On November 19th, Nancy Gansneder at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia and I teamed up to host a 3-hour gathering and knowledge exchange for Virginians working in the fields of dialogue and deliberation. The event was held at UVA in Charlottesville, VA.        We’re posting the lessons we learned here for others who might be interested in hosting their own in-person gatherings in their state. Outcomes The results were good: 19 in-person attendees, 26 others who registered and indicated […] (continue)

Nancy Gansneder at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia and Lucas Cioffi, board member for the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, have teamed up to host a 3-hour gathering and knowledge exchange for Virginians working in the fields of dialogue and deliberation, and… you’re invited!!              RSVP here by October 27th: https://www.eventbrite.com/event/8882256067 Purpose: This will be a fun and productive opportunity for us to connect with and share lessons learned with others doing great […] (continue)

Last week’s coffee hour was great, with just a handful of people we compiled a great list of resources and notes (these useful notes are also pasted below). Whether or not you have participated in past coffee hour calls, your feedback on improving the design is welcome through this survey.  If you are interested in participating on this week’s call, please add your name to the collaborative notes page for the September 19th call. (continue)

Our weekly Coffee Hour calls on Thursdays from 12-1pm EDT have ranged from 6-12 people, and the conversation has been quite stimulating. Usually all topics are welcome.  In light of the situation in Syria, the theme for this week’s Coffee Hour is “Connecting our Dialogue and Deliberation Processes to Governance (i.e our elected representatives).” Here is the link to past notes and the easy instructions for participating. I’d like to see this piece of NCDD’s infrastructure grow into something even more exciting and collaborative.  If you […] (continue)

Join us this Thursday for NCDD’s first “Coffee Hour.”  These informal one-hour calls will give NCDD members an opportunity to connect with each other, bring up challenges they’re facing in their work, and who knows what else… we’ll see!  This is the start of an 8-week experiment to see if regular open-topic conference calls are useful to our members. I believe that if we open up some informal space on a weekly basis for us to connect with each other, we’ll be pleasantly surprised by […] (continue)

As you have likely heard, the Catalyst Awards Program is NCDD’s effort to stimulate collaboration across our member organizations.  The NCDD Board is very happy to see all the projects that have been proposed, and now we are excited to push this experiment farther. We will do this by focusing as much energy as possible from our 1600+ member network on these proposals through a 75-min Maestro Conference call.  The call will consist of small-group discussion where you will have the opportunity to brainstorm with three separate […] (continue)

As you have likely heard, we are very excited to launch the NCDD Catalyst Awards to celebrate NCDD’s 10th anniversary!  Two $10,000 prizes will be awarded to team projects organized, led and selected by NCDD members that jump-start the field’s next best ideas and impact our communities’ and our country’s ability to solve its most challenging problems related to either civic infrastructure or bridge building. To support members with ideas for catalyst award projects, there will be two live Q&A opportunities with Sandy Heierbacher (NCDD Executive […] (continue)

To celebrate NCDD’s 10th anniversary this year, we are very excited to launch the NCDD Catalyst Awards.  Two $10,000 prizes will be awarded to team projects organized, led and selected by NCDD members that jump-start the field’s next best ideas and impact our communities’ and our country’s ability to solve its most challenging problems. Today, we are excited to announce that the online platform for collaboration is open at CivicEvolution™.  The NCDD Board chose this tool because it’s an excellent fit for the catalyst awards; NCDD […] (continue)

This post is part of NCDD Book Club series on Democratizing Deliberation published by the Kettering Foundation last month.  In this post, we discuss Bernard Yack’s chapter about Aristotle’s understanding of political deliberation and how it compares to the views of today’s deliberative democracy advocates. The authors of this blog post are Sarah Read of The Communications Center, Inc. and Lucas Cioffi of OnlineTownhalls. We had different reactions when we first started reading this chapter. Sarah, who enjoys philosophy, thought it was an affirming and deeply […] (continue)

As NCDD’s representative to the White House’s Open Government Initiative, I have attended some informative meetings and phone calls in the past month.  The purpose of this blog post is to share information about how you can get engaged and to hear your ideas for how NCDD can help to continue shaping the Open Government Initiative. The hub of open government activity at the federal level is the US’s action plan of 26 commitments to the international Open Government Partnership. The commitments that are most […] (continue)