Part of"DandDTrans," a community of inquiry and action regarding the role that dialogue and deliberation can play in addressing the mega-crises of our time
As I said in the blog posts, this was a new experience for me. Not so much the online interaction though this is the first time that I have done it for such an extended period of time and engaged at this depth of interaction. What was new was the nature of the group having albeit limited, more experience with causal loop diagraming and empirical approaches to community problem solving as compared to the affective and social nature of interaction quite often found in the DDST Community.
One insight I discovered is that despite coming from different backgrounds, people can often have similar perspectives allowing for collaboration. A collaborative process of interaction can produce results or at least come up with ideas that could be developed even if the members of the group have never met before.
Of particular interest to me on the journey was Meg Wheatley’s Two Loops: How Systems Change(video) based on the Berkana InstituteOur Theory of Change which grew out of her 2006 article Lifecycle of Emergence - Using Emergence to Take Social Innovations to Scale. There were also other discovered resources that I have not had an opportunity to explore fully. My belief in the importance of storytelling and collaboration as means of assuaging the impact of complexity were justified. There were also though in the early stages of the journey a couple of mentions of Donnella Meadows and her 12 points of systems leveraging. It would have been nice to see something develop along those lines.
Many of the ideas that I had prior to taking this journey, while not specifically promoted did often find acceptance in the group interactions and some times like minded concepts being espoused by others. So I feel some sense of verification regarding those ideas, not certainty necessarily but at least the path I am on has potential.
I had not trouble participating in the forums that I did whether World Cafe or Open Space.
One of my reasons for participating in this community was to experience extended, online group interactions that could be related to community governance. In this aspect, the experience was very useful.
I do realize that this process was never intended to be a proxy for online community governance. Still it did provide me with some insights. One being that if we were to transform our form of local community governance away from our current systems to one of both a greater participatory nature and of deeper deliberation then it would be no doubt a good idea to adopt Slow Democracy principles. I also maintained the belief that it is not enough to create possibilities, work still must be done to realize them.
I plan on inquirying more into Christopher Alexander's work on Pattern Language but closer to my own particular perspectives.
I greatly enjoyed my time on this journey and want to send a special thanks to Ben Roberts for being the initial spore for the‘Fungi’ that helped in putting it all together.
My DandDTrans "Story"
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