Susanna Haas Lyons has 15 years’ experience, designing and facilitating in both face-to-face and online environments. Here she generously shares her knowledge of multiple tools, as well as expressing her deep concern about how best to achieve equity and include diverse input, as well as building civic capacity. Links for resources mentioned by Susanna:...Continue reading
Leanne Piggott is an award-winning and highly-skilled curriculum designer and university teacher. Public deliberations require deep learning by participants who come to a gathering with different levels of knowledge and understanding about a topic. As facilitators increasingly move public deliberations online, understanding the principles of transformative learning has become even more important. Anything less...Continue reading
This note, created by the newDemocracy Foundation in Australia and The Democratic Society in Europe, sets out how some of these challenges can be addressed, not through a simplistic digitisation of offline methods, but by creating assemblages of tools and techniques that realise the maximum benefit of online tools while preserving the qualities that make offline deliberation a recognised gold standard.Continue reading
Emily Jenke is a very experienced facilitator of public deliberations. She is a Co CEO of democracyCo. In early 2020 she was taken out of her comfort zone when Covid-19 forced the world into physical isolation. Emily and her colleagues were mid-project, having started face to face. They were now forced online. This...Continue reading
Professor Graham Smith is a Professor in Politics at the University of Westminster, London. Graham has a wealth of experience with deliberative democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic led to some swift re-design among those who facilitate face-to-face public deliberations. In this episode, Graham Smith raises many interesting questions and offers some warnings as well....Continue reading
Dr Oliver Escobar is an academic at the University of Edinburgh and has offered training in facilitation for public deliberations for more than a decade. It is this training that provides the focus of the podcast conversation. Oliver is unusual because of this combination of scholarship and being an experienced trainer. In this interview, he explains...Continue reading
Matthew Taylor is the Chief Executive of RSA, an organisation whose people are thinking about new models for change, influencing policymakers, practitioners and the public to effect long-lasting change. In this podcast, recorded in 2019, Matthew talks about building mandates for change while ‘thinking like a system and acting like an entrepreneur’. The...Continue reading
Nivek Thompson, Journal of Public Deliberation For the First time in Australia a local council has used a deliberative democracy approach to obtain citizen advice on key decisions regarding the full range of Council services, service levels and funding. Typically a participatory budget (PB) gives citizens authority in relation to a component of the local...Continue reading
Two seasoned players in the deliberative field: one from a research foundation, the other from a consulting firm. Iain Walker (newDemocracy Foundation) and Nicole Hunter (Mosaic Lab) bring a wealth of experience to a discussion about public deliberations. They explore: identifying the policy challenge, timeliness, convincing elected representatives, knowing what the most appropriate...Continue reading
British Columbia led the way with a citizens’ assembly in 2004, a deliberative method which has been deeply influential among deliberative democrats. In 2006 a similar process, the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was undertaken in Ontario. Peter MacLeod was part of the secretariat that oversaw the Students’ Assembly on Electoral Reform which...