How should engagement professionals respond to the tragedy in Newtown?

[Steven Clift]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Sandy Heierbacher" <sa...@ncdd.org>
Date: Dec 19, 2012 6:07 AM
Subject: [DW-X] How should engagement professionals respond to the tragedy in Newtown?
To: "exchange" <exch...@groups.dowire.org>

Hi, everyone.  I just wanted to send a quick message to the list inviting all of you to participate in a collaborative workspace (on Hackpad) created to help innovators in dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement explore together how we might respond to the tragedy in Newtown.  We're sharing resources, exploring how to name and frame the issue(s), talking about what it would take to organize a high-quality national discussion, and more.

I'll paste below a post I shared on the NCDD site that includes some more detail, but you can chime in right away by joining us at www.bit.ly/natdial if you're interested.

We have a lot of discussion about Friday's tragedy happening on our main listserv (http://ncdd.org/rc/item/2624), but but the conversation our community needs to have right now is bigger than the listserv can handle smoothly, and I hope we can make the Hackpad work as an alternative, open space for our community to engage, share resources, make specific offerings and, hopefully, find some ways to move forward quickly.

We've got some good discussion going on the Hackpad site, and I'd love to see some of you taking part.

Sandy Heierbacher
Director, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation
sa...@ncdd.org  www.ncdd.org  @ncdd & @heierbacher


How should the D&D community respond to the crisis in Newtown?
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Posted by Sandy Heierbacher  |  December 18th, 2012

In collaboration with Newtown, Connecticut resident and NCDD member Ben Roberts, NCDD has created a space on Hackpad where we can talk about last Fridays tragedy and how our community might respond.

Our community is buzzing with conversation (and opinion!) about what WE can do in light of this crisis

Can we offer facilitation support to organizations in Newtown?
Can we organize a national dialogue on issues that have emerged from this crisis?  and what are the right issues to engage people around?  (Gun law? Mental health services? School safety? Reducing violence in our society?)
What do we already know about running national dialogues?
What resources already exist that people can put to use immediately?
What contributions are people willing to make now?

Weve set up the workspace at www.bit.ly/natdial to encourage people in the NCDD community to discuss these questions and more in an open, organized format (thats super-easy to use, I promise!).  Just login using your Facebook or Google account (or email), look over the directory page to see where youd like to start, and begin adding your comments and responding to what others are saying.  We have quite a good discussion going already  so please join in!

Im especially interested in using this moment to encourage us to think about how we can equip our community to respond quickly and effectively to crises like this in the future.  I hope we can think together about the infrastructure NCDD and others need to be building to enable us to respond together to future crises that cry out for dialogue in a timely, productive, and meaningful way.

The conversation our community needs to have is bigger than the listserv can handle smoothly, and I hope we can make the Hackpad work as an alternative space for our community to engage and, hopefully, find some ways to move forward.  All those involved in dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement (even those who arent NCDD members) are welcome to join us!



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[Montgomery, Leigh]

Greetings: 

Happy New Year to everyone. 

If you or anyone you know of research or a study about the role of local media in response to a crisis such as an extreme weather event or other extraordinary circumstance, please let me know.  

This is for a social science librarians boot camp panel about responding to extremes of all kinds and we wanted to have the media ecosystem be a component.  We are interested in finding someone who might be able to speak about this on Friday, June 7. 

Many thanks for considering this - 

Leigh 

--
Leigh Montgomery
Librarian
The Christian Science Monitor
210 Massachusetts Ave. P02-30
Boston, MA  02115  U.S.A.
617.450.2682
montg...@csmonitor.com

The MONITOR is global: in practice and in spirit
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