Join us Wednesday, April 9th for our next NCDD “Confab Call.” We’ll be talking with NCDD members Matt Leighninger and Mike Smith about the innovative project known as Text Talk Act. The confab will take place from 2-3pm Eastern / 11-noon Pacific.

As part of our role in the National Dialogue on Mental Health project Creating Community Solutions, NCDD and our partners have been experimenting with how the fun and convenience of text messaging can be leveraged to scale up face-to-face dialogue — especially among young people.

The first round of Text Talk Act took place on December 5, and round two is coming up on April 24 (and we hope you’re planning to participate!).

This is new and important stuff here, folks. We’ve been using Mike Smith’s United Americans platform as well as Textizen to design a text-enabled in-person dialogue process. In other words, people get together in small groups of 4 or 5, text into the same number, and start engaging in a dialogue with their group that is prompted by a video, a couple of polling questions, and then discussion questions that come to them via text. Pretty cool!

Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium is the main wizard this, and he talks about this being a way to blend “thin engagement” (what we usually do online and on our phones) with “thick engagement” (the stuff we NCDDers tend to value that takes more time and is best done face-to-face. It’s a way of melding the fun and convenience of texting with the irreplaceable value of face-to-face dialogue.

Along with learning more about the ins-and-outs of this project, Mike will talk to us about how any NCDD member can use United Americans’ technology to design your own text-enabled dialogue projects.

A word on the format:  NCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members [and potential members] of NCDD 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 not required for participation.

This will be a simple conference call (audio only), and most participants will also be engaging on a collaborative doc on Hackpad.com to interact with each other, pose questions, share resources, and take notes.

Register Now to Secure Your Spot…

Sandy Heierbacher

Sandy Heierbacher co-founded the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) with Andy Fluke in 2002, with the 60 volunteers and 50 organizations who worked together to plan NCDD’s first national conference. She served as NCDD's Executive Director between 2002 and 2018. Click here for a list of articles and resources authored by Sandy.

Tags: Creating Community Solutions, field news, NCDD confab archives, NCDD projects, online & hi-tech, upcoming events

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