Building consensus online
From:
James Gilmour
Date:
Feb 01 19:06 UTC
Short link
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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