Deliberations

Terrific video that demonstrates how local democracy can be strengthened at the local level through welcoming and respectful methods of public engagement.

Congratulations to Graeme Gibson for putting this together.

GRASSROOTS was a public forum on growing local democracy, held in the regional NSW city of Nowra, in September 2011. The aim of the forum was to start a community wide conversation on issues of democracy, citizen participation and possibilities at the local level — the level closest to the people. More than 100 participants heard a panel of speakers present ideas from their fields of community engagement, alternative democratic models and planning. After this, using a World Cafe method, participants weighed up the ideas they had heard, what they liked or were concerned about. Enthusiasm and a high level of support for greater citizen engagement in decision making was evident.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 09:23 PM | Link

Most electronic versions of academic journals remain behind a walled garden. This means you have to log into your university portal, and access the journal from there. The way it works is that access to the publisher’s site is controlled through a “proxy url”, which is basically a university-specific extension to the publisher’s url. You can get to the journal without it, but you can only read the tables of contents and article abstracts in each issue. For example, there is an article archived at JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/pss/40401861, but I can only read it via my university with http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/pss/40401861, which makes me log into my university account at University of Western Sydney. There are different proxy services, but I think the most common is EZProxy, which is what my university uses.

I use Zotero to maintain a list (with contents) of articles from journals and other sources. With it I can easily grab articles I find, catalogue them for later citation and paste references into the works that I author.

In days gone by, if you wanted to do a literature search, you’d go to the bricks-and-mortar library and pour through various indexes provided by the publishers and also disciplinary institutions. You can still do that, of course. But now with Google Scholar hooked into all the indexes, you don’t need to leave home. You need to go from the search results to the article via your university’s proxy server, preferably in one step. When you’re on a mission, you can easily burn through a dozen articles in a single session.

Zotero was originally provided as a Firefox extension. In it, you can maintain a list of url redirection instructions, and the extension is smart enough to suggest when new entries are required. With EZProxy at my university, the translation is always to add ezproxy.uws.edu.au to the end of the journal publisher’s url domain. It happens automatically.

But after I decided to switch browser to Google Chrome, which demands use of the ‘standalone’ version of Zotero, I lost the proxy redirection functionality. I don’t know why the Chrome “connector” is unable to do it. I got tired of typing the EZProxy domain onto the end of the URL address.

So I built a free little Chrome extension to do it. Download it from here or the Google Chrome Web Store

Instructions:

1. Extract the zip file contents into its own folder.
2. In Chrome configuration, find Tools | Extensions.
3. Ensure the Developer mode checkbox is enabled
4. Select Load unpacked extension and find the folder with the extension contents.
5. A new EZProxy toolbar icon should appear
6. Right-mouse the tookbar icon and select Options
7. Enter the proxy domain, for example ezproxy.uws.edu.au
8. When you have a journal page showing, perhaps found via Google Scholar, click the button to append the proxy domain to the url. You may be taken to your login page if your session has timed out.

It’s supplied under a GNU licence, you know the one.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 03:57 PM | Link

Very interesting proposal about how to conduct online deliberation, of the type that crowd-sources options that resolve a public policy issue, then chews through and prioritises them:

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 07:18 PM | Link

I agree with Chris Riedy at UTS who makes the point that Australia’s first legislative step this week towards the establishment of a carbon economy can be sustained with Government-convened deliberative processes that invite public understanding and commitment to the structural changes necessary for a sustainable future.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 11:50 AM | Link

Stephen gets it exactly right.

OWS is, at its heart, a change in the way we view social change and political action. It’s a recognition that the placement of too much of anything – power, money, influence – into the hands of a few is ultimately damaging to society. It’s an attempt to create enough social friction to make the accumulation of so much wealth and power unbearable to the few who possess it. And its an attempt to understand how we govern ourselves in the coming era after we have rejected the attempts of the rich and powerful to do our governing for us.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 12:09 PM | Link

A good friend of mine who I will always respect wrote about Occupy: “It seems to simply be a trendy event that malcontents of every stripe are using to air their ill defined (or plainly selfish) complaints.” This comment is similar to many that disrupt the twitter feeds.

Here is my unedited response:

You are stuck on the symptoms, and there is certainly foolishness there. The shit fight regarding the drummers in NY is an example how leaderless self-organising can develop cracks. You are also quick to make universal judgement, nor realising the diversity of people and ideas that the movement has swept up. Also, they have chosen a consensus-seeking format that is not good at filtering out weirdness. But it IS worth taking the time to read and think about the underlying motors, and why we see this outbreak now. It is complex and it is uncharitable to make sweeping statements. To demand that they have well-articulated demands demonstrates the dominance of the frame of economic “rational choice” (a technical term, wikipedia does a poor job of explaining it) which harbours an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” ethic. I don’t blame you for not thinking outside of that, most people don’t, it’s culturally embedded. More and more, it is dawning on writers (less so from the defensive Right) that the movement is restarting a conversation about power and fairness that has been suppressed since the 1960s. It’s the conversation that’s important, and how that’s conducted. The mainstream media has gone from ignoring the movement outright, to opening its opinion pages to discussion, and that’s a good thing. It is too bad that some activists and administrative power are stuck in an agonistic mode. Hopefully, it can proceed peacefully (it did not in Melbourne and Sydney). BTW, most people attending the general assemblies at various Occupy sites are university educated (or in the process) and are well-employed. My criticism of them is that many are utopian, not understanding that you can’t just demand revolutionary change and expect power to move aside willingly. Increasingly, its dawning on the various sites as their conversation develops that change requires raising public awareness and engaging slowly with the authoritative power complex. And that requires a deliberative process.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 11:04 AM | Link

Changes in the functioning of government and business will emerge only indirectly from the Occupy movement. What Occupy can achieve directly is a demonstration that people can self-organise to deliberate responsibly and competently and express the diversity of public values to various policy generation processes. They can insist that public judgement be inserted constructively where it is absent today.

With the day-to-day involvement of everyday people, decisions can be made differently and the excesses of power can be kept in check.

In Melbourne, if Mayor Doyle came out tomorrow and announced the immediate formation of a Residents’ Panel, drawn randomly from the population like a jury with a provision for periodic refresh, to advise Council about its bylaw enactment and regulation, Occupy could claim a victory.

If the corporate watchdog ASIC similarly announced a perpetual public jury that had real teeth and transparency, I wouldn’t stop jumping for joy.

This is an opportunity to mainstream “deliberative democracy”.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 04:54 PM | Link

[UPDATE] Tim Bonnemann writes a terrific piece about consensus decision making at OccupySanJose and recommends Tree Bresson’s process tips about avoiding pitfalls (pdf).

I’ll have my young daughters in tow this coming weekend, so I’m in two minds about dragging them into the CBD for the #occupymelbourne gathering. With over 1200 cities around the world (as of this minute) preparing to convene, it’s a participatory miracle that I would really like to be a part of. I was about five years too young to be a part of the sixties scene of angst towards elitism, but did get involved during the early seventies at the dawn of the environmental movement. Now there is political numbness everywhere, especially at the university. My daughters are still too young to appreciate the re-awakening that occupytogether symbolises. They might be too freaked out by the crowd.

Following the flagship OccupyWallStreet event, each city is calling for facilitators to guide consensus-seeking forums. I’m excited about this because they are advocating dialogue formats like Open Space that really work to inclusively bubble good ideas to the top. I hope that the conversation can expand over the next days and years to bring tolerance and understanding between those who travel under different ethical and ideological banners. I hope there are enough people who would believe in democratic systems that need both political representatives and deliberating citizens.

I’m not a conspiratorialist, and unlike many of the young occupiers I don’t condemn all business interests or all government power for the mess we face today. What I do lament is what critical theorists refer to as the false consciousness that pervades so much of our lives. You watch the ads and you believe in them. You’ve been sucked in. The meek will inherit zip.

If George Carlin were still alive, he’d get you fired up:

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 10:59 AM | Link

I’ve not been very blog-wise lately. That’s what happens when you move house, the routines just go out the window. Anyway, I’m settled in a little 120-year-old renovated terrace house in Hawthorn East, an inner-east suburb of Melbourne. Most of the boxes are unpacked. I had terrible internet connectivity using a mobile 3G USB drive, but I’ve just had an ultra-fast cable subscription installed, so I’m back in business. Health-wise, I’m feeling exceptionally well all things considered. I’m back working on my Phd thesis and also some chapters in an edited volume about the Australian Citizens’ Parliament. I’ll try to pay attention to what’s going on more in the deliberative space, and return to my usual blogging frequency.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 07:50 PM | Link

An assembly of thought leaders and public intellectuals in the UK have written the Guardian newspaper calling for the convening of a People’s Jury. The initiative is propelled by Neil Lawson, who chairs the progressive activist organisation Compass, and Andrew Simms who chairs the leftist nef (the new economics foundation) thinktank. The Guardian effectively endorsed the idea by publishing an opinion piece about it written by Lawson and Simms. The Guardian followed up with an opinion piece by a staff writer that attacks the unaccountable “feral” elite who are mucking things up for the rest of us.

I definitely like the suggestion for an assembly of randomly selected citizens to provide transparent judgement with the aid of facilitation about decision making that is ostensibly in the public interest.

However, I would prefer that the initiative had right-wing support too, for without it there won’t be democratic legitimacy.

A significant proportion of the commentary to the above articles believes that a randomly selected cohort of citizens won’t be up the task. The commenters think they are better than everyone else, which in itself is a demonstration of elitism. The irony is that their rancorous responses only strengthen the case for drawing in a random panel of typical citizens who are not the “usual suspects” to deliberate sensibly and publicly with each other about policies and issues, to help inform public attitudes.

That all said, I am concerned that the attack on the “elites” is misplaced. We need expertise and leadership and we shouldn’t assume that all of them are insensitive to the diverse needs of the rest of us. I don’t share the cynical view that it is inevitable that power corrupts. However, giving power too long a leash does introduce the risk that that they may act inappropriately.

Any process that formally guides power to provide more responsible and publicly acceptable governance has to be a winner for everyone, including those in power.

Newspapers editors think they need conflict to sell. Instead, we need media that is brave enough to change the game completely. We don’t want to be angry any more.

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky at 11:07 PM | Link