We had another great NCDD “Confab Call” last week, and if you couldn’t join us we highly recommend you listen to the audio recording. The call featured NCDD members Tree Bressen and Sue Woehrlin, who led a discussion about the innovative Group Works card deck and the collaboratively-developed pattern language it conveys.

We had 33 participants, many thoughtful comments (during the call and in the Google doc we used as another stream of engagement), and experimented with using the deck as a tool for learning about its potential.

Use the link below to listen to the audio recording of the main segment of the call. We think you’ll find it worth a listen!

1. Listen to the Confab Call.
The full conversation with question and comments. 35Mb 1:11:53 (mp3)*

2. Check out the Confab Call’s Collaborative Google Doc.
Participants were encouraged to introduce themselves, ask questions and respond to discussion points. 152k (pdf)

On Tuesday (May 15th), NCDD hosted a call open to dues-paying NCDD members who live or work in California. My colleague Alissa Black, who recently left Code for America to head up the New America Foundation‘s new project, the California Civic Innovation Project (CCIP), was interested in discussing the project with NCDD members.  Alissa was also very interested in learning about the public engagement work NCDDers are doing in California — especially in the realm of local governance.

We had a great call, with close to 30 participants [all of whom are doing really impressive work in California, I might add!].  Alissa told me she got a lot out of the call, and was kind enough to write up the following summary and reflections for the blog.  We recorded the call and welcome all NCDDers to listen to the audio.  – Sandy

On May 15th I had the pleasure of collaborating with almost 30 Californian NCDD members to discuss the New America Foundation‘s latest project, the California Civic Innovation Project (CCIP).  The discussion began with an introduction from Sandy Heierbacher, acknowledging the work of the community and inviting the members to share their community engagement projects with me.

Following Sandy, I introduced myself and the path that took me from public service to the non-profit sector, always looking for ways to infuse innovation in local governments. I had the opportunity to talk about my new project, the California Civic Innovation Project that promotes innovations in technology, policy and practice to deepen engagement between government and communities throughout California. Through research and information-sharing, CCIP builds communities of practice within California’s local governments and identifies best practices to improving service delivery, opening new channels for public voices, and bridging the state’s digital divides.

Healthy knowledge sharing networks, both formal and informal, are essential to the diffusion of innovation in local governments. CCIP’s research in the area will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how local governments can better share technology, policies, and practices. Additionally, CCIP will engage with local governments to develop an innovation process grounded in public-private collaboration and community engagement.

Speaking with NCDD members was important because I am particularly interested in learning about community engagement projects where local governments are partners in the process. I was amazed by some of the projects the members discussed. Their work is so relevant to my research and will better inform the innovation processes that I hope to develop within local governments.

Additionally, I was struck by the number of members that do not rely on technology to engage the community, mostly focusing on face-to-face and larger gatherings. I will definitely need to learn more about the dialog and deliberation processes to identify when, why and how technology is used (and not used) in the process and the impact it has on the outcomes.

I am extremely impressed with the work of the California NCDD members. Sixty minutes was definitely not enough time to explore all the projects and organizations so I welcome all follow-up calls and emails. I hope this community continues to share their experiences with me and others because we can benefit tremendously from learning more about your work.

  – Alissa Black, director of the New America Foundation’s California Civic Innovation Project

In Eugene, Oregon, the Co-Intelligence Institute is engineering a community-focused process to increase local capacity for healthy, creative group dialogue. By combining trainings and workshops with a series of dialogues around a substantive issue — in this case, the economy — we plan to demonstrate the generative power of group process even as we stimulate conversations that strengthen the Eugene community. We’re calling the project “Let’s Talk: Our New Economy,” and we’re holding the opening events early next month.

The people of Eugene are no strangers to economic experimentation. In good times and bad, they’ve come up with creative ways to interact with the greater economic system — interventions such as housing and business co-ops, community devolopment initiatives, and even an online gifting application. Clearly, there’s an abundance of fodder for good conversation. The Co-Intelligence Institute is partnering with some of these local innovators to present their ideas in a participatory, discussion-based format, using tools like World Cafe and Open Space Technology to ensure quality conversations and to encourage our attendees to self-organize around issues that they’re passionate about.

We’re adding a small twist, though — ordinarily, the process component of a well-facilitated dialogue is nearly invisible, since participants are (rightly!) caught up in the exciting, juicy content that they’re discussing. But since we’re increasing our community’s capability for dialogue, we’re trying to make the process as visible as possible. At the recent NCDD confab call, some of you heard about the Group Works pattern language deck (www.groupworksdeck.org). CII board president John Abbe and I had a hand in designing those cards, and we’ll be using them and other process awareness tools to help our participants learn the dynamics of healthy dialogue, even as that dialogue is happening all around them.

And finally, we’re also holding a series of workshops to directly build Eugene’s capacity for healthy dialogue and communication. Those workshops will cover Dynamic Facilitation (hosted by Rosa Zubizarreta), the Group Works deck, Nonviolent Communication, and more.

In keeping with the community-oriented nature of the project, Let’s Talk: Our New Economy is entirely crowd-funded. We’re online at www.indiegogo.com/LetsTalkOurNewEconomy — check it out!

Interested in hearing the latest on E-Democracy‘s groundbreaking efforts to support online participation in lower income, highly diverse neighborhoods?  NCDD is one of the co-sponsors of an online event E-Democracy is running on Wednesday (May 16) from 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM Central (10:30 Eastern).  Register today if you’re interested in participating!

Here are the details on Wednesday’s online event…

Join us for an in-depth two-way exchange on the lessons from E-Democracy’s Inclusive Social Media effort to support online neighborhood participation in lower income, highly diverse, high immigrant neighborhoods. The call is led by E-Democracy.org.

• This online event is free. Donations to support further outreach are appreciated.
• “Tune in” details will be e-mailed to participants.
• A brief overview of the evaluation report by lead author Anne Carroll will be followed by an extended opportunity for questions and discussion.

The 2010-2011 Inclusive Social Media effort received funding from the Ford Foundation. The participatory evaluation is extremely in-depth and filled with new lessons and knowledge useful to any online engagement initiative seeking to raise ALL voices not just those who already show up.

In 2012-2014, E-Democracy has announced Knight Foundation funding for a major expansion in St. Paul with the Inclusive Community Engagement Online initiative that seeks 10,000 participants reflecting the great diversity of the city.

Participants are asked to:

• Review the 60 page evaluation, which includes an executive summary
• Review the one page outline about the new Inclusive Community Engagement Online effort (input from this online event will shape our new metrics/research/evaluation efforts)

• Join the Locals Online and/or Digital Inclusion Network online communities of practice for further online discussion
• Take a look at the Cedar Riverside, Frogtown, and Phillips lower income neighborhood forums today and contrast it with some lower middle and middle income forums such as Powderhorn Park, Standish Ericsson, and Hamline Midway.

Based on registration interest, we will be using either an international teleconference service or a webinar service. Details will be e-mailed to registrants.

Register now at http://inclusivesocialmedia.eventbrite.com/.

Here’s one more reason to sign up for NCDD’s first online book club…  the Kettering Foundation wants to send a free copy of Democratizing Deliberation to all book club members!

Sign up at www.ncdd.org/community/bookclub1-signup today if you haven’t already.

Democratizing Deliberation: A Political Theory Anthology presents cutting-edge political theory on deliberative democracy. Edited by Derek Barker, Noelle McAfee, and David McIvor, the collection reframes deliberative democracy to be sensitive to the deep conflicts, multiple forms of communication, and aspirations for civic agency that characterize real public deliberation. In so doing, the book addresses many common challenges to the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.

In the book club, we’re going to engage NCDDers in the book’s content and ideas chapter by chapter.  ”Chapter Leaders” will post on the NCDD blog a summary of the chapter they’re assigned, including some of their own reflections on what’s presented in their chapter.  Book club members will then engage with each other on the blog and potentially in some other formats, responding, reflecting, and discussing the summary and the chapter.

We hope the book club will be a fun way to delve into some of the most important research out there on deliberative democracy.

Interested in being a Chapter Leader?  Look over the chapters at http://kettering.org/publications/democratizing-deliberation/ and let me know which one(s) you’d like to summarize!

For those not joining the book club, here’s how to order your copy:

Call 1-800-600-4060 to order the 184-page book, or email your order and mailing address to info@ait.net.  The list price is $15.95, but there is a 20% discount in effect until October. (more…)

I wanted to post a final reminder about tomorrow’s confab at 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific on the new Group Works card deck. Be sure to register today (if you haven’t already) to get the call-in details.

Our 90-minute “confab calls” (conference calls with simultaneous use of a collaborative google doc) are great opportunities for members of the NCDD community to connect with each other, hear about exciting projects in our field, and explore some of our field’s most pressing challenges.

This should be a fun confab call, with NCDD members Tree Bressen and Sue Woehrlin leading a discussion about the innovative Group Works card deck and the collaboratively-developed pattern language it conveys.

Many of you know about these great new cards, but you may have been curious about how they can actually be used in practice.  We’ll be discussing a variety of uses for the cards, and we may even get into how we can use the cards at the NCDD conference in Seattle this fall!

Register for tomorrow’s Confab call at http://ncdd.org/community/confabreg-may2012, to receive the call-in details.

We’ll be putting a call out soon for workshop presenters for NCDD Seattle (October 12-14), and I’d love to get some NCDDers’ help thinking about what makes a great workshop.  Your comments and ideas will help the conference team with the selection process, and will help session leaders start thinking about how best to frame and organize their workshops.

Below are examples of just a few of the workshops we offered at the 2008 NCDD conference in Austin (our last national conference, since we hold them biennially and we ran 5 regional events in 2010 rather than a national event).  I selected these because I recall them as all being well attended and highly rated.

Please take a look at them.  If you’ve attended an NCDD conference before, hopefully they’ll remind you about the types of workshops you appreciated most at the event, and why — and what might not have worked so well at some.  And if you haven’t attended an NCDD conference before, this will give you an idea of the quality of sessions, calibur of presenters, and variety of formats you’ll see at NCDD workshops.

Once you look over the sessions described below, add a comment or two about what you think makes a great workshop (especially on D&D-related topics!).  Feel free to also share ideas about the kinds of workshops you’d love to see at the conference.

- Sandy

A Few of the Workshops Offered at NCDD Austin in 2008…

How Can WE Revitalize Democracy with D&D? – Part 1

DeAnna Martin, Executive Director of the Center for Wise Democracy and Adin Rogovin, Board Member of the Co-Intelligence Institute

NCDD draws together amazing practitioners using many methodologies to improve and transform democracy. We will be exploring how we can collaborate to enable a thriving democracy. This two-part session seeks to begin the conversation among leaders of various methods, those with the passion to transform democracy, and those with resources to discover how we can collaborate to enable a democracy that is truly of, by, and for the people. In 2 sessions over the course of the conference, method and organization leaders from groups like the Co-Intelligence Institute, the Jefferson Center, and the Forum Foundation will be dynamically facilitated in a creative, fishbowl conversation about what might be possible if we were to work together and may achieve concrete next steps for moving forward. Participants are invited to join in the fishbowl if they feel moved to contribute to the conversation and can attend part 1, 2 or both. The session aims to charter an ongoing conversation and collaborative relationships to extend beyond the conference. Strategies will be explored that may lead to local, regional, and national partnerships that will produce results and demonstrate D&D effectiveness on the issues we face. (more…)

Harry Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, asked me to share with the NCDD community an article he co-wrote with Blase Scarnati for the Huffington Post (published 5/3/12), titled “Building Democracy Colleges: A Different Kind of Politics.”

The article begins…

A fit with the season of tornadoes across the nation this year, the Citizens United Versus the Federal Elections Commission court decision has unleashed a venomous tsunami of attack ads by Super PACs. The political weather threatens to get worse before November. In such a climate, what does it look like for higher education to take leadership in “a politics of constructive action by the citizenry across divisions to meet the nation’s challenges,” as Nancy Cantor and I proposed last year (“We Are the Ones,” Huffington Post, August 24, 2011)?

We need changes different than incrementalism, wishful calls for “all of us to get along,” or fracturing of the nation into implacably hostile camps. The freedom movement again holds lessons.

Thelma Craig, a remarkable civil rights leader in southern Alabama whose organization, the Citizens League, elected more black candidates to local office than anywhere else in the South, most certainly believed in citizen-driven change — “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” in the words of the freedom song. Craig, a battler in the hard knocks school of racial oppression, challenged those who advocated for cautious gradualism and those who called for militant polarization alike.

The article touches on some recent events that have exciting implications for higher education reform, including a January 10th White House meeting run by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Civic Mission of the Schools Coalition, and American Commonwealth Partnership, aimed at advancing civic learning and democratic engagement.

Be sure to take a look at the full article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-boyte/building-democracy-colleg_b_1471717.html.

Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff are offering A Master Class on June 11th and 12th for professionals in community, organization, and personal development, in Philadelphia, PA at the Crowne Plaza Philadelphia West. The regular fee for the course is $695, but the discount we’ve negotiated for dues-paying NCDD members brings the rate to $556.

Marvin and Sandra’s Master Class, titled “What Would You Do If…?”, uses eight of their “ten principles for leading meetings that matter,” as described in the book, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! (Berrett-Koehler, 2010). They control what they can (#2), explore the “whole elephant” (#3), let people be responsible (#4), look for common ground (#5), practice the art of subgrouping (#6), stay friends with anxiety (#7), expect projections (#8), and seek to be dependable authorities (#9). We think you will enjoy meeting them and hope you will plan to participate in this special professional development experience.

Marvin and Sandra are also the winners of the 2011 Outstanding Global Work Award – Presented by OD Network. Click here to watch an interview with Marvin and Sandra.

Interested?  Email fsn@futuresearch.net or call Jennifer Neumer at 215-951-0328 or 800-951-6333.  Please visit www.futuresearch.net for all 2012 Future Search Network dates with Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff.  And see www.ncdd.org/discounts for a list of all the discounted trainings available to NCDD’s supporting members.

I saw this on the Participatory Budgeting Project website and thought I’d mention it here as well. Looks like Vallejo, California just approved the first city-wide participatory budgeting process in the US! Residents will decide how to spend around $3 million from new sales tax revenue.

The April 20, 2012 article about this in the Times Herald seems to no longer be available, but here is a segment from the article…

The City Council of Vallejo, California, approved the first city-wide Participatory Budgeting process in the US this week. Residents will directly decide how to spend around $3 million from new sales tax revenue.

The council voted 4-3 to launch a process known as “participatory budgeting,” setting aside 30 percent of revenue collected from a sales tax hike initiative voters passed in November, reports Jessica A. York.

Under City Charter provisions, public-proposed uses for the estimated $9.5 million a year ultimately will require council approval.

“I think that there’s been a number of times in the very recent past in the city where we have not always spent money in the public interest,” Council member Marti Brown said.

“There’s a lot of different opinions out there.” said Council member Stephanie Gomes, “And because we didn’t have a special tax, because this is general, we need to hear from the constituents (with participatory budgeting.)”

Mayor Osby Davis, joined by Council members Hermie Sunga and Erin Hannigan in opposing the participatory budgeting process, said the city would be better placed to undertake participatory budgeting in the future.