If any of you in the Northwest or in Western Canada haven’t yet heard of the Wosk Center for Dialogue in Vancouver, you’re in for a treat. The Wosk Center makes me wish I lived on the other side of the country.

I just received an update from Nicole Mah of the Wosk Center, outlining some of their upcoming activities and programs. A Dialogue Network meets each month to dialogue about dialogue, which is cool enough – but also their 2004 Dialogue Maker’s Series is launching on Sept. 10 with a dialogue inspired by the Dalai Lama’s visit to Vancouver. Click below for the full announcement.
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NCDD member Leah Lamb’s innovative theatre/dialogue program was featured on Monday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. An article by Michael Paul Williams called “Theater as an Agent of Change” outlined Leah’s hopes to inspire civic engagement and community building among youth through her “Engage” program – a blend of theatrical performances and documentary footage conveying the civic and political experiences of Richmond residents. Engage will open September 16 through 18 at Virginia Commonwealth University. Click below for the full article.
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Tom Atlee announced a few days ago that he just posted three interrelated resources on the Co-Intelligence Institute website. The resources are called “Functions that Make Up Community Intelligence”, “Approaches to Community Engagement and the Generation of Community Wisdom”, and “A map of Community Intelligence and some of its important constituents”, and you can read more details by clicking below.
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Choices for the 21st Century Education Program invites teachers to engage their students in the national dialogue on the role of the U.S. in the world. The Choices Program is working with The People Speak to bring this topic to high school students this fall….
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Click below to read over today’s Let’s Talk America e-newsletter. The newsletter provides a great “Hip-pocket question of the week” (What’s the number one thing you consider when picking who you vote for?). It also urges you to sign the “We the People Declaration”, a breakthrough declaration calling for greater dialogue across political differences.
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I received an email from today announcing the publication of an interesting new study about e-participation in German cities. The study is the collaborative work of the new “Initiative eParticipation”, a community of German service providers, think tanks and research institutes in this field. Click below for the rest of Hans’ message, or go to www.zebralog.de/en/000079.html for the complete press release.
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Our friends at CPRN (Canadian Policy Research Networks) just released four new papers that underline the key role of the arts and culture in the creation of “creative cities,” especially in today�s knowledge economy. According to CPRN, “Creative cities are vital to meeting our community and national economic and social goals. By happy coincidence, the conditions that foster creative cities also foster economic innovation, social inclusion, democratic engagement and environmental sustainability.”…
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I received an email today from my friend Tonya Gonzalez, Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, announcing that the Center for Collaborative Policy just released a Hewlett-funded report called “Is Devolution Democratic? Assessing Collaborative Environmental Management.” The report proposes a normative framework for evaluating the democratic merits of collaborative policymaking processes in terms of six criteria: inclusiveness, representativeness, procedural fairness, lawfulness, deliberativeness, and empowerment. The framework is then applied to random sample of 76 watershed-based stakeholder partnerships in California and Washington State. You can download the report at www.csus.edu/ccp/publications.htm.

What do teenagers think about the U.S. presence in Iraq? About a constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriage? About America’s expanding waistline? A new report, “What Were They Thinking? Today’s Youth On Yesterday’s News,” published by Global Kids and NewsHour Extra, shows how teens across the nation tackled these questions and responded to other important current events. Their answers came from online dialogues conducted on Newz Crew, a website run by and for teens to discuss the news that affects their lives. More than 300 teenagers participated in the dialogues, launched March 1, 2004, which were monitored by students at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn. The full report can be downloaded from www.NewzCrew.org/wwtt. Or click below for more info.
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I received an email today from Rob Corcoran, National Director of Hope in the Cities, announcing HITC’s new Connecting Communities Fellowship Program, which graduated its first class this year. This five-part residential program grew out of HITC’s experience with racial reconciliation in Richmond and in their consultations with communities throughout the U.S. over the past ten years. The next class in Richmond begins in January 2005, and the application deadline is October 1. Click below to read the full announcement.
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Leah Green of the Compassionate Listening Project forwarded this July 23 message to her Reconciliation List, and I thought I’d share it with you folks. The message begins…

In a demonstration of strength in the belief that �there is someone on the other side to talk to� more than 220 teachers and educators from Israel and from Palestine met this past week for an encounter and teacher training seminar. These teachers are taking part in the Peace Education Program of IPCRI – the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information - which is being run in more than 50 high schools in Israel and more than 30 in the West Bank….
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Peter Levine of CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) posted an interesting piece on his blog on Friday that I thought some of you might want to check out. Peter says “I’ve been thinking about the future of this movement and the challenges it will face if it really gains traction. To date, most public deliberation in the US has low stakes. In some cases, there is no serious effort to change public policy to match the results of the public conversation.” And Later, he adds “Today’s public deliberations are likely to be more equitable than juries or teams of college students, because moderators are trained and focused on equality. But what about tomorrow’s deliberations? When the stakes go up, individuals with more status or skill will fight back against efforts to support less advantaged participants. They will depict such efforts as “politically correct” or otherwise biased, and they will use their status, confidence, and rhetorical fluency to win the point.” Curious? Go directly to the post.

Interested in checking out more D&D-related blogs? Check out the list of blogs we recently added to the left column of this page.