This is a conversation with Nicole Hunter, Keith Greaves and Kimbra White, the founders of MosaicLab. It covers what happens in the room with a face-to-face long-form deliberation when MosaicLab facilitators are at work. This episode contains an enormous amount of practical advice: the physical space, co-facilitation, templates, report writing, managing data and conflict, as...Continue reading
Rosa Zubizarreta is an American group facilitation practitioner and theorist and the founder of DiaPraxis. This episode is a companion piece with a previous episode that featured Jim Rough, the original designer of Dynamic Facilitation and Wisdom Councils. In the conversation with Rosa, the focus is on relational facilitation: attending to the emotional work of...Continue reading
In a California sawmill in the early 1980s, Jim Rough developed “Dynamic Facilitation”. This “group process” has now been taught in seminars all over the world and forms the basis for the “Wisdom Council Process”, a new way to spark collective wisdom in large systems of people. Wisdom Councils have been used in multiple countries...Continue reading
Whichever party wins office in this presidential race, the US is likely to persist as a conflict-ridden country. But it’s not alone. America is simply a bald-faced illustration of how elections generate animated and antagonistic political campaigns — resulting in a fractured body politic. Electoral regulations go some way to ensure the integrity of the...Continue reading
The November 2017 Symposium event convened by newDemocracy sought to challenge opinion leaders by asking them what practical testable improvements could be made to our democracy in order to improve public trust in how we take public decisions. It sought to move the discussion from one of complaint about problems into one of potential solutions....Continue reading
Dominik Hierlemann is a Senior Expert, Participation in Europe at Bertelsmann Stiftung. Dominik heads the project Democracy and Participation in Europe. He facilitates large-scale public deliberations in Europe with multiple languages and diverse cultures. In this episode, we explore the unexpected benefits that can arise from that when facilitation is done well. Music acknowledgement.Continue reading
Cathleen O’Grady in Science Magazine, Oct. 29, 2020 , 1:45 PM Until recently, Sue Peachey, an apartment building manager in Bath, U.K., didn’t think much about climate change. “I did my recycling,” she says. “I just wasn’t aware of how serious it was.” She never imagined the U.K. Parliament asking for her advice on climate...Continue reading
Linn Davis leads Healthy Democracy‘s program development and process design. He coordinates Healthy Democracy’s complex public processes, trains its facilitation teams, and consults on deliberative projects in the U.S. and abroad. In this episode, recorded prior to the pandemic’s impact, Linn explains the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) and the skills needed for excellent facilitation in...Continue reading
Last week, The Economist UK strongly and clearly endorsed that the use of juries of citizens warrants the attention of anyone seeking to do democracy better. At the core of their reasoning is a practical reality: real-world policy issues which would normally get mired in ‘politics-as-usual’ have been freed up and seen elected leaders from...Continue reading
Laurie Drake is an experienced facilitator working as the Director of Research and Learning with MASS LBP in Canada. She comes to facilitation, as many do, via teaching and this explains her strong focus on the learning elements of deliberative processes. Laurie is passionate about the power of deliberative mini-publics to improve democracy broadly and...Continue reading