of engaging and convening people, both online and offline — whether through new forms of digitally connected conversations and crowd-sourcing, or mini-publics and deliberative processes.

At this point, the core drafting process of the proposed Icelandic constitution is complete. The Icelandic people approved the draft Constitution in a non-binding referendum in 2012, but a filibuster by the opposition party prevented it from being voted on by the Parliament in that year and it has been stalled ever since. There are a number of political parties that remain committed to the passage of draft Constitution, however, and citizen’s groups have worked hard to keep the issue of citizen-centered constitutional reform on the national agenda.

What’s at risk in this process is more than just the success or failure of a unique and forward-thinking citizen-driven constitution. Writing a constitution is a society’s statement of values and purpose. Imagine it as the core social and legal contract that holds a nation together. This would be the backbone of stewardship of public resources, spaces, rights, and laws, should the constitution, or even parts of it, be enacted.

Yet, the new draft of the Icelandic constitution faces other dire problems through this stagnation. Over a decade’s worth of documentation critical to the reform process, including interviews, drafting notes, analysis, films, photos, and other electronic and physical evidence remains scattered across the island on the computers and in the homes of many who participated. The entire history of this process, including crowd-sourced inputs from common citizens and the innovative process employed by its authors in drafting the reformed constitution are not easily accessible to Icelanders, and are in danger of being lost. The memory of the process, of what mattered to Icelanders in their difficult four-year struggle after the 2008 economic crisis, is in danger of fading away.

Given the resistance by some of the political elite to put that people-driven constitutional reform process behind them, losing this history could ultimately close the door on a process that still shows signs of life.

In collaboration with the Icelandic Constitutional Society, the CDCD, and the University of Washington, Build Up envisioned a portal to access an archive of the history. A well designed and well presented interactive analysis of events important to the constitutional process could help Icelanders stay connected to its relevance.

Through an ongoing process of input from Icelandic stakeholders, Build Up worked closely with Eileen Jerrett (CDCD) and Cricket Keating (University of Washington) to develop a portal prototype— a proof-of-concept that gives us an idea of what’s possible when it comes to preserving the history and telling the story of an active constitutional reform process.

Our initial presentation of the tool was met with overwhelming positivity. There is clearly a strong desire for this kind of resource, not only by those central to the Icelandic process but many conference participants from around the world were equally excited about having access to this important process and its history.

Build Up will continue to support this important process. Following the conference, we are now working with CDCD and the Icelandic Constitution Society to bring more Icelanders on board. While thousands of documents and electronic files have been collected, there are likely thousands more uncollected across the island. Icelanders will also need to play a central role in determining the proper framing for the resources as they’re presented through the portal, ensuring the material is relevant and usable. Ideally, this portal not only preserves the history, but also catalyzes new energy among those Icelanders who were central to the effort, as well as a new generation of reformers who were too young to participate in a process that started over a decade ago.

What Icelanders are doing around their constitutional process is relevant to all of us.

While we see many learning opportunities beyond Iceland in making this process accessible, we also appreciate that its universal lessons must first and foremost be focused inward on a process of change within the country. Build Up is excited to play a small but, we believe, important role in supporting Icelanders efforts to present and preserve their recent history while continuing to reform their constitution for a more just and equitable future.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?

  • Essential Partners dialogue
  • Technology of Participation approaches
  • Deliberative Polling
  • Council / Circle process

What was your role in the project?
Creative Director

What issues did the project primarily address?
Human rights

Where to learn more about the project:
www.medium.com/@howtobuildup/we-the-people-of-iceland-ab29e6e670bc

Featured D&D Story: Facilitating Dialogue Circles at the Mixed Remixed Festival

Today we’re pleased to be featuring another example of dialogue and deliberation in action. This mini case study was submitted by Angelo John Lewis of Dialogue Circles via NCDD’s Dialogue Storytelling Tool. Do you have a dialogue story that our network could learn from? Add your dialogue story today!


ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project:

Facilitating Dialogue Circles at the Mixed Remixed Festival

Description

Last June 10 and 11, I and four other facilitators participated in the annual Mixed Remixed Festival at the Japanese National Museum in Los Angeles. The festival bills itself as “the nation’s premiere cultural arts festival celebrating stories of the Mixed experience, multiracial and multicultural families and individuals through films, books, and performance.”

I and my colleagues saw our role as giving the festival participants and opportunity to share their stories in an audience of people whose experience was similar to their own. We did this by facilitating two dialogue circles and an additional workshop which gave participants an opportunity to write about and share their stories.

We were overwhelmed by the response! All told, about 125 people participated in our sessions and many said it was the first time they’d had an opportunity to reflect and freely share their experience of being biracial, bicultural, or other. The audience included people of mixed race heritage and people who were children or parents of mixed race kids. At the conclusion of our sessions, we challenged participants to declare the next step in their journey or what they planned to do differently after participating in the workshop. Some said they planned to organize similar discussions in their communities, while others said they’d now more freely proclaim their identity as “mixed” as opposed to a member of one cultural group; still others vowed to write about their experience.

Because the groups were so large, everyone didn’t get an opportunity to share their stories. We are now talking to the conference organizers to remedy this by offering teleconference dialogue sessions.

At the end of the day, our conference participation renewed our belief in the power of dialogue and our particular approach, which integrates personal storytelling.

Joining me were Roxanne Kymaani, Zachary Gabriel Green, Cindy Franklin, and S.Y. Bowman.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?

Bohm Dialogue

What was your role in the project?

Primary facilitator

What issues did the project primarily address?

  • Interfaith conflict
  • Race and racism
  • Economic issues
  • Aging / elder issues
  • Youth issues

Lessons Learned

We learned several lessons:

  • The power of storytelling for breaking down barriers between people.  The focus on personal storytelling is a unique feature of the dialogue circle method and was particularly appropriate for this group.
  • Many people of mixed race heritage have insufficient opportunities to share their stories with others. They often feel that others expect them to choose ethnic or cultural sides despite their dual heritage and don’t truly feel comfortable when questions of identity are raised.
  • The importance of using large group dynamics in a setting when groups are particularly large. So while 15 or 20 participants would have been ideal, these particular groups were much larger. Therefore, we asked participants to raise their hands when they heard a speaker share something that mirrored their experience. This allowed for greater participation among our two groups, one of which was about 40 people and the other consisted of about 65.

Where to learn more about the project:

www.dialogue-circles.com

Featured D&D Story: University & Community Action for Racial Equity

Today we’re pleased to be featuring another example of dialogue and deliberation in action. This mini case study was submitted by NCDD member Dr. Frank Dukes of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Environmental Negotiation via NCDD’s new Dialogue Storytelling Tool. Do you have a dialogue story that our network could learn from? Add your dialogue story today!


ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project:

University & Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE)

Description

The University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) is dedicated to helping the University of Virginia and the Charlottesville area communities work together to understand the University’s history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination and to find ways to address and repair the legacy of those harms.

UCARE participants represent a broad cross-section of community members and University students, staff and faculty. Our efforts at working across sometimes polarized divides represent positive steps towards truth, understanding, repair and authentic relationship and promote real outcomes to achieve racial equity.
UCARE has had a transformative impact on the University and Central Virginia.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?

  • Restorative Justice approaches

What was your role in the project?

Founder and project manager

What issues did the project primarily address?

  • Race and racism
  • Economic issues
  • Education
  • Planning and development

Lessons Learned

With persistent hard work of listening to concerns and problems, UCARE has transformed substantial elements of the University-community relationship. To list just a few of the key achievements, in the last few years UCARE has accomplished the following:

  • Published a major report documenting community concerns and offering substantial recommendations to encourage truth-seeking, understanding, repair, and relationship.
  • Been a major catalyst in the President’s Commission on Slavery at the University of Virginia. Thanks largely to the efforts of the UCARE steering committee member and three former UCARE interns who are on the Commission, their mandate includes determining remedies for contemporary issues of race and equity. This will include curricular changes, responses to community concerns, memorialization of the full history of the university, and more.
  • Triggered a review of the admissions procedures at the University of Virginia in order to promote increasing number of African-American students. UCARE convened a widely-publicized forum in 2013 pointing to a serious decline in undergraduate African-American enrollment, which then initiated a conversation with the Dean of Admissions.
  • Through a weekly newsletter with over 270 subscribers, built strong networks promoting racial justice and equity by highlighting projects and events in the community and at the University addressing issues of race and equity.
  • Engaged substantial numbers of students and faculty in assisting community organizations; for just two examples, connecting the Charlottesville Task Force on Disproportionate Minority Contact in the Juvenile Justice System with university faculty, and providing intern support for beginning of the African American Heritage Center at the Jefferson School.
  • Transformed the language and focus of University leaders at all levels. For example, the student-run University Guides has a newly developed African American history tour, incorporates racialized history in all its tours (as the only group at UVa doing tours, U-Guides offers all of the visitor tours and all of the admissions tours), and has transformed itself from a nearly all-white organization to one that is now racially diverse.
  • Initiated a review of Central Virginia programs focused on youth, with particular attention to juvenile justice.
  • Working with leadership of the President’s Commission on Slavery at the University, developing a summer youth leadership program that will bring targeted young people to the University of Virginia. This program is currently the subject of a class project through the UCARE-sponsored class, “University of Virginia History: Race and Repair,” itself a pioneering class that includes community members as participants studying alongside students.
  • Created and maintained a weekly newsletter promoting events of interest concerning race and equity. This newsletter currently has about 270 subscribers from the university and community.
  • UCARE is now focusing on ways of institutionalizing its presence. One idea gaining support is to establish a center for community-university partnerships, based on the successful models of other universities, most notably the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. UCARE will be bringing a number of community and university members for a visit in May to explore the Netter Center model.

Where to learn more about the project:

Website is currently inactive although UCARE continues, but has legacy material and should be active again soon: ucareva.org. We also have a more active Facebook page and a highly active weekly news about issues of race and equity that goes out to close to 350 individuals.

Featured D&D Story: Reforming the Barcelona Football Club

Today we are happy to feature another great example of dialogue and deliberation in action. This fascinating mini case study from Spain was submitted by NCDD Founding Member Alberto Lusoli of QuattrodiTre (4d3) via NCDD’s Dialogue Storytelling Tool. Do you have a dialogue story that our network could learn from? Add your dialogue story today!


ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project:

Reforming the Barcelona FC, One Opinion at a Time

Description

The Manifest Blaugrana Association was born to promote a greater and equal participation of all the Futbol Club Barcelona members, to improve its democratic processes, and to go beyond the usual and common football club paradigm, based on a clear separation between the fans and administrators.

Organized and supported by about 200 shareholders of the Barcelona Futbol Club, the aim of the “Debats” initiative is to provide the next President with a set of guidelines collectively written by the members of the association and fans of the club. As 4d3, we have been involved in providing and customizing our collective decision-making platform Deebase to their needs.

Should the members’ register be opened, thus allowing the entry of new members? May the club set a salary cap regardless of UEFA regulations? These issues, among many others, are now finally open to fans’ discussion. Thanks to the Deebase deliberation process, which includes a scoring system and an assessment of opinions and arguments, ideas will be compared and voted by the community, allowing the most popular to bubble up.

The project has been released in conjunction with the electoral campaign that will lead to the election of the new president of the Club on July 18th. The aims of the project are:

  • to provide to the future President a set of guidelines developed collectively by Barcelona’s fans and shareholders.
  • to regularly publish and send to the Club’s management the results of the deliberations

What was your role in the project?

Technology supplier / Co-designer

What issues did the project primarily address?

Associació Manifest Blaugrana (Barcelona)

Lessons Learned

Lost in translation: one of the biggest challenges that we faced during the design phase was to translate the platform in Catalan and Spanish. Since the participants will be mainly Catalan native speakers, it was fundamental to provide a platform fully translated into Catalan. However, at the same time it was necessary to make the platform available and understandable also to Spanish, non-Catalan speakers. Therefore, having a system capable to manage different languages, and providing a hybrid Spanish-Catalan version of the platform was necessary in order to lower adoption barriers.

Where to learn more about the project:

Link to the initiative: http://debats.manifestblaugrana.cat
Link to the platform: http://deeba.se
Link to the association: www.manifestblaugrana.cat
Photo: www.manifestblaugrana.cat/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/rebut.png

Featured D&D Story: Putting People at the Center in Public Health

Today we are happy to feature another great example of dialogue and deliberation in action. This mini case study was submitted by NCDD student member Megan Powers of Grassroots Solutions via NCDD’s Dialogue Storytelling Tool. Do you have a dialogue story that our network could learn from? Add YOUR dialogue story today! 


ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project:

Putting People at the Center: A Fundamental Shift in Public Health Campaigns

Description

One of the most pivotal developments in public health practice over the past 20 years is the attention that is now being paid to the wide range of factors that influence health, such as social connectedness, the built environment, and the characteristics of the places where people live, work, and play. As a result, the public health field not only educates people about individual behavioral changes people can make to improve their health, but also works to change the policies, systems, and environments that shape our world and our ability to make healthy choices.

We’ve seen this impact firsthand. Grassroots Solutions works extensively with public health entities at the local, state, and national levels to reduce tobacco use, mitigate obesity, and address other critical public health concerns.

This work has taught us that while facts and data are, of course, powerful tools, the most successful public health campaigns put people at the center. When you combine data and facts with real people’s passion, commitment,
and involvement, communities embrace changes that have a significant impact on the health of residents.

Our whitepaper draws on our 12 years of on-the-ground experience to illustrate how putting people at the center of public health campaigns results in better and more sustainable health outcomes, and why we believe that people-centric campaigns should serve as the gold standard for population health management.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?

  • Sustained Dialogue
  • Charrettes

What was your role in the project?

Grassroots Solutions served as the project manager and hired grassroots organizers for a variety of these projects, executing engagement tactics and in some cases, facilitating participatory dialogue.

Who were your partners in the project, if any?

Blue Cross Blue Shield Center for Prevention, Cities of Bloomington, Edina, and Richfield (for the do.town initiative), Minnesota Dept of Health (for the CDC Communities Putting Prevention to Work technical assistance project).

What issues did the project primarily address?

  • Mental or physical health

Lessons Learned

  1. An important shift is to move from a campaign that is data-centered and people-supplemented to one that is people-centered, and data-supplemented. We’ve learned that this shift enables campaigns to create space for residents to shape their own neighborhoods with health in mind, and offers the opportunity to form both an intellectual and emotional attachment to their vision for a healthier community.
  2. Putting people at the center means that everything in the campaign is done with an eye towards how residents can be involved. Whether it’s prioritizing which issues to pursue, examining how a neighborhood could be made more walkable and bikeable, or exploring how a new development can support healthy behaviors, a people-centered campaign focuses on engaging residents. Everyday people are encouraged to chime in, talk with others in the community, participate in planning sessions, and make the case for changes to their friends and neighbors.
  3. The reason it is critical to put people at the center of health campaigns is that it results in better health outcomes. Communities that are built to support health will produce better health outcomes, such as bike paths, access to healthy food, walkable neighborhoods, and safe walking and bike routes for kids to get to school. Additionally, these kinds of community features also help shape how people connect with each other and with their neighborhood, town, or city. When it comes right down to it, healthy living is about people and relationships.
  4. Putting people at the center shifts a campaign from episodic, isolated opportunities to engage, to a more relationship-driven approach. This means that residents are invited to help set the campaign’s tone and direction from the very beginning, they are offered leadership opportunities, and become a part of the campaign’s infrastructure. When the campaign’s orientation is centered on people, engagement becomes grounded in relationships with residents who get involved in different ways over time. People’s participation becomes more authentic, like an ongoing conversation, rather than just a single event or action.

Where to learn more about the project:

http://healthy-communities.grassrootssolutions.com

Featured D&D Story: Class Discussion on Gun Violence

Today we’d like to feature a great example of dialogue and deliberation in action, a class discussion on gun violence from University of Missouri. This mini case study was submitted by NCDD supporting member Sarah Read of the Communications Center, Inc. via NCDD’s new Dialogue Storytelling Tool. Do you have a dialogue story that our network could learn from? Add YOUR dialogue story today! 


ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project: Class Discussions on Gun Violence

Description

Last summer I was asked to redesign and teach the Public Policy Dispute Resolution class at the University of Missouri School of Law which I then taught in the fall semester. At the outset of the semester, the students were asked to write an essay about why they had enrolled and what they hoped to learn.

The majority of those essays reflected the students’ deep concerns, as citizens, with the partisan nature of our political discourse and their frustration at how quickly discussions on difficult issues, even with friends and family, turned into name-calling and debate. The students expressed a desire to better understand and address such things as “media-fueled divisiveness”, lack of “nuance in everyday politics”, and “polarization”. They also asked to learn about how points of view form, how policies are made, how to help opposing groups communicate, and how to “explore the area between two extreme views.”

These questions were discussed in the first part of the semester when we focused on skills such as conflict mapping, question framing, and use of non-adversarial dialogue patterns, and the use of different processes to navigate conflict. The last third of the semester focused on actually applying this learning to a difficult dialogue, and the topic chosen by the class was issues relating to gun control or violence.

The classes that followed were designed to allow the students to directly experience how the choice and sequencing of dialogue structures (here informal dialogue, through a World Cafe type forum, to a more deliberative issue forum), paired with dialogue-based phrasing, can change the usual scripts used in discussion of a politicized, highly charged issue like gun violence.

To focus the discussion students were given a real-world hypothetical of adopting a policy on who could carry guns in public schools. This hypothetical used the demographics of an identified nearby school district and a law that had been recently adopted in Kansas. Class members came into the discussions with a wide range of viewpoints (which had been reflected in their prior essays) and were loosely assigned roles as community members.

The two students who agreed to serve as (i) a school board member highly supportive of both the law and of allowing more guns in the schools, and (ii) the superintendent responsible for managing budgets, safety, personnel, and overall administration, received more detailed supporting information for their roles. They were instructed to raise or share thoughts and information as seemed natural or appropriate in the discussions.

Although starting from very different places, the students were (to their surprise), over three sessions, able to reach unanimous agreement on an interim policy that could be placed into effect immediately. Much of this progress had to do with how the dialogues were sequenced.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?

  • National Issues Forums
  • World Cafe
  • Conversation Cafe

What was your role in the project?

Professor / Convener

What issues did the project primarily address?

  • Crime and safety
  • Education
  • Partisan divide

Lessons Learned

The sequencing of different dialogue processes, with time off between sessions, when done thoughtfully, can substantially lessen the overall in-person time needed for groups to come to agreement. Sequencing also allows for better option development, and promotes more productive deliberations at the time deliberative thinking is required. This is because successful resolution of complex issues requires integrative thinking about several different factors – information, interests, values, and rules or standards.

Integrative thinking takes time. Sequencing discussions can provide the necessary time for new ideas and options to emerge. Effective integrative thinking within a group also takes trust in the others that you are making decisions with. Without trust, information is discounted and risk to one’s personal interests is likely to take precedence over the effects on others in the community.

Simply put, building trust requires an effort to build relationships. Building relationships also takes time, and multiple contacts. By sequencing conversations so that deliberation does not occur too soon allows for better relationship development.

Where to learn more about the project:

Read full series of posts here: http://buildingdialogue.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/teaching-the-navigation-of-difficult-dialogues-intro.

Featured D&D Story: Class Discussion on Gun Violence

Today we’d like to feature a great example of dialogue and deliberation in action, a class discussion on gun violence from University of Missouri. This mini case study was submitted by NCDD supporting member Sarah Read of the Communications Center, Inc. via NCDD’s new Dialogue Storytelling Tool. Do you have a dialogue story that our network could learn from? Add YOUR dialogue story today! 


ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project: Class Discussions on Gun Violence

Description

Last summer I was asked to redesign and teach the Public Policy Dispute Resolution class at the University of Missouri School of Law which I then taught in the fall semester. At the outset of the semester, the students were asked to write an essay about why they had enrolled and what they hoped to learn.

The majority of those essays reflected the students’ deep concerns, as citizens, with the partisan nature of our political discourse and their frustration at how quickly discussions on difficult issues, even with friends and family, turned into name-calling and debate. The students expressed a desire to better understand and address such things as “media-fueled divisiveness”, lack of “nuance in everyday politics”, and “polarization”. They also asked to learn about how points of view form, how policies are made, how to help opposing groups communicate, and how to “explore the area between two extreme views.”

These questions were discussed in the first part of the semester when we focused on skills such as conflict mapping, question framing, and use of non-adversarial dialogue patterns, and the use of different processes to navigate conflict. The last third of the semester focused on actually applying this learning to a difficult dialogue, and the topic chosen by the class was issues relating to gun control or violence.

The classes that followed were designed to allow the students to directly experience how the choice and sequencing of dialogue structures (here informal dialogue, through a World Cafe type forum, to a more deliberative issue forum), paired with dialogue-based phrasing, can change the usual scripts used in discussion of a politicized, highly charged issue like gun violence.

To focus the discussion students were given a real-world hypothetical of adopting a policy on who could carry guns in public schools. This hypothetical used the demographics of an identified nearby school district and a law that had been recently adopted in Kansas. Class members came into the discussions with a wide range of viewpoints (which had been reflected in their prior essays) and were loosely assigned roles as community members.

The two students who agreed to serve as (i) a school board member highly supportive of both the law and of allowing more guns in the schools, and (ii) the superintendent responsible for managing budgets, safety, personnel, and overall administration, received more detailed supporting information for their roles. They were instructed to raise or share thoughts and information as seemed natural or appropriate in the discussions.

Although starting from very different places, the students were (to their surprise), over three sessions, able to reach unanimous agreement on an interim policy that could be placed into effect immediately. Much of this progress had to do with how the dialogues were sequenced.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?

  • National Issues Forums
  • World Cafe
  • Conversation Cafe

What was your role in the project?

Professor / Convener

What issues did the project primarily address?

  • Crime and safety
  • Education
  • Partisan divide

Lessons Learned

The sequencing of different dialogue processes, with time off between sessions, when done thoughtfully, can substantially lessen the overall in-person time needed for groups to come to agreement. Sequencing also allows for better option development, and promotes more productive deliberations at the time deliberative thinking is required. This is because successful resolution of complex issues requires integrative thinking about several different factors – information, interests, values, and rules or standards.

Integrative thinking takes time. Sequencing discussions can provide the necessary time for new ideas and options to emerge. Effective integrative thinking within a group also takes trust in the others that you are making decisions with. Without trust, information is discounted and risk to one’s personal interests is likely to take precedence over the effects on others in the community.

Simply put, building trust requires an effort to build relationships. Building relationships also takes time, and multiple contacts. By sequencing conversations so that deliberation does not occur too soon allows for better relationship development.

Where to learn more about the project:

Read full series of posts here: http://buildingdialogue.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/teaching-the-navigation-of-difficult-dialogues-intro.

Featured D&D Story: Strategic Planning for Sustainability in Dauphin Island

Today we’d like to feature a great example of dialogue and deliberation in action, Strategic Planning for Sustainability in Dauphin Island. This mini case study was submitted by Dr. R. Warren Flint of Five E’s Unlimited via NCDD’s Dialogue Storytelling Tool (add YOUR dialogue story today!).

ShareYourStory-sidebarimageTitle of Project:
Strategic Planning for Sustainability in Dauphin Island

Description
I was contracted to design and facilitate a long-term strategy and implementation plan (more here) to create a more resilient community able to balance economic development with environmental protection and conservation. I facilitated planning meetings that included the public, the Town Planning Comm., the U.S. EPA’s Mobile Bay NEP, the NOAA Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Program, and state/county agencies toward designing a strategic planning process to achieve sustainable community goals, adhering to NEPA guidelines and the protection of threatened species. I assisted the community in identifying how strategic planning process could better inform the Island’s Comprehensive Plan and enhance future community resiliency.

The results of this strategic planning process emphasized major issues such as water conservation, community behavior changes related to climate change strategies, including energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions, eco-tourism programs, rising sea level, protection of pristine coastal environments, diverse land-use strategies, and the general assessment of best uses for existing community assets (capital) to achieve long-term community resiliency.

The project planning activities developed both short- and long-term strategies for these issues and more. This project was recognized as a finalist in the International Association of Public Participation’s (IAP2) 2009 Project of the Year Award. The international recognition by IAP2 on pages 8 and 67 in the above linked report acknowledged the diversity of environmental, social, and economic issues addressed, as well as the project’s promotion of the IAP2 Core Values in public participation.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?
Open Space / Unconference, Study Circles, World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry, Public Conversations Project dialogue, Technology of Participation approaches, Future Search, Charrettes and Deliberative Polling

DauphinIsland

What was your role in the project?
Project director; Primary facilitator; Process design specialist

What issues did the project primarily address?

  • Economic issues
  • Education
  • Environment
  • Planning and development
  • Science and technology

Lessons Learned

  • Important to employ multiple ways of engagement for the different publics in community.
  • Make sure an implementation group is in place before project of planning is completed.
  • Keep reminding stakeholders of the role of sustainability in all discussions for actions.
  • Public engagement includes the promise that the public’s contribution will influence the decision.
  • Public participation seeks input from participants in designing how they participate.
  • Public participation must provide participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way.

Where to learn more about the project: www.eeeee.net

Featured D&D Story: Respectful Conversations Project

Today we’d like to feature a great example of dialogue and deliberation in action, the Respectful Conversations Project. This mini case study was submitted by Jerad Morey, Communications and Program Manager of the Minnesota Council of Churches via NCDD’s new Dialogue Storytelling Tool (add YOUR dialogue story today!).

Title of Project:
RespectfulConvProjectRespectful Conversations Project

Description
When the state of Minnesota was facing a ballot question defining marriage, people were divided. Churches found themselves in sharp internal disagreements that mirrored those in the broader community. Fearful of the end result of a year’s worth of polarizing media campaigns on Minnesota’s civic discourse, churches decided to build peace as a way to love the communities they were in and strengthen Minnesota’s civic culture.

The Minnesota Council of Churches, with support from the Bush Foundation and in partnership with The Public Conversations Project, Twin Cities Public Television and The Theater of Public Policy, designed a conversation model not to change minds, but soften hearts. Respectful Conversations on the Marriage Amendment were conducted across the state in rural, exurban, suburban and urban communities. One thousand five hundred fifty Minnesotans participated in 54 conversations. 62% of participants reported experiencing more empathy for those with whom they disagreed. That figure grew much higher in those conversations were the array of viewpoints was most diverse.

People were excited to participate in these conversations and they have proven to be generative. In level 2 evaluations, participants reported improved listening skills, facilitation skills, reduced tension in home conversations, improved parenting skills and paradigm shifts. Many congregations have gone on to create peace in their communities around other divisive issues and sectors such as higher education, government and public health have studied the model for future implementation.

Which dialogue and deliberation approaches did you use or borrow heavily from?
Public Conversations Project dialogue

What was your role in the project?
Program co-designer and communicator

What issues did the project primarily address?
Gender / sexuality

Lessons Learned
Budgeting more for evaluations that captured people’s stories of the experience in multiple media would have been a great idea — we were surprised by all of the good will and gratitude generated by the project, and the thirst for follow-up activities. Had we captured it better to better report on it then we would have had a great storytelling tool that Minnesotans could be proud of.

Where to learn more about the project:
http://www.mnchurches.org/respectfulcommunities/respectfulconversations.html