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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 [...]

Some Rights Reserved by Nicholas_T In his latest book, Bernard Mayer has challenged our thinking about mediation by singling out a dimension of conflict that receives too little attention. Simply put: conflict endures, and Mayer argues that the response to it should go far beyond the immediate resolution of disputes. Staying with Conflict is a [...]

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 [...]

With so much attention focused on the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative , it’s worth taking a look at recent nationwide and state efforts to bring the public closer to government through the use of deliberative democracy techniques. Two impressive examples among many are the Citizens Parliament in Australia, convened to consider ways of improving [...]