For the past three years (ever since attending “The Underlying Dynamics of Conversations that Matter”, a most excellent pre-conference workshop with Tom Atlee and Peggy Holman at NCDD 2008 in Austin, TX), I’ve been following the Group Pattern Language Project, a very exciting endeavor led by Tree Bressen, Sue Woehrlin and Dave Pollard and involving dozens of contributors from a variety of backgrounds, that aims to build — you guessed it — a pattern language of group processes.

Here’s how they describe the concept:

A Pattern Language is an attempt to express the deeper wisdom of what brings aliveness within a particular field of human endeavor, through a set of interconnected expressions arising from that wisdom. Aliveness is one placeholder term for “the quality that has no name”: a sense of wholeness, spirit, or grace, that while of varying form, is precise and empirically verifiable.

The term was originally coined by architect Christopher Alexander, who, together with five colleagues, published A Pattern Language for building in 1977. Others have since applied the term to economics, software design, liberatory communication, wikis and more.

The intention behind this ambitious project is to share knowledge that goes to the “deeper core of what brings a group conversation alive”. Their goals include:

1. To support Purpose-driven design. Form should follow function. The most important part of any meeting planning is to get clear on why you are having the meeting. That choice drives all subsequent choices for that event.
2. To deepen the skills of those who serve as group process guides, leaders, hosts, and facilitators. To assist with their learning in how to do design. To help them choose among many possible processes to create something that will be the best possible fit for their situation at a given time. [...]
3. To serve as a resource for those who are teaching others to design, lead, facilitate group process.
4. To increase process literacy among people who are users of process(es)–which is all of us. Our world needs us to wake up and get more savvy about this.

Throughout the three-year period, progress was documented on a public wiki, as new patterns were identified and went from seed stage to full maturity.

Yesterday, the group launched the Group Works Card Deck, a collection of 91 cards to help facilitators and participants make their group process work more effective:

The Group Works card deck is designed to support your process as a group convenor, planner, facilitator, or participant. The people who developed this deck spent several years pooling our knowledge of the best group events we had ever witnessed. We looked at meetings, conferences, retreats, town halls, and other sessions that give organizations life, solve a longstanding dilemma, get stuck relationships flowing, result in clear decisions with wide support, and make a lasting difference. We also looked at routine, well-run meetings that simply bring people together and get lots of stuff done.

More from the about page:

About the Group Pattern Language Project and the Card Deck

Why are we doing this? Our world is, to a very real extent, based on dialogue. Every action taken that involves more than one person arises from conversation that generates, coordinates, and reflects those actions. Those actions have impact. If our human world is based on conversations, then the work of creating and supporting those conversations is central to shaping a world that works. Designing and conducting meetings and other group sessions well is vital to determining our common future. This project grew around a shared understanding that in an urgent way, our survival depends on our ability to work and play well together, and on discovering and creating group processes which are at the same time effective and life-affirming. Because this is easier said than done, we wanted to deepen and spread the insights, skills, and capacity to make that promise real.

The following core beliefs guide our work:

• Seeing a world in flux and deep need, we believe the work of facilitators, both formal and informal, can make a significant difference to the quality and outcomes of essential conversations. Thus we accept a responsibility, as facilitators and participants in group process, to act for the common good.
• We expect convenors of group process to act with full transparency regarding the motives and expected results of the sessions we organize and run. With honesty and humility, we strive to continuously improve the calibre of our work.
• We choose to assume the best of people. We believe people flourish when entrusted with the opportunity to authentically self-manage, collaborate, and make decisions collectively, as true respected equals. Because the most critical issues facing us in the world and in our organizations are complex and interconnected, we need each other to do this—the challenges we face are beyond solving by leaders or experts in isolation. We believe in sharing power, that we are wiser when we work together.
• We believe that effective group processes are clearly driven by the purpose for which they are called. We respect participants’ life energy by invoking processes that productively use their time, resulting in cooperative sessions that meet a high standard in engagement, achievement and connection. We draw on experience and knowledge to create elegant designs with great care, yet remain flexible and open to change as the circumstances, will of participants and flow of events may dictate.
• Good process builds strong communities. Our work is an act of love in service to the world.

The  print version of the deck can be purchased for $25. A PDF is available for download free of charge.

While this marks a major milestone in the project’s history, the work is not done yet:

Because of space limitations, each card aims only to name the essential What and Why of that particular element. In order to actually use the patterns, you’ll need to come up with the How. A lot of Hows are supplied on our website, where you will find a growing pool of information about the patterns represented in this deck. Some cards have plenty of resources already on the website, while others remain to be fleshed out. Over fifty people were involved in the creation of this card deck, and we’d be delighted for you to join the circle by helping explain how to apply the patterns—see more on this below.

It will be fun to watch how this work evolves next.

And to everyone who played a role in this: Congratulations!

Over the weekend, I came across you+me+politics, a new online dialogue research project coming out of New York University. From their about page:

For our midterm assignment, our class was tasked with creating a conversational space centered on a specific piece of content. Our group decided to focus our work around something controversial. So often, online conversations based on contentious topics are overwhelmed by ugly insults and flame wars. Our aim is to circumvent these all-too-typical cruel and circuitous debates, and, instead, to encourage intellectual and civil conversation.

[...]

Which brings us to the unique structure of our site — conversational enclosures. You’re locked into a discussion with another user on our site, so that you’re forced either to engage in a meaningful discussion, or to bow out. There isn’t a peanut gallery of support for rude comments here; 50 users can’t gang up on one person for having a different opinion. Our hope is that most users won’t be able to sling solely insults for an hour, that those who would typically become bullies in a political debate online might be forced to back up their opinions. In the short term, our goal is to force users from a variety of political creeds to develop civil discourse and to engage with each other.

This reminded me of RedBlue, a project from a few years ago, which aimed to pair US citizens from different sides on the political spectrum (red for conservative, blue for liberal) in an effort to “explore our differences and find out what we have in common.” From their sign-up page:

RedBlue will create a private, one-on-one online dialogue process by matching participants with contrasting views. “Counterparts” will learn about the ground rules of productive dialogue, then engage on a difficult issue by viewing or reading a fictional narrative scenario that frames a front-page issue in personal, rather than theoretical, terms. Their email-style discussion will be monitored by a “virtual facilitator” that will make suggestions, provide feedback, and offer to step in when the heat of the moment threatens to derail the civility of the dialogue.

And this from their about page:

Why RedBlue? Surveys consistently reveal that most Americans hold nuanced perspectives on many issues. The majority is uncomfortable with today’s online political culture, where debate over our policy differences so often ends up in polarized name-calling and demonization. In this regard, citizens are underserved and disempowered, and the integrity of the political system is undermined.

While the RedBlue project begins with the familiar labels that have so often pigeonholed Americans into uncomfortable stereotypes—“red” vs. “blue,” “conservative” vs. “liberal”—participants in the RedBlue process will be able to connect with counterparts whose contrasting views are as subtle as their own, re-introducing a middle ground of public discourse where there is room for reasonable people to disagree.

As far as I remember, RedBlue — for reasons I’m not familiar with — never evolved past the prototype stage.

I still believe that paired dialogue, whether applied stand-alone or in combination with other small and large-group processes as part of a larger consultation or deliberation, holds a lot of promise.

Paired dialogue is a feature that’s already available today on Zilino (our Roundtable module allows for large groups to be split up into smaller units of two or more participants to engage in asynchronous, text-based online dialogue).

Are you familiar with other examples of one-on-one online dialogue? Please share your notes in the comments. I’ve already added both projects to ParticipateDB (here, here).

The following appeared in Public Involvement Techniques: A Reader of Ten Years Experience at the Institute for Water Resources (PDF, pages 265-270), a collection of articles on public involvement from 1983, prepared by James L. Creighton, Jerome Delli Priscoli and C. Mark Dunning for the Institute for Water Resources, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers:

The Samoan Circle: A Small Group Process for Discussing Controversial Subjects

by Lorenz Aggens

Public officials or agency staff often need to hear from concerned publics about their problems, needs, fears and values before a decision is made on an issue of controversy in the community. People with opposing views will often fill a large meeting room, their mood charged with emotion. Many people in the room may hope to influence the decision by their cheers, or booing. Because each person is likely to get only one chance to speak, statements may have been written out for reading, or some especially articulate person will have been chosen to speak for a group of citizens. That responsibility, and the size and temperament of the audience, promotes oration by speakers and the use of words more designed to stir emotions than to share personal opinions and feelings about the subject at issue.

The person responsible for conducting such a meeting usually feels great personal stress over the need to ”control” the meeting and insure that the discussion is equitable and moderate. In attempting to be “in charge” while being fair and neutral, the person presiding over the meeting will often use tactics that will be seen as capricious or arbitrary by those vying for special recognition and influence. If the Chairman of the meeting is from the staff or policy board that will be making a decision on the issue under discussion, he or she is likely to become the target for stern admonitions, emotional appeals, and even threats. The people running, or the panel of decision makers sitting in the front of the room “hearing” from their publics, often feel that THEY have become the subject of the meeting. Instead of being able to listen carefully to what is being said, the chairman or meeting sponsors find themselves in the position of having to answer (or decline to answer) rhetorical questions and challenges.

It was after just such a meeting that the idea of the Samoan Circle was born. The staff of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (the regional planning agency for the Chicago metropolitan area) were ”debriefing”–otherwise known as licking your wounds–after a particularly abusive “meeting” between war parties in a land use dispute. Our discussions quickly turned to whether there was a better way to hear from both sides of an argument without being accused of being the “other side” by both sides.

One of the staff reported that, in some Pacific island communities he had read about (and Samoa might not be one of them), issues were debated, in years gone by, by calling together all interested parties to share their views in an open and equitable discussion format. After several days of feasting and drinking together, those who still felt there was an issue gathered in a circle to discuss the matter. No one was in charge of the meeting. Anyone spoke out who was stirred by the discussion. The more interested participants moved closer to the center of the discussion circle. The less interested remained on the fringe of the circle, or drifted away. The discussion went on and on until those most concerned in the outcome of the matter could arrive at some agreement. Then they all had a final drink together and went home.

With little to lose, the staff agreed that something like this should be tried, although we agreed that–despite their similarities to extracurricular activities at national political conventions–some features of the meeting process would have to be omitted.

Something like the process described in the accompanying article was tried, first on a group of about 30 people, and then with larger groups. At one of these meetings, someone asked for the name of the meeting process. The meeting facilitator, in a momentary flash of alliteration said, “Call it the Samoan Circle!” Efforts to retract that christening have failed. Most people who have used the Samoan Circle process more than once have called it something like a “discussion circle”, or omitted any title, as a means of saving a lot of time explaining something that may be anthropological baloney. [Although the process may not have its origins in Samoa, it has now been used there. However, a report by a government agency staff member notes that after the elders gather to discuss proposals by his agency, a drink is passed around among participants, the effect of which is to paralyze the vocal cords of all "off-islanders."]

[...]

The article goes on to describe the Samoan Circle in more detail and how it has evolved since inception.

Lorenz Aggens is a founding member of IAP2 whom I had the pleasure to meet at the IAP2 USA Great Lakes chapter reception in Pewaukee, Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago.

Sandy Heierbacher, Director of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), gives a nice two-paragraph summary this morning of what her organization’s work is all about:

[...] Our most urgent problems seem even more unsolvable because of our inability to come together civilly and discuss issues and potential solutions in depth with all “sides.”

I work in a field that is trying to change that. We work to bring people together across political, ethnic, generational, economic and ideological divides — sometimes political leaders, sometimes everyday citizens, sometimes both. The idea is that if we can truly hear each other’s stories, and learn why they hold the values and opinions they do (we call this “dialogue”), that we’ll be better able to consider differing opinions on how our most challenging problems should be handled (“deliberation”) — weighing the trade-offs that are inherent in every decision that could be made.

It’s about sitting down and working together, like grown ups, to accomplish something we can only accomplish together, united. It’s not rocket science, and it can sound a bit fluffy and idealist. But actually, it’s just how we learn to deal with all the things that make us human — emotions, pride, values, opinions, perspectives, science, media, facts — and still get things done. In politics, it’s the best way to make lasting decisions and policies (rather than policies the other side overturns as soon as they’re able to), because you create buy-in and trust for policies that don’t compromise people’s core values.

Very well put.

You can read her full post here: How can we remain United?

Another project worth mentioning that’s very much related to the ROI discussions that are happening elsewhere is the Making the Case campaign by the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2). It must have launched shortly after I last wrote about their efforts back in November of last year.

From the site:

Dialogue and deliberation (D&D) is making a real difference to Canadian community life, public policy making, responding to major problems such as climate change and homelessness, and how governments interact with their citizens. These contributions need to be heard and celebrated more widely.

A number of success stories have already been submitted, with more to be published later this year.

A couple of fellow IAP2 USA members and I are interested in doing something similar for the field of public participation here in the US. We’re still in the early stages, but it would be great to have produced a first round of insights by the end of this year. Let me know if you’d like to contribute.

Last week, I attended a conference call hosted by the Public Health Agency of Canada as part of the ongoing D&D Evaluation Project by the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2).

On their resources page, C2D2 states:

The C2D2 community asks, “How do we know – what is the evidence to demonstrate – that using dialogue and deliberation makes a difference?”

Public participation is facing the same question.

Previously, these eight draft principles have been proposed (download PDF with notes from their August 17, 2010 call):

1. Evaluation is a process, not a tactic.
2. Good practice means considering and incorporating evaluation from the beginning of the project.
3. Quantitative and qualitative methods are equally valued.
4. Evaluation should include a learning focus (but whose learning?).
5. Evaluation includes consideration of the context and of the model of action/change the deliberation and dialogue process is embedded in.
6. Evaluation is not values-free.
7. Evaluation should uphold the principles of D&D in its design and implementation.
8. Evaluation should be responsive to needs of project sponsors, as well as the advance of the field.

A project worth watching, for sure.

At the PACE conference in Peoria, AZ last week, a lot of anecdotal evidence was shared that shows how high-quality public participation can help find optimal solutions, save costs, keep complex large-scale development projects on time and on budget, reduce the risk of litigation, build community buy-in etc. What’s missing is a systematic effort to collect these stories and document the lessons learned.

More and more, I am convinced that The ROI of Public Participation would make for a sweet conference.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may well be one of the leading government agencies in the world when it comes to public participation. Their public engagement site offers a plethora of useful information including tools, definitions, case studies and much more. Their Public Involvement Network News electronic newsletter is another great resource.

A feature article in the Fall 2009 edition (PDF, 1.3 MB) provides a nice summary of a recent online dialogue with a group of ”twenty individuals with experience hosting, developing, facilitating, and/or researching web-based public engagement” that aimed to discover “what works, unanswered questions, and promising new strategies” with regard to web-based engagement: Web-Based Dialogue: What is The Next Frontier?

From the article:

What Are Best Practices for Online Dialogues?

There is enough experience with online dialogues that a body of “best practices” is beginning to emerge. This section describes key lessons identified by practitioners—starting with up-front planning, moving into dialogue facilitation, and finally describing how dialogue content affects policy.

It then goes on to list the following eight best practices in considerable detail:

• Establish a clear purpose––and design the dialogue to accomplish it
• Actively market the dialogue and recruit people to participate
• Develop a compelling and constructive agenda
• Use effective facilitation techniques to help people participate and keep the dialogue focused
• Make it easy for people to get started and stay focused on the topic
• Ensure worthy content with lasting value
• Ensure an active and constructive role for dialogue “hosts”
• Make sure participants are being heard—and that they know it

Note that these recommendations are, for the most part, completely independent of any underlying technology — something that’s at the core of our proposed session at SXSW next year.

Towards the end, the article lists a number of remaining challenges. If you’re working in e-participation today, this is pretty much the work that’s cut out for you, which is why I’m quoting this section in its entirety:

What Are Key Remaining Challenges and Questions About Online Dialogues?

Although much has been learned about how to make online dialogues effective, there are still remaining challenges to be addressed through refinements to dialogue design, facilitation, and other techniques. Key challenges include:

• Different levels of engagement—while some people are reluctant to post, some are “chomping at the bit” to get discussions going and can deluge other participants with overwhelming numbers of messages.
• Promoting effective interactions when dealing with participant populations having significantly different levels of expertise, experience, and expectation. When dialogues are open and inclusive, diversity can result in a much more interesting dialogue that produces a rich and varied knowledge product. However, in other instances, a great disparity in threshold knowledge, experience, and expectation can result in a dialogue that is less effective and also more frustrating to participants. Those with a greater threshold knowledge who hope to focus on tangible outcomes may become frustrated with those having a more casual interest (and the casual participants may feel intimated by those with more knowledge and experience).
• Involving people with limited Internet access or other cultural, social, or psychological constraints on participating. (In one dialogue the hosts heard that someone had no access to a computer, and they arranged to receive his faxes, post them, and get the related responses to him for several days.)
• Sorting and organizing the wealth of contributions in an efficient way so that participants and sponsors can find and participate in the parts of the dialogue that are most relevant to them. In some cases, the “noise” of irrelevant postings can eclipse the “signal” of on-topic content.
• Balancing the need to keep conversations focused while also not limiting insightful conversations or unique ideas that are “outside of the box.”
• Helping participants stay current with the evolving dialogue conversations that can run over hundreds of messages posted each day.
• Overcoming some well-intentioned, but limiting government rules, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act’s limits on asking questions of participants or asking them to take surveys as part of the dialogue process.

The web dialogue was hosted by WestEd and the archive can still be viewed online.

Last Tuesday on Change.gov (the official website of President-elect Barack Obama), the transition team launched a public online discussion on the topic of healthcare. From the announcement on their blog:

Join the Discussion

Today we’re trying out a new feature on our website that will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities. We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues — with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top.

The question they are asking:

What worries you most about the healthcare system in our country?

The site uses IntenseDebate, which — at a very basic level — is a threaded discussion forum (with a few added features, such as reputation points, comment ratings, OpenID support).

More than 3,500 comments have been posted so far.

One of the reasons this is interesting is because it may hint at a more participatory approach to government by the new administration, something for which a lot of people have expressed high hopes during the recent US presidential campaign. Accordingly, the initial feedback — from some in the web community, at least — has been very positive: Over on techPresident, Micah Sifry calls it “the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system,” and Eric Eldon of VentureBeat thinks of it as “a great early step in making government more open.”

I wanted to share a few initial observations, mainly with regard to process quality. How to best address some of these issues will be left for future posts but feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. For those interested in this discussion, there are a couple of threads going on on the NCDD main mailing list as well as on one of the groups at Democracies Online.

First off, though, kudos to the people behind Change.gov for experimenting with large-scale e-participation so early in the process (remember this is still just the transition, not the presidency). Despite the many challenges that have yet to be mastered in order to make it work at scale, I believe the opportunities for online dialogue and deliberation to help boost civic engagement and to improve public decision making at all levels of government are tremendous.

That said, a few things that immediately caught my eye:

• No clear process model: Judging from the information available on the website, it is not entirely clear how exactly the comments will be processed, what impact realistically they may or may not have on any policy decisions, or what kind of follow-up and follow-through either the transition team or the new administration are willing to commit to. This can become a problem since it risks disappointing participants (e.g. when assumed impact doesn’t match actual impact and participants are left frustrated over the time and energy they spent in vain).
• Lack of focus in the comments: Instead of simply answering the question (“What worries you…?”), many participants choose to share rich combinations of personal stories, experiences, concerns, assumptions, questions, ideas, solutions, values, priorities, resources, data etc.  While this shows just how much energy the participants bring to the table, it also tends to leave the discussion somewhat directionless. There is no process in place to further organize this input, nor does the forum software support participants in being more disciplined or structured.
• Lack of organizer participation: I was able to spot one instance of comment deletion by the forum administrators, presumably according to their comment policy (screenshot). I may be wrong, but other than that the transition team does not seem to actively engage in the discussions (e.g. ask or answer questions, express agreement or disagreement, or otherwise facilitate the process or provide general community management etc.). I only looked at a few sample pages, though, so I may be wrong.
• Overwhelming amounts of unstructured data: The discussion on Change.gov was off to a fast start, reaching 2,000 comments in the first 24 hours. As with many online discussion forums that reach a certain activity level, the amounts of content produced by the participants can be quite staggering. For example, total word count on this forum may well be approaching 500,000 words already (for details how I got this number, see my rough calculations). That means it becomes extremely time-consuming to keep up with even a small fraction of overall input (poor navigation adds to the problem). Moreover, the fact that this data is largely unstructured makes further processing very difficult if not impossible.

Again, this is an early assessment of a work in progress, and it wouldn’t at all surprise me if these issues will be addressed over time. The combination of a more demanding public (with regard to opportunities for meaningful e-participation) and a more interested and supportive administration (from what we’ve heard of the past year from some of the people involved) looks quite promising.

It came up in the last post, and it is something we’ve been thinking about quite a bit: How to listen online?

Listening in real life is sometimes hard enough. It may require skilled facilitation. Oftentimes, we’re not trained to listen well. It is much easier to talk than to listen, and listen carefully.

Online, however, listening seems to become that much harder. Many of the cues we are used to in real life are missing: for example sound, tone of voice, facial expressions etc. — even silence.

So, if listening is essential to leading meaningful dialogue and the same holds true for online dialogue, then the 1,000,000 dollar question is:

How to listen online?

Over the coming weeks, I plan to share some of our findings here in this blog. If you have resources to share or questions you want to see addressed, please comment.

The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) provides a good definition of dialogue and deliberation, and describes how the two relate to each other:

So what are dialogue and deliberation anyway?

Dialogue is a process that allows people, usually in small groups, to share their perspectives and experiences with one another about difficult issues we tend to just debate about or avoid entirely. Issues like racial disparities, youth violence and gay marriage.

Dialogue is not about judging, weighing or making decisions, but about understanding and learning. Dialogue dispels stereotypes, builds trust and enables people to be open to perspectives that are very different from their own. Dialogue can, and often does, lead to both personal and collaborative action.

Deliberation is a closely related process with a different emphasis. Deliberation emphasizes the use of logic and reasoning to make better decisions. Decisions about important public issues like health care and immigration are too often made through the use of power or coercion rather than a sound decision-making process that involves all parties and explores all options.

Dialogue and deliberation processes tend to use skilled facilitators and carefully constructed ground rules or agreements to ensure that all participants are heard and are treated as equals. For groups that want to move from talk to a decision or action, NCDD recommends starting with dialogue and encouraging deliberation after people have had the chance to tell their personal story (in relation to the issue at hand) in a respectful environment.

Dialogue lays the groundwork for the vital work of deliberation. The trust, mutual understanding and relationships that are built during dialogue allow for participants to deliberate more effectively, and to make better decisions.

Dialogue and deliberation are used for a variety of reasons: to resolve conflicts and bridge divides; to build understanding about complex issues; to foster innovative solutions to problems and launch action; and to reach agreement on or recommendations about policy decisions.

At Intellitics, our goal is online dialogue and deliberation.