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 necessary briefing materials can be quite costly. The challenge is how can we meaningfully involve participants in the co-creation of the briefing process and its outcomes in order to improve quality, lower costs and help make quality deliberation more widely available.

Here’s Tom’s take (as pre-released on Reality Sandwich last month):

Deliberapedia

As noted earlier, framing an issue for deliberation means providing balanced information that helps deliberators take into account the range of views on their issue and the trade-offs connected to whatever choices they might make. Traditionally, it involves condensing a lot of information about that issue into 3-5 approaches for addressing the issue — representing as broadly as possible the full public debate — with the arguments and evidence for and against each approach. Sometimes issue framings also include information about who supports and opposes each option, and a profile of the values that it represents and appeals to.

Most citizen deliberations are framed by professionals who produce “issue books”, videos and other briefing materials, many of which are available at low or no cost, but are quite expensive to put together in the first place. Framing for broad self-organized grassroots deliberations, in contrast, would be crowdsourced, using the fact that advocates for various solutions to a public problem have already developed arguments for their solution and against their opponents’ solutions. Our challenge is to create a context where opponents in the fight over an issue end up participating in co-creating a wiki that channels their information into a coherent frame that clarifies that issue for everyone else. Most of the partisans involved would not participate out of their civic-mindedness but because they wanted their viewpoint to be well represented in this public document. This is the idea behind “Deliberapedia”.

The Deliberapedia vision is inspired by Debatepedia, a leading debate society’s online forum to collectively work up and share arguments pro and con various propositions, creating a database that can be used by debaters everywhere. Deliberapedia would be a massive, readily searchable, rapidly expanding and developing wiki database of organized arguments for and against all sorts of policy solutions to all sorts of public issues.

Deliberapedia would provide a powerful — perhaps even necessary — foundation for a self-organizing grassroots citizen-based deliberative system capable of generating empowered public wisdom with minimal ongoing cost. It would also constitute one of the greatest contributions we could make to democracy even if the rest of the deliberative system for which it was designed is never developed.

Note from the author: The final version of Empowering Public Wisdom will include an appendix showing one way in which Deliberapedia could function, including a special network of grassroots groups focusing on issues they’ve chosen, as well as a chapter on the creation of official legislature of ordinary citizens, who could both contribute to and use Deliberapedia.

It’s still true today that “[i]nside every public participation program is a good public information program.” However, I think we need to be moving from simply informing participants (if understood as a top-down, one-way activity) towards a more participant-centric model that takes into account the entire learning experience. Last Spring at SXSW, I took the liberty to slightly rephrase the guideline as follows: ”Inside every public participation program is a good public learning program.”

The wiki approach Tom proposes has opportunities but also many challenges. In order for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts some level of editorial leadership would still be required, and the need to coordinate non-expert contributors will create certain overhead costs which may at some point outweigh the benefits.

In the context of specific projects, though, one possible solution might be found somewhere in the middle between a top-down and a purely participant-driven (crowdsourced) approach. As I started to outline last year, I agree there is a lot of potential in granting the participants a much more active role in this important pre-phase of any deliberation, consultation or general public participation effort:

• Building on the diversity of participants’ knowledge and experiences could help improve briefing materials in terms of scope, accuracy and accessibility.
• Giving participants ownership of the research process and the outcomes it produces may build buy-in and increase trust.
• Offering participants more variety in the ways they can contribute (e.g. by taking on the role of “researcher, interviewer, fact checker, curator, editor etc.”) might increase overall engagement, with more people participating at a higher enjoyment factor and hence more likely to stick around, invite others etc.

I’d be interested to know who has integrated innovative content co-creation and e-learning components into their online consultations. If you have any leads, please leave a comment. Thanks!

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 Tina Nabatchi, Michael Weiksner, John Gastil, and Matt Leighninger (Editors), Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement, Oxford University Press, Fall 2011:

Abstract: This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the spatiotemporal distance separating participants, the communication medium, and the deliberative process to be followed. After a brief overview of criteria for evaluating different design options, empirical findings are organized around design choices. Research has evolved away from treating technology for online deliberation dichotomously (either present or not) toward nuanced findings that differentiate between technological features, ways of using them, and cultural settings. The effectiveness of online deliberation depends on how well the communicative environment is matched to the deliberative task. Tradeoffs, e.g. between rich and lean media and between anonymous and identifiable participation, suggest different designs depending on the purpose and participants. Findings are limited by existing technologies, and may change as technologies and users co-evolve.

Table 6.1: Summary of Five Design Categories

The authors present a number of design issues, grouped into five multi-dimensional categories (click to enlarge image on the right):

[...] These issues have been selected for inclusion mainly because they have been the subjects of empirical research. As should be apparent, the issues discussed below represent a relatively small subset of all the potential choices a deliberation designer faces. Nevertheless, these issues do provide a way to organize the empirical literature relevant to deliberation design. [...]

Table 6.1 (page 3 in the PDF) illustrates the five design categories and the dimensions they include:

1. Purpose: Why is the deliberation being designed?
   • Outcome (decisions-beliefs-ideas)
   • Collectivity (group-individual)
2. Population: Who will be involved?
   • Recruitment (random-selected)
   • Audience (public-private)
3. Spatiotemporal Distance: Where and when will participants be interacting with each other?
   • Colocation (face to face-telecommunication)
   • Cotemporality (synchronous-asynchronous)
4. Communication Medium: How will communication occur?
   • Modality (speech-text-image-multimodal)
   • Emotivity (impeded-enabled)
   • Fidelity (transformed-unaltered)
5. Deliberative Process: What will occur between participants
   • Facilitation (moderated-unmoderated)
   • Structure (rules-free form)
   • Identifiability (identifiable-anonymous)
   • Incentivization (reward-no reward)

Under “Design Criteria” (page 9), the authors share “some of the [success] criteria that have been applied in the past, especially by researchers evaluating different design choices [...]“. They are:

• Quantity
• Quality
• Inclusiveness
• Preference
• Efficiency
• Efficacy

The article goes on to describe empirical findings related to each of the design dimensions, touching upon some of the key trade-offs involved in choosing either between online and face-to-face or between various online setups, and mentions plenty of opportunities for future research, including:

• Effects of random versus non-random sampling for participant recruitment
• Effects of audience (public versus private deliberations)
• Effects of various modalities
• Effects of structure (specifically, particular techniques)
• Effects of incentives

This research potential is summed up as follows (page 22):

Remarks on Result Specificity and Culturalism

The studies we have cited in this section, together with the design dimensions into which we have organized them, demonstrate that the main question facing future deliberation designers as they contemplate online designs will increasingly be not whether but how to use online tools. Early research in this area tended to treat technology as “a dichotomous variable … either present or not.” But as technologies have evolved, the range of experiences they offer now span a broad spectrum from the simple and truncated text of a Twitter message to the high verisimilitude of the most advanced virtual reality environments, as well as augmented reality systems that attempt to give us the best face-to-face and online experiences simultaneously. Online deliberation and its public version – online deliberative civic engagement – are rich areas of study and design because of the huge space of possibilities within them.

Great stuff! It is clear that given certain objectives, requirements and conditions a variety of design choices may be viable. Furthermore, every tool has its strengths and weaknesses and must generally fit the design approach in order to perform well. There can never be a single most effective web tool for online deliberation (or for public participation, for that matter). That question falls short as long as it’s not based on at least some specifics.

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, 2010: What I think the Citizens’ Assembly should do…
• July 27, 2010: On collaborative learning and online deliberation…
• August 14, 2010: Labor MPs avoiding Citizens’ Assembly pitch
• August 27, 2010: The public appetite for public engagement

There’s a lot of advice in there! Take these recommendations to heart, and you should be ready to design your own citizens’ assembly in no time (well, almost).

For anyone interested in learning more, Participedia has an in-depth case study available about the 2004 British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform as well as one on the 2009 Australian Citizens’ Parliament, which Ron worked on at the time.

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 its development. Over the last fifteen years, shifts in citizen capacities and attitudes have led to a dramatic proliferation of citizen participation and deliberative practices, and in 2008 they helped to produce an historic presidential election. On the heels of these changes, new opportunities for educators and practitioners are emerging in communities, in government, and on campuses. The primary goal of “No Better Time” is to take stock of these developments and to consider future directions for educators and practitioners in teaching, research, and in citizen‐centered initiatives.

We know what we want to happen: colleges and universities will make democracy central to their academic, governance, and public missions; researchers, practitioners, and other leaders will learn together better in order to improve the practice of deliberative democracy on the ground; educators will ensure that all graduates understand and know their responsibilities in a just, free, equitable society; students will become skilled in the arts of dialogue, deliberation and public reason, conflict management, and collaborative decision and policy making; the gap will close between researchers and practitioners and theory and practice…

We don’t know all that needs to happen to make these aspirations a reality. And we think that by bringing together a lot of smart, dedicated, and experienced people, we can figure it out. Convening people who care about deliberative democracy, learning from each other about what works, mapping out and prioritizing activities, and providing the space for innovation and collaboration; these are the objectives of this conference.

About 250 people are attending.

Below are some of the sessions I’m looking at (many run in parallel, so sadly I won’t be able to attend them all):

• The “downside” of deliberative democracy (Alice Siu, Stanford University; Mary Jacksteit, Public Conversations Project)
• Deliberative democracy in federal agencies (Roger Bernier, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Leanne Nurse, Environmental Protection Agency)
• Embedding deliberative practices in local democracy (Terry Amsler, Collaborative Governance Initiative, League of California Cities; Will Friedman, Public Agenda; BongHwan Kim, Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, City of Los Angeles)
• Funding and fostering democracy: What have foundations learned about the field, and what do they want to know? (Stuart Comstock-Gay, Vermont Community Foundation: John Esterle, Whitman Institute; Chris Gates, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement; Dick Ober, New Hampshire Foundation)
• Renewing the research agenda (Jim Fishkin, Stanford University; Archon Fung, Harvard University; Peter Levine, CIRCLE)
• A tech-savvy citizenry: New media for public participation, policy deliberation, and social change (Joe Peters, Ascentum; Brad Rourke, blog.bradrourke.com)
• Embedding deliberative practices in national democracy (Carolyn Lukensmeyer, AmericaSpeaks; Pete Peterson, Pepperdine University and Common Sense California)
• Making the case for this work: Improving the way we collect, report, and explain outcomes (Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University; Kristen Cambell, National Conference on Citizenship)
• Choosing, combining, and adapting deliberation models and methods (Martin Carcasson, Colorado State University; Jim Fishkin, Stanford University; Sandy Heierbacher, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation; Joe Peters, Ascentum)
• Participatory budgeting in local government (Malka Kopell, Community Focus; Harris Sokoloff, University of Pennsylvania)

Quite the line-up, eh?

A lot of pre-conference reading material is publicly available on the conference wiki.

For those wanting to follow the conference from a distance, the tag for this conference is nbt09 (or #nbt09 on Twitter).

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 voices in governance by including people of all races, classes, ages and geographies in deliberations that directly affect public decisions. As a result, citizens influence–and can see the result of their influence on–the policy and resource decisions that impact their daily lives and their future.

See also these previous posts:

• Dialogue and Deliberation
• Quick Comparison: Debate and Deliberation

NCDD’s Learning Exchange lists a few more definitions and notes that deliberation “can be used to solve problems, make decisions, produce recommendations, identify choices, and develop action plans.”

Intellitics will attend this year’s National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation, October 3-5, 2008 in Austin, Texas.

Here’s a quote from the NCDD email newsletter from today that gives you the details:

1.  Latest on the 2008 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation: Creating Cultures of Collaboration

We know your budget is tight this year, but if you are only able to attend one conference in 2008, we think it should be this one. Many people have told us our conferences are the best they’ve ever experienced. I just got an email from Larry Dressler saying the last NCDD conference (his first) was “probably the most innovatively designed meeting of this kind that I’ve ever attended.”

Our conferences are highly participatory (no keynotes and no traditional, dry panels), highly innovative (we try new things each year that are often imitated) and highly accessible (regular registration is only $375, which is about half of what comparable events cost). But the best thing about our conferences, by far, is the people. NCDD events draw the most intelligent, kind-hearted, positive, and thoughtful people I’ve ever encountered, and they’re what make our gatherings great.

So here’s what’s new…

a. The preliminary conference schedule is up at www.thataway.org/events/?page_id=113 – it’s shaping up to be our best conference yet. Confirmed workshops will be added shortly.

b. Our featured speakers are pictured and described at www.thataway.org/events/?page_id=156 – the stellar line-up includes D&D stars Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Bill Isaacs, Frances Moore Lappe, David Campt, Jim Fishkin and Hans-Peter Meister.

c.  At NCDD Austin, we’ll be tackling 5 of the main challenges facing our field. Check them out at www.thataway.org/events/?p=106

NCDD 2008 is co-sponsored by the Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy at Kansas State University, the Global Facilitator Service Corps, the Forum Foundation, the Democracy Imperative, the Bluebonnet Hills Christian Church, the LBJ Presidential Library, and Regis University’s Institute on the Common Good, and Everyday Democracy and Hal Saunders are Partners of the conference.

Learn more about the 2008 NCDD conference, which will take place October 3-5 in Austin, Texas, at www.thataway.org/events – or register at www.thataway.org/events/?page_id=136 .  Hope to see you there!

Their 2006 conference was held in San Francisco and a truly spectecular event, in terms of both content and people.

If you’re interested in doing something at or around the conference that focuses on the online component to dialogue, deliberation, or public participation, make sure to drop me a line or simply leave a comment.

The following are a few Facebook groups we watch that deal with various aspects of dialogue, deliberation, public participation, e-government or e-democracy (membership numbers as of today):

• C2D2 – Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (18 members)
  Community of interest on dialogue and deliberation. Conference held every two years.
• Conversation Cafe (308 members)
  Conversation Cafes promote community, democracy and wisdom world-wide through generating millions of open, respectful public conversations.
• e-democracy (346 members)
  For those interested in e-democracy, especially the efforts of E-Democracy.Org.
• E-Demokratie.org (in German, 12 members)
  E-Government oder E-Verwaltung beschreiben die Darstellung von Regierungs- und Verwaltungshandeln. E-Government wird aber auch häufig synonym mit dem Begriff E-Demokratie (eDemocracy) verwendet. Im Detail muss dabei jedoch stark differenziert werden: so geht es bei E-Demokratie nicht nur um elektronisch gestütztes Regieren. Es geht um viel mehr, es geht um Legitimation, Partizipation und Öffentlichkeit.
• ePractice.eu (97 members)
  epractice.eu is a good practice exchange scheme with a web portal, weekly newsletter, country factsheets, online library, practitioner profiles, events calendar and monthly workshops created by the European Commission for the professional community in eGovernment, e-Inclusion and eHealth. epractice.eu involves practitioners from all 27 Member States, EU-member candidate states and EFTA countries but others are welcome to join. The portal combines online activities with frequent offline exchanges: workshops, face-to-face meetings and public presentations. A large knowledge base of real-life case studies submitted by portal members is freely available. The Facebook extension is provided in order to bridge the gap between Facebook’s social and epractice.eu’s professional touch.
• Everyday Democracy (53 members)
  Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center) is a national organization that helps local communities find ways for all kinds of people to think, talk and work together to solve problems. We work with neighborhoods, cities and towns, regions, and states, helping them pay particular attention to how racism and ethnic differences affect the problems they address.
• Government 2.0 (205 members)
  A new governance construct is possible… Create it
• I support participatory democracy! (395 members)
  This group is for people who believe that democracy only becomes meaningful when it involves its people in participatory decisionmaking processes.
• ICT4Democracy (192 members)
  Gathering of citizens from across the world believing that Information and Communication Technologies can help in providing us with more and better democracy and are willing to do something about it … in their lifetime …
• International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) (20 members)
  IAP2 is an association of members who seek to promote and improve the practice of public participation in relation to individuals, governments, institutions, and other entities that affect the public interest in nations throughout the world.
• National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) (348 members)
  A group for those dedicated to solving tough problems with honest talk, quality thinking and collaborative action. Join us if you agree with Einstein, that the problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
• Participatory Budgeting (158 members)
  Participatory Budgeting (PB) can be broadly defined as the participation of citizens in the decision-making process of budget allocation and monitoring public spending. Participation may take various forms, from effective decision-making power in the allocation of resources to more modest initiatives that confer voice during the development of the budget. This is a group for exchange of information among those interested in practices of participatory budgeting.
• POLITECH INSTITUTE (European Center of Political Technologies) (112 members)
  POLITECH INSTITUTE is a not-for-profit international association (AISBL) and a European Center of Political Technologies located in Brussels, Capital of Europe, bridging public institutions, international institutions, governments, regional and local authorities, universities, research centers, think tanks, civil society and political leaders with technology actors for a better use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) towards the advancement of modern public governance and democracy.
• The World Cafe (249 members)
  A group for practitioners of/people interested in the TWC.

Needless to say, most of these organizations maintain resource-heavy websites of their own.

It’s by no means an exhaustive list, but should give you a head start if you want to connect with people in this community via Facebook. If you happen to know of any additional Facebook groups in this area, feel free to leave a comment.

These are the slightly modified slides from a quick presentation I gave last night at Web Monday Silicon Valley in San Francisco. It’s a first high-level introduction to our first product, a web application for problem solving and decision making in large groups.

| View | Upload your own

We hope to have the initial pieces of an alpha version in place some time over the coming weeks.

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 of a resource kit for deliberative decision-making projects.

Debate vs. Deliberation

In debate, you search for weaknesses in another position	In deliberation, you search for strength in another position.
In debate, you search for glaring differences.	Deliberation involves concern for others.
Debate involves countering the other’s position at the expense of the relationship.	Deliberation assumes that many people have pieces of an answer to a workable solution.
Debate calls for investing wholeheartedly in your beliefs.	In deliberation, you temporarily suspend your judgment of other’s beliefs.
Debate is oppositional and seeks to prove the other wrong.	Deliberation is collaborative and seeks common understanding.
The goal of debate is winning – often only for a short-term advantage.	The goal of deliberation is common ground for action, which is the basis for consistent policy.
In debate, you listen to find flaws and counter-arguments.	In deliberation, you listen to understand and find meaning in agreement.
Debate defends assumptions as truth.	Deliberation reveals assumptions for reevaluation.
Debate defends original solutions.	Deliberation opens the possibility of better solutions.
In debate, you submit your best thinking and defend its rightness.	In deliberation, you submit your best thinking in order to improve it.

Interestingly enough, while there have recently been quite a few initiatives that focus on building better tools for online debate the same cannot be said for online deliberation (at least as far as I am aware of).

One reason for that, in my view, is the fact that both dialogue and deliberation require very good listening skills on the part of the participants. And as difficult as listening may seem in real life, it is generally that much harder to do online.