[governance] CSTD

[D. R. Newman]

On 23/05/10 11:49, William Drake wrote:

> Yes, although it's difficult to imagine what a decently configured
> space could look like, which has probably contributed to the lack of 
> enthusiastic uptake of the challenge.

It is not hard to think of better spaces and processes to find consensus
decisions. Peter Emerson has been doing this for decades in Northern
Ireland and Bosnia, in the meeting process + voting system called the
deBorda preferendum (www.deborda.org). He has frequently found consensus
between groups who hate each other: they do not agree on their first
choices, but will settle for the same second or third choice.

A lot of intergovernmental meetings still use the traditional processes
of face-to-face meetings (which result in either excluding a lot of
people, or 200 people each speaking for 3 minutes, but not listening),
and paper documents. For years we have had groupware that allows us to
do better. Two examples, one on a meeting process, the other on
collaborative document writing.

1. America Speaks (www.americaspeaks.org) runs public meetings with 6000
participants. Ordinary people site in tables of 10, with a trained
facilitator. On the table, someone types notes of the questions, ideas
and conclusions from the discussion. This is fed to a set of assistants
who group together ideas under topics, and feed them back to the whole
hall for discussion and voting.

2. In his Ph.D., Aldo de Moor got loggers and environmentalists to
co-write a forestry policy for British Columbia. His software
(www.grass-arena.org) lets each group make explicit their positions,
rather than falling into wiki editing wars. Under each section are a
list of the issues, and the alternative positions different people take.

Years ago I was part of a consortium that planned to integrate all these
techniques to support a global discussion on global warming, supported
by the Club of Rome. We got to first reserve in Framework 6, but didn't
get funded. Right now I am doing something simpler: getting thousands of
young people to discuss Internet governance, then feed their conclusions
to policy makers. See http://huwy.eu/

-- 
Dr. David R. Newman, Queen's University Belfast, School of Management
and Economics, BELFAST BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland (UK)
Tel. +44 28 9097 3643 mailto:d.r.newman at qub.ac.uk
http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/ http://www.e-consultation.org/
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