Dialogue for a More Inclusive Democracy

About democracy, inclusion, and communication in a changing populus

A consideration of terms

            A populus is an aggregation of people. Here we will speak mostly, for example, of the people of a nation or state. That is the people of a geographic area which they consider "theirs."  This is not a necessary condition and you may live to note that the geographic condition is less important. 

            Communication includes talk. Talk, especially live face to face talk, is a powerful mode of communication. Print and other media are also a powerful ways of  communicating of a different sort, different because it can effect a great number of people at a time. However, media is less power than face to face talk because it lacks many of the qualities of face to face talk.  Much talk may be carried on between two persons. That talk can be very powerful for them, but may have little effect beyond them. Conversation and  discussion are powerful means of communication for a few persons if is broadcasted by media its power is multiplied. Still live, face to face talk can be the most effective. The talk called dialogue can be carried on effectively with as many as 30 or 40 persons at a time. I believe that it is worth our while to learn more about dialogue.

            Inclusive talk is a useful sort of communication which includes you and me and others who may be different from you or from me or from both of us. When the group talk is a democratic and inclusive dialogue group that group can be satisfying and powerful.

            A dialogue group like this forms a place and time for members to have a more equal opportunity to speak and be heard. Much meaningful understanding as well as respect and friendship can develop in such a group. Dialog groups are usually made up of face to face groups from about three to about thirty individual because groups such size often prove effective and successful.

               Democracy is a word used to describe a ruling or governing group. It indicates that those who govern and rule are the people. Democracy can exist with a great number of limitations. An inclusive democracy is one that attempts to limit the limitations. One limitation has been the limitation to a specified area. For example, a city, state, or country, or a city state like ancient Athens or modern Singapore. "Demo" can refer to the people of Singapore, China, or your group. Among us and others the people of a group are citizens.

Citizen is another limiting word. Just because one lived in a specific area did not make him a citizen there. Slaves could not belong to the ruling group, Infants could not be citizens. Sometimes felons were barred from citizenship. So  among us a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people were limited to citizenship.

            These are terms understood in many dialogue groups. There may be other terms which it would be helpful to define, but this handful makes a good start for now.

            This little essay may turn out to be longer than I anticipated. I may consider publishing it in parts. I tend to feel more comfortable with works of only four or five pages. I will almost certainly publish this work at my blog Dialogue With RCS; here there already more than 50 essays on "dialogue" published you may benefit by checking them out.

            Dialogue groups can be used for a variety of purposes, including, as a parlor game. Here I am considering them as a useful and probably vital tool of democratic governance. Democratic governance seems to be my principle theme here.

            So, Inclusivity is implied by democracy so inclusivity is a guiding principle for democratic dialogue groups and all democratic activities. I like the idea that inclusivity implies some interesting variety. That variety may also be an empowering factor of such groups. Expect your awareness of the value of diversity in our democratic processes ton grow.

            An important purpose of the dialogue group I speak of is to provide a safe space and place for the people of these groups to speak. They are made safe from interruption, but are also spaces where appropriate trust can develope, where we get to know one another, where friendship can develop. They are a place where respectful communication is nurtured. However, they are also a place where everyone is not always on the same page. Sometimes a completely new page turns up and we do some interesting learning. Being in a nurturing atmosphere is good, but variety can be the healthy and interesting spice of life.

             The power of a dialogue group is in its ability to support effective democratic governance. The facilitate inclusive democracies by providing productive platforms for a greater number and a greater variety of people to support the stable governance of those democracies. More of the involved voices are heard listened to, heard, and understood and all come to better understand their situation and condition. These groups form a safe and open space where individuals from diverse backgrounds can come together to engage in meaningful communication. They can come to be in a place where at they can come to make good and better decisions and perhaps make them mutually. Through the dialogue, participants can share their perspectives, experiences, and concerns, allowing  for a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand. This inclusive approach ensures that the discussion-making process takes into account the needs and intersects of al citizens, of all members of society.

Education, learning, awareness, in accord with the realities of our community

            We have learning to do. Practice helps. Education and a willingness to be a more aware heps. Recognizing democratic processes is important. Active engagement in democratic processes and and practice in carrying them out is important. Showing up is a great start and a great follow through. We learn best where and when the most voices are heard. Heard one at a time so that we hear them well. Inclusivity and diverse perspectives are valuable reality check.

            In our dialogue groups the comfort of a group in which a most members are of very similar views, beliefs, and background is in an unstable dream world in groups interested in governance. We want the reality and actuality of the society to have representation. That is an important approach is to ensure that the composition of the group reflects the diversity reality of the citizen population. We want to have a group which is as representative of, for example, our town as we can. So, probably some seeking out and invitations may be called for. y including a range of perspectives, our group can better understand and address the realities of our community of interest.

            We want a safe just and realistic ambient for our dialogue group. This involves establishing ground rules which promote respectful and open communication, Where participants can feel comfortable sharing their experiences and opinions. It can be and should be arranged  that each and every member have equal opportunities to be heard. It is important to maintain an environment where participants feel empowered to express themselves with fear of negative judgement or reprisal. At best the oral offering(Speach)  of each member ought to be welcomed as a pressesh gift.

            Dialogue groups can provide a platform for marginalized voices, underrepresented citizens, and persons new to the political conversation of the society. They can better learn the nature of the democratic process in their larger community and learn how to be heard their. The participatory democracy we speak of here aims to involve citizens in the decision-making process. Our dialogue groups can help address power imbalances and promote inclusivity in the process of governance.

The nature of a politically oriented dialogue group

            Politics is not always a bad word.

                So, we can see that our dialogue can be an important way of taking care of ourselves together. Taking care of ourselves together can be called democratic governance.

                Such dialogue is best when it is inclusive. Awareness of the importance and value of diversity in our democratic process needs to be kept high in our minds. As should keeping a safe space available in which to nurture  open and respectful conversation. We profit greatly by maintaining a platform whereat  our voices can be heard. In this space individuals from diverse backgrounds can come together in meaningful conversation. They can begin to share perspectives, experiences, and concerns, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of the issues at hand.

            This inclusive approach can be vital to ensuring that this transformative journey plays a crucial role in bringing us to a decision-making process which leads to action that is to our lasting benefit. Inclusion promotes social cohesion and well functioning communities. Inclusive dialogue can foster empathy, mutual understanding, and more effective action. Such dialogue groups contribute to system change that embraces and supports participation in the working of democracy. Our participation in democracy through dialogue groups creates an environment  wherein diverse voices  are heard, understood, and valued. Open dialogue and inclusive decision-making lead to the useful actions of a democratic society.

            As we have come to see from our experience and the essays on this blogsite that listening to learn and understand rather than plotting your fascinating response is a valuable practice. Active, fully present, attentive listening provides much of the value in the dialogue we are speaking of.  Through such listening we gain deeper insight into the views and sentiments of our fellows. We come to a more useful understanding of the implications behind their words. You come to be clearly and usefully heard by others in the group as come to more clearly hear and understand them. Empathy among group members improves.

            As your group experience continues, group collaboration improves, group dynamics shift for the better. Members find better ways of blending their ideas with those of other members. Your journey into meaningful self-governance is part of your growth and of the development of your community. You are sowing seeds of collective responsibility together.

            It is good to remember that democracy is less an destination and more an ongoing journey. It happens in our day to day doing of talk, decisions, and actions. It is an ongoing doing. It can be fueled by curiosity, learning, and understanding. It can be helped a lot by your understanding of and practice of the dialogue you are being introduced to at this blogsite. 

            Thank you for reading.

                                                                                    Richard

Who Is Interested in Interacting With This Site?

                I will ramble on a bit longer here but it seems it is getting close to time to shut down Dialogue With RCS for lack of interest. The site has been up for over two years and is averaging only about 400 views a month and in that time I have only been contacted once. I incorrectly expected more exchanges with readers and perhaps some "How to" questions.

            I will keep you informed about my intentions. It may be useful for me to move some of this site to the Governance With RCS site. The Dialogue is an important part of governance and taking care of ourselves together.

Another Ramble Into Dialogue Practice:

            This piece seems to be mostly about what the dialogue is and a little about why I find it interesting and a bit about other stuff. I do not intend to say anything about how to practice the dialogue today. How is a big topic in which it seems few are interested.

           The what of the dialogue is that it can be a good way to meaning and understanding, shared meaning and understanding. It can be about kinds of peace, basketball, relationships, or whatever we like. These days I am interested in dialogue about taking care of ourselves together. I call that governance.

            However, The Dialogue is about effective dialogue. It is not complicated, but it does take practice. There are skills to practice, rules to integrate, and good practices to practice.

            In the practice you can find humor, fun, smiles, some laughter. You can also find satisfaction and new skills. You can find empowering meaning and understanding. Perhaps you can find companionship and co-operation. You may find yourself maintaining culture or even creating culture. You will get to know your practice companions better.

            It can be a supporting and strengthening process, and you do most of it with just the support of your group. I see it something like an adult primary and secondary school with no kindergarten. I can be much faster, but we find that we often have to learn one thing before we learn another.

            The practice includes the development of listening skills that helps us to a more useful understanding of our practice companions, ourselves, and the human world. Our developing listening skills bring more and more meaning and understanding into our lives. We begin to find satisfaction and joy by partaking of this kind of democratic talk. The practice may even let more peace and abundance into one's life.

            The dialogue includes being listened to. I the dialogue we can be heard. Speaking of being heard, the dialogue is communion among a group of individuals. It is not a monologue. For me to advance understanding of the dialogue I need a lot of ongoing feedback. I need to know you better to write to you better. I want to write about the dialogue in more detail, more systematically, in ways more appropriate to your wants, needs, and interests. The topic is broad and and can be deep.

            I often see the dialogue as a democratic stream of meaning flowing among us and through us. Still the dialogue can be much like a parlor game that most of can enjoy and still be a meaningful practice. Even as a parlor game there can be stream of growing meaning and understanding flowing among us which might not notice or give a conscious thought to. Still that flow of meaning and understanding created by us energizes new and meaningful understanding among us.

         

            The shared meaning we create with our dialogue is a force which helps us to more peaceful and meaningful families and relationships, helps us to co-operate locally more effectively, and helps us to more healthy societies nations. and to a more useful, resistant, and meaningful culture. 

The Dialogue is Not:    

~ the analysis found in discussion nor is it an effort to persuade anyone

~ an attempt to gain points.

~ an attempt to make any particular point prevail.

            This dialogue practice is a safer, more useful way to honestly share meaning, experience, 0pinion, assumption, and understanding. And this little essay is headed for more ramble. I hope it will turn out to be useful ramble through some valuable orientation and information.

            I hope that you have begun to suspect that the dialogue is likely to hold benefits for you. I believe that it has a variety of benefits for a variety of individuals. One can be surprised to find that a single minute they have to express an opinion of theirs to an attentive groups has real value for them. They are please to know that there can be many such minutes. Others feel there is important benefit in having the words they express are listen to heard with the intention of understanding. Others feel that the knowledge that each will have and equitable opportunity to be heard and that all will have equal opportunity to be heard. All of this can happen in the first grade.

            We all may come to appreciate the benefits in learning and practicing listening skills. Nearly all can benefit practicing speaking skills. Others are gaining hearing and understanding skills, and benefiting.

            All benefit and are please that many are gaining skills at expressing themselves at an extraordinary level of honesty. 

            Others  may feel that they benefit just by learning to accept that which another says is valuable information. Accepting it as valuable not necessarily for being true or something to be believed. But seeing it rather as a representation of another's opinion, interpretation, or experience. That is as a way to a deeper understanding of another whose opinions are very different from one's own.

            Individuals benefit in a variety of individual ways. For me and others a great benefit seems to center on a flow of meaning which begins to flow through a practice group. That flow can lead to a kind of thinking together in face of great differences discovered in a group. That sort of thinking together is sometimes very powerful, perhaps more powerful than the sum of that of all individual inputs

The Practice Calls For Your Effort:

    You will need to work the practice to gain your benefits. Listening, hearing, understanding call for your attention and more. Showing up and keeping appropriate silence take effort. Co-operating with your fellow dialoguers may be a pleasure, but also calls for effort. Learning the mechanics of this dialogue takes effort which may be called work.

            You can gain certain skills and understandings. You may gain some shared meaning and culture. Showing up may be a bit of a job. But there are more advantages. You can gain word power and voice projection. It is possible to gain a more peaceful and meaningful life. Some improve their use of a language which is not their own.

            This is about all the ramble in can handle today.

        If  you have an idea for practicing dialogue online, please share it. Remember, members must recognize each other and begin to know each other. You may use the "comments" app below.

            Their are other dialogue posts to explore at this site. You are welcome to explore them.

            Thanks for going on this ramble.

                                                                                                rcs

        

             

Dialogue Groups

 Dialogue  Practice Is  

      

It can look like a parlor game:               

 It is not about dice or pairs it is a lot about group communication. There is a bit to learn. It may seem like a parlour game and it is a little like that and there is some fun in it, but it can have a much bigger payoff. 

                Our dialogue talk is designed to create areas of coherence in the vastness of misunderstanding. Often a major benefit of our dialogue is to give us a better chance to experience the power of collectively shared meaning which we have created. Most ordinary talk in our society may be called incoherent. To learn to do our dialogue talk, takes ongoing practice. This practice we have called Dialogue for Peace, Magic Table Dialogue, and just The Dialogue. The Dialogue has rules which call for practice. The rules need not be rigid, but they do call for practice which is important. 

It can be a worthy effort:                

The Dialogue is aimed at learning to think together coherently. Thinking together coherently calls for sustained practice. An early practice may be called a listening practice, but calls for some use of your voice as well as of your ears and mind. Thinking together is both satisfying and a great power.  We believe that it is well worth the effort.

                This thinking together is a learning and growth process. It occurs on various levels of consciousness. It occurs in one, in mental talk to one's self, or even on unspoken levels. We could just say that a lot of learning goes on in dialogue practice.

                Make comments below. I respect suggestions and am grateful for them.
Suggestions about how the dialogue might be done online can benefit us.
You may place whatever you have to say in the "Comment" area below anonymously, with a pen name, or just your regular name.

                   Search this blog with one of the several avenues of search available in the side  columns. 

 

                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                      RCS

Dialogue Groups: First Moves

                 Having read other posts on this blog you may have begun to think that you want to start a a dialogue practice group. You may even have the beginnings of such a group. You may have begun to consider the purpose of such a group. Maybe you have had thoughts of sharing thoughts about the nature of groups in general or about the nature of a dialogue practice group. Or, maybe not. Even so, Let me make some suppositions.

                You may decide to come together with two or more interested persons as the beginnings of a pilot group. You decide when and where to meet and if others ought to be invited.You propose to come together to discuss the nature of your proposed dialogue practice and practice group.                 

                 You do actually meet and decide to meet again! At this second meeting you might decide decide to have a seminar or two about dialogue and dialogue practice. You fix a date. You may decide to invite a couple of more prospective members. Deciding to come together to talk about the dialogue is a big step. You have begun to create a power nexus. If power nexus does not sound right, try energy center. As an aunt of mine used to say, "Beginning is the half of it."

                You can begin to to consider together how you want your dialogue practice group to look. It could be useful to visit a library or go online to do some focused checking  about the nature of dialogue and dialogue practice. A couple of members could volunteer to this and report to the group at the next meeting. Another member could review the info here on this blog.

                It is probably time to set a regular meeting time an place. Certainly at each meeting the time a place of the next meeting ought to be clear to each and every member. The purpose of the next meeting should be known and discussed at the present meeting. In fact the purpose and the nature of your meetings ought to be mentioned at each meeting. Another important action for present meetings perhaps ought to be to outline the look and nature of your intended dialogue practice.

                Those deciding to continue to meet may volunteer to come with recommendations of videos, books, and online resources related to the dialogue and its practice. Others might decide that they can share at a meeting that which they have in mind about the practice. At this point you are on your way to having an effective practice group.

                The next meeting might be about how you will actually practice. It might seem right to discuss how the practice ought to look or feel and of why it ought to look and feel that way. It may be right to recall together that which brings you together. Also some sharing about what it is that keeps your group together, to say what makes it fun and useful.

                Some members may decide that the group is not for them. It may be time for some active recruitment. 

                You can find more about the benefits of the practice in other posts on this blog. The posts are here on this blog for your use. I believe I have recommended a couple of books in posts on this blog. You can find some hints about how to practice on posts here. You can find a few simple and important rules to practice and perhaps a law or two.

                Expect to begin to feel the growth in your common understanding of groups, the dialogue, and of the dialogue practice. You will become ready to develop your actual practice. You will want to continue returning to your common understanding of how to keep your group and practice effective. It may be time to consider your recruitment plans and activities. I suggest that you continue recruiting so long as you have fewer than 30 or 40 active members.

                 I have a plan for the structure of a dialogue practice which I will lay out when their is interest.

                Are you pleased to be sharing thoughts about the dialogue with your group? Are you ready for your group to to begin actual practice? What needs to be done to get to where you want to be?

                I expect to add, on the average, one post a month to this blog. I will post more if specific interests are expressed. So there will be more about methods, goals, benefits, and answers to specific questions. 

                I feel I have rambled on about enough for now. So I will close now with a few words about what the practice is.

                 The practice is a way to meaning, understanding, coherence, peace, and to new skills and satisfactions. Its new, but its old. Others around the world are practicing it. They are practicing, learning, and developing powerful and pleasing new skills and abilities.

                I have not been as clear as I wished and may have raised more questions and been less clear than I hoped to be. Please help me to clarify this post and correct errors. There is a "comments" section below where you can add information, ask questions, make suggestions, and comment. The place to click to open the comments section may read "no comments," click on it anyway.

 

 

                                                    RCS