The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation has launched its 2026 Statewide Rail Plan Survey (March 13-27, 2026) inviting citizens, businesses, and freight stakeholders to share priorities influencing passenger and freight rail evolution over 20 years, addressing service frequency, accessibility, safety, regional connectivity, and economic impacts. The 5-10 minute survey positions public input as foundational to long-range infrastructure strategy integrating short-term and long-term visions, covering passenger service improvements, freight operations, network reliability, strategic expansion, and intermodal linkages while ensuring plans reflect lived experiences rather than just technical projections. Partnering with UVA's Institute for Engagement and Negotiation to host town halls and forums where insights are reviewed and refined, DRPT emphasizes that rail planning affects how people travel, see family, access work, and connect communities, representing civic empowerment where Virginia's rail future is shaped by travelers, families, workers, students, and citizens. This initiative advances NCDD's mission by modeling participatory planning where everyday voices directly influence infrastructure decisions affecting daily life, demonstrating how public engagement can ground technical planning in human stories and bridge community sentiment with policy development through deliberative processes honoring both individual experiences and collective vision.

Julia Minson, a Harvard Kennedy School professor specializing in decision science, has released How to Disagree Better, a research-backed guide that demonstrates why persuasion with bulletproof logic backfires and offers counterintuitive approaches to constructive disagreement that improve decisions and strengthen relationships by fostering receptiveness to opposing views. Drawing on twenty years of behavioral science research, Minson shows that individuals who demonstrate receptiveness are rated as more trustworthy, objective, and likable, and they negotiate better deals and wield greater influence. This challenges assumptions that conflict should be eliminated; instead, it asks how to do conflict better through visible, measurable behaviors. Co-founded with conflict management expert Heather Sulejman, Disagreeing Better LLC translates research into practical training, providing teams with tangible skills for high-stakes conversations without backchanneling or burning trust through empirically proven, scalable systems. This work advances NCDD's mission by offering dialogue practitioners evidence-based insights into why traditional conflict approaches fail, how to create conditions where people feel heard while achieving productive outcomes, and concrete methodologies for treating disagreement as a skill to master rather than a threat to manage.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation welcomes Don Waisanen, a communication scholar and practitioner, to its board. He’s a Professor at Baruch College’s Marxe School, adjunct faculty at Columbia and NYU, and founder of Communication Upward. Waisanen’s seven books include Improv for Democracy, Leadership Standpoints, and States of Confusion. He’s also published extensively in journals like Rhetoric & Public Affairs and Communication Monographs. His work emphasizes thoughtful communication practices that normalize conflict, establish peer-to-peer discussion agreements, check silences for authentic participation, and develop facilitative leadership. Waisanen’s addition strengthens NCDD’s capacity to connect scholarly research with practitioner needs, bridge academic and applied perspectives, and advance dialogue and deliberation as essential democratic infrastructure.

The Democracy Narratives Alliance, a global initiative led by People Powered with over 30 organizations, will release research on March 24, 2026. The research synthesizes nearly 400 publications and evidence from 150+ studies on how narratives strengthen democracy and increase public engagement beyond electoral framing. The webinar features speakers from People Powered, Fundación Corona, Global Democracy Coalition, and Busara discussing which narratives foster democratic support, how framing and values invoke participation, and practical recommendations for practitioners and storytellers. The alliance responds to citizens’ frustration with electoral politics and global questioning of democracy by translating fragmented behavioral science and communications research into coordinated action through shared narratives, tools, and strategies tested at global, national, and local levels. This work advances NCDD’s mission by providing dialogue practitioners with evidence-based guidance on framing participatory processes to resonate with diverse publics, overcome institutional cynicism, and help people see democracy as active participation in shaping collective futures.

Simon Fraser University’s Community-Engaged Research Initiative convenes a three-day national dialogue (March 31-April 2, 2026) to explore how public universities can respond to polycrisis, including climate disruption, democratic strain, inequality, public health challenges, and financial pressures. Scholars, community leaders, policymakers, and students will generate insights and strategies for a position paper on collective action. The symposium addresses how universities can act as pillars of democracy and public well-being, advance climate justice and health equity, and prepare students for navigating a fractured world. Co-keynote addresses by Dr. Jessica Riddell and Nisga’a scholar Dr. Amy Parent will be followed by a fireside chat with interdisciplinary scholars on reimagining Canadian universities. This initiative advances NCDD’s mission by modeling cross-sector dialogue on universities’ civic responsibilities, strengthening democratic engagement through community-embedded scholarship, and fostering interdisciplinary exchange for collaborative solutions to pressing societal challenges.

Dr. Larry Schooler, a communication scholar and mediator, presents “The Thoughtful Advantage” framework for proactive conflict management through deliberate communication. He challenges instant-response culture by requiring multi-step self-interrogation. Schooler normalizes conflict as an inevitable natural phenomenon that requires understanding and management, not avoidance. He emphasizes practical tools like peer-to-peer discussion agreements, checking silences for authentic participation, and recognizing the spectrum of honesty. In leadership, he advocates facilitative approaches that create shared power through deep listening, personal attention, and sincere accountability. This framework advances NCDD’s mission by providing evidence-based strategies for creating conditions where people feel heard, establishing guardrails for vulnerability, and moving from silent politeness to productive engagement that acknowledges individual perspectives shaped by culture, gender, and power dynamics.

​Joel Castro, CEO of OneMind.Life LLC developed OneMind, a free, open-source consensus-building platform for groups of 5 to 5,000. It enables participants to move from individual perspectives to collective wisdom through anonymous structured rounds of proposing and rating. The win-twice convergence mechanism ensures genuine agreement, and built-in translation supports cross-language collaboration. The tool addresses facilitator dependency, time constraints, scalability issues, language barriers, and binary thinking through self-facilitating processes that work synchronously or asynchronously. It captures nuanced preferences on 0-100 scales and builds chains of thought where each convergence becomes the foundation for the next. This resource advances NCDD’s mission by providing practitioners with digital infrastructure for participatory decision-making that preserves deliberative values of equal voice, genuine listening, and collective wisdom. It enables practical applications, including real-time workshop facilitation, conflict resolution, group discovery, DEI discussions with anonymous input, and asynchronous deliberation.

​Evidence for Democracy’s public panel on March 24, 2026, explores how AI transforms government evidence collection and policymaking. Beatrice Wayne from the Samara Centre for Democracy, Helen Hayes from McGill’s Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy, and Dr. Renée Sieber from McGill’s Bieler School of Environment discuss transparency, bias prevention, and rebuilding public trust amid algorithmic opacity. The panel examines AI’s current use in policy development, fairness in evidence-based decision-making, and strategies for strengthening accountability as AI tools evolve. Panelists draw on expertise in investigations of Canada’s online spaces, youth-centered AI policymaking, and AI’s impacts on marginalized communities and civic participation. This panel advances NCDD’s mission by examining how emerging technologies shape democratic participation, evidence-based governance, and public trust, offering dialogue practitioners insights into maintaining democratic values of openness and integrity as algorithmic systems become embedded in decision-making processes affecting communities and civic engagement work.

​The UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement’s eighth annual #SpeechMatters conference will examine threats to First Amendment freedoms in higher education on April 8, 2026. The virtual event features legal experts, journalists, artists, and university leaders discussing press freedom, artistic expression, campus speech, academic freedom, and government pressure on universities and platforms. Convened by UC President James B. Milliken and Executive Director Michelle Deutchman, the conference positions free expression as essential infrastructure for democratic engagement and civic learning. It aims to advance NCDD’s mission by examining how threats to free speech affect constructive conversation and recognizing the need for institutional protections enabling people to speak, question, create, and engage without fear of retaliation.

The Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University has documented deliberative youth assemblies emerging across Canada, including New Westminster's Community Advisory Assembly (the first standing deliberative body embedded in municipal decision-making with nearly 17% youth participation), Gen(Z)AI (a national initiative engaging youth on AI policy through regional forums and digital platforms), the Canadian Youth Climate Assembly (which presented recommendations to parliamentarians in the Senate Chamber), and University of Victoria student assemblies addressing campus challenges. These initiatives use civic lotteries for proportional representation, honoraria, and travel support to reduce barriers, expert learning opportunities, and structured small-group dialogues to create meaningful engagement with complex issues, including climate change, AI governance, and health crises. The assemblies demonstrate that treating youth as current civic participants rather than future stakeholders strengthens democratic processes and that long-term policy decisions benefit from intergenerational perspectives. This work advances NCDD's mission by modeling deliberative democracy approaches that address persistent barriers to youth participation, build civic skills and cross-generational connections, and produce policy-influencing recommendations that challenge assumptions about young people's capacity to engage in real-world decision-making on complex public issues.