You are invited to participate in a ground-breaking interfaith "Finding our Common Humanity" dialog that will strengthen our unity while also empowering our diversity.

We have over 70 participants signed up so far, and they are a strong group, so we are going ahead with confidence that the results will be highly encouraging.  The more input, and the more diverse the input, the better the outcome, so please consider adding your voice to the common effort.  Those who are already signed up, it wouldn't hurt to ask your friends even if they are not currently URI members.  This is a good way to introduce more people to the United Religions Initiative. 

The dialog began in 2009 with excellent results.  Now in September, 2010 we are restarting with new topics and upgraded software.

The first goal of the dialog is to strengthen and energize the URI community.   A second goal is to test the dialog process for use in a possible 2011 Middle East Peace dialog.  For additional details, see below.

More about the Middle East Peace (MEP) Dialog Idea

We will need a very good outcome from the "Finding our Common Humanity" dialog if we are to move forward towards a MEP dialog.  For those who are interested, you can find more about the MEP idea on the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics website.  The Wallenberg Institute is a URI Cooperation Circle in Los Angeles which has played a major part in developing the dialog software.

The Software Explained

The Wallenberg'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 select one message and diversity rounds where the participants break up into separate groups, each of which eslects its own message. 

Each round begins with a writing phase in which participant will write one message each 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 winnowing process 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 then 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.

The Theory

The alternation between "unity" and "diversity" rounds is the chief innovation of the Group Dialog software.  In the URI Finding our Common Humanity dialog, we are into that most interesting area of "Dialog among Civilizations".  This is where Group Dialog will shine. 

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 is anathema to them, 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. 

See the 2005 prototype "Finding our Common Humanity" dialog at http://www.raoulwallenberginstitute.org/groupdialog/HumanRights/results.htm. 

At a more practical level, the software can be used to energize a global organization, such as URI, by providing an additional channel for feedback from the grass-roots.  New individual voices will make themselves heard, and at the collective level the power of consensus will be engaged.