Expanding democratic genius into collective wisdom (Part 2)

I’ve been promoting mini-publics – citizen assemblies, citizens juries, citizen councils, etc. – for more than two decades. Their design is a fabulous starting-place for generating collective wisdom in deliberations about public issues. Most such councils are populated by randomly selected citizens combined with – or occasionally replaced by – scientific sampling of population diversity. Those intentionally diverse people are then engaged in high quality interactions – dialogue and deliberation – thereby meeting both Audrey Tang’s standard for “plurality” and the first “source of wisdom” listed in my essay on sources of wisdom, which is “Diversity + Quality Dialogue”.

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While I was still focused on that wisdom source, I came across Polis (see the PPS at the end of this blog post), thanks to Audrey. This participatory polling platform calls forth diverse statements relating to a public issue from diverse people (while helping all of us realize just how unique and diverse nearly everyone is!). It then has all those folks respond to each other’s statements with just Agree, Disagree, or Pass. Then it feeds those responses into an algorithm which sorts the responders into (usually two or three) groups of like-minded people. Then it presents reports showing how each group responded to each statement, viewable in real time by both the participants and the organizers.

From this report, participants and organizers can see not only overall responses to each statement (shown in little bar graphs with green for agree, red for disagree and grey for pass), but also

(a) what statements elicited super-majority agreement or disagreement from most of the people in ALL the different groups (a profound form of consensus which could guide decision-making),

(b) which statements were most controversial (which could be put through our most potent processes for transforming conflict into collaboration, such as Dynamic Facilitation and Nonviolent Communication), and

(c) the entire landscape of perspectives, which could trigger deeper insights into the underlying dynamics of the whole issue, and new conversations that help people take wiser action.

Not long after I learned about Polis, I began to wonder if it could be used to involve more people in mini-public deliberations like citizens assemblies. I wondered: What if a Polis poll was done with thousands of citizens? Wouldn’t that be of interest to a citizen assembly convened around the same issue? And what if the members of the citizen assembly submitted statements about the challenges and possible solutions they were running across to a Polis with thousands of their fellow citizens? Wouldn’t the feedback they got be useful in their deliberations? I thought “YES” to all those questions.

It seems to me that such an arrangement would greatly enhance the level of both diversity and dialogue (thus enhancing the assembly’s wisdom) AND engaging the broader public in the generation of that wisdom. Thousands of Polis participants would be seeing new ideas and possibilities emerging from the polling process with the assembly and engaging in further votes and contributions, vastly expanding the “collective” that was co-creating and realizing the emergent wisdom. This could include not only more of the general public, but public officials, political actors and people in the media (who could be invited to participate, as well!).

It wasn’t long before I realized we have tools to engage hundreds and thousands of citizens in public dialogue and deliberation that are less intense and demanding than a citizens assembly, but more directly interactive than a Polis polling platform. I began to envision dozens or hundreds of Polis participants also participating in easy-to-facilitate, dynamic issue-related World Cafes in schools, libraries, community centers, and more. They’d be stimulated and changed by their experiences in those dialogues – talking to people different from themselves – and have even more remarkable insights and possibilities to share on Polis.

I came to call this model a “collective sense-making system”. A collective sense-making system would engage citizens – those involved in public conversations or those just on the street – in feeding statements into Polis and voting on each other’s statements, thereby generating reports that would influence a citizen assembly, jury, or council – with the possibility of the flows going every which way, potentially generating an iterative or ongoing process of evolving collective sense-making.

In the two models I made of this, I also included
(a) various actors – decision-makers, activists, philanthropists, cultural figures, issue stakeholders, etc. – who could be influenced by the emerging “uncommon ground” to change how they address the issue and
(b) understandings, processes and people who could bring even greater wisdom into the sense-making system. Imagine involving experts in systems thinking and regenerativity as participants in Polis exercises about meeting the metacrisis. The statements they submitted would be voted on by hundreds of ordinary citizens (thus clarifying which ideas are most accessible and appealing and what might be needed to increase citizen awareness of more complex but vital ideas – or even blow the experts’ minds with participants’ creativity!). And that’s just one kind of expert we might want to involve and just one kind of role they might play. (I want to note how expert engagement through Polis helps bypass the dynamic that sometimes arises in citizen deliberations where the deliberators defer to expert witnesses because of their presumed status. In Polis, none of the participants knows who originated the statements they’re voting on.)

I’ll close here, noting that many of the other sources of wisdom can be introduced into deliberations simply by choosing people involved with or expert in each source of wisdom to participate in the deliberative interactions, one way or another. At the same time, some of the sources of wisdom – like multiple forms of intelligence – have more to do with the design of those interactions themselves. I’ll be exploring some of this in future blog posts.

Coheartedly,

Tom

PS: This speaks to one of the recommendations in my blog post “Reimagining Deliberative Democracy to Meet the Metacrisis” which was this:

Explicitly address the challenge and possibility of collective wisdom: Participatory governance and even collective intelligence are – by themselves – radically insufficient to address modernity’s metacrisis. We need to courageously reorient our governance aspirations towards deep understandings that serve the longterm profound wellbeing of whole communities, living beings and systems – in other words, we need wisdom. How might we co-evolve the orientation of deliberative democracy theory and practice towards increasing societies’ capacities for generating effective collective wisdom?

PPS: If you’d like to try out participating in a Polis, check out this ongoing one. If you’d like to see a full Polis report, take a look here. Note that in that report you can pass your cursor over the “bee swarm diagram” (all those dots, each representing a statement) to call up a dot’s associated statement and its agree/disagree bar-graph. For the poll’s list of “true consensus” statements scroll down to the “All Statements” section (below the grey-circle map) and choose “Group-informed Consensus” in the drop-down menu.

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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