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02112: Arriving at common position/consensus

From: "M. Kolar" <wddm(at)mkolar.org>
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 01:00:53 -0700
Subject: Arriving at common position/consensus

Hi all!
We have seen by now that building an organization or even association solely
on-line is next to impossible. But a web site and a group around it like this
one, can still be useful as an information exchange for real groups based on
personal contacts on the ground in various parts of the world.
The second useful thing could be to explore methods on how to conduct
intelligent discussions that lead to some basic common positions. We may
actually have an added problem here by a large concentration of highly
opinionated people who all want to see their particular view to be adopted as
the group position, and may have tendency not to listen carefully enough what
others are saying and explore the possibility of compromise.
And it would be useful to at least finally arrive at a consensual
description of this group that would be posted on the web site, so that new
people who want to join had a clearer idea whether they want to belong to this
group or not. For example the text on the WDDM home page was prepared by only
two people (I was not among them).

Last year, Tom Atlee of the Co-intelligence Institute
(http://co-intelligence.org/) was mailing out an item about an interesting
written process how to arrive at consensus within a group. I am forwarding it
below. What do you think about it? It might even be feasible to implement a
simple version of it on our web site. The main thing is to remove the
name/e-mail address of each participant when they post their proposals to the
group for further editing. In this way, one can judge the proposal only by the
ideas it contains, not being distracted by who was the author.

Alternatively, Pras, would it be easy to implement in the platform/system you
are developing?

Mirek

-------- Original Message --------
From: cii(at)igc.org
Reply-To: cii(at)igc.org


There is a very provocative written process that doesn't claim to do dialogue
or deliberation or consensus process, but in fact has the potential to create a
very deep-level consensus purely through an iterative group writing exercise.
I've always wanted someone to experiment with it as a form of deliberation,
because if it worked well, it would revolutionize the field.

It is an iterative process whose proprietary form is called Synanim; I'd love
to see an open source version developed. It involves groups of ten
participants in which each participant writes up their idea of an answer to the
assigned question or task and then, online, shares it anonymously with the
other 9 group members. Then each person picks one of the posted responses
(their own or another's) and revises it, and then posts their new proposal....
After a number of iterations of this post-choose-revise-post cycle, the
founders of the process (Synanim <http://www.synanim.com/>) say that usually
the answers converge on a consensus -- or, occasionally, 2 or 3 consensuses
among subgroups.

You can have thousands of people participating. In this case, upon completion
of the first task/question, one person is picked from each group to join people
from other groups to forge broader consensus on that task, or to move on to
another task on the same project. The computer choses this "leader" by noting
(a) how many times people in his/her group chose his/her writeup in the
preceding task cycle and (b) how many times he or she chose writeups that many
other members of the group chose. The computer ranks the participants overall
and choses the one with the highest score on these two parameters as the
group's "leader" (who can then participate in the higher level sessions),
presumably because they have some resonance with what their group thinks about
it all.

I find this fascinating. It totally challenges my normal sense that real
interaction -- whether written or oral -- is required for dialogue or
deliberation to take place. This Synanim process has a very different feel,
but given the theoretical power of iteration (from chaos, complexity, and
fractal mathematics), and its observed power in some D&D processes, I can see
how it would work quite powerfully.

coheartedl,
tom



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