Presenter: Joe Goldman

I’ve got a more cohesive review here.

What would it look like to have a national discussion with 1,000,000+ people involved? – Did a pilot in 2003 & 2004

• Need to engage enough people that people would take notice
• Need to do it in enough places that Congresspeople would think their constituents were represented
• You need to do it in a demographically diverse enough way that you have credibility
• You need to sufficiently inform people so that you have good discussion
• Use technology to integrate
• Televised dialogue – demographically representative group
• Hope that viewers begin to identify with people on TV
• Online strategy component
• How can you recruit people both on and off line through the Internet
• Want to generate small group discussions online
• How can you use tools to keep people engaged?

In Northeast Ohio, a group of 85 organizations came up with 30 million dollars to stimulate the economy of Northeast Ohio and granted money to America Speaks

The online world has come a long way in the past few years. What are the online tools that could help take this to scale large enough to impact the U.S. Congress?

Strengths of large scale deliberation

• Asynchronous
• Anonymity – Can be a positive and negative
• Good moderation system
• Searchability
• Hot topic identification
• Facilitation

Challenges

• How do you get lots of people?
• Outreach message needs to be from someone who is known and trusted
• Message needs to reach people on their terms
• Repetition of message
• How do you get people to stay?
• How do you make sense of their opinions?
• How do you aggregate that?
• It has to be fun
• People learn in different ways?
• Have to consider people who cannot participate (too many jobs, disabilities)
• People need to know that their participation has a real impact.

What is the business model? How do you start all of this?

• Start at the local level?
• People may not care about public transportation, but they do care about how long the delay is on the Metro in the morning.
• Is part of the role of online engagement to find online games/tap into online games?

America Speaks is trying to institute an national discussion on climate change

• Engage with science around the subject
• Online game?
• Needs to be viral
• Partner with a bunch of really big institutions that can get the message out?

How often do you do have one of these national discussions?

• As often as possible?

Swiss model of direct democracy

• Vote on ballot initiatives several times a year

State of the USA

• Comptroller General of the GAO said a few years ago that we don’t have a common way to talk about how we as a country are doing
• Working with the National Academy of Sciences, they came up with a system of indicators

How do you get people to care about something that they may not see as an important issue now, even though it is important overall?