Methods

Changing communities, difficult discussions

How D&D Can Help Communities Adapt to Rapid Change Since the 1960s, the US Department of Justice has provided peacekeeping services via its Community Relations Service (CRS) for community conflicts and tensions related to race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and disability. In 2015, the heads of the CRS and the National …

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Facilitating Introverts: Eliciting the Gifts of the Quiet Ones

“Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it!” pleads Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Group work, she claims, stifles some of the most insightful and creative thinkers and inflates the influence of extroverts. To generate the best ideas, workplaces and schools need …

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Engaging on the Edges: Creative Street and Online Engagement

Face-to-face events like public meetings and consultations are, with good reason, at the heart of much public engagement. They provide a dedicated block of time and a common space to learn about, discuss, and gather community input into public issues. However, no matter how well designed the event, such gatherings are pointless if nobody shows …

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The Revolution is Being Protested

Occupy Targets Participatory Budgeting in Chicago My first thought was “how clever of the conference organizers to welcome us with street theater”.  At the entrance to the Second North American Participatory Budgeting Conference, held last month in Chicago, stood a half-dozen casually dressed people wearing photo face masks and holding hand-written signs with questions like …

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Transforming a Community with Sustained Dialogue

The Story of Aurora Community Study Circles. Last week a small but dedicated group of Chicago area dialogue & deliberation (D&D) practitioners traveled through a heavy snow storm to Aurora, IL to meet with Mary Jane Hollis, creator of the Aurora Community Study Circles (1996-2007). Our original goal was to learn about her approach to …

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Americans envision a civic infrastructure for public dialogue and deliberation

Over a long and rainy weekend in Seattle, I joined members of the US-based National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) in a trendy downtown eco hotel for their semi-annual conference. NCDD celebrated their 10th anniversary as an organisation by taking on the monumental challenge of envisioning a robust “civic infrastructure” for public dialogue and …

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North-Westward ho! Oregon embeds public participation in lawmaking

The eyes of the American public participation community are riveted on the Pacific Northwest state of Oregon. It recently became the first American state to institutionalise a citizens jury-style process to improve one method of lawmaking known as the citizens’ initiative. The tale of how the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) made it into state …

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