 25 May 2005 @ 01:31, by Roger Eaton
The Los Angeles Jewish-Muslim Email Dialogue on Human Rights has just concluded most wonderfully. Both the individual messages and the development through the five rounds of the dialogue are very impressive from the "Oneness that underlies all reality" of the first message to a specific five point agenda for Southern California of the last. See groupdialog.org/humanrights/results.htm to view the dialogue results.
The method used is called the Eaton Model of Collective Communication. Participating groups elect messages in alternating "together" and "apart" rounds. That's the short description. This method gives the advantage to those who recognize and support the common humanity of the groups involved. That is the main point here: we can now tilt the playing field in favor of those who recognize and support our common humanity. The test case of Jews and Muslims was chosen so it was not going to be too easy. Yet how well it turned out!
But there are two more important points to be made. First, because we are web based, large numbers can be accomodated. We are using dot-net technology with MySQL currently written in Python, but we are rewriting in Csharp and will be open source, license not yet decided. Dot-net and C# are M$, but no, I have not gone over to the dark side! Both .Net and C# are open standard and with Mono they are now also open source. With our current setup, we can handle 1500 or more participants in a dialogue. With some tuning, no big deal, we think we can handle five to ten thousand. A more radical redesign as a peer-to-peer application will enable us to go global, with any number of participants, however large. We, here means myself and Darryl Kanouse, who is actually doing the coding from Zodeca.
Finally, the process is flexible. It doesn't have to be two groups -- it could be three. In the present case, add Christians and we have an Abrahamic dialogue. Add other religions and we have an interfaith dialogue. OR, here's another idea, in the apart rounds we could have four groups, Jews, Muslims, women and men. OR, say a joint action committee for Southern California comes out of the dialogue, as I hope it does, then there could be a continuing quarterly or bi-annual exchange between the leaders of the joint action committee and the wider dialogue membership. OR, there could be a collective message from the Los Angeles combined group to the permanent joint committee of the 100 Imams and Rabbis for Peace. Etc etc etc. The point is that we have more possibilities than we can pursue.
To sum up, in the Group Dialog process, we have a new, flexible communications capability that gives the advantage to those who recognize and support our common humanity and which can be employed at any scale from the local to the global.
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