Building consensus online
From:
Cioffi
Date:
Feb 02 05:55 UTC
Short link
I think these answers might help us put this conversation in context:
-What is the largest *online* consensus ever reached?
-What is the largest *offline *consensus ever reached?
A hypothetical question: how many citizens would have to agree to a single
health care plan in a country of 300 million in order for the mainstream
media or politicians to pay attention? Are we talking 1 thousand, 1
million, 10 million, or more? Or does the mere fact that this consensus
happened on the Internet prevent any chance of credibility with "real"
people? I hope not, but I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks.
Lucas
On Feb 1, 2008 10:53 PM, Kris Dev <> wrote:
> I agree with James.
>
> We had recently done a bottom-up community initiative in a rural village
> in
> India where we put together members of the community and asked them to
> identify what was their most burning issues? And how do we solve them. We
> could get many ideas and we zeroed in on one and got a consensus to work
> together to get over their first problem and then proceed with the next.
>
> More details offline, if some one is interested.
>
> best,
>
> Kris Dev
> Socail Activist
> India.
>
> On Feb 1, 2008 11:23 PM, James Gilmour <> wrote:
>
> > Miles Fidelman > Sent: 01 February 2008 14:10
> > > > Steven Clift wrote:
> > > > I've found that most online tools and techniques bring our
> differences
> > > > of opinion rather than forging agreement within large groups online
> > > > (over say 15 people). The Internet does a great job at getting
> issues
> > > > on the table, allowing like-minds to coalesce, and when done right
> > > > builds respect among those with differing opinions.
> > > >
> > > I've been giving this a lot of thought, as regards several projects
> I'm
> > > involved in, but I keep coming back to a somewhat broader question:
> Has
> > > anybody seen any approaches - online or NOT online - for building
> > > consensus among groups of any size.
> >
> > This prompts me to ask whether anyone involved in e-democracy has
> employed
> > the established techniques of 'participative enquiry'
> > that have been used in community focused extension work. Could these
> > techniques be adapted for use where there is no face-to-face
> > interaction?
> >
> > 'Participative enquiry' is very much really "bottom up", with major
> inputs
> > from the community members to identify "the problem",
> > identify potential solutions, select the most appropriate solution,
> devise
> > an action plan and then supervise its implementation.
> > This differs from classical extension work where the extension agent
> would
> > usually come in with a pre-set agenda even if he/she used
> > various community focused techniques to spread "the message".
> >
> > Also, 'participative enquiry' is different from 'participative
> research',
> > in that 'participative enquiry' is about a community being
> > helped to solve a real problem, not just helping a researcher to learn
> > more about a problem as part of a research project.
> > 'Participative research' is valuable, but it has a different place in
> the
> > scheme of things.
> >
> > James
> >
> > No virus found in this outgoing message.
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> >
> >
> >
> > Member profile for James Gilmour:
> > http://groups.dowire.org/contacts/jamesg
> >
> >
>
> Member profile for Krisdev:
> http://groups.dowire.org/contacts/krisdev
>
>
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