Re: [h2o-discuss] Deliberation Project

["Steven Clift" <slc@publicus.net>]

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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