Act now re TPP and Fast Track (toxic to democracy)
This month the US Congress could pass legislation that would make sure that complex trade agreements favored by multinational corporations – like …
Conflict and the varied gifts of powerful conversation
The power of conversation is real but not total. People sometimes take an oversimplified perspective of the power of dialogue, deliberation, and choice-creating to deal with tensions between people. EIther they think “just talk” can’t do much to r…
Tom Atlee “public wisdom” conference call 1/17/2012
I’ll be doing an online dialogue in the 2-hour National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Confab Call on Tuesday, January 17th at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific). Ben Roberts, a principal in both weDialogue and Occupy Café, will be facilitating t…
Public issue conversations and the legitimacy of “we the people”
I see several diverse but not necessarily mutually exclusive types of political conversation, and find that differentiating among them helps me think more clearly about this topic: 1. STAKEHOLDERS: Stakeholder conversations involve people with int…
#Occupy Open Space Activities
Catalyzed by the meteoric rise of Occupy Wall Street into public notice and discourse, outsiders are connecting the dots between their pet issues and OWS’s focus on “the unchecked power of Wall Street speculators and corporations”. Many are urging…
Whole System Conversations – and the Voice of the Whole
Who participates in “whole system” conversations? Partisans, Stakeholders, Domains and Citizens by Tom Atlee Consciously convened conversations have many functions. Many seek simply to get people talking with each other. Others try to bring togeth…
Iceland is Crowdsourcing their Constitutional Convention
Here’s a truly remarkable piece of news few people seem to have heard about: Iceland is creating its new constitution with mass online participation. These three short articles give the exciting details. Iceland Is Crowdsourcing Its New Constituti…
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 …