Why
Power should sit closer to the people decisions affect. Most of us agree with that in principle; almost nobody knows how to make it work in practice. My job is demonstrating that it can be done.
How
My background sits across deliberative democracy and organisational development: how groups of strangers can reason together well, and how organisations actually change rather than just announce that they have.
The two turn out to be the same craft. Both come down to designing the room so the intelligence already in it actually gets used.
These days I do that as a facilitator and process designer, working on deliberative processes at local, national and international level. Sometimes that’s a community shaping its own neighbourhood, sometimes an organisation rethinking how it decides, sometimes a citizens’ assembly drawn from an entire country. The scale changes; the discipline doesn’t.
I do all of this as co-founder of Sorted Collaboration, where we help organisations and institutions build participation that actually holds weight.
Writing
A participatory future won’t arrive one good workshop at a time. The system has to change, and changing a system means understanding it properly first.
Participatory Future is my monthly attempt to map it: one idea per edition, worked through in public.
If you care about how decisions get made, not just what gets decided, this is for you.
—
Participatory Future is one idea a month about how we make decisions together, worked through in public. It’s written from my experience of being in the room, not the library, and it’s free and will always be.
If you want to support the writing and keep it going into the future, you can buy me a coffee/beer. The gratitude will be realer than the caffeine hit.
