First impressions: after the conference

I’m at the airport gate again, trying to still the voices inside my head – voices that I had heard over the past three days at the National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation. David Messerschmidt, one of my advisors, is taking the same flight back, and we have talked a little about what we got out of the experience. Here’s my first take on the advice and ideas that I was exposed to:

• Learn and start by just doing it, starting with a content management system and by connecting online via commenting on similar blogs. Feasibility analyses are only good up to a point.
• Incorporate storytelling and non-written communication when talking about policy issues (i.e., don’t be such a wonk, and make it more accessible at the same time).
• Possibly use existing online deliberation tools in order to add depth to the site (i.e., don’t just present the views, but allow and encourage constructive engagement).
• There may be value to such a broad trans-partisan resource, because almost all existing issues guides (if used at all in a deliberation process) are static and necessarily issue-specific.
• The cornerstone of the website must be the trust of users, based upon the integrity of authors to be genuinely trans-partisan.
• There are efforts at online policy-issue tools or other deliberation tools that could be adapted to policy use, but still no prominent website out there that is trying the same approach:
• web2.0, user-generated-content technologies
• broad range of topics
• easy to access and compare viewpoints
• goal of being engaging and entertaining
• flexibility to add local-level or situationally-specific content

I’m sure more will come to me over the coming weeks, as I take down more notes from the conference and as I’m talking with more people and writing the short research paper.