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Robert Benjamin recently published another of his typically thoughtful and provocative essays at Mediate.com. On Becoming a Rationally Irrational Mediator/Negotiator is the first part of an ambitious five-part series on the role of the irrational in conflict resolution. In this first installment, Benjamin sets the stage for a detailed challenge to the reliance on rational [...]

This is the nightmare scenario for any consensus process: After months of hard work by 20 or 30 participants, one or two holdouts, perhaps representing narrow or personal interests, block agreement and frustrate the entire effort. That is possible if the only route to agreement requires unanimous consent. There has to be a way to [...]

Although I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about this so far, the emergence of interactive tools for online citizen engagement poses interesting questions for the future of public policy consensus building. It’s still early days in the development of the web technology, and experiments so far have been spotty. Despite the high orbit of [...]

Over the last few years, concepts like collaboration, the wisdom of crowds and collaborative networks have taken hold as innovative ways for involving large groups of people to help solve complicated public policy problems. However, the terms are often used so loosely that they’re in danger of being lumped together and, in effect, dismissed, especially [...]