Dear Friends in Los Angeles and Tehran,

You are invited to participate in a ground-breaking inter-city "Finding our Common Humanity" dialog that will strengthen our unity while also empowering our diversity. The online dialog will work towards reactivating the LA / Tehran Sister Cities link, facilitate inter-cultural exchange and promote global nuclear disarmament. This dialog grows out of the work of the Los Angeles Area Nuclear Disarmament Coalition -- see laandc.org.

The dialog will continue over five months beginning September 1, 2009. If you wish to participate, please commit for the full five months. Your part will be to write one message of no more than four hundred words each month. Shorter messages are OK. In addition, you will be expected to read and rate messages written by your fellow dialogers. Total time commitment comes to less than one hour per week. There will be suggested topics to make participation easier.

The goal of the dialog is to test the software for possible use in activating the 2960+ Mayors for Peace city network. The MfP network was founded by the Mayor of Hiroshima to enlist all the cities of the world for peace in general and for nuclear disarmament in particular. Both L.A. and Tehran are signed up with Mayors for Peace. To participate, please send your name and preferred email for this dialog along with your city identification: LA, Tehran or Other.

Sincerely,

Roger Eaton
LAANDC Coordinator
(USA) 310 390 5220

More about the Mayors for Peace (MfP) Cities Dialog idea

We will need a very good outcome from the "Finding our Common Humanity LA / Tehran" dialog if we are to move forward towards an MfP dialog. Nevertheless, it is worth a try, since if we can succeed in truly activating the MfP network, we will be able to send a message from the Cities of the World to the 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Conference calling not just for non-proliferation, but actual nuclear disarmament by 2020. Such a message will carry weight.

The Software Explained

LAANDC's "InterMix Group Dialog" software has an "election area" where groups elect messages in rounds and a "forum area" where participants can exchange messages in the normal web way. The participants in a "group dialog" can easily switch back and forth between the election area and the forum area at any time.

The election area proceeds in rounds. There are unity rounds where all the participants together elect one message and diversity rounds where the participants break up into separate groups, each of which elects its own message.

Each round begins with a writing phase in which participants will be expected to write a message for the election. Then there are one or more voting cycles. Each voting cycle reduces the number of candidate messages until one message is elected.

The idea of electing a message is something new and takes some getting used to. In practice it is simple enough. Say we have 50 messages from 50 participants. Then 8 messages are randomly distributed to each participant to be rated for both interest and approval. The top rated 8 messages from the preliminary vote are redistributed to everyone for a runoff vote and the highest rated of those is the "elected" message.

Every message from the election area automatically starts a discussion thread in the forum area. Forum area participants can also start other threads that are not necessarily election related and the expectation is that participants will take advantage of the forum both to discuss the messages they are electing and to have unstructured discussions on general cultural and perhaps interfaith matters.

The Proposal

The idea is that LA and Tehran will each have their own voice in the diversity rounds and will come together to elect a single message in the unity rounds. We will have five rounds over five months, beginning with a unity round.

The Theory

The alternation between "unity" and "diversity" rounds is the chief innovation of the InterMix software. By alternating between unity and diversity rounds, the hard-liners are marginalized. They have the choice of participating in a dialog that includes the expression of the common humanity of the groups, which they do not want to recognize, or of not participating and losing all influence. Result - they have to moderate or be side-lined.

The potentially inimical groups do not confront each other directly. The exchange is mediated by their common humanity in the the unity round and therefore the tensions are defused, and if there is a win-win solution it will emerge. Since in today's world, as humanity presses on the limits of planet earth, there is only win-win and lose-lose, a technology that encourages the win-win solution to emerge is very valuable.

Finally, the software can scale to the global level, where a voice of humanity will create the human consciousness that we need to get through the difficulties of our time. A message elected by the world with affirmation from every quarter will be so widely shared that we will not only know that others know the message but that others know that others know. This is the stuff of a shared human consciousness.