The Participation Company
For the past three years (ever since attending “The Underlying Dynamics of Conversations that Matter”, a most excellent pre-conference workshop with Tom Atlee and Peggy Holman at NCDD 2008 in Austin, TX), I’ve been following the Group Pattern Language Project, a very exciting endeavor led by Tree Bressen, Sue Woehrlin and Dave Pollard and involving dozens of contributors from a [...]
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The following appeared in Public Involvement Techniques: A Reader of Ten Years Experience at the Institute for Water Resources (PDF, pages 265-270), a collection of articles on public involvement from 1983, prepared by James L. Creighton, Jerome Delli Priscoli and C. Mark Dunning for the Institute for Water Resources, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: The [...]
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Earlier last month, New York City saw the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. What started out as a small group of people camping out at a local park in downtown Manhattan has since gained a lot of momentum and spread to dozens of cities across the US. From Wikipedia: Occupy Wall Street is [...]
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The newly-announced We The People e-petition initiative by the White House has been getting a lot of coverage (for example, see here, here, here, here, here). I spent Saturday reading through comment threads on various sites to look for additional feedback, criticisms and concerns related to the public participation process, some of which I’m listing [...]
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Adriano Pianesi and Amy Lenzo just released a short guide to online hosting (published in the March issue of The Systems Thinker): The Art of Online Hosting: From Powerpoint to Powerful (PDF). From the paper: The key to online hosting is simple—deep listening. When it comes to using online tools, people are often distracted by technology, and [...]
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Stephen Whitehead, researcher at London, UK-based New Economics Foundation (nef), recently alerted me to a new paper of theirs: Connected Conversations Reflecting on nef’s decade of experience in democracy and participation, this pamphlet argues that tackling the biggest issues, from climate change to social inequality, needs to start with small conversations between friends and neighbours. [...]
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While I was assembling my off-the-cuff analysis of input types on Change.gov, I felt compelled to revisit two existing facilitation techniques that help guide participation by adding to the process the kind of structure that I believe could work very well for large-scale efforts. First, Dynamic Facilitation, a method I first learned about at the 2006 National Conference on [...]
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Conversations Elsewhere