​​OS Topic 4: Prototyping Crisis-Inspired Change through Hybrid Communication Technologies
​​for "DandDTrans," a "community of inquiry and action" regarding the role that Dialogue & Deiberation can play in addressing the mega-crises of our time
​​Image courtesy of www.NewStories.org
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​Prototyping Crisis-Inspired Change through Hybrid Communication Technologies
​​Initiated by: ​@Stephanie Jo Kent​ on January 6
​​Description: Document and describe what are we doing here-and-now that is a courageous model of civic engagement leading to definite, concerted and collective action
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​​or: ​+Demonstrate how​ we can use Hackpad (and other online tools) to "... slow down the process of thought in order to observe it while it is actually occurring” (p. 3). Dialogue: A Proposal by Bohm, Factor, Garrett (& Burg).
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​​or: Strategy? as ​+Mark Spain suggests​ "more dialogues...exploring how to scale this possibility" and "being simultaneous members of several overlapping circles of people in action and/or conversation locally, nationally and internationally."
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​Open Space for Conversation
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​​GOAL: 
  • ​​Proof of concept of this online/virtual communication prototype for adaptation and future use.
  • ​​Quoting ​@Ben Roberts​' email, DandDTRans World Cafe follow-up: "many of you really appreciated the meta-level process experiment with virtual convening, and are inspired by the potential for what we are prototyping here to be applied “out there” in powerful ways."
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​NEED: 
  • ​​"How to think together in multiple perspectives? Interlocking dialogue circles to create a coordinated way of staying connected as we move through the tumult ahead" (from the notes of BOHM dialogue #1  (Jan 9). E.g., Hexagon cells. How can this model of self-organizing structures be designed and supported to go viral? 
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​Hurdles? 
  • ​​Identified in the first BOHM dialogue (Jan 9), 
  1. ​​participants identified as "toddlers" with this technology, but many (many!) people are quite savvy; they just aren't Here-and-Now. Also, 
  1. ​​someone generalized (?) that participants are experiencing this as "a listening event rather than an advocating event." Is this because of people's reported tiredness from the Jan 6 call?  Or is advocacy something missing?
  1. ​​Two emerging questions: Where are the most ready/valuable points of intervention in the system for dialogue projects? How do the virtual and f2f dialogue worlds best overlap and support each other to sustain heart?
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​Are we at Kitty Hawk?
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  • ​​The first thing that comes to mind is, have we left the ground? How long can/will we stay aloft? Can we land without crashing?
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  • ​​Tom Atlee ​+says​, "We just need to make some vital connections and to upshift our collective inquiry on this subject - and establish such groups in key places in our social systems, particularly political."
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  • ​​We could read that as criteria, hmm?
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​Evaluation Criteria for this DandDTrans meta-level process experiment with virtual convening:
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  • ​​1) Making vital connections
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  • ​​Is this happening for folks? I loved the way you designed the Jan 6 World Cafe call to have the 1st round involve people far-flung across the globe, and the 2nd and 3rd rounds of that call involved people in as tight a geographic area as possible. But were/are/will these connections become vital?
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  • ​​2) Upshift our collective inquiry
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  • ​​Again, the use of technological innovations in-and-of-themselves does not constitute an upshift. In fact, it could be rather passe, actually in keeping with the mainstream flows of digitalized capitalism. What would need to be different in the inquiry processes themselves, to represent an actual upshift? What would have to change about the nature of our collectivity to represent an upshift?
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  • ​​3) Establish such groups in key places
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  • ​​This is a quantifiable outcome-based measure, whereas the first two are more qualitative. Remaining to be defined more clearly are the characteristics of "such" groups that satisfy criteria #1 and #2, and some kind of determination about what constitutes a "key" place. Tom said, "particularly political" - but politics is a process, not a place. 
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​Questions/Challenges?
  • ​​Everybody wants it to be their prototype?
  • ​​I think there is enough need and opportunity for all of us. Functional prototypes, such as could function as a self-sustaining 22nd Century Village, require alliances with experts in multiple fields. Serious team science.
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  • ​​By "their prototype," do you mean that everyone wants their favorite conversational/group process methodology to be what gets used? For me , this relates to ​+Tom Atlee's observation​
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  • ​​​+ in his What's Possible? post​ that we are at the "Kitty Hawk" stage of process development when it comes to systemic change and mass engagement on the scale that is now required. We've got proof of concept, but we're a long way from launching Pan Am, let alone a whole airline industry. 
  • ​​{Ben Roberts, 1/7}
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​Ben and Steph's dialogue
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​​Is there somewhere specific above where you are inviting us to engage, Steph? I love what you're pulling together here. And it feels like "yours," rather than a conversation. Which is fine, of course. It's one of the process edges we're on with these open document spaces, and with written (asynch) communication in general.  It's powerful to be able to think at leisure and at length, and it also means that the "conversational" element sometimes disappears, or somehow needs to be proactively brought into play. Especially for those of us looking to pop in and add something, but not wanting to have to take a long time to grasp the context first. Ben, 1/9.
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  • ​​Thanks Ben, I've been feeling (sort of) like I'm just talking to myself (!) but your engagement and facilitation with me has eased that considerably. And, yes, the style I'm engaging (at least so far, for the most part) is very different than the D&D way. Last night I started to sense a shadow possibility that we could circle around to a common overlap or point-of-focus?  I'm hoping for that :-)
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  • ​​My weaknesses are that I don't conform well, and I have issues with arbitrary boundaries--even though I am well aware of the importance of maintaining the integrity of communication containers! From my perspective, I am working within the discourse of this D&DTrans event, but not within its ritualized cultural norms. Can other perspectives and approaches (ways of being/doing social change) thrive here? 
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  • ​​Ben R., 1/18 "From my perspective, I am working within the discourse of this D&DTrans event, but not within its ritualized cultural norms." Really? Do we even have those? My invitation to you (as if YOU--who is so delightfully iconoclastic-- need one!) is to create the cultural norms you want to have, especially when you're in a space that you have convened, like this one and all your other various pads. If there's a process level constriction coming from me, it's simply that you help others, many of whom are a bit disoriented by this hackpad space (and complaining to me about that) to understand "where they are." I may have implied otherwise in another post, but DO see your work here and on the pads linked to above as part of DandDTrans. What I'm not sure about from the community's perspective is whether its clearer for them to "see" your self-created pads (as opposed to this one) as part of the "main DandDTrans hackpad space," or as something distinct. It's really more about what creates the most hospitable space, not about any reluctance to fully embrace the content you are manifesting as integral to the community, which I absolutely accept as being so.
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  • ​​Not to overpersonalize it, this isn't about engaging with me per se, but my intuition, my aliveness suggests a kind of "test" for the DandDTrans community to move beyond a certain comfort zone full of love and mutual affirmation to more contested spaces where people "get things done" in many different kinds of ways. If the skills of this community are going to flourish at the measurable macro-scale, its members may have to invest themselves in uncomfortable and unaccustomed positions vis-a-vis other movements for social justice and climate change.
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  • ​​The equation that I think would work is fusing social justice movements (esp #BlackLivesMatter with the permaculture movement (composed mainly by relatively privileged whites) around the issue of food insecurity. Society is going to come apart when just-in-time food deliveries are disrupted, however and wherever that occurs. If local food options don't exist, no amount of dialogue or deliberation will make a difference. {Steph 1/10}
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  • ​​Ben R., 1/18 "The equation that I think would work is fusing social justice movements (esp #BlackLivesMatter with the permaculture movement (composed mainly by relatively privileged whites) around the issue of food insecurity."  As it just so happens, I'm part of an initiative--the ​+Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory​-- that is giving birth to just such an initiative in the Bay Area, via a collaboration between Transition US, Daily Acts, and Bay Localize. Here's some info (and these links most definitely take you out of DandDTrans space!): 
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  • ​​Steph Jo (1/19)
  • ​​Thanks Ben! Great resources; I really appreciate you sharing them. I'm going to try and get a proposal of the Learning Lab for Resiliency's 22nd Century Village onto the Initiatives and Alliances list before the end of the month. A longtime pal and I are working on something clear yet flexible enough to grow and change as people join and influence the vision. generating more widely shared meaning about what our endeavor can achieve.
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​Lead-up to Topic Creation
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​​Our group (Room 23, 2nd Round Conversation, World Cafe on Jan 6) discussed this in some depth (and even moreso during the 3rd conversation, ​+Room 30​):
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  • ​​Ben, I'm not sure who said "everyone wants it to be their prototype," so I can't speak for what was meant. I felt it as "competitive" in the sense that 'no one wants to join anyone else's' because everyone's a leader and wants to be the designer or whatever. What we were actually talking about  at that moment was (during the Round 2 call) my "thrilling initiative" in beginning to reach out to people to literally design and build a prototype 22nd century village.
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  • ​​Then, in the 3rd round call, 3 of us had been in that 2nd round call, and someone, I think perhaps Stephen (but it could have been ​@Gerald Dillenbeck​) commented on the full-group harvesting that had just happened. He noticed that none of the folks who commented said anything along the lines of what we had been talking about: a real physical "I want to live with you in the right/best way" kind of holistic solution. 
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  • ​​{Steph Kent, 1/8}
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