Use Randomly Selected Citizen Deliberative Councils to tap the collective wisdom of We the People

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I'm Not So Sure...

Ad hoc, randomly selected, well-informed citizen deliberative councils like Citizens Juries, Citizen Assemblies, and Consensus Conferences have been used hundreds of times around the world to provide policy guidance to public officials and the citizenry. The U.S. lags far behind in their use.

These similar approaches all enable a microcosm of a country or community to generate informed public judgment about specific issues.

They are not legislatures. They are temporary councils, more like juries, but they deliberate on public issues rather than private guilt, and they are far more actively engaged in becoming informed than any jury can be. They get professional help in hearing each other and creatively deliberating.

As with juries, random selection (a) creates greater diversity than one finds in a legislature, (b) makes it much harder for corrupting influences to skew the results, and (c) levels the conversation with an assumption that all participants are peers. Also like a jury, a citizen deliberative council disbands as soon as it completes its work.

These councils can be used for any number of purposes -- to recommend solutions, to evaluate proposed legislation or ballot initiatives, to evaluate the performance of public officials or interview politicians seeking election, and more. They are useful wherever a dependable, informed, reflective non-partisan (or "transpartisan") "voice of the whole" is desired. Their recommendations can be advisory, or a mandate, or they can be put to a vote by the electorate.

A related process, a citizens' Wisdom Council, could serve as an annual "state of the union address" by a group of randomly selected citizens officially convened for the purpose. They would not be assigned an issue to deliberate, but would have a creative conversation for several days and come to consensus conclusions they would then share with the country. Whatever they came up with would certainly stimulate much discussion!

The point I would like to raise in this proposal for discussion is that randomly selected councils of citizens can, under the right conditions, generate far wiser recommendations than vast dialogue and deliberation programs involving thousands or millions of people. Random selection -- sortition -- was the foundation of Athenian Democracy. Well designed microcosms can be more demographically representative of a whole community than a self-selected group or an elected legislature -- although all three forms have their democratic roles. Perhaps most important in these times of tight budgets, government resources -- organizational, informational and facilitation -- can be more focused, resulting in higher quality outcomes at less cost.

This approach can also complement broader community or national dialogues. The special outcomes of citizen deliberative councils can be fed into the more broadly participative dialogues and deliberations proposed here by others. The outcomes of citizen deliberative councils add a totally new voice -- the voice of the whole -- to the usually partisan public discourse we think of as democracy.

For more information on this approach and links to the various related practices, see http://www.co-intelligence.org/CDCUsesAndPotency.html.

Why Is This Idea Important?

This approach provides an inexpensive, effective way to bring the voice of the whole community or country into partisan public discourse or to provide useful, thoughtful advice to policy-makers.

Idea # 443New Strategies and Techniques, citizen deliberative councils, citizen juries, citizens assemblies, consensus conferences, deliberation, deliberative democracy, random selection, sortition, we the people, dialogue, public discourse, public judgment, wisdom councils, juries, microcosms, collective wisdom, economizing

Comments

Nicholas Dewar 8 months ago

Deliberative councils are very interesting and can produce interesting, sound outcomes. I helped facilitate something like this that was organized by the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford last year. It produced a significant shift in the opinions of the participants. The tricky part of this seems to be what to do with the outcome of the deliberative process. Building a policy recommendation (no matter how good it is) that hasn't been requested by authorized "Policy makers" is like pushing on string. The key seems to be developing an interface with the existing policy-making system that ensures the outcomes will go somewhere. Another problem is cost: if the council is going to be statistically representative (especially in a heterogenous population) it has to be quite big, and providing the council with well-developed properly balanced information is time-consuming.
It's promising.

cii 8 months ago

Interesting, Nicholas. My assumption is that if it becomes official policy of the Obama Administration that that would constitute "an interace with the existing policy-making system that ensures the outcomes will go somewhere". Re "statistically representative", I would suggest that with deliberation we are in a different ballpark than with public opinion polling, in which the component people are static sources of opinion rather than interactive co-creators of public judgment. I think this is a matter of "requisite diversity" rather than full demographic representation.

I have an article about this at
http://www.co-intelligence.org/CDCsLegitimacy.html.

I also suspect that a higher standard of decision-making (consensus or supermajority rather than majority vote) creates interactive dynamics that evoke special respect for diverse voices (in order to reach a collective decision), further reducing the need for quantitative breakdowns of diversity rather than simply the presence of diversity. If the one farmer in the group can block a consensus, there is no need to have 50 farmers. Citizens juries tend to use majority or super-majority voting. Danish Consensus Conferences use consensus. This is rich territory for research!

johnable23 8 months ago

To make this happen, I believe Congress would have to reform the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which currently makes it very difficult to establish citizen groups that advise federal agencies.

Still, a good idea, especially in light of new social media technologies that could significantly increase government/citizen collaboration.

bidwell2 8 months ago

This post does a good job highlighting what should be a key component of all participation programs/projects: matching strategies with goals.

There are many different approaches to participation in decision making, which serve different goals. Ortwin Renn has some very good, recent writings on this.

dm88morl 8 months ago

It is through the public at large that change ultimately comes about. It comes through conversations, letters, emails, and commentaries. It is the public at large who came to understand, at last, that the modus operandi of the previous administration, which not only did not invite public input but which shut out almost all, could actually destroy our living democracy.

When the polarity fostered by that administration spread so widely that ordinary people began to see its destructiveness, they began to talk to one another and to imagine creating different ways of living together that might help us all.

Thus, choosing citizens at random seems an appropriate way of finding the pulse of the nation. It makes clear the difference between empowerment backed by reason and power backed by force.

Stephen Buckley 8 months ago

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jhsnider 8 months ago

In July 2008, the UK Ministry of Justice issued a report, A National Framework for Greater Citizen Engagement, which endorsed considering the use of citizens’ juries in public policy deliberation. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, has also implemented a number of citizens' juries. It will probably be a while before a consensus develops on how well they worked. The early press reports I saw tended to criticize them as being glorified and expensive focus groups for politicians. If so, that doesn't necessarily preclude them from making a valuable democratic contribution.

For a review of the academic literature on the use of randomly selected citizens bodies, see my book review essay,"From Dahl to O'Leary: 36 Years of the 'Yale School of Democratic Reform'," published in the Journal of Public Deliberation.

--J.H. Snider, President
iSolon.org

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

Use Randomly Selected Citizen Deliberative Councils to tap the collective wisdom of We, the People, is a great idea. But why not really raise the bar by setting the whole deliberative process of "Citizen Deliberative Councils" online, complete with "Public" input, and using the newly adopted Online Robert's Rules of Order?

ex animo
davidfarrar

cii 8 months ago

The face to face Citizen Deliberative Councils described here don't use Roberts Rules of Order, but I can imagine that Roberts Rules might well be a useful tool for online deliberations. What we really need is to compare the results of a number and variety of face-to-face citizen deliberative approaches with a number and variety of online deliberative approaches (all convened around the same topic) and explore the differences and similarities. Right now what we have are a lot of advocates for this or that favorite approach(es) -- and we need to move beyond that. Some balanced, thorough research seems to be called for, given that we are trying to identify what approach(es) will best provide us with a deliberative voice of "We the People", collectively. Doesn't that seem important enough to warrant some real research? -- Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence Institute http://co-intelligence.org

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

Agreed. But if you are seriously talking about We, the People, there is really only one way to achieve that -- by inviting We, the People, to participate. Anything less is at best, a distraction, a deception at worse.

Moreover, there is absolutely no way you can ever handle a Citizen Deliberative Council made up of, lets say, 15 decision-makers, reviewing expert testimony from 150 experts and 10,000 public comments, together with reams of background material in a face to face setting. And even if you could, the cost would be astronomical. But to construct a Citizen Deliberative Council meeting online, using good deliberative groupware and following Online Robert's Rules of Order, it can be done, and done routinely, with everything from your local city's garden's club meeting to pending Congressional legislation on cap and trade.

The Internet has been called the most powerful communicative tool since movable type. It would be sheer folly not to take advantage of its power now. It would be like someone hitching up a team of horses to pull this new fangled invention called the Model T -- sheer folly!

ex animo
davidfarrar

cii 8 months ago

I'm surprised, David, that your language is so dismissive of the hundreds of Citizen Deliberative Councils (CDC) held around the world as "at best, a distraction, a deception at worse."

A CDC is not made up of 15 "decision-makers" (in any official sense), but of ordinary citizens, and they seldom take testimony form 150 experts and 10,000 public comments, any more than a jury does. They are, rather, ordinary citizens practicing a sort of ideal form of citizenship, with access to far more -- and more diverse -- facts and opinions and expert-interactions -- to say nothing of quality interactions with diverse fellow citizens -- than most people ever have access to. They make extremely informed recommendations. How much they should be empowered as a legitimate voice for "We the People" is a matter for both research and diverse opinion. But they do add a collective voice that currently is not very present in political discourse.

Perhaps most importantly, I cannot agree with your absolute standard of "inviting We, the People, to participate". I assume you are speaking of creating an internet forum that anyone can join. This is fine, but it functions on very different assumptions than a CDC. Just as a jury isn't made up of "anyone who wants to be on the jury", but rather of a random cross-section of the community, so is a CDC. Most CDCs use some form of "stratified sampling", in which a large pool of citizens is picked at random and then individuals are scientifically selected from that pool to collectively embody or reflect the demographic diversity of the community (age, gender, socio-economic status, education, race, etc.). That's who become members of the CDC. Any forum which invites whoever wants to show up -- whether in person or online -- is very unlikely to reflect a true cross-section of the community, especially since experience shows that considerable effort and special arrangements are needed to enable various kinds of marginalized people to participate in citizen deliberations.

So while I do believe there is tremendous value in having forums in which "anyone" can participate, I want to make it clear that that is no substitute for a true microcosm deliberation.

What I hope is that the very different values of such diverse forums can be more deeply understood, so that powerful synergistic forms of citizen deliberation can be created. Imagine (for example) if there was a Wikipedia-like resource on public issues that created "argument maps" of the different perspectives and their various bodies of supporting evidence. Combine that with your deliberative groupware with Roberts Rules. Then imagine a stakeholder council -- made up of the various interest groups and partisans -- who are brought to some common ground using powerful negotiation or consensus processes like those used by the Harvard Negotiation Project or Search for Common Ground. Then imagine all that being at the fingertips of a CDC which, in the middle of its deliberations tests out its tentative findings with the public in an open online forum...

I mean, we have barely begun to create the tools we actually need. Model T, indeed!!!

Tom Atlee
www.co-intelligence.org

Daniel Steinbock 8 months ago

Tom, this is what I hear David saying:
It is evident that online participatory media make possible large-scale public input by thousands or more.
Currently, no one knows an effective way to process and deliberate around this dazzling and disordered collective voice.
Citizen Deliberative Councils don't seem like an effective way to process all that data, either.
Online Robert's Rules of Order may be.

David, this is what I hear Tom saying:
Randomly selected Citizen Deliberative Councils are an established and demonstrably effective process for gathering public input.
CDCs are small-scale, low-tech, well-organized, and fairly representative of the citizen population
CDCs don't have the same socioeconomic barriers to participation as online forums do.
Online participatory media will prove extremely useful for generating representations of complex problems and discourses, quick-polling provisional outcomes of deliberation, or otherwise enabling large-scale support for face-to-face deliberation by a CDC.

My point of view:
Both of you highlight that the technological tools have great potential but aren't there yet.
Apparently there are some folks inside the Obama administration who've been given license to experiment (e.g. this site, change.gov, data.gov).
No doubt these folks are scratching their heads as much as we are about how to organize all this participation.
Assume the online tools of participation do develop, through experiment, as we hope.
Practically speaking, at the end of the day, some group of people has to take whatever consensus/insight/diversity of opinion is produced by online participatory media and deliberate on what to do about it.
This group of people will almost certainly be collaborating face-to-face, small-scale, low-tech.
Currently, the locus of deliberation is only located within the government -- the particular group of people in the Obama administration paying attention.
The goal is to invite more citizens to *that* party.
CDCs seem like a reasonable proposal for systematically inviting representative samples of citizens into the deliberative process that does the hard work of turning insights generated online into concrete practice.

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

cii,

I apologize if I spoke too bluntly. But in terms of creating a CDC that actually represents We, the people, a wise attorney once said...your case is either won or lost during juror voir dire.

If the goal here is to invite more citizens to "that" party, it just seems to me small, face-to-face meetings would be a self-limiting factor in the pursuit of that goal.

Danniel,

Unless a face-to-face CDC is charged with implementation as well as consensus-building, I can't see your point. Implementation is a whole new enterprise, once the consensus has been form and the decision has been made. But here, again, because the Internet is such a powerful communicative tool, there would be nothing preventing the invitation of We, the people, i.e., the public, from participating online in forming the rules and regulations of any successful implementation as well.

Guys...we have to start thinking out of the box here! There is not a minute to lose!

d1doherty 8 months ago

I have facilitated a number of citizen dialogues and am always amazed at the quality of solutions that emerge on really hard topics such as racism, religion, the environment, world hunger, violence, etc. Experts provide valuable information, yet regular folks seem to have a common-sense wisdom about how to solve big problems.

For example we were discussing pollution...it seems so big and complex...then one person said if the effluent from every city, corporation and farm was required to be the same quality as the water intake, there would be very little water pollution. That is the kind of idea that could grow into a sustainable national policy, and be managed at the individual level.

The only thing I really have control over is my own behaviour and the conversations I have in my circle of influence. I have found that citizen dialogues are a powerful tool for propagating change conversations, and coming up with practical solutions.

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

d1doherty,

With all due respect, you don't think city officials, corporate CEOs and farmers haven't thought of that? I am sure the challenge is how to achieve that goal and still be cost competitive, or within a city's budget, or the cost of the farmer's produce within a price range what will sell to in their markets.

I think perhaps a few experts would be advisable here. In fact, there is already a very, very wide amount of material already created that could address this particular issue. All we need is James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of the crowds", guided by informed experts to find the right answers. But to do that we new a communicative tool that will allow all of the experts, with all of their material and We, the people's wisdom brought to bear on this problem at a cost we all can afford. My. friends, that tool is the internet, deliverative groupware and Robert's Rules of Online Order.

ex animo
davidfarrar

in-box 8 months ago

"Ad hoc, randomly selected, well-informed"

So it's random before you start filtering people, or you screen for acceptable people then choose some randomly?

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

Good point, in-box.

"Ad hoc, randomly selected, well-informed citizen deliberative councils"..."cii" suggested that the process would be likened to a jury selection process. As everyone knows, a judicial process is an adversarial setting. So I suppose the filtering process has a set of written criteria, together with two representatives of opposing points of view, each appointing members one by one, and opposing others on stated grounds, all watched over my an impartial judge, who is bound by the written criteria. This deliberation would be, of course, recorded and accessible to the public, with an adequate appeals mechanism available to those not chosen.

How ever the CDCs are created, holding their meetings online, accessible to millions, if not the whole world, would be vastly superior to holding their meeting face-to-face, where only a releative few would be able due to time and distance limitations to participate, is my only point.

My only other point is to raise the consciousness of people who still think in pre-internet terms, that a new day in effective communication has, indeed, arrived. And that to not take advantage of it, where possible, would be a disservice to We, the people.

ex animo
davidfarrar

bidwell2 8 months ago

Let me expand on my earlier comment about goals, because it would help me better understand the other comments here. Participatory processes can achieve many kinds of goals, but different approaches are appropriate for reaching different goals. Here are some possible goals for a process (note: "community" is scalable; it can mean a neighborhood, a group with common interests, a nation, etc.):

*Foster greater civic dialogue to strengthen community, inform the public, and build on common ground. (Participatory approaches: community deliberations, online forums.)
*Provide "decision makers" (e.g., elected officials, agency personnel) with informed recommendations/perspectives representative of the community. (Approach: Citizen juries)
*Integrate perspectives/values of key interest groups into decisions. (Approach: advisory committees)
*Empower the community to make decisions. (Approach: referendums)
*Inform the community, transparency of decisions and decision process. (Approach: public meetings, information repositories, informative websites)

Each approach has its own particular biases. Even a citizen jury, which intends to be most representative of a community's demographics (or perhaps values?) is biased in who chooses or is able to participate. Moreover, there are normative pressures and inter-/intra-group dynamics in deliberative groups.

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

bidwell2,

I agree. Many public issues have opposing views and provisions must be made in this "Use Randomly Selected Citizen Deliberative Councils to tap the collective wisdom of We the People" suggestion to deal with creating a CDC in an adversarial setting. At present, I have seen very little literature from the links provided acknowledging this issue, let alone addressing it.

ex animo
davidfarrar

cii 8 months ago

Re: "At present, I have seen very little literature from the links provided acknowledging this issue, let alone addressing it." Read the article at the link I provided and follow the many links contained in it. Visit the Jefferson Center, the home of Citizens Juries (which is linked to that article), which contains a complete manual for running Citizens Juries. Use Google to research consensus conferences or the amazing Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform held in British Columbia several years ago? I wrote a book THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY and posted its chapters on citizen deliberative councils online at http://taoofdemocracy.com/toc.html.

The web is overflowing with information about citizen deliberative councils of all forms. Use it to find out more about what thousands of researchers and practitioners have been doing in this area. As you say "I think perhaps a few experts would be advisable here". Ask them how certain issues you are concerned about are being addressed.

One fact is very obvious to deliberation practitioners -- at least face-to-face onesL Very few issues actually have only two opposing views. Unfortunately and unnecessarily, political discourse is often framed in polarized ways to mobilize emotional support in a majoritarian system (only two choices makes it easier to get 51% than if there are three or more choices...) But the vast majority of issues have multiple (often overlapping) viewpoints associated with them, each with their related base of supportive argumentation (data and logic), values, solutions, framings of the problem, etc.

From all I've seen, the most powerful methods for addressing social issues don't deal with A versus B dynamics, but with bringing forth the full gifts of each perspective and creatively weaving them into something that works for the vast majority of those involved. A broad range of diverse perspectives can be included through engaging diverse information, diverse expertise, and/or diverse participants. To the extent this is done -- AND to the extent we use processes that enable the creative use of diverse gifts AND the dissonance among them -- we get powerful (wise) results.

Examples of this include (but are not limited to)

(a) "framing an issue for deliberation" (creating "issue books" that have detailed arguments for and against 3-5 leading perspectives, as produced by National Issues Forums http://nifi.org/) and many others.

(b) engaging an advisory panel of diverse partisans to oversee the provision of briefing materials and experts to a citizen deliberative council. (The selection of participants is usually done with NO attention to what they know or think about the issue, but rather to other kinds of demographics, as described in my earlier comment. The idea of opposing advocates choosing participants is not part of citizen deliberative council procedures.)

(c) using powerful co-creative processes like Dynamic Facilitation which deeply hear all perspectives and translate violent disagreements into concerns that are then well heard. (I have a hard time imagining how this would be done online, but that's another subject...)

There is a different logic and dynamic at work in deliberation than in THE WISDOM OF CROWDS. Suroweicki clearly is unfamiliar with today's powerful dialogue and deliberation methods; his critiques belong to more primitive forms of public discourse. However, his descriptions of the use of crowds in prediction markets and in identifying the correct answer to questions that HAVE one correct answer, are very compelling. His version of the wisdom of crowds breaks down, however, when the question being addressed doesn't have a right or wrong answer, but involves the complex "choice work" of trade-offs, delving into each other's diverse values, and transformational co-creativity.

Helene Landemore researches collective intelligence and democracy at MIT (she's moving to Yale in the fall). She seeks to integrate decision-markets and deliberative processes, both in theory and in practice, in order to increase the overall wisdom of democracy. THAT'S the kind of creative engagement that we urgently need with these different approaches. We need to figure out how to synergize online approaches with face-to-face sources of collective intelligence and wisdom, to make them more powerful together than they can possibly be separately. Precisely because I share David's sense that we don't have much time, I urge him and others here to help us all find ways to do this.

Tom Atlee
cii = Co-Intelligence Institute

PS: And yes, CDC random selection often uses random selection of a large group of people from the phone book or voter registration lists, or social security records, and then a smaller demographic selection from that large group to DEMOGRAPHICALLY represent the diversity of the community/country. The only time I've heard of anyone asking prospective selectees what they thought of the issue being deliberated was during several Danish Consensus Conferences where selectees were disqualified if they knew anything much about the issue at all! Thus those panelists were all at the same starting point, without bias, learning about the issue together. The BALANCING of biases then goes on in the selection of briefing materials and experts to testify. The selection of both participants and sources of information is a hot topic within the field of deliberation.

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

Thanks, Tom.

I will certainly read your suggested literature,as I am sure others will, as well. I certainly appreciate your effort. But I remain sceptical. I remain sceptical because human nature being what it is, the process WILL be manipulated. To me, and this is just my feeling on the subject, it would be far better to acknowledge the fact that the process does have inherent biases and prejudices, in every aspect of the deliberative process, from selection of the CDC members, to picking the facilitators, in the facilitation process itself, to the experts invited, to the experts not invited, to deciding when and where to hold the CDC meetings, and so on. It is to these structural shorcomings Suroweicki's THE WISDOM OF CROWDS would be able to overcome by seer numbers.

Let me just take a blind stab here and ask you at what time during the day are these CDC meetings generally held? Where are they generally held? How many people from the public usually attend these meetings?

I ask you these questions, as you may have guessed, because they are factors that directly effect the CDC process and one that the online deliberative process can directly impact.

In terms of addressing your Point(c): using powerful co-creative processes like Dynamic Facilitation which deeply hear all perspectives and translate violent disagreements into concerns that are then well heard. (I have a hard time imagining how this would be done online, but that's another subject...)

If a CDC member requested -- or more specifically, if a CDC member made a motion, and if the motion is seconded and a vote of the entire CDC is taken in the affirmative) a request to further explore an area of concern with a dynamic facilitator's would be generated.

The dynamic facilitator would respond, in writing -- I would suggest in a certain color -- and the dynamic facilitator's post would become part of the record for all to see and carry on from there. There would be any number of ways to approach this function, from simply adding a "Dynamic Facilitator's Response" hyper link, leading to a full web page, to placing the dynamic facilitator's response directly under the CDC request.

Under the "Public" section, of course, there will be an opportunity for the public to respond to the dynamic facilitator's post, as well as a voting function, as to whether the public agrees with the facilitator's choice work or not, or have no opinion one way or there other, usually represented by the horizontal thumb position, as opposed to a thumbs down or a thunbs up icon -- your basic deliberative groupware function. In this manner, all voices will be heard, not just that of the dynamic facilitator's.

But, as I said, I will read your material, as presented, and, again, thank you for your effort. If you have any specific hyper links as to how CDC members are chosen, by whom, and by what method, et cetera, it would speed up the process considerably -- another unique function and power of the internet at work.

ex animo
davidfarrar

d1doherty 8 months ago

davidfarrar,
I agree, online tools are a useful adjunct to face to face dialogue.
- a benefit of online is 24hr access over time and across distances, with a written record of ideas and information for others to read
- a benefit of face to face is we get to meet our neighbours and the subtleties of non-verbal communication allow us to read emotions as we mutually shift attitudes and commit to action.

d1doherty 8 months ago

inbox,
You asked "So it's random before you start filtering people, or you screen for acceptable people then choose some randomly? "

The purpose of random selection in the citizens' council process is to reduce selection bias. In theory every member of the community should have an opportunity to be chosen. A community could be a workplace, a neighbourhood, a city, state, etc. In reality one attempts to get as close to that as possible (e.g. limitation of the voters list or phone book). In this way the group symbolically represents the voice of the community. The more councils, the closer to the truth this becomes.

d1doherty 8 months ago

davidfarrar,
You said "if a CDC member made a motion, and if the motion is seconded and a vote of the entire CDC is taken in the affirmative) a request to further explore an area of concern with a dynamic facilitator's would be generated."

In a face-to-face CDC a question can be tested without the formality of Roberts Rules, however online, as you suggest, a more formal decision tool adds accountability and clarity given the lack of non-verbal communication cues and asynchronous time frame.

In our CDC planning group we found for some decisions a 50% +1 vote was too blunt. We experimented with a graded decision process. Once the question was put before the group we voted on a 5 point scale
-2 unacceptable
-1 prefer no
0 neutral
+1 prefer yes
+2 essential

In this way, if the balance of votes were on one side we could proceed. But if any votes were in extreme opposition to the consensus, we would explore the concerns to see how they could be addressed. In this way we avoided having the situation of 49% unsatisfied members on a key decision, and we were not bogged down by requiring 100% consensus.

After RR's virtual motion/2nd, a graded voting system would work online too.

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

Yes,

You can, of course, experiment with the rules, or even adopt a set of your own. The point being, you establish some sort of deliberative order which will allow all to speak and to be heard along the linews of RRs. Robert's Rules have over time proven themselves to be very effective in bringing order to a deliberative meeting. And there is certainly nothing inherent in RRs that would prohibit them from being re-written for online use. It would be a real break-through for public participation in governmental affairs if they could also participate right from their own home computer at any time in real deliberative government meetings. If a particular CDC meeting was online and the public was given a chance to participate, although unofficially, the CDC members themselves would be able to see where the public was heading on an issue, read their comments, questions and concerns, and move the CDC meeting towards those ends, address those concerns, answer those questions. Whatever the outcome of a particular CDC meeting, it would be considered far, far more valuable if 13,000 people also agreed with their conclusion.

Sadly, this is a point Obama's Organizing for America hasn't fully appreciated. Rather than simply turn his 13-million member group into a rubber stamp committee, give them their own voice, allow all to speak and to be accurately heard. In this fashion, their collective voice would be far, far more effective if people realized it was coming from them and not simply dictated from on top.

ex animo
davidfarrar

cii 8 months ago

Some responses to your earlier comment, David.

1. Your concern about manipulation or corruption of the process is quite warranted. I have that concern quite broadly -- about Congress, media, online processes, presidential elections, stimulus packages, military budgets, markets, corporate personhood, nano-bio-robotics, and virtually anything else that has power and money attached to it.

Interestingly enough, one of the least corrupted processes among our governing institutions is the one most like citizen deliberative councils: Juries. Not perfect by a long shot, but it is a success story worth studying.

That said, I don't agree that the PROCESS of Citizen Deliberative Councils has "inherent biases and prejudices." Perhaps you meant the process has inherent VULNERABILITIES to manipulation at all those points you identified. THAT I agree with. For you, that may mean the process isn't worth the risk. For me, for whom the process offers us a very high value-added for our democracy, the process' vulnerabilities mean we must institutionalize safeguards to ensure its integrity, just as we do (or try to do) with Congress, elections, etc. (As Jefferson is said to have said, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.")

2. Re your "blind stab." Most Citizen Deliberative Councils are not public meetings, so none of the public come, aside from the members of the Council and the various experts and staff that inform and support them. Sometimes a complete record is made of the proceedings, sometimes not. I suppose a complete record could be made if and when they are officially established here; given resources, it is not hard to do.

However, I can tell from your comments that I need to remind you and all other readers that there are several different varieties of Citizen Deliberative Council -- Citizens Juries, Consensus Conferences, Citizens Assemblies, and Planning Cells, to name the most prominent. (Citizen Deliberative Council is my coined name for these varied but quite similar processes.) CJs are usually small and not public. Consensus Conferences as practiced in Denmark include private briefing sessions followed by expert testimony held before an announced public gathering (like a Senate hearing) followed by non-public deliberations (like a sequestered jury). The first big Citizen Assembly -- the one in BC on electoral reform -- had briefings (I believe they were not public), followed by collecting white papers from anyone who wanted to submit one and holding public hearings in each legislative district, followed by private deliberations. I'm not sure how German Planning Cells handle the "public access" aspect. So you see, there are a lot of different ways this gets addressed, and the U.S. could create its own variant in consultation with experts with the existing models (for whom manipulation, bias, and adequate representation of the population are all hot topics, with lots of options, opinions, and nuances about how to handle them).

But I want to be clear that a CDC is NOT a legislature or a public meeting. As I've said before, it is more like a jury -- it is temporary, it is made up of a specific number of selected random ordinary people (not public officials or stakeholders or whoever wants to come), its deliberations are usually private, and its findings are public. (You can read many examples in two chapters in my TAO OF DEMOCRACY, "Citizens deliberate about public issues" and "Citizen deliberative councils" -- both active links in the online table of contents at http://taoofdemocracy.com/toc.html.

The only similar council I've seen where the deliberations were public was Maclean's Magazine's "The People's Verdict" project in 1991 which was subsequently publicized in detail in both TV and print media. Full data on it is linked to the main URL given in my original proposal and is described in some detail in chapter 12 of my TAO OF DEMOCRACY; the chapter is posted online at http://tinyurl.com/hz4f. I always think of it as one of the most remarkable democratic media exercises ever, but there are probably lessons there for making a national citizen deliberative council fully public, as well.

3. The Maclean's Magazine effort also highlights a function also highlighted by Citizen Wisdom Councils -- stimulating public conversation. CDCs can be used to make recommendations to voters or public officials. But they can also be used to stimulate public dialogue about their findings. Furthermore, your idea of having citizen commentary before and/or during the CDC deliberation is excellent. I was earlier confused that you wanted online participation in the CDC's deliberations. That could be messy. But an online deliberation on the CDC's topic could be going on in parallel, with the CDC panel able to access it and/or participate in it. A "televote panel" is another public participatory option, described in the "Citizen Deliberative Councils" chapter of my book, linked above.

I've also wanted to see CDCs use the Web much more for research -- e.g., they could receive their briefings and expert testimony and then divide into several groups to surf the Web for hot data and options on their issue, returning together to share what they found. This would mitigate against too tight control of their access to information by the organizers. Currently I've heard of no CDCs using the Web as an information source. There are obviously all sorts of possibilities there.

4. I'm afraid your suggestion re how to do Dynamic Facilitation online has nothing to do with Dynamic Facilitation. It's like trying to do gardening online. Apples and oranges. Doesn't work. You'd have to study up on DF before we could talk more about it. DF involves a very in-person dynamic. For example, the facilitator reflects back to each speaker what they heard, with emotional intonation and all the rest, in a way that is an art that simply doesn't translate into writing. There is a slim chance it could be done by video, but even then I'm not sure. So much of DF has to do with the energy of the group as a whole, which the facilitator and others sense "in the air." Trust me on this one. At least until you've experienced DF for yourself. If you want to take a DF training or just read more about it, check out http://dynamicfacilitation.com. (There's an entire training manual online, if you want to go deep without a training.) (Also, FYI, there's a comparison of DF, Consensus process, and Roberts Rules at http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-comparisonRR-CC-DF.html.

5. Re choosing panelists for a randomly selected citizen panel: Wikipedia has a good short article on random sampling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_selection. There's even a book RANDOM SELECTION IN POLITICS p://www.greenwood.com/catalog/C6702.aspx -- and it turns out random selection (sortition) was a major foundation of Athenian democracy. I know that most Citizen Juries use stratified sampling (described in Wikipedia). The BC Citizens Assembly sent out a letter to voters and those who volunteered in each legislative district ("riding") gathered in a community meeting in the district and a man and woman from among them was chosen by lot -- from each legislative district. A Wisdom Council in Ashland, OR, used a random number generator online to pick people out of the voter rolls (which are publicly available on CD). So there are a variety of approaches -- and various critiques of each one.

I hope this is helpful.

jpritikin 8 months ago

This idea is integrated into a national ballot initiative process in the National Initiative for Democracy proposal (http://ni4d.us).

david.is.farrar 8 months ago

Yes, it was certainly helpful. Thank you.

For the record, I agree with the proposal. With all its shortcomings, the process of holding randomly selected citizen's deliberative councils(focus groups)should be undertaken. Although, I am not sure they should be held in a private setting. As I have suggested, with the advent of the internet, conference video, streaming video and efficient online archiving of same, there should be no reason NOT to have our cake and eat it too.

Randomly select your committee members from all over the country. Insure each has a computer, bandwidth and a web-cam. Thus equipped, they can hold their deliberative meetings online, in full public view and with full public participation, both before the online video conference deliberative meeting is held, as well as afterward, for fact-checking and other follow-up purposes. The advantages of this procedure is that it would truly provide the basis to suggest these proceedings will "tap the wisdom of We, the people," as well as create a compete record of the proceedings.

One added note, if structured correctly, committee members, as well as the public, could, theoretically, attend the meeting at any time, day or night, over the course of a month, several months, or years, depending on how long it took the committee to make a motion to call the question. Have it seconded, and supported by a majority vote of the committee. In essence, once provided with the necessary online equipment, there would be no need to physically hold a deliberative council meeting at a time and place certain at all. All can attend and become part of the process of tapping into the wisdom of We, the People.

ex animo
davidfarrar

Debra Bryant 8 months ago

Do a search in Google on "Government Wealth" then if you are inclined, support this man that has provided this great service for us that make up the USA. We need volunteers to audit their city, county, state, etc...

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