Thirsters and Democracy Lab to Collaborate

[Bob T]

* THIRSTERS AND DEMOCRACY LAB TO COLLABORATE

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Dear Thirsters in Residence:

The announcement below is from Thirster in Residence MARK FRISCHMUTH, financial counselor and principal creator of “DemocracyLab,” a serious attempt to employ digitality to improve democratic process. Mark has spent endless hours of work to develop DemocracyLab.

Our congratulations and thanks, Mark!
Best,
Bob
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BY MARK FRISCHMUTH:

Hello everyone, it was a pleasure seeing many of you Thirstday evening. I've enjoyed our discussion to date and am hopeful that you'll be willing to continue exploring this issue using a different set of tools than we've employed so far.

As many of you know, I founded a nonprofit organization called DemocracyLab a few years back, which aims to use online dialogue to find better solutions to public policy problems. Our website is up and running, and I've copied over the themes and text from our ThirsterGrams into DemocracyLab's structured conversation. You can see the results by visiting http://thirsters.democracylab.org/.

DemocracyLab uses an approach called "Values Focused Thinking". The idea is that it's important for participants in a dialogue to identify the Values that are important to them, the Objectives they seek to accomplish, and the Policies or actions they advocate. In the Thirsters' DemocracyLab community, I've created a Measure 66 & 67 Issue and preloaded the site with the concepts that have emerged from our discussion. I'm hopeful that we might be able to learn some things about ourselves and each other by participating in this process.

The instructions you'll need to follow are:
1. Visit http://thirsters.democracylab.org/
2. Create an account (you can work anonymously, but your input won't be saved once you navigate away).
3. Click on the order the issues button, and drag Measures 66 & 67 to the right (this would make more sense if we had multiple issues in the Thirsters community).
4. Click on Measures 66 & 67, and prioritize the Values that are most important to you, if you think something's missing, please add it.
5. Next prioritize the Objectives that are most important to you.
6. Prioritize the Policies that are most important to you.
7. You'll now find yourself at a Summary page, showing your rankings as well as those of the Thirsters community as a whole. I've pasted the ThirsterGrams into the comment section where they can be reviewed. Please continue to add to the discussion as you see fit.

The hope is that DemocracyLab's process will allow people who disagree about policy alternatives to find common Objectives or Values to build from in crafting better solutions. I'd be very interested in your feedback about the interface we've created and how you think it can be improved. Please use the "Feedback" button on the left side of the page to provide suggestions. If this is a hit with the Thirsters, it'd be easy to use for discussions on future issues as well.

All the best,
Mark