We'd welcome your feedback on the story, either here or in our discussion forums.

After reviewing the document it's so nice to see our ideas synthesized into a meaningful direction!

Can't wait to see how people are reacting to the vision and how we can start integrating the values of the document in community/local initiatives as well as policy!

Check out the French version as well.

I have just started coming to grips with the background of the the project and the Beyond Boarders Draft (6).

I.

I have always had trouble with Power Point type presentations, and unfortunately that is the case here at the moment. To me a set of slides is something to be spoken to. If I start with the slides and no speech, I usually can't get passed the extreme high-level of abstraction imposed by the slides to generate my own narrative. Perhaps I'd liken the slides to the bars in Rilke's poem 'The Panther.' However, that's just me. I prefer to start with narratives and see if I can find a story in it.

I will work with the draft a bit more and see what happens. I will take some guesses and make some comments in the meantime.

In the 3 C's slide, the center object is Canada/ians as a role model in the world. Since I haven't read the discussions, I take the idea of role model as a prominent feature of our national lore that has been allowed to atrophy in recent decades. My own orientation is that I feel the country lacks direction and has had a direction I don't agree with imposed as a result of our federal political process. That may be the orientation here as well.

If I wished to play a role in forging a new direction, I would certainly start with ideas and stories that already exist within our national lore. Organ transplants are simple compared to culture transplants. The idea of Canada as role model seems a good, even a powerful, place to start forming a narrative.

con't

con't from above:

II.

In the 3 C's slide, I do understand the 'double headed arrows' between the center and objects surrounding the center, even though I'm not sure the outer elements are exhaustive or mutually exclusive, or even members of the same set. However, they should work just fine as discussion points. On the other hand, I do have some trouble going around the circle of outer elements through the single headed arrows. For example, I have some trouble saying 'Embracing diversity feeds into promoting good governance.' I can stretch the idea to make it fit, but perhaps the stretch is too much to provide an easy foundation for compelling narrative. Much the same is true for the other outer relationships. I also am not sure of how the elements to the right of the role model circle relate to the idea of role model. I assume these elements are national resources. 

Overall to this point, I'm not sure I could generate narrative directly from the set of draft 6 slides. As I mentioned, that may just me. I do recognize the difficulty of summarizing input, or aggregating content to use more zippy language. Nobody has a lot of experience, and as noted, this is an experimental effort.

I am reminded of a book called 'Black Elk Speaks' Black Elk was a contemporary holy man of the Oglala Lakota who allowed himself to be interviewed by anthropologists. He rhetorically asked his interviewer ''Where are your stories . . . How can you know who your are or what is right to do without stories?" Indeed! Perhaps that's a good question to ask ourselves. I also am reminded of Pascal who wrote in the 1600's: “…We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them.”  

My orientation is that strong truth requires both the mind and the heart. That is why I look for stories, since stories speak to both heart and mind. I need to find a story here.

Tom,

Thank you so much for your level of engagement with the document. It's personally very meaningful to me to have someone really take time to try to understand the work that we are doing - work that can be challenging to explain in the online context.

It seems like a lot of what you were struggling with here relates to the limitations we face in our ability to present our findings - a Power Point is most definitely not our first choice, and we are working to find the funding and the creative team necessary to produce something much richer, more interactive and more in line with the emotions we heard in all our dialogue sessions.

I'm fascinated by your attachment to the word "story" - I myself feel the same appreciation for it (and also for Rilke). In our most recent dialogue session, a lot of participants felt uncomfortable with the term, as they thought a "story" was something that wasn't open to change. They preferred the term vision. I think for us the jury is still out - and it should be more than a question of semantics anyways.

Next week on March 11th we'll be releasing a full report of our dialogue session, and you'll see a lot more details in there (including how we arrived at the graphic representation of the story). Again, this will just be a PDF, but we are edging closer to really being able to bring the depth and complexity of our findings to a public audience.

Did you find that at least the five key areas (green economy, equality, governance, diversity and innovation) felt like a good basis for you, in terms of re-instating Canada as a role model in the world?

Reilly:

Yes, I guessed that the Power Point file represents a manual summary of a work group. As an external audience, I did find the ideas are not easily accessible. I also am aware that alternatives such as Wiki technology are not inexpensive, and some of the Wiki applications I've seen also are not particularly accessible.

Yes, the five key areas seem like a good starting place. I could work with the single arrows provided I don't think of them as implying causality or deny that other paths among the key areas or other key areas may exist. 

I will note that the areas seem to be at somewhat different levels of abstraction. For example, 'advancing a green economy' might be taken as an implementation of a more general 'advancing a sustainable economy.'  Other areas such as 'promoting good governance' may have a flavor of a simple normative that everybody thinks they advocate. I observe that such issues may complicate generating a compelling and accessible story. One of the skills in writing is keeping the time, place and who's speaking clear for the reader. If it's not clear, readers tend to go and do something else.

I think there may be a problem with using the Beyond Borders draft for both an internal summary as well as an external face. It summarizes for the group but may not tell a story to an external audience. I also have no ready-made solution, but maybe a story-board might help.  If you accept Jeff Jarvis's take that the net has moved from a content to a link economy, the home page of the site should tell a compelling story or else there will be few links--no links, no fame, no impact, no value. Tough world!

When I first accessed the site, I scanned the home page, clicked on 'conversations,' and identified content to read, and then hit links that led to the draft. The draft was where I started wondering what the site was about.

I'm still here becasue I think the work is important. I'm trying to be constructive. I have both an arts and a science background.

Hi Tom,

Again, thank you very much for your comments - they are definitely constructive. I understand what you mean about the problem with using the same draft for both internal and external audiences. We've completed a full report from the national dialogue now, called Back on the Map . A report still isn't the type of easily digestible, interactive format we hope to have in the future, but I think you'll find that even if you just read the Executive Summary you'll get a better idea of where the story came from, what it really means, and where we'd like it to go.