Building Consensus via Group Dialog
The idea here is to implement a dialog between groups using a simple voting-on-messages technology. Each round of the process, participants will write messages and then vote to select one message to represent the group. If there are many messages, the voting has to go in cycles, with random distribution of a few messages to each voter each cycle, and dropping some proportion of the lowest vote getters each time around. ...more »
The idea here is to implement a dialog between groups using a simple voting-on-messages technology. Each round of the process, participants will write messages and then vote to select one message to represent the group. If there are many messages, the voting has to go in cycles, with random distribution of a few messages to each voter each cycle, and dropping some proportion of the lowest vote getters each time around.
To build consensus, a group dialog needs to alternate between "together" and "apart" rounds. In the "apart" rounds each participating group elects its own message. In the "together" rounds, all the participants from all groups elect one message to represent their common humanity across the groups.
With this structure, the groups never confront each other in a direct back-and-forth exchange. Rather, communication between the groups is mediated by the common voice of the combined groups.
The interesting political possibility here would be to implement an American political dialog with red, blue, purple and green "voices". President Obama could connect with America in a new way by replying to the elected message of the "together" round.
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