Progress Made on our Goals

Our five basic goals for the conference were:
  1. Defining and clarifying our work and our field.
  2. Building knowledge and sharing information.
  3. Building skills.
  4. Meeting and getting to know our colleagues in the field.
  5. Initiating collaborative projects.
The two intermediate outcomes we pledged to work towards with use of the Hewlett funds were:
A photo from one of the plenary sessions.

1. Participants (and the organizations and colleagues they report to and influence) will be more effective and efficient in their work as dialogue and deliberation practitioners.

Specifically, attending the National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation will help them to:

2. The processes of dialogue and deliberation will be strengthened and streamlined.

And the long-term outcome we pledged to work towards was:

The practice will be improved due to the infrastructure for the dialogue and deliberation community that will be generated at the conference, whether that infrastructure takes the form of a new organization, an annual meeting or conference, an active listserv or online bulletin board, or any other form.

Specifically, dialogue and deliberation practitioners (not only participants in the conference) will be more likely and able to:

The activities we conducted in order to reach these outcomes were:

Did Our Activities Lead to the Outcomes We Intended?

We will address our intended outcomes separately for clarity.

Intermediate Outcome Number 1:

Participants (and the organizations and colleagues they report to and influence) will be more effective and efficient in their work as dialogue and deliberation practitioners.

Did participants increase their skills in facilitating and organizing D&D programs?

Of the 56 break-out sessions, 20 provided opportunities for conference participants to build their skills in facilitating or organizing D&D programs. On average, participants who completed the session evaluation forms felt that the sessions would help in their D&D work (4.16 score out of 5).

The results of our Final Day Survey tell us that people felt that their own skills and knowledge were improved somewhat at the conference. On average, more conference participants agreed with than felt neutral about the statement ?Overall, my own skills and knowledge were enhanced (3.83 score out of 5 maximum).?

It was clear, however, that people would have appreciated more opportunities to improve their skills in organizing and facilitating D&D programs. The statement ?Throughout the conference, there was sufficient opportunity to improve skills in organizing D&D programs? only received a score of 3.34. And the statement ?Throughout the conference, there was sufficient opportunity to improve facilitation skills? scored 3.16. This means that slightly more people were satisfied with the skill-building opportunities at the conference than were dissatisfied with them.

Obviously, more of an emphasis should be placed on skill-building sessions at the next conference ? perhaps there should even be a pre-conference training for intensive skill building. Overall, though, participants were very pleased with the conference. 92% felt that the conference met their personal expectations, and people rated their overall conference experience a 4.21.

Can participants more readily access existing dialogue and deliberation resources (online, offline and human) that can help them in their work?

The participant handbooks and the NCDD website both list resources that can help practitioners in their work. Training opportunities, books and manuals on facilitation techniques, and selected D&D guides can all clearly be utilized for skill-building. Because of our efforts, practitioners can more readily access existing D&D resources that can help them in their work. Incidentally, the handbooks given to each participant were a huge hit, receiving a rating of 4.25 out of 5.

Many of the NCDD projects that are currently in the works will enable D&D practitioners to more readily access existing resources. All of the resources currently housed under the Dialogue to Action Initiative (including the calendar and main community page) will be integrated into the NCDD website, so navigating www.thataway.org and finding what you need will be much easier. The feature we are adding that will allow practitioners and scholars to post and examine best practices, lessons learned, reports and other such resources will also help improve access.

Is it now easier for participants to share their future accomplishments, ideas, strategies, activities and solutions with other leaders and practitioners in the D&D community?

The new connections and relationships people made at the conference should make it easier for participants to share their accomplishments, ideas, strategies, activities and solutions with their colleagues. Providing all participants' contact information and bios in the conference handbook should also help make this easier.

The online community we created on the NCDD website also makes sharing this kind of information easier. All conference participants were registered for the main NCDD Discussion list, which allows them to send emails to each other quickly and easily.

The NCDD website and online community have already made it easier for people to share their accomplishments, strategies, solutions and activities. As stated above, many of the new sections and features we are adding to the next version of the website will also make information-sharing even easier.

Can participants more readily assess and evaluate their work?

Only one break-out session directly addressed evaluation (Evaluating Intergroup Dialogue: What We Did and What We Learned, presented by Christian Dorsey of Operation Understanding D.C. and Ellen Wayne of the University of Baltimore, Center for Negotiation & Conflict Management). More opportunities to learn and share evaluation tools at the conference would have been useful.

Our collaborative project with the Deliberative Democracy Consortium will lead to the development of a new tool or series of tools that can be used for a variety of different D&D models, venues and circumstances. Because of this project, we hope that practitioners will be able to more readily assess and evaluate their work. Our first step in this project is to collect evaluation tools that are currently being used throughout the dialogue and deliberation community. NCDD plans to provide some of these tools on its website as a resource for practitioners.

Is it easier for participants to initiate collaborative efforts with other D&D practitioners or organizations?

Our Final Day Survey results tell us that most participants planned to contact some of the people they met at the conference and possibly start collaborative projects with them (3.76 out of possible 5 rating).

The evaluation forms for the break-out sessions tell us that many people were inspired by those sessions to pursue collaborations with either the presenter or similar organizations or individuals. (That was the second most common response to the question ?What next steps does this session prompt you to pursue??)

Even more promising, 57 of the 108 people who completed that survey indicated that they had begun exploring the possibility of partnering or working collaboratively with other conference participants. Here are some exciting examples of what conference participants were considering on the last day of the conference:

NCDD has already made it somewhat easier for conference participants and NCDD members to initiate collaborative efforts through its online community ? especially through the main NCDD Discussion list that all conference participants were subscribed to. And our 10 collaborative projects (listed on page 30), are providing NCDD members and other D&D leaders with opportunities to become actively involved with some of the most exciting, promising projects going on in the field today.

Through the practitioner advice forum, regional networks, internal NCDD ?sections,? commentaries on the main NCDD page, and other new NCDD projects and features, we will continue to make it easier for people to initiate collaborative efforts, and to share their accomplishments, ideas, strategies, activities and solutions.

Intermediate Outcome Number 2:

The processes of dialogue and deliberation will be strengthened and streamlined.

Are participants better equipped to increase others' knowledge and understanding of D&D and to promote D&D in their communities?

The conference brought D&D practitioners and scholars together from across the entire spectrum of practice. We would be surprised if even one person failed to leave the conference with a greater awareness of the plethora of models, tools, applications, venues and outcomes used and emphasized by different communities of practice.

The resources compiled by members of the Organizing Team and provided to participants in the conference handbook and on the website, in and of themselves, have equipped participants with the information they need to more effectively promote D&D in their communities. The list of 65 terms and definitions that participants left the conference with (86 are now listed on the website) provided people not only with a quick reference tool for looking up unknown terms in titles and descriptions of break-out sessions. This list remains the most comprehensive list of terms that can be found that covers the entire spectrum of practice.

The sample ground rules were compiled not only to provide practitioners with ideas, but also to provide people who train others in D&D principles or methods with a short handout that represents ground rules used across the spectrum of practice.

Several of the other resources we provided were designed to be used as handouts, such as the ?Why Foster Dialogue & Deliberation? sheet which quotes leaders from various communities of practice, and the ?Selected Guides to Dialogue & Deliberation? list.

Are participants more likely to work together on conducting D&D-related research and creating D&D resources?

NCDD certainly has been and will continue to make it easier for scholars and practitioners to find ways to work together to conduct research and create resources. One of the projects we recently initiated involves collecting information about who is currently conducting or soon to be conducting research in the field, and what the focus of their research will be. NCDD's Convener, Sandy Heierbacher, often receives emails from Ph.D. candidates and other researchers who are interested in finding out if there are others who are exploring questions similar to the ones they are thinking about. We hope to be able to keep an ongoing list of D&D research that is being accomplished and planned in order to foster collaboration and prevent duplication. We are hoping to share this information on the website.

As explained previously, many collaborative projects were initiated at the conference, and we have since developed ongoing structures that allow conference participants and NCDD members to connect with one another more easily, making it easier for them to initiative collaborative projects.

NCDD has also begun to partner with some key organizations in the field on important research and resource projects. We are working with the Deliberative Democracy Consortium to research existing evaluation tools used throughout the field in order to create a new tool or series of tools which can be adapted for different models and programs. We also plan to assist the Consortium with a relationship mapping project which will help answer questions about which D&D groups work together, which organizations serve as bridges between clusters of groups, where there is a need for more interaction, etc.

We are also collaborating with The Democracy Design Workshop at Yale University and the New York Law School to help develop, populate and promote an exciting new web-based resource called the Interactive Democracy Inventory. And we are working closely with the Society for Values in Higher Education to ensure that D&D resources and networking opportunities for faculty, staff, administrators and students at colleges and universities are made available on the web ? whether on the NCDD website, the SVHE site or the Teaching for Democracy site.

From the number of emails we receive from researchers looking to collaborate and from the spirit of collaboration and co-creation that currently exists throughout the D&D community, it appears that people are more likely to work together on conducting D&D-related research and creating D&D resources. We just need to be sure they have the resources, information and opportunities to make it happen.

Are participants more informed about their place in the D&D community, and dialogue and deliberation's place in the fields of conflict resolution, public participation, social change, community building and others?

If the conference accomplished anything, it opened participants' eyes to the great diversity that exists in the dialogue and deliberation community. People are leading dialogue and deliberation programs across the country in schools, in churches, in workplaces, and in virtually every other venue imaginable. They are encouraging people to engage in dialogue and deliberation about issues ranging from race relations in their communities and violence in their schools to how to handle the buildup of nuclear waste or the rapid rate of development in their region. People are organizing D&D programs in order to resolve conflicts, to increase citizen participation in governmental decisions, to educate, to help people build self-awareness, to improve communication skills, to strengthen teams or build coalitions, to stimulate innovation and to foster effective community change.

Participants left the conference with an increased awareness of the various ?communities of practice? that exist in our field. They left more aware of arts-based civic dialogue, of collective inquiry models such as Bohm dialogue, of the intergroup work being done at colleges and universities, of the use of technology in large-scale deliberative forums. They left more aware of how they, their work, their organization and their networks fit into this large self-named D&D community.

But they also left with questions, and with work to do. When asked in the Final Day Survey whether the conference helped participants to identify or begin addressing any key questions facing our field, the most popular response was the question of identity. Who are we? What are dialogue and deliberation, and how do they interrelate? Are we a field, a network, a community or a movement?

Long-Term Outcome:

The practice will be improved due to the infrastructure for the dialogue and deliberation community that will be generated at the conference, whether that infrastructure takes the form of a new organization, an annual meeting or conference, an active listserv or online bulletin board, or any other form.

Our Progress on this Outcome

An infrastructure for the dialogue & deliberation community is certainly being developed. The conference led to the development of not only active listservs and plans for future conferences, but also a formal Coalition of leading D&D organizations and individuals. The Coalition's plans and activities range from providing resources online and establishing new ways for practitioners and scholars to connect with one another and learn about each other's work, to creating new, flexible evaluation tools and creating a speaker's bureau to link the press to D&D outcomes.

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