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
I fell into this opportunity by happenstance, via the generic email invitation from Tom Atlee. He wrote,"start now," which I interpreted literally given that there was so much already in the Hackpad from the hosting team's Practice Dialogue. I began interpreting what I was reading, generating several spin-off pads according to themes that struck me as highly germane to the endeavor. This was a few days prior to the first World Cafe call.
Hackpad excites me because it captures features of group interaction that are usually hard to notice and even more challenging to draw everyone's attention to. I'm hopeful that the formal and informal harvesting methods will attend to the ritual and cultural aspects of the"Dialogue and Deliberation" style of communication. For instance, I realized just from reading material available before the first call that I'm an outsider: there is a lot of jargon and a base of shared meaning and experience that I could discern but not belong to. I could choose to"belong"(pending acceptance) by enacting more of those communication rituals, but my most alive parts reject too much conformity. This basic resistance is part personality type, part valence, part calling....
The first aha was realizing this DandD container was a pool of(what I'm thinking of as) pure whiteness. By using the label"whiteness," I explicitly do not mean ethnocentricism or racism. I mean,"this is how white people talk." The second aha was an OMG of self-recognition:"Now I understand, much better, what and why people of color criticize subtle behaviors and so often choose not to invest in deepening relationships with white people." I could see a previous iteration of myself, acting in all of the"white ways" that I was discovering I could now actually perceive. This was cool but also heavy because, third, I realized I was(once again, apparently inevitably) in a kind of antagonistic role with the group, or, to be more precise, in a role that members of the group and especially hosts would be likely to perceive as antagonistic.
I'm in!
It was a fascinating ride. I began with high energy and enthusiasm because of the potential Hackpad provides for us to observe and monitor the dynamics of group interaction. Then I realized this wasn't really happening, maybe wasn't even the intention of the hosting team or even fit within the vision? I'm unclear, here...my path kept me away from Tom Atlee's main thread on the +Strategic Use of Conversation. I'm curious to go read it now/soon and see if the discourse there mirrors or is significantly different than the dialogue I witnessed/experienced and participated in within other threads.
"What kept me away?" is a question I recently asked myself, and the best answer I have right now is that my valence kept drawing me to the margins. Tom created the Calling Question and those who participated in his theme formed the"center" or the"core" of the"landscape" or"shape" of this DandDTrans event. Who held the outside? Ben Roberts maintained boundaries(he confronted me/my creation of spin-off Hackpads and we negotiated how that could function on the periphery), some other folk'found' me'out there' and even made effort to join me when my reaction to group-level dynamics sent me off to the margins--it was very nice not to be alone! But I was acutely aware that the joining was minimal, and that the tensions of connecting center-to-periphery were not being addressed in any deliberate way, only through what I would call the"ally" behaviors of Ben R, @Chris Smerald, and @Gerald Dillenbeck.
In other words, this group(for the most part) enacted typical behaviors of exclusion--not consciously or on purpose, but by default or unintended consequence.
Let me acknowledge that Ben R did invite me to one Hosting Team meeting and that I have since been invited to participate in the official Harvesting planning group, so it's not like I was"ignored" forever! But the pattern I perceive is, I think, very similar if not parallel to that which people of color often experience in predominately white groups.....because I wasn't"doing it"(this Hackpad thing)"in the same way" as Tom and the core group, I was hyper-aware of my'outsider' status the entire time. (There were microdynamics that reinforced the sensation of not belonging too, such as receiving no response(not even acknowledgement) to questions and comments to others in the Hackpad space.)
So, here I am in this role on the periphery . . . what a vantage point it is! I really appreciated whoever it was who made the distinction between"discernment and judgment" during the last BOHM call. My concern for and empathy with folk here is genuine. Everything I believe I'm perceiving clearly is a result of numerous confrontations; my offering is to hold this space, this place, this location on the outer edge looking inward, and invite people in the center to consider carefully how, what, why, why not it is/isn't challenging to look out from the center and work the tensions with the edge as well as all the discursive space in-between.
Even though the Hackpads will soon be closed and no further contributions will be made herein(unless/until they are strategically re-opened?), the action of the language used by people within this space constitutes a discourse that acts forward into time: it has influence in the world. Whether it is the kind of action we aim for and intend; or a kind of action that proves counterproductive to what we claim to desire remains, in my view, an open question. I am committed to working through the Spores Project as well as the more official/formal Harvesting process in order to keep this question alive and imbue it with generative, life-sustaining and change-inducing force.
For now, I am complete.
Will consider if it makes sense(and I can find more time) to respond directly to the following questions.
Instructions:
Please use the this space to share your thoughts now about Tom’s original question and what occurred for you over this past month of involvement: What do we, as members of the dialogue and deliberation community of practice, have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems?
Use the queries below if they help but don’t feel bound to respond to them or be in any way limited by them. Tell the stories and give the details that will make your ideas and experiences come alive.
What you gained: What new insights, challenges, ideas, inquiries, or actions came up for you from your participation this past month? What possibilities have opened up or been further reinforced?
What you experienced: How did you feel or change at different points in this process? Which processes did you participate in? Which were new to you? For processes you’ve experienced before, what was it like doing them online? What worked for you, and why? What didn’t? How might you use or change these processes on another occasion? What about the web tools used? Maestro? Hackpads? Zoom(if you experienced that)? Any others?
What next: What are you doing, will do or might do as related at least in part to the question that brought us together and/or as a result of what we have done together? Who else would(might) you involve?
My DandDTrans "Story":