Fw: The Official Launching of a Leading-Edge Co-Creative Project

Wed Jun 30 17:38:05 PDT 2004

G'day All

Here is an item from my friend Tom Atlee which may evoke your passion -
and participation!

With love

Alan
Adelaide
Co-Intelligence Institute Associate

Dear friends,

The National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation Wiki -- an
unprecedented participatory website.

I have done dozens of hours of work on this project.  I've sent you
little hints that it exists.  And now it has finally been officially
released.

This is a monumental, ongoing co-creative party/project to which any
and all of you are invited.  Together, we are making the world's most
comprehensive resource for participatory, democratic, co-intelligent
practices anywhere on the web.  It will grow deeper and wiser as more
people participate, sharing their knowledge and experience.

Follow Sandy Heierbacher's suggestions, below.  If you want to join
in, give yourself 15-30 minutes to get the hang of editing wiki
pages.  And then there are no limits to what you can do there.

If you know anyone who is interested in group, organizational,
community and democratic process, please let them know about this.
We need all the hands, hearts and minds we can get.  Note also that
this is a fabulous research resource for scholars and students.

Thanks so much for co-creating a world into which this can be born.
As you can tell, I love this project.  I think it will make a
tremendous difference.

Coheartedly,
Tom

_ _ _ _ __ __

From: NCDD Discussion - Sandy Heierbacher <sandy at thataway.org>
Subject: Important message about NCDD's new wiki
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 07:39:07 -0400

Introducing the NCDD Wiki

Wikis are the posterchildren for online collaboration, and the
National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation's new wiki (at
<http://www.wiki-thataway.org>http://www.wiki-thataway.org) is
thriving - before we've even officially launched it.  NCDD members
are already using the wiki to work on projects together, and Tom
Atlee (President of the Co-Intelligence Institute for those of you
who don't know him) has been spearheading several exciting
collaborative projects on the wiki.

Our wiki is open and available for anyone involved in the dialogue &
deliberation community to work together on projects, share ideas and
post information.  A huge thank-you goes to Lucy Perry of InfoVisions
and John Abbe of the Sandhi Institute for making our Wiki a reality.

What is a "wiki"?

Wiki is Hawaiian for "quick," a word that accurately describes the
process for editing pages on a wiki.  Basically, a wiki is a set of
pages on the web that anyone can change.  Anyone can also easily
create new pages on wikis, and they often do.  Most wikis in use
today are used for collaborative group activities.  People write
pages together, often with little regard for who has 'ownership' of
the words.  You can think of a wiki as a book, with dozens to many
thousands of pages and potentially infinite more.  The content of the
pages is limited only by the imagination of the participants, because
everyone can edit everything.  Explore Wikipedia
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_P
age)
for a mind-boggling example of what a single wiki can become.

NCDD's wiki, pre-launch, has 270 pages.  That's more pages than we
have on the rest of thataway.org.

I encourage you to go to
<http://www.wiki-thataway.org>http://www.wiki-thataway.org and do all
of the following things:

1.  Explore.  Click all around the wiki, seeing what's already up.
To see a list of all of the pages in the wiki, hit your enter key
while your cursor is inside the search feature.

2.  Learn how to use the wiki.  Editing pages, adding comments,
creating new pages - all of this is easy.  But people tend to be
afraid they'll mess up.  I'll include some basic instructions below,
but know that even if you delete all 270 pages of the wiki by
accident (which you won't), we can easily get the pages back up.

3.  Create your own home page on the wiki.  By typing your name like
this - BuffySummers - with your first and last names capitalized and
squashed together, you've just created a new page that has your name
as a title.  Then you can add whatever details you want people to
know about yourself, your work, your organization, etc.

4.  Initiate a new topic or project on the wiki, and use this list to
get others involved.

5.  Participate in one of the exciting collaborative projects Tom
Atlee is spearheading on the wiki.  Here are short descriptions of
the three projects Tom considers to be the most compelling.

- PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES - ParticipatoryPractices is the page's name -

Here we have the potential to create the most comprehensive, useful
participatory process resource on the Web.  Already there are almost
200 approaches listed.  Ultimately, with your help, every process any
of us knows about will be described -- with links to websites,
practitioners, books, articles, stories, and analysis of everything
about that process and the conditions for its effective use.  And
since this is a Wiki, all this will continually evolve as we learn
more and as more people's viewpoints are included.

- EXPLORING BASICS OF DIALOGUE AND DELIBERATION - ExploringBasics -

Here we can delve into the underlying and overarching dynamics of our
practice, moving deep into and beyond all specific methodologies.
What are we trying to accomplish with D&D?  What factors make for
success or failure no matter what method we're using?  Can we find
common language and descriptive tools for discussing our efforts,
across our various disciplines?  To these ongoing inquiries we can
all continually contribute our insights and deepening questions, for
the enrichment of one and all.

- PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES ANALYSIS - ParticipatoryPracticesAnalysis -

Here we can delve together into what various methodologies are good
for -- and not good for -- and how we might use them together
synergistically for greater effect.  In combination with the previous
two Wikis, this Wiki dialogue will become a great weaving and mapping
exercise to guide us in connecting up with each other in our
practices and in helping to build the collective capacities of
groups, organizations, communities and whole societies.  Here is
where we find out, together, how it all fits, and how powerful it can
be.

PARTICIPATING IN THE NCDD WIKI

Okay, I'm pretty sure after reading that you want to participate in
the NCDD wiki, so here are some basic rules to get you started:

1.  Adding a comment to an existing page on the wiki.
This is the easiest way to participate in the wiki.  Just scroll to
the bottom of the page you want to add a comment to.  Type your text
into the comment box and click on "submit your comment".  I suggest
adding your name after the comment if you want people to know who it
came from.

2.  Editing an existing page on the wiki.
Maybe you found a typo or want to make things sound a little clearer.
Maybe you disagree with a statement and want to change it in a way
that feels right to you.  Maybe you want to add to a document or
delete something you think shouldn't be there.  All of this is OK -
this is a wiki after all.  Just click on "Edit this Page" at the
bottom of the page you want to change, make your changes and save.

3.  Creating a new page on the wiki.
Find a logical place for your new page to be linked from.  If you're
creating your own home page, add your name to the WikiParticipants
page, for example.  To create a new page, think of a simple, logical
title for the new page, then SmushWordsTogether to create the new
page (making sure the smushed words are all capitalized). Then click
on the question mark that appears after the new TitleName to create
some text for the new page you've just created.

Sounds tricky?  It's absolutely not.  After you try it, you'll know
that.  Instructions on how to edit pages and format text (bold,
italics, etc.) can be found at
http://www.wiki-thataway.org/index.php?page=FormattingRules.
Remember, you are writing directly onto a webpage!  You can play
around in the wiki's SandBox, which is at
<http://www.wiki-thataway.org/index.php?page=SandBox>http://www.wiki-thatawa
y.org/index.php?page=SandBox.

If you have questions, let me know.  I hope to see you all on the wiki!

- Sandy

Sandy Heierbacher
Convenor, The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)
<file://www.thataway.org>www.thataway.org
802-254-7341
sandy at thataway.org

--

________________________________

Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * PO Box 493 * Eugene, OR 97440
http://www.co-intelligence.org *  http://www.democracyinnovations.org
Read THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY *  http://www.taoofdemocracy.com
Please support our work.  *  Your donations are fully tax-deductible.

________________________________

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