Category: Worth A Look

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Worth a Look: Program for Public Consultation

Worth A Look
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About

The Program for Public Consultation (PPC) is a newly-established joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.  PPC has been established to develop the methods and theory of public consultation and to conduct public consultations. In particular it will work with government agencies to help them consult their citizens on key public policy issues that the government faces.

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What Is Public Consultation?

Public consultation is a means to improve democratic governance by helping governments consult their citizenry on the key public policy issues the government faces.  Public consultations are conducted with representative samples of the citizenry. Using standard scientific methods of random sampling, a sample is chosen and subsequently weighted to reflect the population census on all major demographic variables, thus producing an accurate microcosm of the citizenry.

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Responding to the Crisis of Democracy

PPC was developed in response to extensive evidence that democracy is in a crisis. The core principles of democracy are widely endorsed around the world, especially the principle that the will of the people should be the legitimating basis for government decisions.However, there is a widespread perception in the publics of democratic countries that their governments do not serve the common good of the people, but rather serve organized special interests that have the means to exert disproportionate leverage over government decisions.

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See Also:

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Worth A Look: October 2011 – Human Needs Not Corporate Greed – Stop the Machine Create a New World

Worth A Look
Press Release Open Letter

We Stand With the Majority of Americans: Human Needs, Not Corporate Greed

A large majority of the American people consistently support the following agenda:

  • Tax the rich and corporations
  • End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending
  • Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all
  • End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests
  • Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation
  • Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages
  • Get money out of politics

The government, dominated by elite economic interests, is going in the opposite direction from what the people want.  The American people’s agenda is our agenda.

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Worth a Look: Who Governs the Globe?

5 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Civil Society, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Worth A Look
Amazon Page

Review

“This path-breaking collaborative work illuminates complex social and political relationships that constitute governing authority in a changing world. New questions provoke deeper reflection than the term ‘global governance' typically stimulates. Specialists need to read this fine book, and so do students.”   Louis W. Pauly, Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Governance, University of Toronto

“This volume makes and illustrates an important fact about global governance today: it isn't only or always the institutional form of actors – be they states, corporations, or NGOs – but their relationships with key constituencies and with one another that shape governance outcomes. Authority, the essence of governance, comes in many guises. I recommend this book highly.”   John Gerard Ruggie, Harvard University

Product Description

Academics and policymakers frequently discuss global governance but they treat governance as a structure or process, rarely considering who actually does the governing. This volume focuses on the agents of global governance: ‘global governors'. The global policy arena is filled with a wide variety of actors such as international organizations, corporations, professional associations, and advocacy groups, all seeking to ‘govern' activity surrounding their issues of concern. Who Governs the Globe? lays out a theoretical framework for understanding and investigating governors in world politics. It then applies this framework to various governors and policy arenas, including arms control, human rights, economic development, and global education. Edited by three of the world's leading international relations scholars, this is an important contribution that will be useful for courses, as well as for researchers in international studies and international organizations.

Original Conference with Presented Papers (2007)

Conference: Who Governs the Globe?
November 16 & 17, 2007

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Worth a Look: Institute for 21st Century Agoras

Advanced Cyber/IO, Worth A Look

Institute for 21st Century Agoras

People the world over aspire to participatory democracy. Yet the democratic planning and design of social systems, from local urban projects to national health care, is threatened by our institutional inability to engage stakeholders in dialogues that result in effective collective design and commitment.

A Democratic Vision for All Stakeholders
The Agoras Institute promotes a democratic transformation of civil society and government by empowering the capacity of client organizations and educators to produce breakthroughs in the collective confrontation of multidimensional wicked problems. Our immediate mission is to establish and nurture new Agoras of the 21st century – global centers of democratic participatory design and education – in areas of critical socio-political importance or demand.

What are Agoras?
With each shift in human social communication and technology, the means for wise engagement must evolve. In ancient Athens, all citizens could meet face to face in the public arena. Today, our arenas are globally distributed, with unmanageable relational and problem complexity. The Institute supports client organizations with tools, practices, and training to support engagements for addressing projects of high sociotechnical complexity.

At this critical juncture of the evolutionary process of humanity, there cannot be conscious evolution without the capacity to explicate through dialogue the wisdom of the people in the Agoras of the 21st Century Global Village.

 Alexander Christakis

Phi Beta Iota: Includes software being tested and scaled.  See the slideshow by Tom Flanagan.

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Worth a Look: Curriculum Reform Forum

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Threats, Worth A Look
Koko the Reflexive

The Curriculum Reform Forum

The Curriculum Reform Forum is dedicated to disseminating thought leadership in the field of curricular reform in order to inspire local reform initiatives. It is a platform for global dialogue fostering the exchange of ideas as well as a resource offering concrete support to academic practitioners.

Inspired by this question of the father of Modern Skepticism we would like to approach contemporary curricular reform with the wisdom and fervour of an owl going into nosedive. You are invited to read our manifesto and join the conversation!

CurriculumReform.org

Phi Beta Iota:  We have focused on Paradigms of Failure and on the loss of intelligence and integrity for decades.  Now George Soros has had his aha moment.  The Reflexive Movement is advancing on all fronts.  Russell Ackoff smiles.

Below is the essence of the Manifesto:

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Worth a Look: Keeping Watch (UN Surveillance)

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Amazon Pre-Order Page (Moves in August not December, Amazon Page Has Not Been Properly Set Up By Publisher).

Knowledge is power. In the hands of the UN peacekeepers it can be a power for peace.  Lacking knowledge, peacekeepers often find themselves powerless in the field, unable to protect themselves and others.  The United Nations owes it to both its peacekeepers and the “peacekept” to utilize modern tools to make its monitoring effective for conflict prevention and resolution.

Keeping Watch explains how modern technologies can increase the range, efficiency and accuracy of UN observation.  Satellites, aircraft and ground sensors enable surveillance of large areas over long periods.  They can provide imagery of hot spots for use as evidence in human rights investigations. Sensors can be the extended “eyes” of UN patrols, humanitarian convoys and robust UN operations.  Fortunately, commercial technologies have been increasing exponentially in capability while decreasing rapidly in cost.  The United Nations, however, continues to use technologies and techniques from decades past.

This book identifies the benefits and pitfalls of specific technologies.  The few cases of technologies effectively harnessed in the field are showcased, and creative recommendations are offered to overcome the institutional inertia and widespread misunderstandings about how technology can complement human initiative in the quest for peace in war-torn lands.

A. Walter Dorn teaches military officers and civilians at the Canadian Forces College (CFC) and at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is a professor of defence studies and Chair of the Department of Security and International Affairs at CFC. He has both studied and served on UN peace operations, and worked as a consultant to the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations.