Platforms for Civic Learning and Convergent Agreement

[tom flanagan]

Can communities learn from the within (or from the margins) and then develop an inclusive, central 'community mind' with respect to specific issues? Or must early forming mindsets in the civic sphere fragment into silos and special interests as bonding-social capital overpowers a yearning for bridging-social as is so common elsewhere in life?

 

Stated another way, can (or should) communities achieve Mansbridge's “convergent agreement” (where the same reasons for agreeing are held by all who agree), and if so ... how?

 

I am interested in learning platforms that will support groups in efforts to discover convergent agreements and take collective mindful action. I am making a distinction between the one-to-many traditional leadership lectures presented to groups and from the many-to-one group responses back to a source through aggregated individual votes in design critiques, public hearings, and referendum voting.

 

I am specifically interested in how many-to-many exchanges of perspectives can be structured and sustained so that they will reliably lead to convergent agreement.

 

I know of only one methodology that does this (Structured Dialogic Design) and I would be very, very interested to find other methods ... which perhaps might be less demanding to implement.