The city square (agora) of Athens is the reputed birthplace of democracy. Athenians participated in their government. They discussed issues, decided courses of action, and carried them out. Democracy made Athens a dynamic, creative force 2500 years ago. Even then, however, democracy was fragile, sometimes stupid, and short-lived. Plato held it in low esteem and Aristotle likened it to "mob rule."

Why, then, do we want to create 21st Century Agoras. What we want to create are communities energized by vibrant participative democracy. In our Information Age as old hierarchies prove dysfunctional, it is imperative that human communities have flexible ways to tap their wisdom and power. We do not believe that unstructured discussion on the Athenian model is adequate for dealing with the complexities of the Information Age. It was not adequate even for the simpler (by an order of magnitude as determined by a metric called Situational Complexity Index) situations of that bygone age.

We believe the Information Age offers us a way to make participative democracy work today. Research and proven methodology aided by computing power has solved the basic dilemma of democracy: How can we hear perspectives of all the stakeholders, dialogue about them, and still reach decisions and act on pressing issues?

The approach that overcomes this dilemma and multiple other hindrances to dialogic democracy is called the Structured Design Process (SDP) that the Agoras Institute calls "Co-Laboratories of Democracy." This process is a refinement of Interactive Management, which was developed over the last 30 years by John Warfield and Aleco Christakis. A book , Co-Laboratories of Democracy: How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom and Power to Create the Future (2006, Information Age), explains this process in detail including its origins and the science behind it.

Using Co-Laboratories, the Institute for 21st Century Agoras works to establish islands of democratic communities (agoras). We intend to plant agoras around the world that will spread like crabgrass as people exercise their newly discovered wisdom and power. Our efforts are in their early stages, but progress such as that pioneered by the Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) is spreading in the global Indigenous world.