Going local to global to local with Duane Elgin

Duane Elgin and his wife, Coleen, visited Amsterdam the last two days, and Friday evening, CommunityIntelligence honored their visit with a dinner dialogue (contributed to by 14 people), followed by delicious deliberations over not less delicious dessert at IEF Amsterdam.

It was a deep learning conversation, full of insights and inspirations, touching key issues of our times now and ahead, generously sprinkled by Duane's humor and playfulness. It would take many blog entries to give justice to the richness of the exchange. Here, I touch only briefly one stream of that evening's effervescent thought bubbles.

It started as a quote from the Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity's Future in my invitation to the dinner guests who came to welcome Duane and Coleen:

“I do not assume that electronic communication can or should carry the entire burden of human communication. It is vital that we combine the power of global communication with study circles and other forms of grassroots dialogue. With the combination of the two, a local-to-global conversation could emerge to shape the outlines of a sustainable future... If we could generate this kind of worldwide dialogue, it seems plausible that the human family could mobilize itself to begin building a future that we scarcely could have imagined a decade or two earlier.”

That quote triggered some vibrant exchange of views and news that led me to think about the following questions:

What could be a small but practical and feasible step towards discovering/inventing rich patterns of seamlessly connected, local-to-global-to-local conversation flows among concerned citizens? What project could serve as good focalizer of shared attention to make it so? My candidate consists of three "simple" steps:

1. Support the work of visiting evolutionary thinkers and doers, by hosting inspiring and productive conversations about questions that matter the most to them and others around the table.

2. Add real-time media to connect local audiences across word via text, audio, and video chats, blogs and videoblogs.

3. Richly document the local "evolutionary salons" and use all the appropriate media for making its full content or edited-down highlights (depending on agreement with participants) available to interested global audiences. Using forums, wikis, blogs and other social media, we can turn the ideas that emerged target of critical examination and improvement by other interested circles around the world.

There are many signs of these three steps already happening. Where the practice of spontaneous "evolutionary salons" seems to lag way behind the technical possibilities is the timely linking back-and-forth with the global conversations on the same topics. If you know of excellent practices of that two-way linking actually occurring, please let us know.

Related entries in this blog:

• How local meetings with global experts can boost CI

• Inter-subjectivity in an organic pub