Transcript: "Re-Marketing Dialogue"
What follows is an abridged transcript of a conversation held Saturday, October 5, 2002 at the National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation in Alexandria, Virginia. Jed Miller of Web Lab led the discussion. Panelists included Dr. Amitai Etzioni, Elaine Shen, Lars Torres and Miriam Wyman.

JED MILLER
Thank you so much for coming. A couple of introductions, provisos, and disclaimers... The first is that by "Marketing" I do not mean that we need "Dialogue" hats or t-shirts or keychains. Remarketing is a phrase I heard used by someone in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict resolution area, and it struck a nerve with me as a term that was appropriate for understanding where this work lives in the public consciousness, and where it falls in the imaginations of individuals in our small, local and broader communities.

I work at Web Lab in New York City. It's a non-profit that creates thoughtful dialogue methods on the web, and promotes the potential of the web as a truly interactive medium, for people participating in discussions and other digital experiences to be real participants and contributors to the larger event and the larger result.

This question has been coming up a lot in sessions that I've been in, so far: How do we present ourselves to each other, to our memberships and participants, to the larger community of practice, to the public directly, and, of course, to the media?

Imagine hearing this: "I was at a dinner party, and it got really late, and we were all talking about a book, and we realized that we had a great variety of viewpoints, and it was a great argument, and it resulted in some interesting mutual understanding, and some slight shifts of opinion, nothing major. And we decided that we should get together again and start a book group."

Now, people have had experiences like that. You get really excited about something, you're in a social setting, you're in a semi-formal setting, and you say, "Yeah, let's start a book group."

On the other hand, it could go this way: "What'd you do last night?" "My mother wanted us to go to a community board meeting." "Well, why?" "Well, they're worried about the dump and they're going to buy new land to expand the dump and it's a few blocks from our house, and people are worried about..."And you say, "Yeah—what was it like?" "Everybody was just talking."

That's what we don't want. So, how can this work fall in bin number one and not bin number two?

The goal of this session is not to present a practice, or even an approach, but to ask a question and begin to think together about answers. And, if we can, to identify a few tools and goals that can help us.

Tim Erickson of Politalk has been kind enough to archive what we're doing, and I hope that this can be the beginning, for this group, and for each of you in the work you do, of an ongoing dialogue about how we express what we do, and how that expression defines what we do in the minds of others.

LARS TORRES
Thank you. Good morning. I work with Carolyn Lukensmeyer at AmericaSpeaks.

Just to give a little history: My first encounter with the AmericaSpeaks model of citizen public deliberation was the Youth Summit in Washington D.C. At the time, I was a high school teacher at a public charter school. And the students that we work with are, I would have to say, among the least engaged—practically, not necessarily consciously—in the issues that impact Washington D.C. They're not out there going to meetings, being involved in protests and things like this, but they have a deep sense of their own personal history and a sense that they carry with them of disempowerment because of those histories.

The first thing that really struck me when they came back into the classroom to talk about the summit was how they had never been in a room with 2,000 young people before, and how that in and of itself was a very empowering experience. And then the second was the opportunity to really liaise directly with decision-makers. They thought it was very unusual and very inspiring that the Mayor spent part of the day there, to listen. It was their agenda; the issues that were coming up that he was responding to were issues that they generated.

One of the things that was frustrating for me—and it may be true for some of you, in the work that you do—is the half-life of these kinds of things. If there's not something connective to sustain it, then where does all that feeling go?

My question, that I'd like to explore, is: In talking about "cultural" or "re-marketing dialogue," what are the central stories we want to tell about dialogue? Because I think in the mass media there are some central narratives, some central stories that sort of get recycled. And if we're going to think about re-marketing or marketing dialogue, what are the central stories we want to tell?

ELAINE SHEN
I'm Elaine Shen with Active Voice. We work with filmmakers and producers, mainly in public television,  using film as the springboard for people to start conversations, whether it's about race, or globalization, new demographics in immigration, or gender issues.

And we find that film, because it's become so much a part of the storytelling in our culture, is the new storytelling. People respond to film. They look at it as sort of a safe way to sit back and absorb something. But if you notice, if you go to a movie with someone, or a group of people, you come out of it talking about it. Well, how do you capture that moment, where a film can really just turn someone's thinking, or, you know, just get them going, an emotion... How do you move that to some kind of action, make it a part of something bigger?

And one of the ways that we try to do that is with dialogue. We facilitate the process of dialogue deliberation around various issues using film. Earlier Jed asked us to think specifically about how our work had worked or not worked in a particular culture, and the first thing I thought about, probably, was when we started taking our work into the jails.

The Sheriff's Office of San Francisco called us because they found our web site, and they said, "We're doing a Cultural Competency course for our inmates, and we use film as a touchstone to get people talking about issues of sexism, of racism...could we work with you?" We were really excited. And it blew me away, because the prison culture is not one that I'm familiar with; I've never worked inside one. And it was a whole new way of communicating and thinking and acting and behaving that I had to learn and think about. And it broke down a lot of my assumptions and stereotypes. And it made me remember the pockets of isolation that we create in the society.

It reminded me a little bit of what I thought of when I first saw this panel, as far as [dialogue as] "the new Dungeons & Dragons." I'm not that familiar with Dungeons & Dragons. When I was growing up I just didn't know that much about it. And I started questioning: why didn't I know that much about it? It was a true cultural phenomenon. It was also very secretive, almost. What are these people doing? They're in dark rooms, and they're playing with things, and it's all this secret language. And I'm hoping that dialogue and deliberation—I hope we're not like that. I hope that we're not so obscure that we develop our own vernacular to the point that excludes a lot of people, who say, "What are these people talking about?"

A young lady who was in David and Martha's session yesterday was saying, "Some people can't even come to the table, because a table is not a place where you have a conversation—you just don't do that, culturally. You don't make contact with people. That's not where it happens." So that's one thing that I want to explore: it leads me into the obstacles ... the possible left-leaning bias ... it being too insular. And I'm still trying to grapple with whether this is a good or a bad thing, or whether we're too process-oriented.

MIRIAM WYMAN
I'm from Toronto, Canada. My work over the last twenty-five years or so has focused on public involvement of one sort or another. I come out of background in environment and women's studies, so a lot of my work has been related to environment issues and women's issues. The dialogue work is fairly recent, but it seems to me a logical addition to the public constitution work, that has been part of who I am and what I do forever.

I think Dungeons & Dragons was a boys' phenomenon, actually, more than a girls' phenomenon. But there's a really neat restaurant in Old Town called Bilbo Baggins and I had dinner there last night.

Normalizing dialogue, in the way that recycling and knitting are normalized—and I do both of those, so on some level I like that idea—but I think we talk about dialogue in two ways.

One is around how people talk to each other, and my question there is, shouldn't people be doing that normally with their friends and family members, and I've had some real questions about why we need to organize dialogue groups or conversation cafés. So I'd certainly like to hear a little bit more about why that's so compelling a notion. What's wrong in our lives that we don't have people to have real conversations with and we need to find ways— It's like going to a gym for exercise; being enrolled in a café for dialogue. I'm not sure that the metaphor actually works for me although I know it does for all of you.

The other part of it is dialogue as a tool for getting better information feeding into decision-making processes. And for me that link to decision-making is a really important one. That's kind of the crux of my concern and my involvement. I think if we're looking at deepening democracy, then we need to do more than encourage people to talk to each other for the sake of talking to each other. I think that talk needs to be very connected to changes and decision-making and policy-making.

The focus of that work in the last few years has been at the international level, through the Citizens and Governance Program of the Commonwealth Foundation, which is an inter-governmental organization that does a lot of civil society work and has recently put a lot of work into strengthening citizens' voice in governance, and how that happens in various parts of the world. So we're looking at creative initiatives that are underway, to find ways that people are doing this in their own communities, primarily at the local level, that are helping to put citizens back where they belong, which is at the center of governance, in a world where it looks like citizens are customers or taxpayers, and the people at the center are decision-makers with a global trade agenda and world economics. So there are some real contradictions in there.

With respect with my experiences of the cultural impact of dialogue, two things came to mind. One was a dialogue project called "The Society We Want," in which we actually organized dialogue groups across Canada that focused on key economic and social policy issues, and it was through a policy research organization which has quite good access to decision-makers and policymakers within the Canadian government.

But we heard two really important things from participants. One was that they really loved the opportunity to come together and sink their teeth into an important issue—that that was not something that happened a lot in their ordinary lives, so that's a bit of a counter to my earlier concern that "Why do people want to get together just to talk." And the second was how important for them to know what was going to happen with what they were telling us: that dropping this into a "black hole" was not okay. They'd do it if they could be really persuaded that something was  going to happen. That didn't mean that the world needed to change tomorrow, but they needed to know that there was a pipeline—that people across the country were talking to people who were making decisions about these issues. So that was one really important piece.

The other was a process I was involved in, in Thailand, around creating environmental education curricula. They thought they'd imported the Great White Expert on Environmental Education, and they were very taken aback when I met with the people in the relevant departments to say that this workshop that we were doing together next week was one that we were going to jointly design and carry out. This had not been a part of their experience, I don't think. They had done a magnificent job of organizing the logistics and the hotel, and briefcases for everybody, but the agenda and the program would be my bailiwick. And of the week we had to work on this, three days were spent overcoming the, "No, I'm not going to tell you about all the wonderful Environmental Education models that work in North America, because North America is not Thailand." And they had all kinds of wonderful things going on in their community, and they had not connected with the Environmental Education people in their community. This was a government department; they hadn't spoken to the Education Department; they hadn't spoken to the Health Department; they hadn't spoken to Public Health—

JED MILLER
So that was the culture that pre-existed. There was a platform that was, in its own way, a culture.

MIRIAM WYMAN
Right. And by the time I left, three weeks later—after, by the way, a really successful workshop with people from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos whose English was virtually nonexistent—we got commitments from people in each of those countries to prepare chunks of a manual for culturally-specific work that was going to go to work for them. So it was not a formal dialogue, but it was a way of engaging people in work that they wanted done, but that it had really not occurred to them that they could do by themselves. I thought that was really striking. ...

My sense is that young people, especially, are giving up on electoral politics. In Canada more people recycle than vote. This is a real problem, and the question for me is how to get people engaged in ways that affect the lives of their communities and that will ultimately improve the way our nations work.

The questions you raise, Jed, speak to me about embedding deliberation and dialogue in popular culture, in a real way—in a real way. And it begs all kinds of questions that Elaine began to raise, around the assumptions about dialogue. It assumes people are very competent verbally. Most of this takes place in English; our capacity to deal with it in the languages of our major cities is relatively limited. I think that's a place where we really need to give a lot of time and attention. And from the government side, there are all kinds of assumptions about citizens not understanding issues, about the timelines for consultations...those of who have been doing consultations make long lists of what the barriers are to making this work better.

JED MILLER
I'd like to introduce Dr. Amitai Etzioni, and thank him for being here. I'm a newcomer to what communitarianism is, and when I was reading about it, I was struck by the description of a restored community, in which—assuming we have strong rights in our country—strong rights presume strong responsibilities. And one of the definitions of a civil society that I read was "one with a lively sense of personal and civic responsibility in which people develop skills in government." I think that's what we're talking about, when we talk about "embedding"—we're talking about creating that liveliness in a broader way, about this work and work like this.

AMITAI ETZIONI
Thank you very much. I'm very appreciative that you've asked me to come here. I'm usually not on panels on Saturday mornings. [laughter] But I'm glad that you asked me, and here's why: I'm one of those people who cannot do, but teach—so I was dying to see people who "do." I've spent most of my life in the library, working on a theory of dialogue. I did some things about what I call "the rules of engagement"—what you need to do in order to have a productive dialogue. You should not demonize the other side. You should not say "Twenty years ago, you also did not take out the garbage." [laughter] ... and bring up all the back issues.

By the way, if you go to communitariannetwork.org you'll find out all you need to know and more. You'll see our position papers, our platform, our network—it's all there.

Now, the essence of communitarian thinking— I'm not going to lecture; I promise you. I was trained by Martin Buber and Buber said "dialogue, dialogue, dialogue." The essence of communitarian thinking is that many of the things we need to worry about are not solved by either the government or the market, but in that third realm of voluntary associations in families and communities. This third sector is not based on coercion and police and accountants. It is not based on self-interest and markets. In order to nurture and sustain this third sector, dialogue is essential, because it's the only way a community can get to a shared understanding of what we are going to consider is proper behavior, and what is unacceptable.

I'll tell you a story. Another reason I'm here is to triple the number of people who have gray hair. Most of you were not around at the time of the story. I'm sure you saw the movie. 1963, the Cuban Missile crisis. As you know, we were very close to nuclear war; the Soviet ships were closing in. Kennedy was saying, "We're going to hit you if you do that;" It was very tense. And a bunch of us were sitting here, like this, saying "What can we do about this?" "Don't curse the darkness; light a candle."

It occurred to us—one version of Dialogue Theory—if a third party that was not beholden to either side, which was recognized, stepped in, and that party would say, "Cool off; step back; let's take the time to work this out." And both sides would find it easier to yield, and not lose face. So who could this party be? And for some reason (if I could only remember why) we decided that the Pope could be such a party. So because I was student of Martin Buber, and Buber translated the Bible for the Church, I called Buber in Jerusalem and Buber called the Pope. I'm not claiming any particular role. I'm sure a thousand other people did something similar. [laughter] But the next day the Pope called on both sides to cool it, and they used this as an excuse to clear the air.

For me, what is typical about this example is, if you are interested in communities, you often put your shoulder to the wheel; you never know exactly what you did, but everyone kind of helps and hopefully it's a good outcome.

The dialogues I'm particularly interested in are similar to what you're talking about. And that is, dialogues of public policy and moral issues. Especially moral issues. What happens is, once in a while it's difficult. You can trigger conversations, not just in a family, or locally, but nationally and internationally, with the moral issues such as we have now in the United States, like the death penalty, or gay marriages.

And when you're in the middle of one of those dialogues, it sounds like you don't have a beginning and don't have an end. It meanders, and there's all this screaming that there shouldn't be. But if you come back later, sometimes two, five minutes, sometimes more, the dust settles and there is a new, shared understanding, about where we should be going.

If you go back, really back to the 1950s, the environment was on nobody's mind; most people threw garbage out the window and dumped things in the water, and you didn't think about any more than you'd get up every morning and worry about the Chinese government.

ELAINE SHEN
Well, I used to do that... [laughter]

AMITAI ETZIONI
I tip my hat to you. [laughs] But I still in insist that most of us don't get up in the morning and worry about the Chinese government.

But today, there is a new, shared understanding that we have a moral obligation to Mother Earth, though we still disagree about exactly what it is.

Since we do not want to rely on lawsuits and government agencies standing there, making sure that people do what's right. In the end we have to rely on people's goodness; on their changing their habits. And this is what dialogues do. You convince people that they should want to be different. And they can really accept it, because they participate in the dialogue. Then, at the end of the day, they are active. There's a high correlation between [this acceptance and] people's civic duty—even things that people think are governmental things; paying taxes. The psychology of paying taxes—you see, one of the major reasons people pay taxes is that they think the money is being used for a legitimate purpose. And if they think the burden is fairly shared. (By the way, we'll see what happens in the next few years.) I don't want to get too political, but let me just say that at the moment we have a law which favors rich people, and a lot of people don't think it's very fair.

So I don't want to go on and on, but one thing we have to face is that there are thousands of people at any one time who want to get on the national and international dialogue platform. And it doesn't tolerate more than two topics at a time. So if you want to go and start a new dialogue, a good time it when the other ones are... they never finish, but they are meandering from one topic to another. And you have to have patience. And drama is an essential part of triggering a conversation. That's why "Common Cause" is such a failure; it's upper-middle-class people who don't want to get their hands dirty. It's not sitting in my library trying to write papers.

Let me just close with this example. The effect of the last election on this issue is what we call a button. Good middle-class people don't want to get their hands dirty. If you want to start a dialogue, you have to get your hands dirty.

JED MILLER
I'm going to try a little to answer my own question: What's the culture that I fit into, as a practitioner of dialogue? What are its challenges, and, maybe, a couple of quick proposals.

Hosting online dialogues—trying to develop online communities and discussions, and create discussions—is chiefly about how big a space are they going to give me on the computer screen, so that I can say, "What's your opinion about this?" and make it seem glamorous or interesting; make it seem germane, make it seem like it's something that relates to you.

The web is entering an adolescence of some kind, but a lot of web sites to this day work like this: you go to the web site, and it's "Campbell's Soup-dot-com." And it says "Read soup reviews." "Buy soup." "Read about the history of soup." "Hear about the latest Campbell's Soup news." And then, up in the upper right corner: "Talk about soup." So what's the dialogue that's going to be engendered there? It's going to be thin; it's going to be sparsely visited; it's not going to be visited regularly; and it's going to be visited by people who self-identify already as dialoguers.

The challenge we face, building online communities, on the web or on AOL, or on listservs, is, "How do you reach out beyond the self-selected constituency? How do you make it exciting—or at least interesting—to a larger group of people?" Aside from what the web people call the ‘real-estate issue' I just described, there are questions of phrasing: ask a pointed question; link it to something that's already going on.

That has been the culture of dialogue that we struggle with as online community builders. A culture of busy people, not many of whom are on the web specifically to talk; but I believe—and the results seem to show—any of whom might talk under the right circumstances with the right provocation. For instance, an impending war, or a challenged election, or a sick child with a condition that not many other children have. Context is a big part of it.

I heard the phrase "remarketing dialogue" coined by a gentleman named Forsan Hussein whom some of you know, who works for The Abraham Fund, which creates coexistence discussions between Israelis and Palestinians. I'm trying to think more broadly about how we can present this community, present this initiative. So my thoughts go off in very practical directions, where the stakeholders are involved; then in very kooky directions, that have more broad cultural impact—like, what if Oprah did try to try "talk groups" for a year? What if you could make a movie like The Breakfast Club, a movie about people who encounter each other across differences and have a deeply inspiring experience that changes how they approach their lives? ... It's worth thinking about, how it lives in people's imaginations.

I'll close with a suggestion Peter Muehlberger at Carnegie-Mellon mentioned to me a few days ago. I guess Thomas Jefferson proposed having ward-based decision councils—having very local discussions that happen even at the more local level than the democracy as designed by the framers, where very small communities, local neighborhoods—I don't know what a "ward" is, or if it's bigger than a hectare [laughter]—but a ward would get together and talk, and those were citizens talking, and then those recommendations or conclusions would be translated upward to a regional level, or a state level, and so on and so on.

We've never done that, as far as I know, in an organized way. I've never been part of one. We're all very familiar—and you more than I—with models like that. But it would be interesting to try that in a very visible way, in a very visible community, on a very visible issue. And it would be an interesting model.

AMITAI ETZIONI
Those of you who want to get a taste of one version of this: We have 20,000 people on our email dialogue list, and we put, once a month, a question of some importance, and we get a dialogue. All you have to do is go to the site and go to the same place, and you can also see past dialogues. If you have any suggestions, you should put them down.

LARS TORRES
How do we create situations that the press might really be interested in, or could spark coverage in the mass media, in the popular media?

Maybe it's a day where each of us gets five people to take a card table out to a local Safeway and we all sit in front of a local Safeway with a big sign that says "Let's talk." And people start having these conversations. And it's such a big thing; it's like these hand-holding events across the country; it's bringing strangers together, which is compelling to the media. That could generate some coverage and build some momentum—then, other coordinated activities are happening afterwards. So it's more about building situations or opportunities for the media to cover dialogue.

I'm sure there are a thousand and one compelling stories about dialogue, and that's the rich stuff that could get packaged by Jerry Manders' group, the Public Media Center, that does public interest advertising. Things like "How did dialogue change, in a positive way, a conflict between this new landfill and a community...?"

For me "vernacular" is an inspiring term, because, when the Catholic Church was growing, the decisions that were being made that impacted people's lives were all being done in Latin. Whereas the languages that were being spoken were the vernacular. Those were the languages that animated people's belief systems. Often in competition with the new values that were emerging from the Catholic Church.

And, for me, if I think of a corollary today, that might be hip-hop. How is hip-hop vernacular? It's a conversation across generations—maybe not directly an 80-year-old and a sixteen-year-old hip-hop artist, but a sixteen-year-old hip-hop artist who is developing issues or beats that were developed in the Seventies.

It's also a conversation across class. You have many, many young people from a range of economic backgrounds that are involved in this conversation. It's a conversation across race and ethnicity. It's also global—so Japanese hip-hop has its own feel; it's own vernacular. Paris or here—there's also commonality.

I don't have a story, but I'd love to hear about stories that people think are compelling, and then start to figure out, how do we embed those stories, like you said, in the consciousness of people, but also in our imagination? How can what we want to be in the future happen? So there's an imaginative element to the stories we want to tell; they don't all have to be fact-based. With fiction, with imagination, we're pushing the possibilities of what dialogue is.

ELAINE SHEN
We worked on a film called Rabbit in the Moon, about four years ago. I don't know if you know about it. It was on PBS, and it was about the Japanese internment, in the United States. The storyteller was a Japanese woman, Emiko Omori, who talked about her family who was interned. When we develop these engagement campaigns, we bring together what we call a "brain trust"—a strategic meeting—of different people from different communities who have a stake in the issues brought out by this film.

So, we're talking about people from the Bay Area community, education people, community leaders. People watched this film about Japanese internment, and suddenly something started happening in the room. And there was media in the room as well. This woman who worked with Native groups in the Bay Area said, "Well, this happened to my people, too—they just called it Reservations. We were put aside." Then a South African minister said, "Where we grew up, there were ‘townships' in our community." Then a woman whose, I think, mother was a Holocaust survivor said, "These are the stories that I've heard about what was happening in my family, in concentration camps."

And there was a producer in the room from the local PBS station in San Francisco, who said, "This is a show right here: about how this film has brought together themes for people to start talking about the commonalities and common ground that can be established." So we use that example a lot, about the power of film.

What impact can this have on a larger scale—a massive scale, a global scale? I don't know. How can we replicate this? This is something that we have been working on.

We all have this belief that dialogue can be very powerful. How can we ensure that? Can we bring it into schools—integrate it into schools? What are the institutions that everybody has to touch? Schools, possibly the government?

The schools—okay, possibly. So you can go to "teacher training," and start training teachers early on about the different processes of dialogue and deliberation. I don't have the answer—I'd just like to throw it out there; what people think, if this is something that would be embraced by government institutions. Because the nature of the dialogue is to get people together and maybe even get them thinking about questioning the government, so why would they support something like this?

JED MILLER
I'm hearing at least six distinct themes. I'm going to throw them out and then stop talking and we can all respond to what we've heard so far, and maybe come up with some suggestions and some terminology and some ideas.

The 800-pound gorilla is the press. How do we describe what we're doing to them? Some of us have been them; some of us still are them. I was at an interesting presentation by the Search for Common Ground folks about a process called Common Ground Talk, about other models to engage the press and about how to build new models for media. But it's an ongoing question: can we do something visible? What about the press, how do we reach out there?

Another is timing. Dr. Etzioni talked about that. The public imagination, in a small community or in the national or global community doesn't have that much "bandwidth" to think about that many different things. So at what moment do you come and shift the dialogue? When is it right? It looked like we were going to have a big conversation about electoral reform a couple of years ago. We didn't. I don't know why. But that was a moment.

Lars mentioned vernacular, language. Aside from reaching out in a public way, how do we reach out in a more one-to-one way, a less formalized way, and change our language, change our terms? There's a lot of debate going on right now at this conference about how we describe what we do and how we describe these goals.

Miriam and Elaine each talked about faith that something will happen. If you're going to engage people, you have to catch their minds at the outset with the idea that there will be change, or there will be listening. Dr. Etzioni talked about the tax example; the idea that it will be useful. I want to know that, if I'm going to do this, if I'm buying into this system, I'm doing it because I believe that the money will be used for a good purpose, and there will be some fairness.

That brings up the issue of follow-up and follow-through. We talked about the "drop-in" events that we do sometimes with youth, where you give them this great experience, and then nothing afterwards in their lives, or in their surrounding daily life, in those first two sectors of life, which for children are school, the official sector, and then family. We don't really give them a third sector that has institutionalized the kind of tools that we present at these "drop-in" events.

Finally, how do we harbor the institutions and infrastructures, like in Miriam's story, that are already there, so as to build a series of bins to catch the work that we're codifying and offering, that we present programmatically?

LEN TRAUBMAN
I think an example would be: ten years ago we started a Jewish/Palestinian living room dialogue in the San Francisco peninsula. And now there are six dialogues in the area. We've had the remarkable experience that we really never [need to] go to the media any more, but the media comes to us: CNN and MSNBC, all the local TV and newspapers—because it's authentic.

Here in Washington, we're going to be meeting with the State Department, with the U.S. Institute of Peace, and we were just invited out to the campus at Georgetown, and one of the groups there, the Jewish Students' Association, decided to sponsor a dialogue presentation every Tuesday evening. And they were shocked, because it was the first time that all the youth groups on the campus ever came forward and said "We want to co-sponsor this." The Muslims, the Arabs, the Israelis, the Jewish kids.

So, something is happening. The State Department also wants to meet on Tuesday, the Israel/Palestinian office of the U.S. Department of State. And this all comes from dialogue, citizen dialogue in living rooms, moving across the country and onto campuses to replace the sign wars. So it seems to me that dialogue is a function, because it doesn't take sides; because it's portable, because it gives everybody a place to be heard. That it's a desirable human function, and it has broad appeal, if it's authentic.

"Authentic" means that it's not just dialogue, that it is sustained dialogue. That people are actually getting their hands dirty, as [Dr. Etzioni] said, and getting out of their front door, and meeting each other, and dedicating their lives to it. It's not just a hobby or a pastime, but it's a way of life they've adopted, and it's demonstrated that it works. It transforms people, and transforms the nature of their relationships.

CHIP HAUSS, Search for Common Ground
I want to pick up on what Len said, because this is a point that crystallized in my head as you two walked into the room. When I met Len and Libby Traubman in the mid-eighties, one of their colleagues came up to me at a meeting one day and said, "I finally understand you guys on the Left. You expect to lose. As a businessman I can't expect to lose; I have to go in assuming I'm going to win." That stuck with me.

Also, I was flying home from the American Political Science [Association] meetings, and I sit down and this woman comes and sits down next to me. Of course, she looks around and sees all these people reading books that no one in their right mind should be reading.

And she starts talking to me, and it turns out she's a Georgetown Law professor who had been in the Clinton administration and does confrontational, aggressive civil rights work. We start talking and she said, "I've never thought about the role of dialogue in conflict resolution; and you guys need to come talk to us."

So it seems to me that if we move into a world in which: a) we assume we're going to win, b) develop strategies for doing so, c) come up with the chutzpah to market, to go back to what we're supposed to be talking about, d) know it's going to be difficult work, and e) place ourselves in such a way that people who would not normally think of talking with us find us not off-putting, but acceptable—which may mean doing things like wearing ties...

I've been doing a lot of work with Fundamentalists and Evangelical Christians over the last six months. They're perfectly open to talking with us. And I've been bothered for the last twenty-four hours, sitting here listening to people saying things like "They don't like us," "They don't share our values." I just think we need to ponder that, and say, "It's got to be done, and let's go do it."

DICK CHASIN, Public Conversations Project
I'm wondering about our trying to invent something when there are already a few "wheels" around. For example, I would love to know who has done dialogue or deliberative work just among the people who come here. Whose specific work has been covered in the general media to the point where it may well have reached a hundred million general readers or viewers?

If you have that kind of coverage, then the next question is, which of them have got the story right? If they did get the story right, how did they put it? Why do we need to "invent a vernacular" when really good journalists get it better than we put it out?

And look at the assumption, which I think is quite true, that the government pays attention to those media, and, guess what? You get calls from the State Department, someone speaks with the Pope. [laughter] I was asked to come before the National Security Council, full of the Iran-Contra people, and just say what I knew about my contacts in the Soviet Union. Why? Because they didn't have a book on Gorbachev. They didn't know what the hell they were doing. They were looking at someone whose politics were totally opposed to theirs and saying [he] knew.

So one of the fastest routes to the government is the media. And the media must cover certain stories.

. . .

DAVID CAMPT
We all believe that we have to strengthen "democracy," but I'm not sure that that framework works as well as "telling those leaders what we want." It's a framing question. We need to think about that seriously if we're trying to get people engaged at a local level. Not just in the structuring of the dialogue, and linking it to action, but actually in the marketing of it. What are we doing? We're getting together to talk, to figure out what we're going to do next. I think we need to be sensitive to different audiences.

And, just, quickly, a couple of other things: I think that the importance of celebrity—movies, politicians, etcetera—getting behind it ... we need to really think about some strategy for making that happen. I think a sense of crisis is important too. Jefferson also said we should remake our democracy every twenty years. So when are we going to get a couple of major voices, of politicians, to talk about the need to strengthen the role of democracy and link dialogue to it?

I think that early institutionalization is important; getting the whole notion of it into schools as a practice that people are used to taking on, so that when they become adolescents and adults, they expect that part of what we do to make collective decisions is to get together and talk in a different way.

And, lastly, I think that in a society in which many people are worried about the erosion of community, we can have a conversation about places. People are looking for some greater sense of community. We can structure conversations around places. That might help.

JED MILLER
I'm really struck by what David just said about use of words—about changing something to a verb. "Talk" is a blown-out thing, especially on the web. "Talk" is a verb but it gets used as a noun. But it feels different if you say "learn more." Or the definition of "democracy." It's a term that's weighted down with a lot of connotations, more and more of which are negative, I think, to be honest. Not all of them. But if you said, "Tell people what we want." They're almost synonymous, ultimately—but the difference is huge.

COLE CAMPBELL
I'm an Associate of the Kettering Foundation. I'm really a journalist and an editor. There are two movements of reform in American journalism right now. The dominant movement of reform is a "Standards" movement—not unlike the Standards movement in education—in which very high-profile journalists and former journalists are trying to get the profession back to professional standards, and they're spending a lot of time articulating standards.

There is a second reform movement, that has been ebbing and flowing, called the Public Journalism movement. That is a dialogic and deliberative journalism that basically re-conceives the citizen, not as a passive consumer of information, but as an actor in his or her own right, and therefore re-casts journalism to be, "How do we help these political actors make decisions?"

I think that people who are involved in dialogue and deliberation can best engage their local media by not asking them to cover you—because they get that from everyone. "Cover us, cover us. Pay attention to us." But, rather, if you say, "Come to this event, and you will hear people working through an issue," then both traditional and public journalists will show up for that, because you're giving them content.

But the real challenge is not to get them to pay attention to an event. It's to help them frame how they see public deliberation or public dialogue. You've got to spend a lot of time sort of helping them understand, pointing out, almost briefing before the event, "Here are the dynamics that you're likely to see." So when they come to the event and they see those dynamics, they begin to understand deliberation and dialogue; they begin to trust you as a credible source of information about deliberation and dialogue. You need to engage them. You need to help them see new ways of seeing, as experts in dialogue.

JED MILLER
So, again, a linguistic re-framing. Don't invite them with "Hey, please cover us." Invite them to hear what three hundred people that you've put together think.

COLE CAMPBELL
And then, beyond that, make it sort of your secondary agenda to help them understand how people are coming to these thoughts, as opposed to blurting them out they way they might blurt them out to a pollster or some other "grabber."

JEAN HANDLEY
I'm Jean Handley, Turning Point Partners, and I'm sure I'm only one of many people here who have a success story that they can share, and I'm going to go ahead and jump in because there's not very many women's voices, and I can't complain unless I go ahead and do something about that.

It's kind of an example of coming through the back door. It's an example I give of racial/environmental conflict in Norco, Louisiana that started back in the 1950s, when there wasn't the environmental thought that's happened since. Shell Chemical came and put a plant into this town Norco, and Norco had a Black community called Diamond, and they put it in Diamond's back yard.

And there was this conflict that went fifty-some years over the injustice of that, and the citizens of Norco— an "Erin Brockovich"-type situation. And the changing of the guard of Shell and international environmentalists coming and getting in, PBS doing a film. And, this past summer, people asked if they could come in and mediate it, and no-one would do it, and finally they asked me, and I said, "Sure, why not."

I co-facilitated. And the whole idea was, they did not want to do a mediation; they wanted to do a dialogue. Especially Shell—they were very clear. This would not be a mediation, it would be a dialogue. And of course we honored that.

We went to three different groups: the allies of the environmentalists, the citizens of Norco, and Shell. And nobody could say anything nice about anybody. It was just terrible. And what we asked the different people to do is to come in and represent the needs of the other side, for lack of a better word. And that they had to come together, and each group would get a representative to take five minutes to represent fifty years of needs of the other side.

And they did it very well. When they first came in, they couldn't look at each other; they sat down in different parts of the room; a tiny room. Playing with clay—these things you do. And my third meeting, at the end of it Shell announced that they were ready to offer a buyout. This was something they'd been trying to get for fifty-some-odd years. And then the rest of it came to how that worked out. It's worked out beautifully.

Of course there was a lot of media, some of it national. And the success of this story was that Shell in England was so shocked that they're sending representatives from Holland and England to come and talk to the citizens, and talk to Shell and the facilitators to find out what happened, because they want to replicate that in South Africa, they want to replicate it in other parts of America. And that was just one little dialogue group. So it may not be governmental, but here it is in the corporate world. And taking advantage of that media situation and moving the dialogue.

EILEEN DZIK
I'm Eileen Dzik from Search for Common Ground. Coming from the point of view of a journalist and hearing what you were saying, I really want to extend that, and say that there certain things that you can look for in trying to sell stories, and one of them that I hear in the Israeli-Palestinian dialogues, and this story too, is novelty.

Journalists are always looking for stories that have novelty. And I've followed some of the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian dialogues, and I actually helped bring a dialogue group in Brooklyn onto WNYC in New York. And at that time it was the height— Well, it still is the height of extreme rhetoric. And it was considered so interesting and refreshing to hear something different that they got deluged with requests for media, from The New York Times, all the networks wanted to interview them.

So the lesson is that you have to grab the moment. You really have to ride the wave of the big controversies, and understand what's newsworthy at any given time and take advantage of it.

CAROLE FRAMPTON
My name is Carole Frampton from Search for Common Ground. I want to just add one small thing. To say, in terms of strategies for success—We hired someone whose job is to get the stories out to the newspaper. Not to get our name out, but the stories out. And what is interesting even within the organization is that this person is coming from a different field. And that's a challenge even within our own internal culture, to have this kind of hard-core journalist or communication person coming from this softy, process kind of organization. And we have also a media arm, but you have to go and work with people like that, and accept the challenge, and accept that they will not necessarily say things the way we would say them, and not work necessarily the way we work, but there are clear strategies that exist, and professionals to do it, and we use them.

ELAINE SHEN
I'll make this quick because I know we're running out of time. All of you are out there doing work, and I just want to humbly put forward that film can be a powerful tool to help you do your work. It can be a methodology that you choose. You can choose human-rights-based training. You can choose civil rights technology or you can do something that's film-based, and that's what my organization does.

I've been listening the last couple of hours, and I've heard Jed talk about The Breakfast Club, I've heard people talk about Thirteen Days—the Cuban Missile Crisis—Erin Brockovich, allusions to PBS.

And, sure, you can make a distinction between films like, I don't know, Exit Wounds [laughter] or Under Siege as opposed to documentary films or films that really make you think. And we tend to work more with documentary films, and that's the niche of the culture, but it can be something where you build an event around the drama media. And that's what's happened to a lot of our collaborators, is that as they work with film, and Len and Libby have worked with "Promises" which some of you might know about, which won the Academy Award.

I think about the way that film has affected me, and it shames me. Like Boys Don't Cry. I didn't even know about that crime until I heard about that movie. And I'm thinking, "Why didn't I know about it?" It took a Hollywood film to make me think about that.

HARRIS SOKOLOFF, University of Pennsylvania
High school students often have video courses and video clubs. If you're looking for people to engage and learn about what you're doing, they could do that as a Senior Project, perhaps. This is a practical way— of getting a video done and introducing some high school kids to the process of dialogue and deliberation.

I've been working with the Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board for 6 years, and every Sunday they have a community voices page. And every time now that we have an election in Pennsylvania or Philadelphia, the Inquirer does a citizen's voices project, which gets citizens to identify issues.

The key is, as Cole said, that the newsroom comes not to cover the event, but to learn the way that citizens are talking about things and to incorporate that into the way that they think about reporting. There is however a caution. If the news reporters believe that that's the perspective they bring, then you really need to talk to them about what they're about to see, about what might be the appropriate way. Often in dialogues and deliberations citizens try on ideas. What you don't want is to have someone quoted with an idea they haven't tried on yet. You've got to work with the reporting staff to understand what's going on so that they can enter into the sense of the work you're doing, rather than trying to find where there's blood on the floor.

LARS TORRES
One of the things that I learned from AmericaSpeaks in New York City was that the media picked up on the event, and the novelty, if you will; that there were 4,000 citizens impacting a public decision-making process, and that that was the box. And the story that wasn't covered and I don't think gets covered in a lot of these individual stories that we have when we talk about media success, is the larger process we're contributing to; the process of democratic renewal.

That story two million eyeballs did not see in all of this global press coverage about Listening to the City. We're partly to blame for that because we didn't prep our communications people; we didn't have a paragraph in our press release that really spotlighted— We're just a part of this big groundswell that's going on and we want you folks to start looking at that groundswell. And so I think that each of us, as we go out, we should think about, what's a coordinated way we can also discuss this bigger story that we're contributing to?

MARGARET ANDERSON
I'm Margaret Anderson, and I work for the Touchstone Discussions Project, and I work with students. About 250,000 students think together an hour a week, on different topics, teach discussion skills, and respect each other.

But I think it's a visual story! I think we can read about this story and it doesn't transfer much; you don't get it. I think it's experiential, and it's hard to get people to show up for the experience. So I think we need some kind of story about all of our stories and what it looks like when people are using dialogue for different purposes. Because I don't think most people know what it is, and I think you need to see it; see people listening and thinking together.

JED MILLER
Len just handed me an Elie Weisel quote that says, "People become the stories they hear, and the stories they tell."

One thing that we're very familiar with from proposal writing, and from pitching, if we pitch, and from editorial meetings is, "Okay, what's the story?" "What's the log line?" "What's the lead?" "What's the mission statement?" "What's the question?" "What's the problem?" "What's the solution that we're offering in this proposal?"

So storytelling is a wonderful model and I think it's a lot less loaded than the word "market." [laughter]

AMITAI ETZIONI
There's a lot of good stuff flying around here. My only feedback is, not everything that is good is a dialogue. Some of you feel that you have the message; the media should take it to the government; the government should do what you tell them. I did it once or twice; it's a fantastic high when it happens—no wonder you want more.

But it is not dialogue. So not everything that is good, desirable, wonderful is dialogue. Dialogue really entails what you just talked about. If you can get people engaged, if you can get emotions, and values opened up to each other. And it takes more than headlines. It's wonderful if CNN recognizes the Palestinian-Israeli dialogue in New York. but that's the icing on the cake. The cake is the dialogue, in which these people hopefully came closer to each other.

Now, one thing which I find helpful—maybe you can tell me what you guys think about that—I frankly used to scoff at role-play. And then I saw one. And I'm sold. Because at the end of this, something stays with you viscerally, which is really in the end what counts.

JED MILLER
Before it turns into the "filtering-out" phase, I just wanted to thank Sandy Hierbacher. Sandy asked me if I had thoughts on a session a couple of weeks ago. This was put together late—you'll notice this is number 54 in the book [laughter]. And thanks for having your nerves touched and for wanting to come talk about it. Thank you for incorporating the panelist listings. And thanks to Dr. Etzioni for coming at the last minute.

This is a tremendously exciting topic so I urge you to seek out your colleagues. And I will try to post a transcript of this on the Web Lab web site, because I think this is raw material for further thinking.