The Kettering Foundation’s soon-to-be-released book, Democratizing Deliberation: A Political Theory Anthology, brings together recent and cutting-edge political theory scholarship on deliberative democracy. Edited by Derek Barker, Noelle McAfee, and David McIvor, the collection reframes deliberative democracy to be sensitive to the deep conflicts, multiple forms of communication, and aspirations for civic agency that characterize real public deliberation. In so doing, the book addresses many of the most common challenges to the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. Here’s what NCDD member Katherine Cramer Walsh (University of Wisconsin-Madison) says about the ... (continue)

On January 21, 2012 the City of Bell convened a historic bi-lingual Community Forum that brought more than forty residents together to deliberate and to offer guidance to local officials on goals and budget priorities for the 2012-13 fiscal year. This process is one of several initiatives of the new Bell City Council to restore transparent, community-focused government to Bell. Following a welcome from Mayor Ali Saleh, and short presentations on the purpose of the forum and the overview of the City’s fiscal condition, small ... (continue)

New Hampshire Listens works at the local and state level to facilitate and support civil, public deliberation of complex, polarizing issues. We share resources on dialogue design, train facilitators, and work with local and state leaders to create opportunities for informed conversation on social, economic, and policy matters. We bring people together for engaged conversations and informed community solutions. Public dialogue opportunities augment formal, traditional means of engaging citizens by creating venues and resources for face-to-face and on-line deliberation. Our vision is to create a ... (continue)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) is proud to launch the “Public Participation Guide“, an international public participation toolkit. It is a resource for agencies and organizations to help develop, plan for, and implement programs that engage the public in environmental decision-making. U.S.EPA has worked on developing this guide since 2009, initially for use in the Middle East and North Africa, but with potential for global application. It has now been introduced to regions and countries around the world. The guide was developed to ... (continue)

This article, available for sale at Cambridge Journals Online, is compromised of the text from a Presidential Address delivered before the APSA in Seattle, September 2011, by Carole Pateman of the University of California, Los Angeles and is based in part on her book, Participation and Democratic Theory.  Some of the ideas and arguments in this address were also presented in 2011 at the UK Political Studies Association meeting, in London, and at the Canadian Political Science Association meeting, in Waterloo. From the abstract: Over the past two decades we ... (continue)

Debategraph is a social enterprise that combines argument visualization with collaborative wiki editing to make the best arguments on all sides of every complex public debate freely available to all, and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all. It was co-founded by Peter Baldwin and David Price, who have been collaborating on Debategraph’s development on opposites sides of the world over the last five years –  and is evolving continuously towards the fulfilment of our long term vision for a new form of public communication. For a ... (continue)

In December 2012, Alberta Climate Dialogue released a series of short videos exploring the benefits of deliberative democracy, featuring well known practitioners such as Matt Leighninger (DDC), Janette Hartz-Karp (Curtin University), Edward Andersson (Involve UK) and others. These insightful snapshots of public engagement knowledge and case studies are a valuable resource for communicating deliberative democracy ideas to others. (continue)

This 2011 book, edited by Roger A. Lohmann and Jon Van Til, focuses on how public deliberation and group discussion can strengthen the foundations of civil society, even when the groups engaged in debate share a history of animosity. Scholars have begun to study the dialogue sustaining these conversations, especially its power to unite and divide groups and individuals. The twenty-four essays in this collection analyze public exchanges and the nature of sustained dialogue within the context of race relations, social justice, ethnic conflicts, public-safety ... (continue)

This resource was submitted via the Add-A-Resource form by NCDD member Joe Raelin, author of the article and Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education professor at Northeastern University’s Center for Work and Learning.  His work can also be found at www.leaderful.org. The first purpose of this article is to make the case that democratic leadership, referred to as “leaderful” practice, should be the fundamental form of leadership that characterizes participatory organizational change. The article appeared in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol 25, No. 1, 2012. I wrote the ... (continue)

This Prezi Presentation is about MctIBIS, a web based system for tackling wicked problems collaboratively. MctIBIS is based on the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) introduced by Horst Rittel in the 70s and implemented using an information relationship management engine. (continue)