New Toolkit Streamlines PB Evaluation in N. America

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

We were excited to learn recently that Public Agenda and the Participatory Budgeting Project – two of our prominent NCDD member organizations – have released a new participatory budgeting evaluation toolkit in collaboration with the North American PB Research Board. The toolkit will help municipalities across the continent document the impacts and effectiveness of their local PB efforts. We encourage you read more about it in the Public Agenda article below or find the original here.

Evaluation Matters: A New Toolkit for Assessing Participatory Budgeting

For those of us exploring ways to deepen and expand public participation in democracy, we know how essential evaluation is to our cause. Both government officials and the public have limited time, energy and resources. And furthermore, many may already be disillusioned by current and past efforts to include the public in decision making.

We need to be able to demonstrate to officials, the public, interested funders, community partners, and others that their investment in new public engagement methods will be worth it. Will more people participate, particularly those who have been historically less civically engaged? Will the new form of engagement lead to better decisions and policies that residents support? Will the public feel like their voices have been heard, and will they come to understand the complexities and trade-offs inherent in many policy decisions? Will the method build trust among officials and the public and open pathways for collaboration among community-based organizations and the government?

At the same time, we as public engagement practitioners are very busy. Evaluation can be time consuming and complicated, especially when we’re attempting to measure something amorphous like deeper public participation. As such, evaluation too often gets lost among everything else we’re doing.

For these and other reasons, we are particularly excited about one of our current projects: an initiative to help make it easier for practitioners to evaluate participatory budgeting efforts.

Communities across the country are experimenting with participatory budgeting (PB for short), which is one potential avenue for deeper public participation and engagement. Through PB, local residents get to decide how their community will spend a set amount of public money. Many of these communities, including some in New York, Chicago, Long Beach, CA and Dieppe, in New Brunswick, Canada, are also trying to track and measure how PB is affecting residents, officials, and neighborhoods.

Community members evaluating PB often have questions that are locally unique and relevant. At the same time, because many PB processes across the U.S. and Canada follow a similar structure, these evaluators are also often looking to answer common questions shared by communities.

To help foster collaboration among evaluators and facilitate shared learning on these questions, we have been working since the start of 2015 to support and coordinate local evaluation work. Ultimately, we hope that this will also lead to a better understanding of the successes and challenges of the PB movement as a whole.

One of our first steps has been to develop a toolkit for those tasked with evaluating PB in their communities. We developed the toolkit in concert with the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), the North American PB Research Board and local evaluators from numerous PB sites across the U.S. and Canada.

The toolkit includes key metrics – 15 in all – for capturing important elements of each local PB process specifically and the movement in North America generally. These metrics describe the way PB could impact things like civic life, equity, and governance.

To help ease the evaluation process and data collection, these metrics are paired with survey instruments that address the 15 key metrics. Evaluators can customize these survey instruments and use as needed. We also developed a questionnaire for evaluators that will help us and local evaluators to collect and share comparable data about PB processes across North America and over time.

The toolkit also includes a timeline to help evaluators best determine where and how to undertake PB evaluation at different stages of the PB process.

Download the Toolkit Here

While we developed the metrics and survey instruments for participatory budgeting, the underlying concepts are applicable to evaluating other forms of public engagement, like deliberative meetings, community conversations, and citizen juries.

We hope these tools will help those working on participatory budgeting in their communities by taking some of the guesswork out of measurement and making time for other things like constituent outreach and engagement. If you’re interested in hearing more about evaluation and our work with PB researchers, you can join our listserv for the participatory budgeting community by sending an email here.

Have you voted in a PB process and want to get more involved? Or are you curious about PB and looking to introduce it to your community? The website and people of Participatory Budgeting Project are a great resource for those who are new to PB and want to know more. Introduce yourself to the Participatory Budgeting Project.

You can find the original version of this Public Agenda blog post at
www.publicagenda.org/blogs/evaluation-matters-a-new-toolkit-for-participatory-budgeting#sthash.SQWKGkAR.dpuf.

Le Temps des Communes: Biggest Commons Festival Ever

Posted on October 1, 2015 by David Bollier

Le Temps des Communes, surely the largest festival of the commons ever, is about to get underway! The festival is not just a single event in a single place, but a series of more than 250 self-organized events to be held over the course of fifteen days in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada (Quebec) and several Francophone countries in west Africa.

From October 5 to 18, there will be symposia, workshops, lectures and participatory events on all sorts of commons-related topics. There will be events to showcase free and open source software, community gardens, participatory mapping projects, seed-sharing, open scientific knowledge, renewable energy co-operatives, land trusts and even a Creative Commons-licensed musical. The hundreds of festival events will help introduce the commons to the general public and demonstrate to current commoners just how large, diverse and exciting the world of collaborative provisioning truly is.

In Lyon, there will be a roundtable about making the city a commons. In Brussels, there will be an Open Source Festival. In Brest, a bike tour of shared gardens. In Paris, nearly thirty different events are planned.

I wish that I could attend the “law and the commons” discussion that will feature Stefano Rodotà, the Italian law scholar, politician and human rights advocate who has pioneered new legal principles for the commons. Paris will also host “A Day in the Commons” on Île-de-France, with workshop, a meal and planning for the future.

New Research on Making Policy through Crowdsourcing

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

For those interested in democratizing more of the policymaking process, check out this recent post below from NCDD organizational member Davenport Institute and their Gov 2.0 Watch blog that highlights recent research into policy crowdsourcing. You can read the post below or find the original here.

Research: Policy Crowdsourcing

For anyone really interested in diving deep into the question of crowdsourcing for public policy, various techniques and available research regarding their relative benefits, challenges, and effectiveness, a recent paper by John Prpic of the Lulea University of Technology (Sweden), Araz Taeihagh of the Singapore Management University, and James Melton of the Michigan University, College of Business Administration may be right up your alley.

From the abstract:

What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policymaking? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative tradeoffs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature.

You can download the paper here.

You can find the original version of this Gov 2.0 Watch blog post at http://gov20watch.pepperdine.edu/2015/08/research-policy-crowdsourcing.

‘We’re Number 10!’ Reasons the U.S. Is Losing Ground

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

The United States for so long has been a champion of innovation, but because of powerful special interests and also because of some unwise reasons, we are losing a great deal of ground. When I was growing up, we would hear chants that “We’re Number 1!” especially around the time of the Olympics. Americans were proud. We thought, whether rightly or not, that we were or had the best of everything that counted. Travel abroad offers reason for humility. I found a striking example when I visited Germany this past August. There were solar panels everywhere.

The U.S. is known for innovation for a number of reasons. The first is that early on the country was guided by a pioneer spirit. While Europe was strongly controlled by longstanding conventions, in the Americas, so many things were new. Much of the countryside was “wild,” a characteristic that was harmful when ascribed to the native peoples. Considering the wilderness of forests, bears, and other things that could kill you, there was much to do to survive. Innovations were necessary.

Beyond that, as de Tocqueville and later Max Weber pointed out (no relation, by the way), America had an industrious spirit and brought a Protestant work ethic to its industries. While the U.S. had its many troubling capitalist robber barons, it also has long been a land of invention and creativity. It’s remarkable how many inventions came from the United States, like the light bulb, the telegraph, and the telephone.

When you consider that the United States invented the automobile, it seems sad that Ford Motor Company failed to innovate and anticipate the changing market for fuel. With increasing gas prices, which of course fluctuate, demand naturally has risen for smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles. My wife and I bought a Prius. It has a 10 gallon tank of gas, or thereabouts. That might seem small. On that 10 or 11 gallon tank, we can drive 5.5 – 6 hours from Oxford, MS to Altanta, GA. True story. We get there needing to fill up soon, but we get there (I’ve got family there, so we’ve done it several times).

It’s no secret that the supply of oil in the world is a limited resource. If there’s any debate about it, the real question is when exactly we’ll have reached peak production that will then inevitably decline. There’s no doubt about the inevitability, just about when we’ll start to feel it. Even if it seems far off, we know that prices will rise again in our future. That’s a force for leading the market to want more efficient cars and sources of energy. Besides, why spend more on getting from A to B? Some people conspicuously consume gas, proud of the Hummers. Hell, I’d love to drive over something in one of those too. When I drive to Atlanta, however, I’ll get there a whole lot faster (not having to stop) and more cheaply if I can take a Prius.

In light of America’s history of innovation, it was a sad moment when Ford and the auto industry in the U.S. had to be bailed out during the financial crisis. The U.S. Government, which means you and me, bailed out the auto industry to the tune of nearly $80 Billion (yes, with a B). Much of that was recovered eventually, which is the good news, but we saw a loss of $9 Billion dollars that weren’t recovered. Why was there such a failure? Despite clear evidence that the market wanted more fuel efficient cars, Ford and others kept building sport utility vehicles. While Japan and South Korea made money hand over fist on fuel efficient cars, like the Prius, our auto industry defiantly rejected the idea that Americans cared about issues like the environment or fuel costs. You and I paid for that.

In August of this year, when Annie and I visited Germany, we took a train from Munich to Regensburg, in Bavaria, and then another from Regensburg to Berlin. First of all, the U.S. really needs to catch up on train infrastructure. Trains are awesome, even if one leg of our trip had its problems. So do highways (traffic, accidents, etc). As we went through the German countryside, we saw small towns in which houses had solar panels all over them.

The featured image in this post is an aerial view of something we saw in a lot of fields on our trip – solar energy farming. Germany is establishing the infrastructure, the technology, the expertise, and the innovation for new ways of harvesting energy, and they’re way ahead of the U.S. We’ll eventually be buying their tech, hiring their experts. The U.S. has been ridiculous about energy, perhaps because of Gore’s efforts to get people to care about global warming — if one party is more vocal on an issue, it must be a controversial matter, right? Wrong (If you’re a skeptic, be a smart one and read the 2014 IPCC report. Otherwise you don’t know what you’re talking about). Another reason is that the U.S. is an oil producer, so folks might think that it’s a bad thing to go after the renewables for that reason. That doesn’t make any sense of course. There were plenty of candle makers when Edison invented the lightbulb.

To anyone who says “Yeah, but solar panels are not so efficient and can’t replace yada yada…” Come on. The early automobile wasn’t perfect either. The glass would cut into you if it shattered. You had to crank the damned thing to get it started, while standing outside of the vehicle, etc. You don’t see advocates for the horse and carriage today. Problems or needs for efficiency and enhancement are precisely the places where the Germans are going to innovate and we’re going to give them our money and follow their lead. This isn’t the attitude of a nation that wants to be #1. It’s lazy and shortsighted.

American reluctance to dive into renewable energies is burying our heads in the sand. It’s counter to the American spirit of innovation. It’s also not wise in business terms. The defiant attitude that leads some people irrationally to dislike fuel efficient cars, solar panels, and preference for investing public funds in energy innovation over extensions of our eventual end of our oil abundance is precisely the reason why Zakaria said we’re living in a Post American World. Another reason is that the rest of the world is getting wise and “rising.” We’ll have oil for quite some time, but responsible people care about their grandkids, even when they don’t have them yet.

It’s time for the U.S. to snap out of this silliness and to want to be number 1 again, especially in terms of smart innovation.

P.S. If you enjoyed this piece, check out my earlier one called “Greening Industries and Green Industries in Mississippi.”

Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi, expressing only his own point of view. He is the author of Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South (2015). Follow him on Twitter and “like” his Facebook page.

Guide to Choosing Tools for Digital Engagement

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

Choosing the right methods for digital engagement can be disorienting, and that’s why we were happy to find this helpful guide to picking appropriate e-democracy tools that Geoff Mulgan of Nesta recently published at www.nesta.org.uk. The guide is aimed at supporting public officials, but can be helpful for anyone looking to engage stakeholders in decision making. We encourage you to check out Geoff’s piece below or find the original Nesta post here.

Designing Digital Democracy: A Short Guide

I’ve written quite a few blogs and pieces on digital technology and democracy – most recently on the relevance of new-style political parties.

Here I look at the practical question of how parliaments, assemblies and governments should choose the right methods for greater public engagement in decisions.

One prompt is the Nesta-led D-CENT project which is testing out new tools in several countries, and there’s an extraordinary range of engagement experiments underway around the world, from Brazil’s parliament to the Mayor of Paris. Tools like Loomio for smallish groups, and Your Priorities and DemocracyOS for larger ones, are well ahead of their equivalents a few years ago.

A crucial question is whether the same tools work well for different types of issue or context. The short answer is ‘no’. Here I suggest some simple formulae to ensure that the right tools are used for the right issues; I show why hybrid forms of online and offline are the future for parliaments and parties; and why the new tools emphasise conversation rather than only votes.

Clarity on purpose

First, it’s important to be clear what wider engagement is for. Engagement is rarely a good in itself. More passionate engagement in issues can be a powerful force for progress. But it can be the opposite, entrenching conflicts and generating heat rather than light. The goals of engagement can include some or all of the following: legitimation, or public trust; better quality decisions and outcomes; or a public which better understands the key issues and choices. These goals can often coincide. But there will be many times when they directly clash with each other.

A related question is how direct democratic engagement relates to representative democracy. Sometimes these align – when a political leader or party creates new forums to complement the paraphernalia of elections and manifestos. But sometimes they conflict – with Iceland’s attempt to involve the public in writing a new constitution an important recent test case (the new constitution was drafted by a broad based commission with online inputs from the public, and endorsed by public referendum, but then rejected by a newly elected parliament). One lesson is that it’s wise to involve elected politicians as directly as possible – since they continue to hold ultimate authority.

Clarity on who you want to reach

Second, who do you want to reach? Even in the most developed nations and cities there are still very practical barriers of reach – despite the huge spread of broadband, mobiles and smart phones. Recent experience suggests that engagements which only use digital tools rather than print, radio, TV and face to face, can get very skewed inputs. That’s fine for some kinds of engagement – 1% involvement can greatly improve the quality of decisions. But it’s vital to keep checking that the participant groups aren’t unrepresentative. Even very tech savvy cities like New York and Los Angeles have repeatedly found that participants in purely digital consultations are much more male, young, well-educated, affluent and metropolitan than the population as a whole.

Clarity on what tools for what issues – navigating ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’

Third, even if there were strong habits of digital engagement for the whole population it would not follow that all issues should be opened up for the maximum direct participation. A useful approach is to distinguish issues according to two dimensions.

The first dimension differentiates issues where the public has expertise and experience from ones where the knowledge needed to make decisions is very specialised. There are many issues on which crowds simply don’t have much information let alone wisdom, and any political leader who opened up decision making too far would quickly lose the confidence of the public.

The second dimension differentiates issues which are practical and pragmatic from ones where there are strongly held and polarised opinions, mainly determined by underlying moral beliefs rather than argument and evidence. Putting these together gives us a two dimensional space on which to map any public policy issue, which could be described as the ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’.

Diagram: Belief and Knowledge spaces

Public engagement, and the use of digital tools to widen engagement, is possible on all points. But different types of issue need very different tools, depending on how open or closed public views are likely to be, and how inclusive or exclusive the knowledge needed for participation is.

For example, an issue on which there is widely shared knowledge but strongly contested values (like gay marriage) requires different methods to one which is both more technical in nature and dependent on highly specialised knowledge (like monetary policy). A contested issue – in the top left quadrant – will bring in highly motivated groups who are very unlikely to change their views as a result of participation. New fora for debate give added oxygen to pre-existing views rather than encouraging deliberation.

With very specialised issues, by contrast, wide participation in debate may risk encouraging unwise decisions – which will subsequently be rejected by voters (how much would you want the details of monetary policy, or responses to a threatened epidemic, to be determined by your fellow citizens?). So in this, bottom right, quadrant some of the most useful tools are ones which mobilise broader bodies of expertise than the ones immediately accessible to government, but try to filter out inputs based on opinion rather than knowledge or experience.

Another interesting category, however, falls roughly in the middle to top right of the table above. These are issues involving scientific choices that include ethics, some highly specialised knowledge, but also significant public interest. For issues of this kind, open public deliberation may be important both to educate the public and to legitimise decisions. Stem cell research, genomics, privacy and personal data are all issues of this kind. The issues surrounding mitochondrial research are a good recent example.

But the formats need to involve smaller groups in more intensive deliberation and engagement with the facts, before the process is opened up. The challenge then is how to use these exercises to influence a wider public, which in most cases must involve mass media as well as the internet.

I’m sure there are other issues and dimensions to consider and would welcome suggestions on improvements to the model I’ve set out here.

Clarity on requisite scale

Fourth, engagement looks and feels very different at different scales. A small city like Reykjavik can run a fantastic online tool for citizens to propose ideas and comment. There’s a directness and authenticity about the points made. At the other end of the spectrum a nation of 300 million like the US, or 1300 million like India, is bound to struggle with online engagement, since well-funded lobby groups are likely to be much more adept at playing the system. More systematic rules; more governance of governance; and a bigger role for intermediaries and representatives is unavoidable on these larger scales. Democracy isn’t fractal – instead it’s a phenomenon, like much biology, where larger scale requires different forms, not just a scaled up version of what works in a town or neighbourhood.

Clarity on identity and anonymity

Modern democracy allows people a secret ballot (though we sometimes forget that this is a relatively recent idea, sometimes attributed to the Australians, though I think France got there first). But we usually make votes in parliaments visible. The modern internet allows for anonymity which has fuelled some its worst features – abuse, extreme views etc. So any designer of democratic engagement tools has to decide what levels of anonymity should apply at each stage. We might choose to allow anonymity at early stages of consultations, but require people to show and validate identities at later stages (eg. to confirm they actually live in the neighbourhood or city involved), certainly as any issue comes closer to decisions. The diagram below summarises these different steps, and the block chain tools being used in the D-CENT pilots bring these issues to the fore.

The 2010s are turning out to be a golden age of democratic innovation. That’s bringing creativity and excitement but also challenges, in particular around how to relate the new forms to the old ones, online communities to offline ones, the democracy of voice and numbers and the democracy of formal representation.

Crowds can help with many tasks. But they are particularly badly suited to the job of designing new institutions, or crafting radical strategies, or combining discrete policies into coherent programmes. This still tends to be the preserve of quite small groups, in intense face to face conversation.

As a result my guess is that the most successful models in the next few years will fuse representative and direct elements. They will be honest that the buck still stops with elected representatives – and that the online tools are inputs and supplements rather than replacements. They will present conversation and deliberation as preferable to relying on occasional elections, and the odd binary petition. But they will also be clear that the 21st century parliament or city council has to be a hybrid too – physical and digital.

You can find the original version of this Nesta blog piece at www.nesta.org.uk/blog/designing-digital-democracy-short-guide#sthash.qXW93aMa.dpuf.

The Commons and EU Knowledge Policies

Posted on August 3, 2015 by David Bollier

One of the great advantages of a commons analysis is its ability to deconstruct the prevailing myths of “intellectual property” as a wholly private “product” – and then to reconstruct it as knowledge and culture that lives and breathes only in a social context, among real people. This opens up a new conversation about if and how property rights in knowledge should be granted in the first place. It also renders any ownership claims about knowledge under copyrights and patents far more complicated -- and requires a fair consideration of how commons might actually be more productive substitutes or complements to traditional intellectual property rights.

After all, it is taxpayers who subsidize much of the R&D that goes into most new drugs, which are then claimed as proprietary and sold at exorbitant prices. Musicians don’t create their songs out of thin air, but in a cultural context that first allows them to freely use inherited music and words from the public domain -- which future musicians must also have access to. Science can only advance by being able to build on the findings of earlier generations. And so on.

The great virtue of a new report recently released by the Berlin-based Commons Network is its application of a commons lens to a wide range of European policies dealing with health, the environment, science, culture, and the Internet. “The EU and the Commons: A Commons Approach to European Knowledge Policy,” by Sophie Bloemen and David Hammerstein, takes on the EU’s rigid and highly traditional policy defense of intellectual property rights. Bloemen and Hammerstein are Coordinators of the Berlin-based Commons Network, which published the report along with the Heinrich Böll Foundation. (I played a role in its editing.) The 39-page report can be downloaded here -- and an Executive Summary can be read here.

“The EU and the Commons” describes how treating many types of knowledge as commons could not only promote greater access to knowledge and social justice, it could help European economies become more competitive. If EU policymakers could begin to recognize the generative capacities of knowledge commons, drug prices could be reduced and climate-friendly “green technologies” could be shared with other countries. “Net neutrality” could assure that startups with new ideas would not be stifled by giant companies, but could emerge. And scientific journals, instead of being locked behind paywalls and high subscription fees, could be made accessible to anyone.

People’s Tribunal to Assess Fracking and Human Rights

Posted on July 29, 2015 by David Bollier

When the state no longer enforces its own legal standards on human rights or ecological protection, often in deference to corporate partners, the logical response is to establish a commons-based alternative – a people’s tribunal. That’s what is now planned in the case of fracking and its implications for human rights.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) has scheduled a session in March 2017 to “consider whether sufficient evidence exists to indict certain named States on charges of failing adequately to respect the human rights of citizens as a result of permitting, and failing to adopt a precautionary approach to, hydraulic fracturing and other techniques of unconventional oil and gas extraction within their jurisdictions.” The Tribunal is an internationally recognized public opinion tribunal functioning independently of state authorities and operating out of Rome. The Tribunal will hold a week of hearings in both the US and UK.

Governments take great pains to prevent their most sacrosanct policies from being questioned in courts of law. Consider how the US Government short-circuited any significant court rulings about the NSA’s extensive secret surveillance of citizens, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. It took Edward Snowden's revelations to force judicial review.

We’ve been here before, of course. The lawless Vietnam War was a prime example. As a corrective to the state crimes committed in that instance, philosopher Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre organized the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal in 1967 to hear evidence about violations of the citizen’s basic human rights. In that tradition, today’s PPT will assess the human rights implications of fracking.

Future Search Learning Exchange Offers NCDD Discount

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

The Future Search Network, an NCDD member organization, recently shared the opportunity for NCDDers to get a great discount on two workshops they are offering later this year. These two workshops will be offered this Aug. 17-23 in Berlin, Germany and again from Dec. 7-11 in Philadelphia, PA. The early bird deadline ends August 4th for NCDDers, so make sure to register ASAP. You can learn more from the FSN announcement below.

The Annual Future Search Learning Exchange

We hope you can join us! Future Search has events scheduled for August in Berlin, Germany and for December in Philadelphia, PA.

The theme of this year’s Learning Exchange is “Working With Future Search to Address our World’s Challenges”.

The Learning Exchange is for anyone who is interested in applying Future Search principles in their work and their lives – not only for those who regularly lead Future Searches. This event is open to members of the Future Search Network and to practitioners working with the principles of Future Search across other large scale, whole systems approaches to change.

As always, the Learning Exchange is your opportunity to:

Meet Future Search practitioners and advocates and hear their stories
Share your experience of Future Search and exchange ideas
Learn about what we are doing as a Network around the world
Reflect on who we are touching through our work
Explore how people are using the principles and philosophy of Future Search in meetings of all sizes, every day
Re-energize your practice and yourself, and have fun!

***We will extend both workshop early registration rates to August 4th for NCDD Members – SAVE up to $700 on tuition!***

The Learning Exchange will include two separate workshops in both locations. Here are the details on both:

Managing a Future Search – a Leadership Workshop
August 17-20, Berlin, Germany
December 7-9, Philadelphia, PA, USA .

This workshop is for leaders and facilitators who want to learn how applying Future Search principles and methodology enables an organization or community to transform its capability for action. You will experience this highly successful strategic planning method used worldwide by organizations and communities for social, technological and economic planning.
Learn more & register

Lead More, Control Less – a Master Facilitation Class
August 22-23, Berlin, Germany
December 10-11, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Based on the upcoming new book by Sandra Janoff and Marvin Weisbord, “Lead More, Control Less: 8 Advanced Leadership skills that Overturn Convention”. Learn about personal and structural issues for leading interactive meetings. Explore the realms of practice beyond traditional models, methods and techniques.
Learn more & register

Featured D&D Story: Reforming the Barcelona Football Club

Posted on July 23, 2015 by NCDD Community

Today we are happy to feature another great example of dialogue and deliberation in action. This fascinating mini case study from Spain was submitted by NCDD Founding Member Alberto Lusoli of QuattrodiTre (4d3) via NCDD’s Dialogue Storytelling Tool. Do you have a dialogue story that our network could learn from? Add your dialogue story today!

Title of Project:

Reforming the Barcelona FC, One Opinion at a Time

Description

The Manifest Blaugrana Association was born to promote a greater and equal participation of all the Futbol Club Barcelona members, to improve its democratic processes, and to go beyond the usual and common football club paradigm, based on a clear separation between the fans and administrators.

Organized and supported by about 200 shareholders of the Barcelona Futbol Club, the aim of the “Debats” initiative is to provide the next President with a set of guidelines collectively written by the members of the association and fans of the club. As 4d3, we have been involved in providing and customizing our collective decision-making platform Deebase to their needs.

Should the members’ register be opened, thus allowing the entry of new members? May the club set a salary cap regardless of UEFA regulations? These issues, among many others, are now finally open to fans’ discussion. Thanks to the Deebase deliberation process, which includes a scoring system and an assessment of opinions and arguments, ideas will be compared and voted by the community, allowing the most popular to bubble up.

The project has been released in conjunction with the electoral campaign that will lead to the election of the new president of the Club on July 18th. The aims of the project are:

to provide to the future President a set of guidelines developed collectively by Barcelona’s fans and shareholders.
to regularly publish and send to the Club’s management the results of the deliberations

What was your role in the project?

Technology supplier / Co-designer

What issues did the project primarily address?

Associació Manifest Blaugrana (Barcelona)

Lessons Learned

Lost in translation: one of the biggest challenges that we faced during the design phase was to translate the platform in Catalan and Spanish. Since the participants will be mainly Catalan native speakers, it was fundamental to provide a platform fully translated into Catalan. However, at the same time it was necessary to make the platform available and understandable also to Spanish, non-Catalan speakers. Therefore, having a system capable to manage different languages, and providing a hybrid Spanish-Catalan version of the platform was necessary in order to lower adoption barriers.

Where to learn more about the project:

Link to the initiative: http://debats.manifestblaugrana.cat
Link to the platform: http://deeba.se
Link to the association: www.manifestblaugrana.cat
Photo: www.manifestblaugrana.cat/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/rebut.png

UN Hosts History’s Largest Global Climate Deliberation

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

Last month, the team with the Jefferson Center, an NCDD member organization, hosted one of 96 day-long deliberations that occurred around the world where average citizens discussed what should be done about climate change. It was the largest ever such consultation, and the results from Minnesota and abroad are fascinating. We encourage you to read the Jefferson Center’s piece about the process and the results below, or find the original here.

World Wide Views in the Twin Cities

This past Saturday, we hosted 70 Twin Cities metro area residents at the Science Museum in Saint Paul to discuss climate and energy issues as part of a global day of public deliberation. Organized by the World Wide Views Alliance, 75 countries around the world conducted World Wide Views on Climate and Energy forums in the largest ever global citizen consultation on climate change. The goal was to gather quantifiable public opinion to inform decision makers at every level, but particularly negotiators at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21).

Each of the 96 host sites followed the same agenda and addressed the same questions. The resulting data is credible and consistent, making the results an important asset to both researchers and politicians. Every site, including ours in St. Paul, provided participants with the same informational materials on current international climate policy issues. Participants were asked to discuss and vote on a series of questions designed to reflect controversies that might arise at the COP21 talks in Paris this December. Voting results were uploaded in real time.

67% of the Minnesota participants identified as “very concerned” about climate change, and 79% felt that the UN climate negotiations over the past twenty years had not done enough to tackle climate change. National and global percentages were very similar. 97% of Minnesota participants (along with 95% of US participants) agreed that our country should take some measures to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions even if other countries do not take action.

Minnesotans were slightly in favor of a carbon tax for all countries (with gradually increasing costs for countries that do not reduce their emissions), although a significant portion of the room also completely opposed a carbon tax, much more so than the global average. On the other hand, Minnesotans – in agreement with 59% of the United States participants – were more enthusiastic about cutting fossil fuel subsidies than the rest of the world, and slightly more in favor of stopping fossil fuel exploration than the global average.

wwv-fossil-exploration

Twin Cities residents tended to agree with the rest of the world about international policy. 77% of Minnesota participants were in favor of a legally binding treaty in Paris, either for all countries or at least for developed and emerging nations. 97% of Minnesotan participants also agreed with the overwhelming national and global consensus that countries should update their climate commitments every five years after Paris.

Twin Cities participants were nearly unanimous (96%) in agreeing that all countries should report their emissions and report on the progress of their contribution to lower emissions, but were more divided about whether the UN should have the authority to conduct reviews for each country (55%) or only for global combined efforts (38%). These responses roughly reflect the average national and global data trends, but stand in stark contrast to the 70% of developed country participants in favor of the UN reviewing individual countries.

wwv-un-review

Similarly controversial: the lengths different groups of people were willing to go in order to stop climate change. 71% of developed country participants thought that the world should do “whatever it takes to limit temperatures exceeding 2 degrees Celsius of warming,” but only 54% of Minnesotans agreed.

Participants from the seven county metro area were selected to, as near as possible, reflect the racial, gender, age, and educational diversity of the Twin Cities, in order to elevate the opinions representative of all metro area residents. The results from all World Wide Views sites will be shared with the delegates attending the COP21 meetings, both ahead of and during the negotiations in Paris. Compare results yourself at the World Wide Views results page.

Stay tuned for more posts as we continue to unpack World Wide Views results.

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies

Category Archives: international