Dear advocate/practitioner of conversational practices,
As we move into 2015, are you profoundly concerned about climate change, serious resource depletion, and other major threats to civilization? Do you believe that we face an urgent and challenging opportunity to transform our social systems and cultures that are generating those crises? Are you interested in what conversational professionals - mediators, conveners, facilitators and your other fellow advocates and practitioners of dialogue, deliberation, and process - could do to catalyze powerful collective shifts that address these disturbing and exciting transformational possibilities?
If so, know that you are not alone. We and many others feel as you do, passionately. So many people responded to a post about this by Tom Atlee on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation discussion list that three of us called for further conversation and more than 50 signed on, half of whom participated an initial conference call December 15. With this invitation we're reaching out to thousands more in our field to see who else feels called to this vital adventure.
So now we ask you to join us in pioneering a dialogue and deliberation(D&D)“community of inquiry and action" during January 2015, online and virtually(using phone and video conferencing), to more deeply pursue this urgent question that a few dozen of us have already begun exploring:
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?
We know there are a number of ways to come at this question, so we are using January to explore different possibilities while building relationships among those of us who have passion about this topic. You’ll see below that we’ve scheduled a number of virtual meetings using different methods all in this one month—both in direct audio/video dialogues and in online written conversations—in an effort to meet all our different needs as D&D agents of social transformation.
You are welcome to participate in as many or as few of these events as you like—and you are encouraged to participate any time in the online dialogues underway in the hackpad forums we've provided. Each virtual event can stand on its own, and each may have different outcomes—some perhaps quite unexpected—but we suspect that insights and energies emerging in each one will reverberate in all the rest.
As we go through the above activities together, we'll be gaining first hand understanding about how processes we have usually experienced face to face translate into virtual environments and about the pros and cons of the on-line tools we will be using—topics about which we expect to reflect more later in January. Bearing in mind that this environment and these online tools may be new to many of us, we will go out of our way to provide as much technical support as we can in this process. And, we also beg in advance your forbearance and honest feedback as we explore this new territory together.
What happens beyond January—with all of us together and/or in various subgroups—is up to each of us. As hosts, we are designing the January experience to encourage various follow-up opportunities to emerge according to their own energy. The particular set of engagements above will end at the end of the month, having provided value to all who have been part of this community during that time. But what happens next will depend totally on the passion felt by you and the other participants and the responsibility and creativity you bring to your conversations with the other passionate folks you meet in the process.
So we welcome your participation and look forward to what will emerge here. The more of us pursue this, the more we will learn and the more action will result, moving us all forward.
