Category Archives: upcoming events

Developing “Text, Talk, and Act”: A new strategy for combining ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ engagement

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NCDD members may be interested in contributing to the development of a new public engagement process that will roll out in December as part of the National Dialogue on Mental Health. “Text, Talk, and Act” has been developed by Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), the other members of the National Dialogue’s Creating Community Solutions partnership, and the directors of two civic technology nonprofits: Michelle Lee of Textizen and Michael Smith of United Americans. Sandy Heierbacher of NCDD, Raquel Goodrich of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, and Mary Jacksteit and Sue McCormack of CCS have been instrumental in making this happen.

We developed this process because we were looking for a way to involve more young people, with the technology they use most, in a way that captures national excitement and produces meaningful small-group dialogue.

Essentially, what we are doing is combining the strengths of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ engagement. Thick engagement has been a key element of public participation for a long time, though it has proliferated dramatically in the last twenty years; it happens mainly in groups, either face-to-face, online, or both, and features various forms of dialogue, deliberation, action planning, and policy choicework. Thin engagement has developed more recently; it happens mainly online, and is easier, faster, and potentially more viral – it is done by individuals, who are often motivated by feeling a part of some larger movement or cause.

Both thin and thick engagement have their merits – and their limitations. We wanted to find better ways to weave together these two strands, thickening the thin forms and thinning out the thick. “Text, Talk, and Act” resulted directly from this conversation.

Like most kinds of thin engagement, “Text, Talk, and Act” is easy to organize. You don’t need moderators, discussion materials, computers, or screens: just participants with text-capable cellphones. (If not everyone has a cellphone, you need only ensure that there is one cellphone per small group.)

  • Participants form into groups of 4-6 people, then start the 60-minute process by texting ‘START’ to 89800.
  • They receive a welcome text, followed quickly by a few polling questions about mental health, such as “1 in 5 people experience mental illness each year. Take a guess: Half of all mental health problems begin at age: A) 14, B) 24, C) 30”
  • Each time the participant texts in a response, they receive a text with the next question.
  • Aggregated results of the polling can be viewed online in real time.
  • Participants are asked to accept some guidelines: “Let’s talk guidelines: 1. Listen w/ respect, 2. It’s OK to disagree but don’t make it personal, 3. What’s said here stays here. Is this OK?”
  • The participants then receive the first of several dialogue questions, including: “Without naming names, talk about how mental health issues have affected you or people you know (Take 15 mins to discuss in groups & reply NEXT to go on.)”
  • Responses to these dialogue questions are not recorded. (And phone numbers are not kept in the system after the process has ended.)
  • Next in the sequence are polling and dialogue questions on the best ways to “make a difference” on mental health issues.
  • One of the final questions asks participants to “commit to 1 action to help make a difference” – participants can text in their ideas, which can then be viewed online along with other ideas from their school, university, or community.

The process is designed to last one hour, but the technology allows people to start any time they like (on December 5th), and take as long as they like. Participants will also be able to organize a “Text, Talk, and Act” event after the 5th.

We used the Textizen platform for the high school pilot of “Text, Talk, and Act,” held at Rex Putnam High School in Milwaukie, Oregon. “This exercise has created a more trusting environment in our class,” one student said. “We understand each other better now.” Our college pilot, at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, used the United Americans platform. Please contact either Textizen or United Americans if you are interested in using this process.

Meanwhile, please join us on December 5th in trying out this new process! There are three easy steps:

  1. Bring some people together on the 5th
  2. Have them form into groups of 4-5, with at least one cellphone per group
  3. Ask them to text “START” to 89800

Learn more and sign up for updates at www.creatingcommunitysolutions.org/texttalkact, and see Sandy’s previous post about the project at www.ncdd.org/13369 (including the infographic NCDD’s Andy Fluke created for the project!).

Collaborate in IAP2′s Write-A-Thon on Friday

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IAP2 logo

Do you have some free time this Friday, November 22nd? If you do, we hope you consider helping out our partners at IAP2 USA (an NCDD organizational member) with their “write-a-thon” event, a collaborative work day to improve its website and tidy up after IAP2 USA’s great 2013 conference. Whether you have 15 minutes or the whole afternoon, there’s something you can do to help!

You can sign up to help and find out more about the day on this Google Doc. Here’s how it will work:

The Communications Team will do some basic prep work, such as setting up an environment for collaborative writing, listing the areas that need work and providing the necessary instructions.

The day of the write-a-thon, November 22, we’ll start with a kick-off conference call in the morning. We’ll also schedule brief check-ins throughout the day (like every other hour or so) to make it easy for people who join late catch up quickly. These calls would also help us coordinate tasks among our distributed team and resolve any critical questions or issues.

While the main event will take place over the course of just one day, we will probably have everything ready a couple days prior so volunteers can get a head start if they want. And we’d probably leave it open for contributions over the weekend.

Updating the navigation structure of our website and swapping out content won’t actually take that long. Who knows, the new and improved website might launch before Thanksgiving.

A write-a-thon is a participatory method that has application for public participation work. This is a chance for you to experience this innovative format hands-on while also helping IAP2 USA. Win/win!

The whole day will kick off with a conference call briefing at 12pm Eastern/9am Pacific (Dial-in info: 1-213-342-3000 / 268555#). This is what you can expect:

We’ll be using Google Docs as our collaboration environment. The main document is now up and running and has more details, incl. dial-in information for our kick-off call and several other check-ins throughout the day and a first list of content areas we plan to tackle.

If you’d like to get involved, here’s what you do:

  • Head to the Google Doc and add your name to the list of participants.
  • Join us for our 10-minute kick-off call at 9am Pacific (12pm Eastern) on Friday or for any of the other check-ins
  • If you have further questions, just get in touch (leave a comment below, contact the office or complete our volunteer sign-up form to join the communications team)

Remember, every small contribution is welcome! Whether you have 20 minutes to spare in between meetings, an hour at the airport or an entire afternoon — there will be plenty of opportunities to help out.

You can find more info about the event and how you can help below, or you can visit their blog to see the full original post or the final update.  Thanks in advance to everyone who chips into this great collaborative process!

Announcing the Next Stage Facilitation Intensive, Jan. 8-10

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We are pleased to highlight the post below, which came from NCDD Sustaining Member Becky Colwell of Integral Facilitator via our great 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!

IntergralFacilitator-LogoExplore what is happening on the developmental edge of facilitation, and what it means to you — join Integral Facilitator for our Next Stage Facilitation intensive training this January 8th-10th, 2014, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In this three-day workshop, you’ll learn new ways to be a more Integral Facilitator who can make any dialogue and collaboration more successful and to help your groups, teams, stakeholders, and cultures cohere. There has never been a better time than now to invest in developing your awareness and capacities as a facilitative leader.

We promise a deep dive into your personal presence, and more than a taste of integral expression in groups. Engage in compelling conversations about your work with groups, and try new practices that stretch the embodiment of who you are in this increasingly important role.

Register today and make this experiential workshop is your first step into the next stage of facilitation where you:

  • Engage yourself more fully in service of the future that wants to emerge
  • Meet the challenge of more complex real-life issues and conflict
  • Integrate the interior and exterior experience of groups
  • Cut through the clutter of techniques and methods to get to the heart of the matter
  • Navigate conflict, shadow, emotions and power politics
  • Enjoy richer, deeper and more satisfying engagements

Our fans speak for us:

“Next Stage Facilitation is the highest iteration of working with groups which will actually create a real and positive change in the world.” — Dorothy Tanguay

For more information, visit us at www.integralfacilitator.com/programs/next-stage

Reminder about tomorrow’s NCDD Confab on Rockefeller’s GATHER

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Confab bubble imageDon’t forget to register for tomorrow’s confab call! From 2:00 to 3:00 pm Eastern on November 20th, we’ll be talking with Rob Garris and Noah Rimland Flower about the Rockefeller Foundation’s new publication GATHER: The Art & Science of Effective Convening.

The Rockefeller Foundation and Monitor Institute released GATHER earlier this year as a free hands-on guidebook for all convening designers and social change leaders who want to tap into a group’s collective intelligence and make substantial progress on a shared challenge.

The call will provide a great opportunity to learn more about how foundations are thinking about their role as convenors, and think through your own role and strategies as a convenor.  Our featured speakers tomorrow are Rob Garris, Managing Director at Rockefeller Foundation (Rob oversees their Bellagio conference center, and oversaw the creation of GATHER) and Noah Rimland Flower of the Monitor Institute (one of GATHER’s two co-authors). NCDD’s Board Chair, Marla Crockett, will be facilitating tomorrow’s call.

Join us for “Text, Talk, Act” on Mental Health

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On December 5th, we encourage all NCDD members to participate in the first-ever, nationwide text-enabled dialogue on mental health. All you need is 1 hour, 4 people, and at least 1 phone.

TXTTLKACT_Infographic

This is a project of Creating Community Solutions – a collaborative effort led by the National Institute for Civil Discourse, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, AmericaSpeaks, Everyday Democracy, National Issues Forums Institute, and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (with many, many partner organizations signed on — including some of you!). We’re excited to be experimenting with the use of text messaging technology to help groups of young people and adults, all over the country, get together in small groups for one-hour discussions on mental health.

Sign up today at bit.ly/texttalkact, and think about whether you can get your university, your classroom, your community group, your neighbors, or others involved in Text Talk Act!

And please share this infographic widely to help us promote the event! The infographic was created by Andy Fluke — NCDD’s Creative Director.

Small groups of 4-5 people will gather together for the event. Each group will need a cell phone and will receive polling & discussion questions and process suggestions via text message.

Results from the live polling questions will be tabulated almost instantly, so that people will be able to see how participants across the country responded. The discussion questions will provide a safe space for candid dialogue on mental health, one of the most critical and misunderstood public issues we face. The process will also provide an opportunity for participants to discuss actions they can take to strengthen mental health on their campuses and in their communities.

Dialogue Insights and Trainings from Public Conversations

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pcp_logoWe read a great piece recently from our friends and organizational members at the Public Conversations Project reminding us about the importance of intentionally preparing ourselves for difficult conversations and presenting new training opportunities to hone our preparedness. Dialogue, deliberation, and other forms of public engagement aren’t always about moving forward together – sometimes we have to work through heavy issues or open conflicts between groups.

As Public Conversations’ Bob Stains writes in the article, if we aren’t ready for the emotions and reactions these conversations can provoke, it can derail the whole dialogue:

…The more intensely I care [about the subject of the dialogue], the higher the conversational stakes, the more likely it is I’ll say something I regret. The thing I’ve said that causes regret is almost always an automatic comeback: a knee-jerk reaction rather than an intentional response, usually defending myself or attacking the other in some way. My reactions in those moments can set others off and then sweep us along a downward-spiraling pathway to pointless argument, misunderstanding and damaged relationships. As I look back on those moments, I wish I’d been able to approach them differently.

Many of us have seen this happen before, or even been the ones reacting from a less-than-productive place, and it reminds us that being prepared for dialogue is ongoing work.

Lucky for us, the Pubic Conversations Project announced in the same post that it will be offering two new two new workshops for the first time this spring called Preparing to Succeed and Facilitating Public Meetings. These trainings will focus on preparing for and facilitating difficult public meetings that will help practitioners show up and perform at their highest level. These two new trainings will be added to Public Conversations’ Fall 2013 – Spring 2014 workshop schedule for trainings on dialogue design, skillful facilitation, powerful practices of inquiry, and more. And NCDD members get a 15% discount on all Public Conversations trainings, so make sure to let them know you’re with us!

But you don’t have to wait until Spring to get new dialogue tools. We’ll leave you with some of the great preparation tips that Bob shared in his blog piece. Next time you’re getting ready for dialogue, consider thinking back to these kinds of questions:

You can prepare for a hard conversation by yourself or with a partner by asking reflective questions. Here are some sample questions from The Uncertain Path to Dialogue: A Meditation, an article by Founding Associate Sallyann Roth:

  • What do I do that shuts others down?
  • What makes it possible for me to listen to them?
  • How can I keep from being taken over by the belief that the other person or group is really the problem?

And more questions to ponder from our pre-dialogue preparatory interview process:

  • When have you had a constructive conversation with someone with whom you disagree on this issue?
  • What aspects or qualities of yourself to you want to make sure to bring out, and what do you want to make sure to restrain in order for you to be at your best in the upcoming conversation?

Finally, simply taking some time to think about your purposes for engaging in the conversation will go a long way. What do you care about? What are you hoping for? What do you want to make sure to avoid? How do you want the relationship to be after this conversation? Stepping back and reflecting on these and other questions beforehand can help you respond intentionally rather than automatically. It can prevent future regrets about things said and turn a potentially destructive conversation into one of mutual learning, understanding and respect.

We hope you can put some of these reflections to use in your own work. You can find the full post on the Public Conversations Project blog, Doing Dialogue, by clicking here: blog.publicconversations.org/preparing-to-connect/#.UoGP_Pl-TS0.

Registration open for Nov 20th Confab call on Rockefeller’s GATHER

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Want to build your toolkit as a convening designer? Join us for our next NCDD “Confab Call” on Wednesday, November 20th from 2:00 to 3:00 EST to speak with the authors of the Rockefeller Foundation publication GATHER: The Art & Science of Effective Convening.

Leading the conversation will be:

  • Rob Garris, Managing Director at Rockefeller Foundation. Rob oversees their Bellagio conference center, and oversaw the creation of GATHER
  • Noah Rimland Flower, Monitor Institute. Noah is one of GATHER’’s two co-authors and led the content creation

Gather-coverEarlier this year, Rockefeller Foundation and Monitor Institute released GATHER as a free hands-on guidebook for all convening designers and social change leaders who want to tap into a group’s collective intelligence and make substantial progress on a shared challenge.

GATHER provides simple frameworks for the questions that are often ignored: whether convening is the right tool to use to advance a strategic agenda, and how a convening can be used to achieve a specific purpose. It then helps you understand how to customize the design to fit that purpose, laying out a clear series of steps for what is a naturally chaotic workflow. It then offers principles to use for each of the many tactical choices involved. GATHER and its accompanying workshop materials are designed for you to use in your own work, with a team, and with larger groups both inside and outside an organization.

On this Confab Call we’ll be discussing:

  • An introduction to how convening is a strategic tool for foundations
  • A case study of how convening can be used for social problem-solving
  • The top three mis-steps that convening designers make, and how to avoid them

A word on the format:  NCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members of the NCDD community to talk with innovators in our field about the work they’re doing and connect with each other around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is required to participate in this call, as space is limited and we suspect this one will fill up fast.

Dues-paying members (supporting, sustaining and org members) get first dibs on this one, but non-dues members may register starting next Wednesday (November 13th) as space allows. A max of 150 people will be able to participate on the call.

Int’l Course on Participatory Methods in India, Spring 2014

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This post was submitted by NCDD member Varun Vidyarthi of the Manavodaya Institute of Participatory Development via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have field news you want to share with the rest of us? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

manavodaya

You’re invited to participate in a two-week program titled “People Based Development – Concept and Practice” is a unique experience in participatory development in India. It combines inputs in classroom with field visits involving direct interaction with villagers. This will be the seventeenth international course at the Manavodaya Institute that is known for its pioneering contribution to the self help movement in India.

The program is based on the following lessons learned at Manavodaya:

  • Participatory development is a process that builds on people’s own capacity and resources and it can be initiated by outsiders through deep dialogue.
  • The process of participatory development is feasible even among the very poor and illiterate.
  • A successful participatory development process requires a clear vision, strategy, and suitable values among facilitators of the process.
  • Participants from earlier programs have used the method among refugees in Norway as well as people with learning disabilities in the UK.

For more info about Manavodaya’s work you can find their website at www.manavodaya.org.in, visit Manavodaya’s Facebook page, or check out their informative and inspiring video below:

Making Engagement More Fun with CommunityMatters

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CM_logo-200pxCivic engagement and public participation can often be dry, boring, and even down right tedious, and many of us have struggled to find ways to make civic engagement more fun. Some have found interesting ways to do it, but for many of us, it’s hard to think of new ways to jazz up our work.

But that’s why our partners at CommunityMatters have been thinking and talking over the past month about how we can make our work of building and engaging community more fun. They have already started by helping show that engagement can be fun with their list of 75 ways to make your town more playful and their “leaderboard” for playful engagement projects.

And CM is continuing to help stimulate and grow those fun ways to engage with the second installment of their “Let’s Play!” conference call series, “Creating Fun Places“.  If you missed the first installment in the call series, “Making Engagement Way More Fun“, don’t worry! You can find and listen to audio of the entire call by clicking here.

The “Creating Fun Places” call is coming up November 14th from 4 – 5pm Eastern and will feature two great fun instigators who will share insights on bringing play into normal public spaces:

Public spaces bring our cities and towns to life – they’re where we gather with friends, take breaks from the office and bask in the sunshine on a warm summer day. But much of the public realm is lifeless and overly utilitarian. Wouldn’t it be nice if parking lots could make you smile, or if transit stops were so fun that you sort of hope the bus will be late?

On the next free CommunityMatters conference call, we’ll hear from Mike Lanza of Playborhood and Brian Corrigan of Oh Heck Yeah. They’re working on creative placemaking strategies to turn ordinary places into fun-filled ones. Join us on Thursday, November 14th from 4-5pm for great ideas on making your city or town a more playful place.

We encourage everyone to register now for the conference call, which promises to be both informative and, of course, fun! We know it will be a great break from the work week, so we look forward to having you join us on the call!