My working definition is that dialogue is a transformative process of communication that is most likely to emerge from an enabling dialogical space founded on qualitative time and space, willingness and good faith; that creates a dynamic equilibrium between both group & individual, and conformity & creativity; and that results in the conditions of re-humanization of the other and the self, suspension of judgment, a search for shared meaning and connecting to a larger context.
The three layers of my definition of dialogue offer a technology for enabling dialogical spaces, an archetypal theory of dialogic process, and a philosophy of the dialogical world-view.
I will briefly explore this definition in the next section and then address the first and third layers, and the components of those layers. Because of complexity, I treat the second layer on the archetypal model of dialogic process in a stand alone subsequent section.