Cosmopolitan Conversations:

Faci l i tati ng Pol i ti cal Engagement and

Soci al I nnovati on Across Cul tures
Cosmopolitan Conversations Leipzig, Germany cosmoconvos.tumblr.com
The question was put to him what country he
was from, and he replied, 'I am a citizen of the
world.
- Diogenes of Sinope, 404 - 323 BCE
Cosmopolitan Conversations
Faci l i tati ng Pol i ti cal Engagement and Soci al Innovati on Across Cul tures
An Invitation to the Conversation
Cosmopolitan Conversations is an experiment in intercultural collaboration. The ultimate aim of the
project is to design innovative online spaces of political engagement in which young people from
around the world can come together to discuss and debate the big challenges society faces. The
project is in its earliest stages and there are many different forms it could take on.
I am reaching out to the Global Studies community because I need your help in coming up with
answers to some fundamental questions: What might these spaces look like? Who should be part
of them? What would make them engaging and meaningful? What would attract people to them?
What ideas and issues would animate them? How might online spaces of engagement translate
into real world social change? And what technologies and platforms are best suited to the task?
The idea is to bring together a diverse group of young people for a Google Hangout to brainstorm
solutions to a few of these big questions. Basically I want to draw on your experiences to gure out
what makes a space engaging and what are the issues that young people are most passionate
about today. In this document, Ive collected some of my own ideas that might contribute to the
discussion. If this is something that sounds interesting to you, please visit this link so we can gure
out when everyone is available: http://doodle.com/nbii2vrr54qmn4p4
Jordan Stark
May 2014
Cosmopolitan Conversations
Faci l i tati ng Pol i ti cal Engagement and Soci al Innovati on Across Cul tures
Rei nventi ng the Publ i c Sphere
Foundational Concepts
The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal
problems, and through that discussion inuence political action. It is a discursive space in which individuals and groups
congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment. The public sphere
can be seen as a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk

and
a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed.*
1
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspired host, held partly to amuse and partly to rene the taste and
increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often followed Horaces denition of
the aims of poetry, either to please or to educate. In his book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
Jrgen Habermas argued that salons played a key role in the emergence of the public sphere in 18th century France.*
The word cosmopolitan, which derives from the Greek word kosmopolits (citizen of the world), has been used to
describe a wide variety of important views in moral and socio-political philosophy. The nebulous core shared by all
cosmopolitan views is the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political afliation, are (or can and should be)
citizens in a single community. Most versions of cosmopolitanism understand the universal community of world citizens
as a positive ideal to be cultivated.
2
Cosmopolitan Conversations
Faci l i tati ng Pol i ti cal Engagement and Soci al Innovati on Across Cul tures
* denition adapted from wikipedia
denition adapted from plato.stanford.edu
Cosmopolitan Conversations
Faci l i tati ng Pol i ti cal Engagement and Soci al Innovati on Across Cul tures
A
B
The Public Sphere
Unlocking the Cosmopolitan Imagination
The Network Cosmopolitan Innovation
Building Cosmopolitan Communities:
A global network of young innovators
working in academia, the private sec-
tor, NGOs and government. A com-
munity built around identifying, under-
standing and solving emerging global
problems.
The Cosmopolitan Imagination: New
solutions to emerging global problems
born out of an ongoing process of inter-
cultural exchange and collaboration.
The Reinvention of the Public Sphere:
Spaces designed to bring together
young people from around the world
to think about the big challenges so-
ciety faces.
International
Development,
Poverty and Global
Health

The Asian
Century and the
Rise of the Rest
Economic
Inequality and the
Future of Global
Capitalism
Climate Change,
Energy and
Sustainability
Education and
Learning in the
Twenty-First Century
Human Rights and
the Global Struggle
for Gender Equality
Global
Governance and
Regional Integration
Urban Planning
and the Future of the
City
Citizenship,
Activism and
Democracy in the
Digital Age
Internet
Freedom, Mass
Surveillance and
Privacy
Peace, Conict
and International
Relations
Aging
Populations and
Public Sector
Challenges
What issues and
ideas are most
important to young
people today?
Cosmopolitan Conversations
Faci l i tati ng Pol i ti cal Engagement and Soci al Innovati on Across Cul tures
Cross-Sector Exchange and Col l aborati on
Government
Cosmopolitan Conversations
Facilitating Political Engagement and Social Innovation Across Cultures
Government
Academia Private Sector
NGOs
Respondi ng Creati vel y to
Emergi ng Gl obal Chal l enges
Cosmopolitan Conversations
Facilitating Political Engagement and Social Innovation Across Cultures
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If not us, who? If not now, when?
- Czech slogan, 1989
Cosmopolitan Conversations
Faci l i tati ng Pol i ti cal Engagement and Soci al Innovati on Across Cul tures
Innovative Assignment Report:
Reflections on Purpose and Lessons Learned


My innovative assignment derived from two central convictions: Firstly, I believe
that dialogue and debate are the foundations of democracy. When we come together to
discuss important issues, we are forced to articulate ourselves in a way that makes us
more conscious of our own point-of-view as well as the points-of-view of others. This is
essential if we are going to figure out what sort of society we want to live in, and how
that society might be brought about. Secondly, the best solutions are often those that are
born out of interactions between people from radically different cultural and professional
backgrounds. In line with these core convictions, my innovative assignment was an
attempt to figure out how we might create online spaces of intercultural dialogue and
collaboration, and through those spaces reinvigorate our democracy and begin to find
new ways of confronting global challenges. To achieve this, I organized a Google
Hangout in which I invited friends from my programme to come together to brainstorm
ideas around this theme. My goal was to assemble a group of young people who were as
culturally diverse as possible.
The project actually involved organizing two hangouts. The first hangout brought
together friends from Canada who I reached out to for general feedback about the project.
I made some big mistakes in the first session and learned some important lessons: Firstly,
when you bring a group of people together they have to know what is expected of them,
and thus, the purpose of the meeting has to be clear and simple, and desired outcomes
explicitly defined. Secondly, facilitation skills are extremely important. Good ideas are
useless unless you can create spaces in which people feel comfortable to engage with
those ideas, and also share ideas of their own. Although I knew this on an intellectual
level prior to the project, the first hangout made me aware of this in concrete, practical
terms. Indeed, both hangouts were profoundly humbling. I realized that if I am going to
be effective in bringing about the changes that I think are important and necessary for
society, I will need to focus my energies around developing facilitation skills and
techniques. Another key lesson concerned the attitude and role of a group leader. I
discovered that when trying to engage a group it is far better to start with an attitude of
genuine curiosity as opposed to focusing on conveying some predefined message that
may be important to you, but irrelevant to the group. A final lesson was that if the
structure of a meeting is too rigid levels of creatively and engagement will suffer.
As a result of these lessons, I made sure I was clear about the desired outcomes of
the second session. I decided that the most important outcome was simply the generation
of as many new ideas as possible. I was also far more conscious of the facilitation style
that I brought to the discussion. Whereas I sent out a detailed outline of all the topics I
wanted to cover for the first session, in the second session I adopted a more open format
in which there was no real agenda, but rather a clearly defined theme and a set of
prompting questions related to it. I made it clear to everyone involved that the only thing
I was after were ideas and that there was no predefined way the meeting needed to
unfold. The conversation that took place included students from South Africa, the United
States, Germany, Spain, and of course, Canada.
We generated some interesting questions and ideas that I hope to develop in the
future. One core idea was that social innovation should be focused around finding
creative ways to link online communities and real-world political institutions. In addition,
there was a lot of enthusiasm about the potential to use crowd-sourcing platforms as a
means of facilitating social and political change. Perhaps ideas born out of online spaces
of intercultural dialogue could be actualized through crowd-sourced projects. These
projects could be powerful tools to challenge the complacency of traditional political
parties and manifest the will-of-the-people in tangible ways. A related point was made by
one friend in the hangout that the only way people will participate in online deliberative
forums is if the ideas that emerge from those spaces have real-world political
implications. Crowd-sourced projects could be the vehicle through which collaborative
solutions are brought to life, and therefore act as a powerful incentive to motivate online
political engagement. I am currently in conversation with friends from the hangout who
expressed an interest in developing the project further. I have also reached out to the
friends in my network who have the most experience facilitating groups, and asked for
advice and resources that might help me deepen my own facilitation skills. Ive been
particularly inspired by the Open Space Technology (OST) approach, which I hope to
incorporate somehow into future online group conversations. An unedited video of the
conversation can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF61Z7FlJL8