Re: [WDDM] Arriving at common position/consensus

[Doug Everingham <dnevrghm(at)powerup.com.au>]

This suggestion from the World Direct Democracy discussion group seems to propose something like

• Garry Davis's Syntegrity technique and

• www.sociocracy.biz

Relayed by Doug Everingham : –

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 From:   wddm(at)mkolar.org

Subject: [WDDM] Arriving at common position/consensus

Date: 1 May 2009 6:00:53 PM

To:   wddm@world-wide-democracy.net

Reply-To:   wddm@world-wide-democracy.net

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