Bill Keller’s New York Times op-ed “What if Sanity Prevails in Washington?” offers a tantalizing vision of what might be possible if we moved beyond partisan politics-as-usual. Sadly, he stops just short of the kind of evolutionary breakthrough we…
The three articles below describe major approaches to addressing the deficit — for health care, taxes and the military — that would have a greater impact on America’s budget woes than ANYTHING being currently negotiated by Congress and the Obama…
I have recently heard that people in the Coffee Party and the No Labels movement and some other groups seeking to represent “We the People” have recently been wondering how an organization can be about both “advocacy” AND “dialogue and deliberatio…
So much is happening under the guise of “the budget crisis” that I thought it might be useful to deconstruct this issue a bit. I am concerned, in particular, because a number of efforts are emerging to formally engage the public in deliberations a…
This morning my brother, Dick Atlee, wrote the following: I was going through the UCS’s [Union of Concerned Scientists] latest update, from yesterday, and encountered the following, which crystallized a thought that has been nagging at me for days…
Probably virtually everyone reading this is already aware of the triple crises in Japan — mega-earthquake, mega-tsunami, and mega-nuclear catastrophe. I have found it often difficult to find truly useful information and perspectives on this crisi…
What would happen if professional organizers and facilitators of dialogue and deliberation decisively and publicly demonstrated their capacity to help cities and states solve their biggest problem — collapsing budgets — and then broadly promoted…
“We were made different to complete each other…” — Egyptian engineer Muhammad Saladin Nusair, whose photo supporting Wisconsin workers went viral… Two remarkable presentations of our common humanity and shared predicament showed up in my emai…
The emergence of the Wikileaks phenomenon is a game-changer of the sort I highlighted in “Are we ready to change the Game yet?” http://bit.ly/bwGTJO. The unfolding Wikileaks saga is generating an increasingly novel playing field — remarkably diff…
Recently I’ve seen a swirl of information (mostly on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv) about participatory budgeting. Below, you’ll find a sampling of this info, in relatively raw form. I do not know enough to sort it …