Many good people are reluctant to get involved with political discussion groups, because expectations tend to be high, but experience with them is often discouraging. Too much of the political energy generated is negative. People seem to enjoy taking turns venting bad feelings about agreed upon political adversaries. Discussion tends to focus on what’s wrong with the policies, actions, or the personalities of these enemies, while discussion about better alternatives is relatively rare. When political discussion is positive, it tends often to involve unrealistic fantasies and rosy predictions that few participants believe.

Most people avoid expressing disagreement, but when they do, they often argue without hearing each other, and again little is accomplished.

Most of the interactions that we see between our elected leaders and pundits look like more of the same. During congressional committee hearings, speeches from the floor of either legislative body, candidates on the stump or debating each other --in fact, whenever politicians relate publicly--they seem to be either attacking each other or preaching to the choir. Substantive, productive dialogue in a political context has become so rare that many people have concluded that it just can’t happen. This is so commonplace that the word “political” has become synonymous with “opportunistic,” “exaggerated,” and “probably false.”

The remedy we propose is to initiate more meaningful grassroots participation in dialogue that leads to action at the level of policy development. In order to do that, the conflicts that threaten to destroy the dialogue either need to be prevented from happening or dealt with directly whenever they come up.

The program’s first and primary strategy for dealing with conflict is to decrease the likelihood that it will come up in the first place. For example, we are structuring both the online and face-to-face DNA group discussions so that participants start off on more or less the same page. We are under no illusions that this filtering will eliminate differences of opinion, interest, or needs; however, it should prevent some of most intractable issue-based conflicts from manifesting in the dialogue.

Participants in the Solution Exchange will be encouraged to make all their input as constructive as they can and to avoid negativity. When they fail to meet these standards, we will be in contact with them and respond appropriately to each situation as it occurs.

The DNA groups will employ a number of mechanisms for minimizing interpersonal conflict, and for resolving whatever conflicts do come up. In spite of our efforts to get like-minded people together, some arguments will arise out of different points of view about the public policy issues under discussion, But many of the differences that emerge in political activities in general and in discussion groups in particular are more personal than issue related and they have to be understood and remedied in personal interaction.

It might be useful at this point to consider some of the specific personal and interpersonal problems that frequently appear in interactive political groups and forums, and what we plan to do about each of them in the DNA groups.

Limitations of Online-Only Interaction

Because the online-only Solution Exchange will involve asynchronous and anonymous communication that is not face-to-face, most of the deeper conflict resolution methods that follow will not be easy to use there. This is one of the many reasons that we plan to launch the Dialogue Network for Action. In the interim, we will be experimenting with different ways to relate to conflict on the site, and we welcome your suggestions.