[governance] CSTD

[William Drake]

Hi

Thanks David, this is interesting, and as Jeremy notes, some of these concepts could be usefully explored vis IGF.  At the same time though, it's pretty clear that procedural innovations are not what most governments are looking for viz. EC, but rather old school lock the doors, majority vote intergovernmentalism.  So it'd be a rather hard sell...

Best

Bill

On May 23, 2010, at 9:03 PM, D. R. Newman wrote:

> 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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***********************************************************
William J. Drake
Senior Associate
Centre for International Governance
Graduate Institute of International and
 Development Studies
Geneva, Switzerland
william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch
www.graduateinstitute.ch/cig/drake.html
***********************************************************


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