Real Deliberative Tools
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Hoyle Hodges
- Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Response for 23 Feb 2011
- Real Deliberative Tools
- We believe that it is important to develop tools, strongly rooted in the democratic tradition: i.e.,
firstly, let’s try to reproduce what we know to work quite properly in the offline world, removing through the use of ICTs some of their space and time constraints. (Schuler, Deliberation and Community Networks: A Strong Link Waiting to be Forged, pg 4) Roberts Rules of Order is exactly the right choice as a basic building block for any digital online deliberative democracy project. Roberts Rules first published in Feb 1876 has become the standard for conducting meetings between people. Roberts Rules bring order out of chaos while ensuring that everyone present has their say, yet the minority cannot overrule the majority. As a young teenager and a member of the Future Farmers of America (FFA) we practiced Roberts Rules and had parliamentary procedure competitions with other clubs. Knowing how to conduct a fair meeting that was useful in getting things accomplished was considered a normal part of being a citizen back then. Knowing that we aren’t going back in time anytime soon, makes the idea and implementation of projects like e-Liberate even more critical. I say critical because we have more and more citizens who want to participate in a deliberative democracy in a meaningful way, yet other than a blog really have no way for their voices to be heard.
The key to this is developing the capability that allows people to inspect, edit (change, add, delete), and save alternative sets of rules and import the rule-sets to either augment or replace the rules currently being used. (Schuler, Deliberation and Community Networks, pg 6-7) The author gets it completely right here, for any set of rules to be functional to the users they must be relevant and applicable to the context and time line of the issue being decided. An organization may need to limit or extend the time available for “open comments” or give the chairperson more flexibility or authority. The rules must fit both the issue and the group making the decisions. The “Protocol Engine” discussed by the author is a very intriguing idea and I hope forward progress is being made in this direction, along with internationalization and language capability so that eLiberate use can spread to more organizations across the world.
