Participants

• Tim B.
• Neil D. (Drupal)
• Jerry F. (informal and democratic orgs achieving goals and continuity, unsuccessful oss system ... http://cope.icsi.berkeley.edu)
• Michael W. (e-thepeople, digital townhall, stanford "deliberative poling" .. how do you get good balance between deliberation and activism ... non-partisan vs. partisan )
• Brian S. (civicevolution, emphasis on process ... not just enough to have a space, need for process, participants must see results/progress, one way to help enhance feeling of productivity))
• Yaffa (works w/ groups, many different frameworks for decision-making, combiningg online and offline, online is often not very representative)
• Todd D. (CPSR, stanford, partnership for internet and community engagement PICE, system called DEME, aimed at pre-existing groups who know each other, DEME provides tools that map the real-life processes, started 3.5 years ago, relaunch under way ... demo expected early 2007)
• Oliver M. (Germany, Attac, network for free knowledge)
• Brent
• Silona (league of technical voters, consensus wiki at the code-a-thon, works with SRI)
• Bill McG. (CPSR, civil society, interested in supporting projects, interested in multi-lingual, currently a videoconferencing project that
• Kaliya (interested in interested in combination of online and offline and how they can complement each other, tom atlee, extreme dev democracy book, it's not either or but hybrid is more the way to go)
• Lauren G. (cpsr)

Does deliberation require a position of power?

• Not necessarily, should have an end result (could be a manifesto)
• Should provide some closure
• Important to have clear expectations

How to deal with (encourage) disagreement or dissent?

• Big problem with chat rooms: oftentimes people have many different email addresses and identities, multiple usernames
• Distinction between closed systems and open systems
• DEME: offers verious types of groups (open, invite-only),

How to do credibility, identity, reputation?

• Groups work best if there's a 1-on-1 connect between real life and online identity
• e-thepeople: open system, in general most people are trustworthy, you want people to have trust in the system, a few bad apples can cause a lot of problems
• one issue with identity: revealing yourself, you want to develop trust over time (don't require people to give up full information up front), allow aliases for some projects
• league of technical voters: current project, goal: have granularity (e.g. local sierra club may want to share access to members' email lists but not give a way that email list)

What's the value-add of requiring user idenity?

• Reasons: e.g. voting mechanism (one member one vote), fraud
• But: anonymous political speech is important
• System may require ID, certain tools don't
• Level of anonymity depends on the real-life group or obbjective: often, you want to know who you're dealing with!
• build parameter choice into the tools/systems ... need to be configured so that all the sensical choices are available ... anonymity is often crucial ... people do things that could get back at them and hurt them later ...
• jury: the only model americans are familiar with ... only expose the final result, not the actual deliberation process ... group (jury) gets to choose what to expose (transcript, decision)
• small groups are much better suited for group dialogue and deliberation

How to scale?

• instead of 144 people, do 12 groups of 12
• representative models

How to make sure the ideas that bubble up are the best ones?

• 1 out of 12 is elected the "speaker"
• Very transparent process, meta group (group of 12 speakers) is visible to whole group
• Setting thresholds for new ideas to be sent to the meta group

What tools are we using ourselves (besides our own stuff)?

• Todd: good example is Wikipedia
• Groupware in general: often tries to prevent people from doing bad things, which also prevents a lot of good things .. only intervene when necessary ...
• "Steak knives problem"
• Problems with wiki: little voting capability, not structured data, hard to aggregate, view data from different angles
• Hard to track history: who did what when etc.

Closing round

• Offline people are sometimes afraid of online people
• Issue: integration of offline and online very difficult (decision makers often aren't as online), profile information can be problematic (being from country=israel can put you in a certain corner)
• Beware: picking the tools for deliberation, create discussion materials, decide what th agenda is, opportunities for corruption in a closed system, important to give people a lot of options (e.g. to configure software) to accomplish different goals, important that political speech is protected
• Online deliberation software design: seems like a ... aggressive process.
• There is not one way to do online deliberation: depends a lot on the problem at hand. national issues forum vs. local community thing. make sure to have a lot of flexibility ... start small, solve 1 problem first and then expand out of that ...
• 1-trick pony is what gets you success today (focus on 1 thing and excel at that). whereas, online deliberation is very complex and requires a lot of tools...
• Tim: want to experiment more with swarm approach

Things we didn't get around to discuss...

• Community ground rules? which ones, how to enforce?
• Anonymity and privacy (or maybe we did)