We’re excited to announce the winners of the NCDD Catalyst Awards — two $10,000 prizes for team projects run by NCDD members in the areas of Civic Infrastructure and Political Bridge Building.

The award winner in the Civic Infrastructure category is:
A Collaborative Plan for a National Dialogue Network Infrastructure (main contact: John Spady)

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The award winner in the Political Bridge Building category is:
Real Dialogues: D&D Reality Show (main contact: Tim Bonnemann)

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NCDD intends to support the winning teams in whatever ways we are able to, and we will certainly keep the NCDD community updated on the teams’ progress and opportunities to get involved down the road.

We used a combination of activities (our Seattle conference, the CivicEvolution platform, the NCDD blog and listservs, and more) to encourage our members to form teams to address challenges facing our field that are too complex to solve on their own.  Voting was open to all members for a ten-day period that came to a close last night at midnight Pacific.  See this document (PDF) for the full voting results.

A special, heartfelt thank you to the donors who made these awards possible. The Civic Infrastructure award is funded by generous contributions from members of the NCDD Board of Directors and the Bridge Building award is funded by a donor advised fund called the Harrison Giveaway Fund.

We are also greatly indebted to NCDD supporting member Brian Sullivan, who donated the use of his CivicEvolution platform and many hours of his time to the Catalyst Awards process.

Thank you also to all six of our finalist teams. Speaking on behalf of the volunteers, donors, and NCDD Board members who made this awards process possible, we are all extremely grateful for — and inspired by — your creativity, innovation, and commitment to finding new ways to work together to move our field forward.  We hope those of you who didn’t win will move forward with your projects, and invite you to keep the NCDD community informed and involved along the way.

Feel free to comment below and let us know what you thought of the Catalyst Awards process.  This experiment was new for NCDD, and we would love your feedback and suggestions for improvement!

To celebrate NCDD’s 10th anniversary this year, we are very excited to launch the NCDD Catalyst Awards.  Two $10,000 prizes will be awarded to team projects organized, led and selected by NCDD members that jump-start the field’s next best ideas and impact our communities’ and our country’s ability to solve its most challenging problems.

Today, we are excited to announce that the online platform for collaboration is open at CivicEvolution™.  The NCDD Board chose this tool because it’s an excellent fit for the catalyst awards; NCDD members can post ideas for catalyst awards projects, attract collaborators, elicit feedback, and synthesize it into an evolving project proposal through a transparent and constructive process.

NCDD members are diverse in their level of proficiency with online technologies.  If you are curious about integrating online dialogue into your in-person work, this is a great place to start.  NCDD member Brian Sullivan has generously created the online collaboration space on CivicEvolution specifically for the NCDD community.

This is an opportunity for you to jump out of your facilitator role and experience the online process designed by one of our very own members.  Most importantly, we will be collaborating across our organizations on this platform over the next few months (and, of course, in-person at the conference next week!) until the final project proposals are due on January 13th.

The two $10,000 prizes will be awarded in the areas of civic infrastructure and bridge building. We’re looking for self-organization, collaboration, and innovation among our members. The team approach will help you address challenges that are too complex to solve on your own.

For an overview of the Catalyst Awards read by NCDD’s director Sandy Heierbacher, check out this presentation created by Andy Fluke…

Please use the comment field to add your thoughts on civic entrepreneur John Spady's Idea Incubator post!  NCDD has been talking to John about this idea, and we're excited to engage NCDDers in these questions leading up to (and at) NCDD Seattle this fall.

Occasionally I'll hear or read about someone, somewhere, who says, "We need a national dialogue about X..." -- where X might be "race relations" or "immigration reform" or "the national debt" or (insert your own issue here) -- a list of issues that is indeed long and important.

While the issues are important, what I personally think about is how can we even do it? How might we design an organizational infrastructure for a coordinated and practical national dialogue? This is a topic I want to cover during our NCDD conference in Seattle this October. But first, I'd like to invite my fellow NCDDers to help me think about this concept further.

Let me start with what I think our goal should be:
To create an adaptive and collaborative infrastructure that enables any participant to learn about, and respond to, selected national issues; and to form a confederation in support of a National Dialogue Network Infrastructure.

And the general values that I think such an infrastructure should possess, are:

• that it is Distributed - it engages as many grassroots participants and organizations as possible.
• that it is Collaborative - that in helping others it helps itself. Building trust and goodwill will bring increased participation overall.
• that it is Anonymous - Information gathered in a survey, is always reported in aggregate form and never used in a way that could identify individuals. The planning board would need access to monitor lists, content, and response data but would never share, sell, or rent personal data to anyone for any reason.
• that it involves a Coalition/Confederation - It can do more with others than it can do by itself. It supports and encourages diverse methodologies among participants.
• that it is Nonprofit and Cost Effective - Monies or services received go primarily to build out the infrastructure and cover related costs. Accounts are transparent and open.

I think it should have oversight and accountability from a trusted national scope nonprofit organization (so it can receive tax deductible donations) but that operational and day to day management would be a coalition or confederation of collaborating individuals from national scope organizations (a planning board) who understand the value of working together to achieve what is harder for any one of them to accomplish alone.

I am also thinking that while issues are determined and advanced by the planning board that it would also be critical to have a pathway for issues from outside the planning board to be received from the general public. If public and published criteria are met then it should be incumbent on the planning board to formally respond to an issue request and make a decision to adopt the issue or not.

And I want to talk about funding ideas… should funds come from only a single source (for example, one helpful foundation), from multiple donations contributed by the organizations making up the planning board, or from strictly public contributions (individuals and/or multiple foundations)?

The simplest mental image I can think of to describe all of this is that of a tree with twinkling lights. Each light represents a community scale organization talking about its own issues and so each light is different. But each light decorates the national tree, and occasionally (when the need calls for it), all the lights glow with the same color because all the organizations are asking their members to talk about the same important issue. Supporting community scale efforts creates an infrastructure for national scale issues. And I think it will require more cooperation and less competition.

I hope this is enough for now to give people an idea of what I'm trying to propose. I welcome any and all thoughts and comments. Are we ready (and willing) to collaborate?

John can be reached on these social networks:

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/jspady
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/jspady
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jspady