Input on 'Listening' Tool kit for Deep Hanging Out

@Josie Holt you may already have this as it's quite a few of the other docs already, but just in case..

VocalEyes: Enabling community organising (prioritisation, organisation and implementation) and coordinated collective action around social and environmental initiatives on a national/global scale within communities, schools, colleges & other organisations.

Functionality - Overview

VocalEyes contains an extensive toolkit for community organising that includes:

• Local democracy: Generation, prioritisation and debating of ideas.

• High impact solutions repository (DNA): Enabling stakeholders within communities of similar types (i.e. pupils in schools, staff in local authorities, residents in geographic communities), to discover, adapt and replicate the best solutions and case studies implemented by similar communities around the world.

• Participatory budgeting: Open and transparent budgets with income & expenditure transactions and evidence of need from the community.

• Motion voting: Time limited voting on policies and procedures.

• Crowdsourcing: Pledging time and resources into teams and projects.

• Action planning: Creating tasks, due dates and assigning to members.

• Events: Setting up events, managing attendees and logging meeting notes.

• News: Generating blog posts to promote news stories and case studies of ideas into action.

• Custom automated reports: Enabling reports with member priorities, pledges and other activity to be sent to specific people in specific departments and locations to help close the feedback loop.
  
  More info: https://about.vocaleyes.org or [email protected]
  

There is of course the Empathy Circle, and the Empathy Cafe.


1. What is an Empathy Circle? http://bit.ly/EC-WhatIs

2. Why Participate?    http://bit.ly/EC-Benefits

3. How to Empathy Circle?   http://bit.ly/EC-How

4. Empathy Circle Facilitator Training http://bit.ly/EC-Facilitate

Endorsed by Jonathan Pie. https://www.facebook.com/EmpathyCenter/videos/2379787935570024/

And list of Dialogue and Deliberation Practices from
National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation
https://sites.google.com/site/thechangehandbook/samples/dialogue-and-deliberation

Resource Guide on Public Engagement
http://www.ncdd.org/files/NCDD2010_Resource_Guide.pdf

Yes, that one is very much on my radar. Thank you for your work and for introducing me to it x

Hi Josie, World Cafe and Open Space Technology are two very basic formats that can be very useful, depending on the context and how they are framed. Both of them definitely support "deep hanging out".

And, while they are indeed "basic", there is also an art and a skill to using them. Each of these processes has extensive learning communities online. One of the most useful things you might do, is encourage/offer some "Art of Hosting" trainings, which is a process where people can learn these methods experientially, and more.

A third approach, Dynamic Facilitation, (DF for short) is a particular process for "deep hanging out" that can be particularly useful when we are in need of collaborative and creative problem-solving in face of a shared issue. It requires more active involvement on the part of the facilitator, and is ideally useful for a group of 25 or so.

And, it also has time-tested large-group applications; a small group (either stakeholders or sortition based can work) does a "deep dive" with DF support, then shares their findings as the catalyzing "input" to a much larger conversation, which can be held with a Public Assembly or a World Cafe process. This specific model, now called "Citizens' Council" in English and "Vorarlberg Bürgerrat" in German, has been used often in Germany and Austria and has worked very well there.

Note: I don't know anything about their XR chapters, I am speaking more broadly about the work of their public engagement practitioners. Just like most Citizens' Assemblies have been carried out by public engagement practitioners, so have Citizens' Councils. However, as a smaller, leaner, and more cost-effective format, they are a good one for community organizers to know about.

Great ideas. I'd appreciate more basic language without abbreviations and jargon ☺️🙏

Don't quite understand the request. These are the names that these processes go by; the intention of including their formal names is to help people find more information about them. For example, here is the main website for The World Cafe. And here is the website for The Art of Hosting. If there are any specific terms you would like to have clarified, am happy to help. I did use an abbreviation for Dynamic Facilitation (DF) have attempted to clarify above.

It was sortition and DF that confused me 🙂

Thanks so much for clarifying, Nadia... yep, sortition is not a frequently-used word outside of deliberative democracy circles. Sometimes people use "random selection" which may be more easily understood yet it can sound like just picking someone up off the street! 🙂 So maybe "scientific random selection" could be a better choice of words... others are proposing "chosen by lottery". There's actually a major conversation going on within deliberative democracy circles, about how to best language this, so any input you might offer would be most helpful...

Josie Holt 

I see empathic listening/active listening as a basic foundational skill and mindset. It is like a basic building block that can be built on and helps people tap into their basic human capacity to listen to each other. It's bit of a crutch for bringing listening into hierarchical, fearful,  judgmental, low-listening based cultures that we live in.

Carl Rogers refined the active listening process and many, many people have built on the basics of empathic listening. So there are many process that have this as a foundational component.  Here is a the beginning of a list of practices with links. http://j.mp/2vpfabF

Being a Deep Listener
* Counseling and Coaching
* Person Centered Therapy (Carl Rogers)
* Focusing (Gene Gendlin)
* Peer Counseling
* Empathy Circles (Edwin Rutsch)
* Motivational Interviewing (William Miller)
* Non Violent Communications (Marshall Rosenberg
* Imago Relationships Therapy (Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt)
* Thomas Gordon Training (Thomas Gordon)
* etc, etc

Conflict Mediation
* Conflict Resolution and Mediation Practices
* Restorative Circles (Dominic Barter)

Facilitation
* Dynamic Facilitation DF (Jim Rough and Rosa Zubizarreta)

Design
Empathic Design (Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking)

Empathic Direct Action

The empathic listening can be included into
* Peoples Assemblies
* Democracy Building Practices
* Open Space,
* World Cafe (was one of my inspirations for Empathy Circles.)
* Etc.

 

The first two links don't seem to work 🤔