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.
Citizen Conferences allow for citizens to deliberate and provide policy recommendations for a government entity. The government entity can then use these recommendations to better meet the needs of its citizens.
Participants
The participants in citizen conferences are selected randomly to represent the diverse sets of opinions and demographics of a region (e.g. a State). These participants are usually ordinary citizens, not stakeholders or professional lobbyists.
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.
ConsiderIt is an internet-based platform that stems from the basis of personal deliberation into a form of public deliberation. It allows users to examine trade-offs and the vantage points of other users on proposed actions such as ballot measures, by forming deliberation around a list of pro and cons authored, adopted, and shared by various people using the platform. The design process began with the goal of supporting a voters guide written by community members in the 2010 U.S. election.
Model UN is a simulation of the United Nations that aims to reach students from all walks of life by educating them about international political issues within the United Nations[1]. The Model UN encourages students to act as leaders and ambassadors of a nation within a particular UN member states. The students play the role of an ambassador and are encouraged to gain knowledge of a current issue set on the UN agenda.
A Scenario Workshop is a participatory method encouraging local action with a mix of scenario and workshop which aims to solve local problems and anticipate future ones[1]{C}{C}{C}. Scenarios involve narrative descriptions of potential future problems that emphasize relationships between events and decision points{C}{C}{C}[2]{C}{C}{C}.
