IR will host at least two types of dialog forum: Open forums that are available to anyone, and invited dialogs (or "structured dialogs") with limits on participation (usually 3-15 participants) and duration (usually several weeks). All dialogs are expected to use the General Guidelines. They are fairly basic and not meant to add an "integral" awareness to discussion. Invited dialog participants are asked (and others are encouraged) to also use the Integral Dialog Guidelines (or some variation on them tailored for the situation), which articulate what we think it means to bring an integral consciousness to dialog. Though contribution to some forums will be limited, all dialogs will be open to the public to read.

This page is organized as follows:

Overview

General Guidelines, which are basic rules of the road for participants in all Integral Review online forums.

Integral Dialog Guidelines which more deeply support breadth, depth, and integration in knowledge building. These are in two parts:

1. Structure and Form of Posts

2. Attitudes and Perspectives

Overview

Visit the IR Forums page for a list of the current dialogs and planned forums. If you are interested in participating in any of the dialogs, or want to suggest an article or topic for a new dialog, please let us know.  Before you begin participation in our community of open forums, IR asks that you join its mailing list and read the Guidelines below. 

IR dialogs have three interrelated purposes: 

1. Knowledge building, i.e., the collective attempt to discover or create ever more adequate knowledge.

2. Building social capital, i.e., the community building and networking that occurs as people interact, get to know each other and accomplish something together.

3. Deepening spiritual or transformational capital, i.e., in the ways that one grows and develops from interactions with others with different perspectives than one's own, engaging in self-reflection and adaptation.

IR forums provide some features that should help organize content so that it can be easily found for reference and re-used during the dialog. We also hope that our forums will have archival value, i.e., that they will contribute to knowledge building not only through the knowledge gained by active participants, but will also have value after the close of the dialog and for those not actively participating in the discussion. To support quality dialog and to support archival value, we use three steering mechanisms:

1. Dialog Guidelines: i.e., this document.

2. Forum Topic Structure: This refers to how we (and the forum software tools) organize topics and initial questions within a dialog.

3. Facilitation: The contributions of those who volunteer to facilitate a dialog. These contributors commit to regularly take a "bird’s eye view" of the dialog, consider the needs of the group as a whole, and post comments from that perspective.

We consider these dialogs an experiment in collaborative knowledge building. Our goal is to provide steering mechanisms to support self-organization so that useful order will emerge out of the wonderfully chaotic and improvisational nature of dialog. We ask for your feedback in helping us improve our steering mechanisms, which may be modified often during our initial learning curve.  Read IR Issue 3's leading article, Toward Integral Dialog: Provisional Guidelines for Online Forums, to find out more about the reasoning behind our forums and their structure.

We ask that all participants be willing to take the brief evaluation process that we post at the close of a dialog. This feedback is important to us as part of our goal to experiment and discover better ways to build knowledge using online forums. 

General Guidelines

1. Use real identities. All participants are asked to use their real names, no anonymous posts or pseudonyms, please. Include contact information (email and/or home page) in posts. 

2. Be respectful. Maintain a safe container for the expression of views and the emergence of creative collaboration.

-     No attacks or threats. Avoid rumors. Respect those with differing views.

-     Respond respectfully to suggestions from designated online facilitators/moderators.

-     Consider how your idea will affect people of various perspectives, particularly those with world-views likely to be different from yours.

3. Stay on topic. Help the forum stay focused and easy to follow.

-     No advertising.

-     Keep to the focus of the forum in general and the topic specifically. (Brief mention or links to off-topic items allowed in the context of on-topic conversations)

-     Try to be brief and to the point--or at least include a summary of your points at the top of your post.

4. Identify factual information and cite sources

-     Differentiate what you think are facts (data/information) from interpretations (opinions, inferences, values, etc.).

-     Site sources for facts, e.g., reference books, newspapers, web sites, etc. Factual claims have less validity if the reader has no way to verify them.

-     When referring to some text from the article or another's response paste in a quoted text snippet so others can find it in the online text using text search.  When referring to another's post, include the post date and contributor name.

5. Be curious, creative, and open to change.

-     Seek to understand other peoples' perspectives, visions, and needs. Focus on underlying needs rather than specific strategies.

-     Be open to the possibility that the experiences of others may transform your opinion.

-     Creatively explore strategies that meet as many needs as possible.

-     Don't just critique, offer positive alternatives.

6. Notice, question, and clarify assumptions. Reflect on possible biases you may have. Help others clarify theirs.

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Integral Dialog Guidelines-1: Structure and Form of Posts

Label paragraphs (optional): (sequentially through the article/post, e.g. "1, 2, 3"; or hierarchically showing sections; e.g. "3.1.5"). This will help others refer to specific claims or ideas. 

Use dialog labels: When useful, we suggest labeling statements or paragraphs with labels such as the ones suggested below, in CAPital letters in front of your statements or paragraphs:

"FACT:" (or "INFO:"), "OPINION:" (or "HYPOTHESIS:"), "QUESTION:" (or "REQUEST") (to balance advocacy with inquiry and curiosity)

Other possible labels include:  SUGGESTION (for how to proceed with dialog or other actions), APPRECIATION (to balance critique with acknowledgement) , PROCESS (to discuss the process or tone of the dialog), ASSUMPTION (to identify your underlying beliefs or values), CHAT (to identify tangential posts such as "I second that idea" and "glad to see you here on this forum").

Also, the dialog software may provide for "process icons" such as "I agree" and "Let me summarize" that server the same purpose. In addition, we will proved separate Topics in which to post certain types of comments, such as "" to delineate these from the main dialog.

See the guidelines below for more ideas on process labels for dialog contributions.

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Integral Dialog Guidelines-2: Attitudes and Perspectives

These are our attempt to characterize what makes a dialog integral, reflective, healthy, meta-systematic, etc. 

Self-Reflexivity (and metacognition). Critically examine one's own values, assumptions, biases, and interests. Reflect on biases that may arise from culture, gender, power-dynamics, etc. (As appropriate, be transparent about these, see transparency below.)

Affect as feedback. Strong reactions, favorable or critical, to another's idea or style are invitations to look inward (with what David Bohm would call "proprioception of thought") and be alert to bias, projection, black-and-white thinking, and other contractions of thought. This is not to advise against vigorous language or strong claims, but a reminder that emotional states may contain important information about conscious or unconscious needs, values, or goals. Discovering the psycho-logic of our projected emotions can lead to self-knowledge-building. We do not suggest that it is always productive to communicate to others what one discovers in such introspection, but propose that it is worth paying attention to.

Authenticity/sincerity/transparency. Make a sincere effort to make known all information that could be relevant to the particular problem under consideration. This might include:

-     One's true intentions, interests, needs, feelings, and desires.

-     Relationship to the topic (experiences and level of expertise).

-     Relationship to the author or participant one is commenting on.

Multi-self perspectives. Individuals are not usually "of one voice." One can explore contradictory internal beliefs; take up opposite sides of an issue; speak from multiple inner voices (e.g., the voice of compassion, the inner defender, the skeptic, the vulnerable child, the voice of higher awareness, etc. See Voice Dialog, and Big Mind Process at www.bigmind.org). One can speak from one's levels of needs/values from the Spiral Dynamics model, e.g., the purple, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow perspectives that arise within one. One can speak from the perspective of one's role, e.g., “in my leadership role as project manager I think… but as a parent of teens I think...and as your friend I think…"

We-reflexivity (and meta-dialog). It may be important to reflect on group relationships and process, to make "points of order," reflect on the quality of the dialog, or discuss the usefulness or meaning of these guidelines.

 Ideal role taking. Attempt to understand the argument from the other's perspective. This usually requires a commitment to iterations of dialogue and learning. Making direct inquiries is recommendable, and spares guessing at another’s position. Usually, people welcome opportunities to explain what they mean. This process may require putting one's world view and cherished ideas aside (suspending) to try to enter into the world of the other (or open to a larger space of possibility). This hypothetical role taking can be of participants, or of various stakeholder groups.

Contradictory perspectives. Allow for paradox, ambiguity, and contradictory ideas, and attempt to look for and articulate the questions underneath. 

Synthesizing/transcending and including/metasystematic perspectives. Is there a perspective from which the perspectives or "truths" on the table are all true in their own way? Does the complexity of the subject matter indicate that each may be appropriate or necessary in certain contexts (i.e., one size does not fit all)? Have all valid concerns been integrated into a conclusion (i.e., is the conclusion nuanced enough to be adequate)? What are the strengths, weaknesses, and differences among the various paradigms, theories, or worldviews converging in the conversation? 

Balance critique with appreciation and inquiry. The cultivation of openness, contemplative "letting go, letting be, and letting come" can, without losing rigor, allow critique to turn into curiosity. Dialog can build upon the strengths in another's position as well as capitalize on the weaknesses in another's position.

Methodology reflection. There is no single or fixed set of criteria for evaluating claims or assertions. People judge the validity of each other's claims differently for different situations. (See methodological pluralism [Wilber, 2006], metaphorical pluralism [Lakoff & Johnson, 1999], and epistemic indeterminacy [Murray, 2006a].) The point is to try to differentiate and be explicit about how we make these judgments (i.e., distinguish various truth/validity/meaning-generating methodologies or criteria). There are many possible frameworks for these differentiations, including:

-     Various truth-validating criteria, including: correspondence with objective reality; coherence with other things that are believed; the consensus of experts or group members; practical utility; the authority, legitimacy, or reliability of antecedent information sources. etc.

-     From Habermas' validity claims framework: Is your critique about another's claim about its: comprehensibility, truth, moral or normative rightness/appropriateness, or the sincerity/honesty of the author?

-     Wilber's information sources of "eye of matter, eye of mind, or eye of spirit;" or his 8 primordial perspectives and methodologies (including phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and empiricism). 

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Note that these guidelines are meant to be applied alongside (or over and above) more standard knowledge building values. We do not discuss them here, but precision, rigor, clarity, efficiency, accuracy, logic, and objectivity remain important to productive textual dialog. These more traditional values can be at odds with those implied above (and at odds with each other) and finding a combination parsimonious to each context is a matter of art and wisdom. (In Spiral Dynamics parlance one could say that we are supporting second tier methods of knowledge building, which must by definition transcend and include first tier methods.)