Building consensus online/definitions?
From:
Miles Fidelman
Date:
Feb 07 22:41 UTC
Short link
On 2/7/08, Peter M. Shane <<email obscured>> wrote:
> I've been loosing following this thread, but find myself wondering -- is
> everyone using "consensus" to mean the same thing?
A really good question!
John Miller wrote:
> Practically speaking, when I'm asked to define consensus (eg while teaching
> group facilitation) my "easy" answer is: "Enough agreement that the whole
> group can move forward together."
>
And a pretty good answer, with the caveat that sometimes an 'agreement
to disagree,' and for sub-groups to split and go down different paths
may be a reasonable outcome; with at least two possible variants:
- try multiple things in parallel, and then select among them later
(e.g., think about various kinds of grant programs, or competitions -
lots of phase 1 winners, not so many at later phases)
- multiple approaches / groups continue to co-exist - think markets, or
forks of open source software projects (how many Linux distrubutions are
there now?)