Cross Collaborate

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The collaborative approach to water resource planning has been growing over the past 15 years, especially where urban, agricultural and environmental needs are straining the local supplies. Like many other public water managers, the Sonoma County (California) Water Agency faced a decline in groundwater supply throughout the Sonoma Valley as pumping steadily increased because of [...]

Robert Benjamin’s essay on the place of irrationality in mediation, discussed in the previous post, urges mediators to focus as much on the emotional and even illogical motives contributing to conflict as on the rational analysis of issues. Many practitioners do this, in so far as they can, because they not only recognize the importance [...]

The Future Search Conference is one of several collaborative planning methods that take a “whole system” approach. These processes try to replace shelf-bound plans with agendas for action that are developed collaboratively in the course of intensive large-group meetings.
Key Concepts
To do this, Future Search insists on the basic starting principle: “Get the whole system [...]

The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative has been holding its second phase at the blog of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The initial brainstorming phase has generated hundreds of ideas and comments relating to five major categories: Transparency, Participation, Collaboration, Capacity Building and Legal and Policy Challenges. While there have been problems with [...]