Self-managed villages of tiny houses => many solutions!
Self-managed villages of tiny houses can address many of the ills of homelessness, middle class struggles, civic belt-tightening, sustainability, quality of life …
CII fundraiser results – and some perspective…
What this message is about: We had a fairly successful fundraiser, but we’re still tight. It is interesting to contemplate tight times in the …
A tantalizing whiff of public wisdom from beyond politics as usual
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…
More good thinking about the “budget crisis”
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…
Info and Perspective on the Budget Crisis
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…
Will powerful conversations solve state and local budget crises?
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…
Participatory Budgeting Practices, Places, Games and Resources
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 …
Participatory budgeting goes online – a step THRU fiscal crises
With budget-belts tightening at all levels of governance, I have suggested that public engagement is vital to pick up on community and governance functions that official government agencies no longer have enough money to handle well. This goes bey…