[governance] rules to support deliberation (was Re: Formal public)

[Norbert Bollow]

Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> Some time ago Norbert quite correctly I think, referred to the
> Habermas related notions of "civic/participative deliberation" and
> the rules that necessarily govern this. 

My current view of this issue of rules is that while I'm not at all
sure what are the necessary conditions that a set of rules must satisfy
in order to allow a group to sustainably have effective deliberative
processes, it is very clear from experience (not only on this list)
that it is necessary to have some kind of rules (which may be explicit
or unwritten-informal) on what is acceptable conduct, and some kind of
incentive mechanism that promotes conformance to those rules.

What are good rules?

I think that there is a lot of room for legitimate experimentation in
this regard.

I think however that in the context of such experimentation, it is
important to avoid situations where there are written rules but in
actual reality a significantly different set of rules is informally in
effect. Even if such a situation might result in a positive experience
for the group of participants, the *value of the experience as an
experiment on deliberation environments* would IMO likely be very
limited.

Greetings,
Norbert

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