Moses & Claire advance reading

topics-and-advance-readings/nvc.md

@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
+# # Topic Proposal: NVC for Standards Working Groups
+
+**by Claire Rumore & Moses Ma, FutureLab Consulting**
+
+**Venue:** Submitted to the 9th Rebooting the Web of Trust Technical Workshop
+**Date/Location:** September 3-6, 2019, Prague
+**Keywords:** communication, collaboration, psychology, identity, blockchain, decentralized
+
+**PROPOSAL**
+We propose to facilitate the collaborative drafting of a paper that discusses the possible use of non-violent communications (NVC) and cognitive behavioral (CBT) methodologies, to create a collaboration toolkit for Internet standards working groups. We believe that a carefully designed combination of NVC and CBT would empower working groups and their facilitators to be more effective, by learning how to perceive the emotional reactions and tacit needs of participants in a working group, and to learn the art of making more effective requests. If the facilitator can teach these techniques, it can create a shared basis for connection, cooperation, and effectiveness in the discussion.
+
+**An Overview of NVC and CBT**Nonviolent Communications (aka NVC) was developed by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, who has introduced it to individuals and organizations world wide. NVC has been used between warring tribes and in war-torn countries; in schools, prisons, and corporations; in health care, social change, and government institutions; and in intimate personal relationships. Currently, over 200 hundred certified trainers and many more non-certified trainers around the world are sharing NVC in their communities.
+Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (aka CBT) was pioneered by Dr. Aaron Beck in the 1960s, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. Having studied and practiced psychoanalysis, Dr. Beck designed and carried out several experiments to test psychoanalytic concepts of depression. CBT has been found to be effective in conflict resolution therapy, an approach to treatment that seeks to teach people conflict resolution skills, which was designed primarily to help couples but can be used to address conflict in any situation, whether it arises in a family, between friends, at the workplace, or in any other situation.
+The combination of these approaches may provide a simplified approach to conflict resolution skills training, to help working group participants and facilitators to learn how to redirect conflict without emotional detouring and incorporate enhanced communication techniques as the primary tools for exploration and resolution. This is all about helping people to unite when facing difficult situations, and the encouragement to work together rather than combat each other in order to overcome issues that may, if left unaddressed, lead to dysfunction, depression, or contempt.
+**The Components of Conflict Resolution**_Observations_ are what we see or hear that we identify as the stimulus to our reactions. Our aim is to describe what we are reacting to concretely, specifically and neutrally, much as a video camera might capture the moment. This helps create a shared reality with the other person. 
+_Feelings_ represent our emotional experience and physical sensations associated with our needs that have been met or that remain unmet (see below). Our aim is to identify, name and connect with those feelings. The key to identifying and expressing feelings is to focus on words that describe our inner experience rather than words that describe our interpretations of people’s actions.
+_Needs_ are an expression of our shared humanity. All human beings share key needs for survival. We also share many other needs, though we may experience them to varying degrees and may experience them more or less intensely at various times. In the context of NVC, needs refer to what is most alive in us: our core values and human desires. 
+_Requests_ are a technique that can be used to help get cooperation for particular strategies to enable more cohesive collaboration. Learning to make clear requests and shifting our consciousness to making requests in place of demands are very challenging skills for most people, but could be the key to transforming negative situations encountered in standards development work. 
+**How We Could Apply NVC/CBT to Our Work**
+Our DID community has a rule of thumb that _our N participants should speak roughly 1_Nth of the time./ When participants violate that rule of thumb, we can use the observational tools of NVC to unpack the underlying nexus of feelings and needs, to arrive at well formed requests.
+So when we observe such behavior, such as people who tend to repeat themselves about the “right” way to implement identity systems, or repeatedly pushing a commercial venture or ICO. As tempting as it is to enter a state of judgment, we need to describe what we see or hear in observation language without mixing in evaluation. The key to identify the feelings and express them, without criticism or blame. 
+Again, in the context of NVC, needs refer to what is most alive in us: our core values and human desires. Understanding, naming, and connecting with those needs is vital. So with the person who repeatedly pitches their ICO, we can see how worried they are about the success of their business, or that they are from an economically disadvantaged part of the world without access to venture capital, or that they’ve invested their last penny on this venture and are actually in a state of fear. By acknowledging what is really happening for them, we can use awareness to dissolve the fear and have them express - in a more emotionally compelling manner - their request for others to support that venture or share the URL. 
+*How DIDs and VCs could empower NVC/CBT *
+Finally, this working group could return the favor, by helping to drive the adoption of NVC through the design and development of decentralized technologies to support the usage and viral promotion of NVC. The concept is simple: by creating a verifiable claim/credential for moderation and facilitation training, using NVC as a pilot training system, users could be verified for facilitation and moderation roles in online communities. This would also provide the CCG community with a vested interest in making NVC work with the CCG and RWOT working groups. The PR advantages of this type of partnership would be significant.
+In essence, we would create decentralized framework for reputation in facilitation and moderation. Reputation is an essential component of social and business networks, because it serves as an optimizing influence on such systems. If we intend to optimize online communities, there is no better way than to support the adoption of training in online moderation and the facilitation of online collaboration. 
+
+And so, our goal for collaborative work during the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop is to map out functionality for such a system. We wish to co-author, with members of the community, a position paper that seeks to address these these and related challenges and to produce proposals for concrete and meaningful solutions. 
+
+
+For more information about the ideas contained in this white paper, please contact the authors, Claire Rumore at [email protected] or Moses Ma at [email protected].