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Re: [h2o-discuss] Deliberation Project
Good luck with your efforts. I forwarded the Deliberation url
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projects/deliberation/> to the 1000
person Democracies Online Newswire that I run - that might help
generate some more comments.
In terms of online deliberation some important references include:
http://www.e-democracy.org/do - Browse the DO-WIRE archive and
consider joining this moderated announcement list.
http://www.policity.com - Excellent citizen participation resource
http://www.e-democracy.org - Minnesota E-Democracy - check out
the Minneapolis Issues Forum, the MN-POLITICS lists, and the
current Virtual Hearing on Representative Reform in Minnesota.
GW's Democracy Online Project rates our political discourse as
the best on the Internet (ours is only half junk versus most being 99
percent junk)
http://www.publicus.net - Read the "A Wired Agora" presentation
for real examples of how to make civic dialogue work on the
Internet. Check out the second half of the "Envisioning the Public
Internet" speech for advanced information exchange ideas.
http://www.opengroups.org - A proposed standards effort to
promote group interaction across the Internet without proscribing
the kind of tools used. Join the team putting this together.
http://www.publicus.net/oc/ - An in-progress page with links to
articles and resources on online collaboration and interaction
prepared for the Markle Foundation.
A few comments - the development of consensus via online
deliberation is the holy grail of online conferencing. After years of
direct involvement with online political discourse I have yet to see
full consensus reached through online means alone - I have seen
the net complement consensus processes (and in IETF and other
very technical areas the issuing of draft documents and the wide
open meritocracy of Internet technical e-mail lists does lead to
something useful (but even the IETF meets in person). As one
person who studied "online collaborative work" told me "after 25
years of studying online collaboration we have determined that
people just don't want to collaborate. And if we do what to use
these tools the optimal size group is two."
Online discussions work wonderfully for agenda setting and
information exchange. It is also a great tool for group work where
consensus is already established.
The challenge is to first develop the online commons
<http://www.e-democracy.org/do/commons.html> and then
incrementally build from that foundation toward more deliberative
use of the technology. (While work settings are using more and
more advanced online collaboration tools, people tend to be paid to
use such systems. They are required to use them to get their
work done. This could be extended to political groups where there
is some agreement as to the problem being solved for more or less
internal work, but the extension of these tools to mass citizen use
in an open setting requires a foundation of online political discourse
experience that can only be built over time and in incremental
steps.
Sincerely,
Steven Clift
http://www.publicus.net
P.S. While I am a consultant to the Markle Foundation for the their
Web White & Blue efforts <http://www.webwhiteblue.org> the
above are my own opinions.
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Steven Clift - E: clift@publicus.net T:+1.612.822.8667
Info - http://publicus.net DO - http://e-democracy.org/do
Web White & Blue - http://webwhiteblue.org
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