Dotmocracy is a transparent, equal opportunity, and participatory large group decision-making tool. It is a simple method for recognizing points of agreement among a large number of people. Participants write down ideas on specially designed paper forms called Dotmocracy sheets and use pens to fill in one dot per sheet, recording their levels of agreement. The result is a graph-like visual representation of the group’s collective opinion. Note, this is not sticky dot voting like you may be familiar with.

Dotmocracy has been proven to:

• Recognize collective priorities and direction from all participants.
• Engage and empower diverse groups of people.
• Recognize agreement on unique and specific ideas, as well as general and thematic ideas.
• Give an equal voice to even the quietest of participants.
• Help avoid verbal debates and “soap box” style speech-making.
• Support friendly discussions while efficiently leading to practical conclusions.
• Provide fully documented results that can be easily turned into action plans.

We will learn the details of facilitating this technique and apply the tool in a real life scenario, discuss approaches to various challenges and hear stories from Jason’s experience in Venezuelan communal councils, Canadian co-operatives, un-conferences and public consultations.

Jason will be selling b/w copies of his Handbook at a 50% discount of $5. You can download a free PDF of the Handbook and learn more about Dotmocracy at www.Dotmocracy.org

Please join us on September 8 from 6-9pm at OCAD’s sLAB for another lively, engaging and educational session and forward this invitation along to anyone you know who might be interested in attending.

Information and registration at our eventbrite website.

Join Design with Dialogue from 6-9 pm on the second Wednesday of every month at OCAD’s sLab. We are a community of practice who learn together how to lead conversations for meaningful action through participatory design, strategic dialogues and the co-creation of emerging facilitation methods.

August’s session will be hosted by Kaleem Khan and Peter Jones based on the design-friendly practices of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and World Café. Due to interest from last month’s participants, we will move forward with our group’s scenarios (for a near-future Toronto) as triggered by themes from our experiences of recent G20 events.

To address the concern for “What should we do now?”, we’ll use AI to create a positive framework for working together and then gather in a World Café to generate new possibilities for action.

Improv play and drawing are rumored for this session. For newcomers to visual thinking, we introduce approaches to structured and informal sketching to enhance the dialogue with a graphic representation of our conversation.

Please join us for another lively, engaging and educational session and forward this invitation along to anyone you know who might be interested in attending.

Register here at EventBrite.

Thanks to DwD regular James Caldwell for posting a review of our June DwD session on his blog.

James discusses our learning of Appreciative Inquiry…

and the case study we performed on OCAD University’s rebranding exercise.

In each session this year we have explored a pressing issue or question from the group’s experience, or brought to the sessions as a concern for dialogue. Reality handed us a good question after the recent G20 meeting.

We explored ways of framing the concerns we sometimes call “problems.” Impelled by the urgent and messy mix of issues we saw emerging following the G20 security event in Toronto, we inquired into the framing of the situation. What are the opportunities inherent in the problem as constructed? How do we establish and pierce through a problem frame so that the true concerns we share in common might emerge?

Our deck presentation:

A visual reflection from Patricia Kambitsch reveals impressions of the dialogue leading into scenario formation.

In June’s Design with Dialogue we go in-depth with Appreciative Inquiry, a technique for affirmative conversations that lead to shared understanding about situations or goals. The session will be led by Dr. Douglas Reid, a strategy professor at Queen’s University School of Business and graduate student in OCAD’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation MDes program. Appreciative Inquiry,, developed at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s by David Cooperrider, was originated as a practice for coordinating positive dialogues in organizations, and it has emerged as a social design approach over the last few years.

AI built on earlier work conducted by action research theorists and is intended to expand a system’s capacity for cooperation and change potential by aligning members through shared affirmations of what is best, desirable, or cherished in a jointly-faced situation. After briefly outlining the rationale and background of AI, Doug will lead the group through an exploration of a sample problem (created and confirmed by the group) so as to demonstrate the AI technique and show how it expands the potential for cooperation through definition of shared aims or goals.

Doug provides a brief article discussing Appreciative Inquiry that may help participants gain an orientation to the practice and its power in design, organizational inquiry, and social action.

Register today on Eventbrite, and introduce yourself if your first time!

The Presence Workshop is about play and public speaking.  It’s experiential, intensive, and spontaneous; having fun with the serious.  It’s about sensing your self and censoring your self-doubt, because the knowledge you communicate to others is also always felt.  People listen to presence, let’s practice speaking from it.

Roger Martin‘s recent presentation on the subject:

Here’s Humantific‘s perspective: