Written by NCDD director Sandy Heierbacher to expand upon the text on our “What Are Dialogue & Deliberation?” page. This resource provides enough details to enable you to decide which of these leading dialogue and deliberation methods you should learn more about. In addition to looking at which methods fit your intentions, you will need to consider which methods are aligned with your resources, timeline, and the people you feel need to be involved. The text below is drawn from NCDD’s Engagement Streams Framework. AmericaSpeaks ... (continue)

This commentary was submitted for the NCDD website by Tom Atlee and Rosa Zubizarreta in March 2003. The piece is adapted from Tom's book "The Tao of Democracy" (2002). It begins "To 'facilitate' means to 'help make easier.' If our goal is to have meaningful and powerful dialogue, the role of a facilitator is to help make it easier for the group to do so. Dynamic Facilitation, created by consultant Jim Rough, is a leading-edge process designed to help groups have meaningful conversations, access their creativity, and discover practical breakthroughs to challenging situations, even in the midst of divergent opinions, strong emotions, and conflicting beliefs. (continue)

This spiral-bound manual describes a transformational approach for facilitating dialogue in situations where people are highly invested, emotionally charged or polarized, and helping groups arrive at practical and creative breakthroughs. (continue)

Discussions about participatory democracy frequently focus on levels of participation and its direct effects on policy-making. A new model for community dialogue has been developed called The Wisdom Council. This model focuses on high-quality conversation in a small group of participants, with a goal of affecting overall community conversation. Despite, or because of, its newness, there have been no critical evaluations of this approach. Recently, a Wisdom Council was held in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon. This 68-page thesis provides an evaluation of that event. (continue)

The Center assists communities in creating Wisdom Councils - randomly-selected, facilitated 'juries,' reflecting the larger diversity of the community - which engage in dialogue about the larger system and arrive at creative consensus on shared visions. These visions in turn serve to increase the quality of the dialogue among the larger community. (continue)

In Western Australia the Department for Planning and Infrastructure has taken a leading role in exploring innovations in community engagement, with 21st century town meetings, deliberative surveys, citizens' juries, multi criteria analysis conferences and consensus forums. In May 2005 they assembled in Perth some of the most progressive innovators and experts from the USA and Australia, who led a unique experiment in community engagement. Over two days these initiators and experts took more than 300 participants through their leading edge techniques. (continue)

The Center for Wise Democracy assists communities in creating Wisdom Councils - randomly-selected, facilitated 'juries' reflecting the larger diversity of the community - which engage in dialogue about the larger system and arrive at creative consensus on shared visions.... The Center for Wise Democracy provides 20% discounts to their trainings for dues-paying NCDD members. (continue)

Here are the five great handouts from "The Wisdom Council: A Tool for Empowering 'We the People'" - facilitated by Jim Rough and Deanna Martin at the 2006 NCDD Conference in San Francisco. (continue)

Jim Rough & Associates offers transformational workshops on facilitating Dynamic Facilitation - generative dialogue for creative and practical problem-solving, applicable to both technical and social issues. Dynamic Facilitation is the essence of "emergent leadership." It's where one person helps others face difficult issues creatively and collaboratively, where they achieve unanimous, win/win solutions. It achieves this magic by engendering a nonlinear, heartfelt, transformational quality of thinking called "choice-creating" ? vs. "decision-making" or "problem-solving" or "creative problem-solving." (continue)

This book suggests that the U.S. adopt a Citizens Constitutional Amendment which says: Each year, 24 registered voters will be randomly selected in a lottery to form a Citizens Wisdom Council. This Wisdom Council will be a symbol of the people of the United States. With the aid of a dynamic facilitator, the group will meet for one week to choose issues, talk about them and determine consensus statements. (continue)