To the Other Most Liberal City: there's no debate

I confirmed today that I'm headed for the 2006 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation in that great liberal bastion, San Francisco. When Prof. Mark Long, my faculty advisor for this summer research, heard that I was thinking of going, his words of advice were to take what I hear there with a grain of salt (more like with a salzbergwerk).

I'm actually pretty excited about going there. The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DCC) sound like the type of organizations that have done some thinking on the potential of online deliberation. The conference itself has a full day workshop devoted to online deliberation tools that I will unfortunately miss, and the DCC has a working group devoted to online deliberation that is starting a blog with a broader, but similar focus to this blog.

I should also mention that John Gastil, a UW Communications professor, is involved with both of these groups, and will be a featured panelist at the conference. Coincidentally, John and I played tennis a few years back without knowing that we would be interested in similar topics, and I recently contacted him as I was looking for a faculty advisor. Small world.