e-Deliberation is an online enabling technology for collaborative decision and strategy making by the persons who have the expertise or are impacted by the focus of the e-Deliberation. It provides the thinking process and platform to tie it all together.
Problems and Purpose
e-Deliberation targets difficult, complex or wicked problems that have multiple stakeholders each with their varied interests, preoccupations and goals. The e-Deliberation thinking process yields a multifaceted resolution which tends toward full participant consent.
Choicework Dialogue -- also called Choice-Dialogue or ChoiceDialogue -- developed by Viewpoint Learning, is a structured and facilitated method of face-to-face, in-person deliberation in which a representative sample of approximately 40 citizens deliberates for 8 hours about a policy issue. Choicework Dialogue has been used for public deliberations about public policy issues as well as for intraorganizational deliberations about organizational policies.
In 2000, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), a Japanese governmental administration, organized a National Consensus Conference on genetically- modified foods in Tokyo.
VoterMedia is an incentive structure for encouraging public interest media to develop, to flourish and to cover issues that matter to a voter community. A typical first-step implementation is a blog competition in a small democracy such as a student union or a municipality. Voters allocate a limited budget of community funds among various competing blogs. This can be seen as a variant of Participatory Budgeting.
A Social Forum is a one to four day event that addresses a wide number of topics of concern to civil society organizations and individuals opposed to neoliberal economic globalization through workshops, demonstrations, panels and plenary discussions. The guiding Charter of Principles, established in 2001 at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, defines a Social Forum as:
