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World Cities Dialog
Until recently, the World Cities Dialog was an LA Area Nuclear Disarmament Dialog. In its new incarnation, the dialog promotes people to people peace and friendship between the cities of the world. Nuclear disarmament continues as an important theme of the dialog, and where it can, the dialog will support and strengthen existing Sister Cities relationships.
Here is a link to Join or Visit the dialog. The plan is to start up the World Cities Dialog as an LA / Tehran exchange, and then rapidly expand to include all the 3100+ Mayors for Peace cities. The dialog software has a voting-on-messages feature - more details below. We will use Facebook and Twitter to recruit at least one participant from each of the Mayors for Peace Cities and together elect a "Message from the Cities of the World" to the 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Conference to be held in Vienna next May.
By starting with Los Angeles and Tehran we give the dialog newsworthiness from day one, which will help with recruiting participants. LA and Tehran it turns out are both on the Mayors for Peace roster, and, surprisingly, they are Sister Cities as well, though the Sister Cities link has been dormant since 1979. Moreover, the huge Iranian population in Los Angeles makes the relationship very real with many people in LA having relatives in Tehran.
By focusing on peace and friendship, on nuclear disarmament, which is a shared goal of Tehran and Los Angeles, and on Sister Cities kinds of topics, such as arts, culture, sports and trade, the dialog will provide moral support for the people of Tehran without getting into the political issues raised by the June election outcome in Iran.
More about the World Cities Dialog Introduction
The World Cities Dialog
uses an innovative voting-on-messages technology called InterMix Group
Dialog software. An InterMix dialog proceeds in rounds, with each round having three phases: 1) the writing of candidate messages, 2) discussion of the candidates messages in a forum, and 3) the rating of the candidates to elect a message for the round.
The long run plan is to continue to expand the dialog to include rural areas as well as cities. The World Cities Dialog is a prototype, an experiment in participatory democracy on the web aimed at massively involving "We the People of the Earth" and leading to the formation of a nonviolent bottom-up voice of humanity with influence and perhaps eventually a "Global Assembly" with real power to build a world that works for everyone.
The Los Angeles / Tehran dialog will grow into a Mayors for Peace network and elect a message from the Cities of the World to the May 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Conference. This should prove the concept and get us moving towards a full scale process with 10's or 100's of millions of participants. The process can scale, so this is all doable with a reasonable budget.
The Dialog is sponsored by the Unity-and-Diversity World Council. We are co-sponsored by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics in Malibu. Additional co-sponsors are wanted.
Democracy on a global scale is the solution to the ever more obvious shortcomings of the nation-state system. We love our nations, but we have to rise up to the global level to solve global problems. Unifying mankind, if we do it right, will mark the beginning of a golden age – and it is in our reach.
In More Detail
The World Cities Dialog process is designed for the exchanging of messages between groups online. The focus is on the group level message exchange, not on the exchange of messages between individuals.
In the World Cities Dialog, topics are provided and each member of the group responds, adding his or her comments to the dialog. These messages are voted upon and the message that the group rates highest is put forward. Here's how it works:
- Members of the group write "candidate" messages either on a preset topic or on their own topic if so desired.
- The members rate the candidates on two scales, for interest and approval, and the highest rated message wins that "round" and is delivered to the other group(s) as an expression of the authoring group - this is what is meant by "group level" message exchange. To determine the highest rated message, we multiply average interest times average approval for each message and compare. Elected messages are therefore both interesting and approved. Because there are normally very many messages, there is preliminary rating to bring the numbers down for the final runoff.
Click here for even more complete detail. A discussion forum brings individual message exchange into the process, but the focus is on the exchange of messages between groups.
The Dialog alternates between unity and diversity rounds using the Eaton Model of Collective Communication . In the unity rounds, everyone cooperates to elect a single message. In the diversity rounds, the separate groups each elect their own message. The prototype World Cities Dialog will begin with a three round dialog between Los Angeles and Tehran.
Dialog Expectations
The theme of the Dialog is how to build "a world that works for all." Humanity, we believe, is composed largely of intelligent and generous human beings who already agree it is past time to get on with the job. The missing ingredient is the common awareness that we, the people of the world, are already united. Consciousness of that unity is an important part of what the Dialog will provide.
The structure of the Dialog gives the advantage to those who want to work together for our common peace and prosperity in a well-sustained natural environment. The hardliners are faced with the difficult choice of either staying away, in which case they lose influence entirely, or participating, in which case they are effectively endorsing human unity and will feel the pressure every day to moderate their views. Therefore we, the Dialog proponents, are in the enviable position of being entirely inclusive in our attitude. If you are not against us, you are for us!
Electing a message is a unifying activity. Elected messages become doubly important, first because, by the nature of the rating system, they are highly approved and interesting but also because we realize that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone has read these messages. In other words, the top rated messages have reached collective consciousness. They are shared messages, and as such leap ahead of the other messages in everyone's imagination. We get everyone on the same page in a very literal way, thus encouraging the groups to self-coordinate. At some point we will have enough participation so the whole world will be reading the messages elected by humanity. That will be such powerful PR for the global perspective that all the media money and hardliner spin-machines in the world will not be able to dent our impact.
Moreover, the highly rated messages will consistently express love and wit, because these core attributes are what all the world appreciates. As we see generous, intelligent and good-humored messages prevail again and again, our sense of trust will grow, and our feelings for the "other" in general will be uplifted. This effect will take hold within our developing movement and raise our spirits from the start, giving us the energy to go global in a big way. Along these lines, see the wonderful results of a Jewish-Muslim dialog using an earlier version of the technology.
Finally we should consider the effect of participation on the participants. The continued alternation of viewpoint from the unity perspective to the separate group perspective and back should prove highly educational. Because the framework of the dialog itself guarantees the separate group identities, the participants can ardently promote unity in the unity phase without feeling any sense of disloyalty to their separate group. And it works the other way about as well, where the participants can whole-heartedly promote the welfare of the separate groups in the diversity phase without thereby betraying their common humanity.
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