Experiments in Civic Sensemaking
From the category archives:
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 climate policy
July 26, [...]
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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 into, but lots [...]
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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 a critical point in [...]
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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”?
Deliberative democracy strengthens citizen [...]
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Sandra S. Hodge, Ph.D. and Program Director Discovering Common Ground: Missouri Communities Deliberate at University of Missouri has a nice comparison chart that looks at the differences between debate and deliberation: Deliberation and Your Community: How to Convene and Moderate Local Public Forums Using Deliberative Decision-Making (training manual) (PDF, 1.1MB). The training manual is part [...]
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The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) provides a good definition of dialogue and deliberation, and describes how the two relate to each other:
So what are dialogue and deliberation anyway?
Dialogue is a process that allows people, usually in small groups, to share their perspectives and experiences with one another about difficult issues we tend [...]
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Conversations Elsewhere
