Pioneering a citizen engagement model for large democratic societies
The difficulty of democracy is how to let people deliberate, and yet come to a common voice. This is inherently a problem of scale – the more people you have (and the less time they have together), the more likely you are to give up either the opportunity for the individual to express him/herself, or the experience of the group coming to a deliberated group decision.
To overcome this difficulty, AmericaSpeaks, a small non-profit with a vast and growing network, has created a methodology for taking essential democratic processes to scale.
They have been the true visionaries in this field. Over the last ten years they have sought out and secured the laboratories, and they have conducted the experiments, so that those coming after them have a model for enabling large numbers of citizens to engage in deliberative democratic processes – processes as essential to a democracy as voting itself.
A “21st Century Town Meeting” allows all the participants to spend most of their time in small group discussions with other citizens. And AmericaSpeaks uses technology to allow the participants to understand the essence of what is going on in all of the other discussions in the room. By exploring the subject in small groups and then gathering together and distilling the small groups’ thoughts, the full group is able to generate short lists of actions, opinions or values. And with the technology, they can come to a group prioritization of the list (i.e. everyone has a vote). Without these kinds of processes, enabled by a smart use of new technology, large town hall meetings generally involve simple question and answer sessions, with participants playing mostly a passive listening role.
Leveraging meticulous design, and the scalability of the technology, AmericaSpeaks is able to accomplish this kind of small group discussion leading to whole group decisions (e pluribus unum) with thousands of citizens at a time. Their’s is a blueprint for realizing democracy in very large groups.
AmericaSpeaks has also been at the forefront of designing democratic processes that preserve the face-to-face immediacy of discussions between small groups of citizens, and yet include groups that are geographically dispersed. This is not a model of individuals sitting at their own computers, typing questions in to a distant leader or expert. Rather it is the same model – of small group discussions leading to whole group decisions – that they pursue in large meeting halls. In this case, they leverage the internet to provide dispersed groups with access to the technology that is used so effectively in the room. The result is that there is no geographical barrier to these fundamental democratic processes.
Posted by Karl Danskin
