Building consensus online
From:
Krisdev
Date:
Feb 02 03:54 UTC
Short link
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
>
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