Organizing for America | Tom Atlee's Blog: From citizen engagement to wise democracy

From citizen engagement to wise democracy

By Tom from Eugene, OR - Dec 1st, 2008 at 11:58 pm EST

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Tags: citizens, collective intelligence, conversation, deliberation, Democracy, department of democracy, engagement, innovation, stakeholders, technology, transparency, wise democracy

I hear a lot of talk about citizen participation and public engagement, such as enabling citizens to track government decision-making and comment on it.

I'd like to offer some useful distinctions between

public participation/citizen engagement
deliberative democracy
collective intelligence
emergence-based practices
wise democracy.

Most public participation activities involve community volunteerism, advocacy activism (especially through civil society institutions), or large scale exercises of individual citizenship. Some involve citizens broadly in conversations about public affairs. The focus of such citizen participation is usually to engage large numbers of people. Many open-government initiatives enable individual citizens and partisan activist groups to engage in a more informed way with the functioning of government agencies and legislatures.

Deliberative democracy engages citizens (and sometimes stakeholders) in weighing options for public policy, with the results variously presented (or not) to the public or governing bodies. Here the focus is on the deliberative process. Diversity of opinion is valued and occasionally representative samples are sought.

Collective intelligence focuses on process design factors that impact the quality of the outcome, and on the role of a given institution, innovation or event in increasing the CAPACITY of the country (or other polity) for whole-system learning and problem-solving. Various tools, institutions, and forms of citizen engagement or deliberation produce more intelligent recommendations than others, or more effectively enhance the collective intelligence capacity of the whole.

Emergence-based practices add the factor of breakthrough or innovation. Here we aren't simply considering which of a given set of options is best, but releasing co-creative dynamics that generate new options out of whole-system engagement.

Wise democracy uses all of these (and other approaches) in conscious ways to maximize the scope and depth of collective insight and coherence in the public as a whole and in the effectiveness of public policies and programs. Face-to-face and technologically mediated methodologies are integrated in creative ways. Deliberative and emergence-based practices which engage microcosms of the citizenry and of stakeholder groups are chosen, designed, and carried out to generate maximum collective intelligence, using advanced technology and online resources as well as high quality dialogue. These highly focused microcosm conversations are undertaken within the context of broadly engaging public conversations -- and all of it is reported and discussed in the media, including online. These processes are iterative, so that the democratic process becomes not only a form of governance but a form of whole-society learning-from-experience and conscious evolution.

I think building the capacity for a wiser democracy is not only a lasting legacy (from which it would be hard for the old guard to retrench), but is also essential for dealing with the complexity of 21st century challenges.

I've tried to embody that in a proposal for a Department of Democracy
http://wiserdemocracy.blogspot.com which I submitted to the change.gov website. It covers both the elements discussed here, as well as existing Obama proposals and the democracy concerns and innovations of others.

Other useful references:

Principles of Public Participation
http://www.co-intelligence.org/CIPol_publicparticipation.html

Designing Multi-Process Programs for Public Participation
http://www.co-intelligence.org/DD-MultiProcessPgms.html

Co-intelligent Democratic Theory and Innovations
http://www.co-intelligence.org/CIdemocracypolitics_theory.html

An "imagineering" story from 2020 re use of D&D in politics and governance
http://www.co-intelligence.org/S-PatandPat.html

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