tomflanagan – Institute for 21st Century Agoras

The Case for Citizen Think-Tanks

tomflanagan — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 15:08:20 +0000

The Case for Citizen Think Tanks Not in all communities, but in many communities, there is a growing sense of confusion, frustration, and even anger in America, and it takes its form at the street level upon which most Americans live their lives. The confusion is larger than what any one mind can grasp. It

Heraklion DEMOSCOPIO

tomflanagan — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:04:25 +0000

Heraklion DEMOSCOPIO: A vision for democracy, cooperation and dialogue The municipality of Heraklion in Crete, Greece will soon open the Heraklion Demoskopio, a new institution that will engage the stakeholders of the city in open and focused dialogues. It will be a public space for eliciting citizen concerns, hosting their dialogues, and posting those concerns

A Digital Approach to Democratic Dialogue

tomflanagan — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:24:52 +0000

The essence of a democratic act is the co-construction of a coherent understanding of a shared circumstance. All else flows from this constructed understanding. It has never been easy, and today may be much more difficult that it has been in the past. This is frustratingly ironic to many who turn to the Internet as

The Irony of the Predicament of Detroit

tomflanagan — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 12:02:00 +0000

In a recent blog titled “Detroit and the Temptation of Ruin,” Tufts University civics scholar Peter Levine speaks of art, poverty and hopes for renewal. The story, as Levine notes, is tragic in the Aristotelian sense – local art and architecture documents a rise to power, a celebrated era, and a collapse to “700,000 people

US EPA Taking Democratic Steps Toward Community Involvement

tomflanagan — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 23:35:13 +0000

The Institute for 21st Century Agoras presented a technology poster at the EPA’s 13th Community Involvement Training Conference in Boston on July 30 – August 1. Our poster is entitled A Democratic Approach for Sustainable Futures, with a more lengthy sub-title “Framing Consensus Views for Collective Action: The Sociotechnology of Interpretive Structural Modeling Embedded within Structured

Policy is more than a product of process; policy is process itself

tomflanagan — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:57:32 +0000

The London School of Economics and Political Science blog site carries an evocative – if not provocative – post from a Senior Researcher at the Centre for European Studies, at the University of Oslo. The post is nine months old, and hasn’t drawn much response – however, the commentary does beg for an audience. Plato

Hyperpartisanism: a consequence of mismanaged complexity?

tomflanagan — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:52:51 +0000

In an inaugural event in NYC last weekend, the NoLabels movement presented its view of a way to resolve the hyperpartisan crisis in America. “Legislators need to stop fighting and to start working together.” It is unclear how and when legislators choose to fight. Newly seated legislators don’t come into office with aggressive intent. They

Elinor Ostrom’s Legacy of the Commons

tomflanagan — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 08:28:20 +0000

At this time in history, 78 is still far too young an age to be swept into the future. For four decades, Elinor and her colleagues have been slaying a myth that was breathed into life by Ecologist Garrett Hardin‘s misunderstanding of the nature of “The Tragedy of the Commons.” The myth is that people

Democracy as the Means to Discover the New Narratives for Sustainable Futures

tomflanagan — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:42:48 +0000

Democracy is in the business of continually creating a new narrative … oral, textual, and graphic … that can move through and transform communities. While some voices within the Club of Rome have railed against the shortfalls of distorted democracy (and we can see their points), there are few alternative governance approaches which we feel

What would a “national dialogue infrastructure” look like?

tomflanagan — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:16:26 +0000

The director of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation recently asked listserv members for responses to the concept of a “national dialogue infrastructure.” The goal was to gather some input for an NCDD summit to be held in Seattle in the fall of 2012, and the request called attention first to the “values” that