The Participation Company
In the second chapter from his upcoming book, Tom Atlee picks up the topic of learning in deliberation, something he has written about previously. It’s a thorny issue and generally applies to public participation as well. One problem, as I see it, is that quality deliberation requires informed participants, but properly framing the issue and creating the [...]
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Tom Atlee will be presenting at this week’s NCDD Confab Call. From his blog: I’ll be doing an online dialogue in the 2-hour National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Confab Call on Tuesday, January 17th at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific). Ben Roberts, a principal in both weDialogue and Occupy Café, will be facilitating the call [...]
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Via Alex Moll on Twitter, I just came across OpenGov.gr, the website for the Greek Open Government Initiative. From the English language version: Opengov.gr has been designed to serve the principles of transparency, deliberation, collaboration and accountability and includes three initiatives: Οpen calls for the recruitment of public administration officials. Top level and mid-level openings [...]
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Tom Atlee is working on a new book (due out this Summer). From an email he sent this morning: My new book – “Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics” – has gone through two rounds of editorial review. It is scheduled for publication in early August 2012. The publisher – North Atlantic [...]
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Earlier this summer, I happened to come across an excellent new article on online deliberation design. Now that it’s out of draft mode, I can finally share it here. Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence (PDF, final working version) by Todd Davies and Reid Chandler is currently in press and will appear as chapter 6 in [...]
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Following my previous post about the upcoming Deliberative Poll here in California, I have been invited to attend the event as an observer. From the invitation email: I am writing to invite you to observe an exciting civic engagement event this summer that will help chart the course for California’s future. On June 24-26, a [...]
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Now here‘s an interesting project, scheduled to happen in California next month (via). From the press release: Coalition of Reformers, Academics and Foundations to Conduct California’s First-Ever Statewide Deliberative Poll SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A coalition of non-partisan reform organizations, academics and journalists today announced that they will partner with Stanford University’s Center for Deliberative Democracy to conduct [...]
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Sandy Heierbacher, Director of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), gives a nice two-paragraph summary this morning of what her organization’s work is all about: [...] Our most urgent problems seem even more unsolvable because of our inability to come together civilly and discuss issues and potential solutions in depth with all “sides.” [...]
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Another project worth mentioning that’s very much related to the ROI discussions that are happening elsewhere is the Making the Case campaign by the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2). It must have launched shortly after I last wrote about their efforts back in November of last year. From the site: Dialogue and deliberation (D&D) [...]
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In my previous post, I mentioned that wiki-based policy crafting has been tried before. Well, I thought what better opportunity to reach deep into the archives and dig up a few related examples from around 2007/2008 (including some that tried to tackle slightly different problems, such as issue or debate mapping, but still all fairly [...]
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Over the weekend, I learned about LexPop, a new wiki-based site that invites participants to collaboratively craft public policy on any issue (see their current project: Policy Drive: MA Net Neutrality). From the about page (emphasis theirs): Just as pamphlets were once the most efficient and effective means for distributing ideas, so too was this type [...]
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In case you haven’t seen, there’s a very interesting event coming up this week. The Deliberative Democracy Workshop “Connecting Research and Practice” will take place February 3-5, 2011 in Sydney, Australia. An invited workshop, it will bring together some of the leading researchers and practitioners in this field from around the world. The expected key [...]
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Back in December, Tom Atlee shared some interesting thoughts over on the NCDD listserv about what he refers to as Creative Participation. He recently joined the growing list of NCDD guest bloggers and today shared his post on the NCDD blog: Creative Deliberation The article brings up some good points that highlight the need for better [...]
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Over on Facebook, the Kettering Foundation asks with regard to the Times’ Budget Puzzle: What do you think: are budgeting exercises like these what we would call “deliberative choice work”? If not, how are they related? For a definition of what Kettering means by choice work, we turn to the ever-competent NCDD resource center and [...]
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Last week, I attended a conference call hosted by the Public Health Agency of Canada as part of the ongoing D&D Evaluation Project by the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2). On their resources page, C2D2 states: The C2D2 community asks, “How do we know – what is the evidence to demonstrate – that using dialogue [...]
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Over the past few weeks, Melbourne, Australia-based Ron Lubensky has written an series of posts explaining the concept of a Citizens’ Assembly and defending it against unfounded criticism: July 23, 2010: Open letter to Julia Gillard, Prime Minister July 26, 2010: Assembled citizens make sense July 26, 2010: Another good op-ed supporting Citizens’ Assembly about [...]
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This is a short review of “Beginning with the End in Mind: A Call for Goal-driven Deliberative Practice” by Martín Carcasson, PhD (CAPE Occasional Paper / No 2 / 2009 — PDF) Carcasson‘s essay on deliberative practice presents, in his words, “a conceptual framework to help practitioners more systematically consider both the short-term and long-term [...]
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Session notes and related resources from the “No Better Time” conference at the University of New Hampshire back in July are now available for download on their resources page. Measuring and metrics was a hot topic that was discussed at the following learning exchanges: Embedding Deliberative Practices in Local Democracy (session notes, PDF): This would need some further digging [...]
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I’ll be taking the red-eye to Boston tonight on my way to what looks like a great conference: No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy for Educators and Practitioners The conference is hosted by The Democracy Imperative and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. From their website: What are the conference’s objectives? Deliberative democracy has reached [...]
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In their FAQ, The Deliberative Democracy Consortium defines deliberation and deliberative democracy as follows: What is “deliberation”? Deliberation is an approach to decision-making in which citizens consider relevant facts from multiple points of view, converse with one another to think critically about options before them and enlarge their perspectives, opinions, and understandings. What is “deliberative democracy”? [...]
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