In 1982, two weeks after I met Barbara Marx Hubbard, she told me about a social process that she and her partner John Whiteside had developed. He’d been an Information Officer for the Air Force and had done live television coverage of space launches for NASA. They called their process SYNCON—for “Synergistic Convergence.” Barbara described it as a huge “wheel” on the floor of a convention hall. Surrounding a mission control desk at the center were removable walls to create sectors for health, education, economics, science, technology and more. The idea was to see if everyday citizens could unite those sectors into a whole system. The people they brought in were as diverse as possible, and in a day-long session, after learning about a particular field, people moved around the wheel to experience the various sectors. Then, at the hub, they somehow created a coordinating function that brought them together.

In a 2015 speech where she talked about it, Barbara said, “The result was Synergistic Democracy. When we took down the walls, people started to sing and dance. They were like those little molecules. They wouldn’t stop rejoicing!” After witnessing one of these events, astronaut Edgar Mitchel said, “Barbara, if I had a Geiger counter, it would have gone off the charts.” “What worked,” Barbara said, “was clustering people together and asking them what they wanted to create from what was provided.”

When Barbara told me about this, I was managing the Television Center at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio developing and teaching courses in film and television production. She wondered if there was a way to revise the SYNCON process and put it on television. That wasn’t feasible, but it led to several conversations about the role of television and its potential for creating social synergy.

Inspired by our talks, I created a schematic for a circular television station on a large sheet of paper. At the hub was a large news desk, and it was surrounded by the operational departments that Barbara had envisioned. There, teams of content specialists and journalists would join with producers and editors to transform the incoming information about what’s working in the world into stories, segments and programs. Rotating anchorpersons at the hub would introduce the programs and segments live throughout the day. Barbara loved it. And soon she was referring to the operation as a “Convergence Center”. As she described its functions, I wrote them down. She said it would:

Like the SYNCON process, the various sectors would be integrated in the Convergence Center to create a socially responsible electronic nervous system, eventually the television network we envisioned (World Good News Network). Barbara observed two key points in this regard: that “positive change comes from an engaged citizenry” and the Convergence Center process would bring “individual initiative and mass consciousness to focus on the challenge of building a future that works for everyone.” In 1988, Barbara and her friends operationalized a Convergence Center at The First Soviet American Citizen Summit in Washington, D.C. It was a resounding success.