Deliberating Supermarkets and their opulence was this episode's agenda, but a series of unfortunate events has made most of the recorded audio unusable. All you get is a little intro to the pod that never was, but are rewarded with a post-credit scene that is a ridiculous celebration of Bad Poetry Day by The Economist. We'll see you next week when …

Pt. 1/2 - Nonsensical with the DenisR. Colonizer at large. Denis and Dayaan go way back. They tell the story of a German boy who visited the shores of Africa and stayed due to the love of Picasso and Tap Water. Nonsensical Tangents, of course, but they invariably end up discussing more serious topics such as long-distance relationships and poverty-…

Pt. 2/2 - Deliberating mental wars and being called a wh*re. The night before Nons turns 25, the pair find themselves battling mental wars. In typical bestie fashion, they guide each other to reflect on the root of their spharkle-powered concerns, while throwing a bit of shade along the way. *WARNING: Mental health is a discussion point in this epi…

Pt. 1/2 - Nonenisical with Nonsonthemove. Bestie at large. It's the first proper catch-up since Dayaan moved to China. The usual venting and gossip session proceeds, but they also talk about the continual dynamic of their friendship where everyone assumes they hook up. We also hear a bit about their synchronized break-ups. But of course, it's all f…

As we draw this podcast series to a close, it’s fitting to take a global perspective on public deliberation with Claudia Chwalisz who leads the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation. Claudia is co-authoring a number of influential reports, convening a global network and maintaining an online digest, Participo. LINKS Catching the Deliberat…

Bobbi Allan was randomly selected for a public deliberation in early 2018. Coincidentally, she has a background as a facilitator so can offer an unusual perspective as she describes the residual effect of a deliberative experience.Από τον newDemocracy Foundation

This conversation is with Rhiann McLean (in Scotland) and Max Hardy (in Australia). Both are dedicated to amplifying the voices of people with disability—through research and public deliberations.” LINKS Research Voices Citizens’ Jury Video of the Research Voices Citizens’ Jury Report from Research Voices Citizens’ Jury NDIS Citizens’ Jury Video of…

Kara Dillard is an Assistant Professor at James Madison University in the US. She is also the operations specialist for Common Ground for Action (CGA), an online variant of National Issues Forum (NIF). In this episode, Kara explains this short-form process, as well as its strengths and challenges. As a moderator training specialist for NIF she offe…

Dr Kath Fisher is an extremely experienced professional facilitator. She is also an academic at Southern Cross University (Lismore, Australia). In this episode, Kath shares some of her journey and offers a number of useful techniques that she uses routinely in public deliberations. Documents Kath referred to in this episode A summary of the report …

Abbie Jeffs has a background in urban planning and public policy but was an excellent facilitator in a successful consultancy, Straight-Talk, for many years. She’s now working for a public sector organisation—a loss for the field of public deliberation—although Abbie remains a strong advocate. She has much wisdom to impart in this episode and sever…

Lucy Cole-Edelstein has over 30 years’ experience as an engagement practitioner, as a facilitator and process designer. She established and ran a successful consultancy, Straight-Talk, for some of those years and later sold her company to RPS with whom she now works. In this episode, Lucy shares several activities that build the group’s skill set a…

Jason Diceman is an experienced facilitator based in Toronto, Canada. He created a very useful tool, Feedback Frames (previously in the form of Idea Rating Sheets and, earlier, Dotmocracy templates). His latest invention enables score-voting on participant-generated ideas, rather than a crude survey or voting tool. It’s being used throughout the wo…

This is a conversation with Nicole Hunter, Keith Greaves and Kimbra White, the founders of MosaicLab. It covers what happens in the room with a face-to-face long-form deliberation when MosaicLab facilitators are at work. This episode contains an enormous amount of practical advice: the physical space, co-facilitation, templates, report writing, man…

Rosa Zubizarreta is an American group facilitation practitioner and theorist and the founder of DiaPraxis. This episode is a companion piece with a previous episode that featured Jim Rough, the original designer of Dynamic Facilitation and Wisdom Councils. In the conversation with Rosa, the focus is on relational facilitation: attending to the emot…

In a California sawmill in the early 1980s, Jim Rough developed "Dynamic Facilitation”. This "group process" has now been taught in seminars all over the world and forms the basis for the “Wisdom Council Process”, a new way to spark collective wisdom in large systems of people. Wisdom Councils have been used in multiple countries and are now embedd…

Dominik Hierlemann is a Senior Expert, Participation in Europe at Bertelsmann Stiftung. Dominik heads the project Democracy and Participation in Europe. He facilitates large-scale public deliberations in Europe with multiple languages and diverse cultures. In this episode, we explore the unexpected benefits that can arise from that when facilitatio…

Linn Davis leads Healthy Democracy’s program development and process design. He coordinates Healthy Democracy’s complex public processes, trains its facilitation teams, and consults on deliberative projects in the U.S. and abroad. In this episode, recorded prior to the pandemic’s impact, Linn explains the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) and the s…

Laurie Drake is an experienced facilitator working as the Director of Research and Learning with MASS LBP in Canada. She comes to facilitation, as many do, via teaching and this explains her strong focus on the learning elements of deliberative processes. Laurie is passionate about the power of deliberative mini-publics to improve democracy broadly…

Dr Chris Foreman graduated in 1999 with a Masters in theoretical physics from Edinburgh University. He spent four years doing defence research in the UK, first with DERA and then QinetiQ in satellite communications before returning to education in Cambridge in 2004 to complete a Masters in Nanotechnology and a PhD in Protein Engineering at Cambridg…

Unusually for a town planner, Anna Kelderman does her own facilitation of engagement processes and sees it as a natural and effective way to do town planning. She wishes more of her planning colleagues would do their own public deliberations with diverse groups to co-design their futures. In this episode, Anna shares what she has learnt and some of…

A slice of history since this was recorded with Scott Newton a year-and-a-half ago when he was less experienced with public deliberations than he is now. However, it’s illuminating to hear the voice of a rookie. Even though Scott was familiar with facilitating workshops and public meetings, this conversation follows his first foray into the world o…

Arantxa Mendiharat was relatively new to the field of deliberative democracy when this was recorded in May 2019. She was also involved with an exciting project in Madrid that she helped design and implement — a combination of direct and deliberative democracy that was written into the city’s laws. Arantxa has gained a great deal of experience and k…

Max Hardy was one of the earliest adopters in Australia of deliberative methods such as citizens’ juries. Currently, he is working primarily with local and state governments and government authorities. After many years Max has retained his early enthusiasm for facilitating public deliberations, in particular collaborating with citizens in order to …

Marcia Dwonczyk has been facilitating for decades and it shows. Her tremendous experience will be invaluable for those who are new to facilitating public deliberations. Marcia’s primary role is on the Leadership Team of the international Partnership Brokers Association but she has also facilitated a number of public deliberations in Australia. Here…

Dr Don Lenihan is Co-Chair of Open Government Partnership’s Practice Group on Dialogue and Deliberation. He is an extremely-experienced facilitator with a willingness to share his immense experience with others. Much of his thinking, along with input from others in seven countries, can be found in the guides developed by the OGP Practice Group. He …

Kaela Scott and Dominic Ward from Involve UK come together in this episode to share their experience of facilitating long-form deliberations like citizens’ assemblies. They cover how to structure one and how to adapt that plan for different circumstances. They also offer their experience of facilitation training: one as an extremely experienced fac…

Wendy Faulkner has an academic background as well as an enormous amount of practical wisdom to offer in this conversation which has been split into part (1) and part (2) because of its length. Wendy and her colleagues have produced an incredibly useful handbook that they generously share with others, and also offer some excellent facilitation train…

Wendy Faulkner has an academic background as well as an enormous amount of practical wisdom to offer in this conversation which has been split into part (1) and part (2) because of its length. Wendy and her colleagues have produced an incredibly useful handbook that they generously share with others, and also offer some excellent facilitation train…

André Bãchtiger has been researching the way people deliberate for 20 years. In this episode, he shares some fascinating findings from formal spaces such as parliamentary environments in Switzerland, as well as a deep analysis undertaken of a Deliberative Poll in Europe. André uses the Discourse Quality Index to explain the way people deliberate to…

Kathy Jones has had decades of experience with community consultation and stakeholder engagement. She is currently a director of The newDemocracy Foundation (as is the interviewer). This conversation covers the thrill of facilitation at the micro-level and its specialist nature, including the distinction between stakeholder engagement and deliberat…

In this episode, Simon Burall, Senior Associate with Involve (UK), explores the institutional arrangements that might effectively bring the public into important decisions about science and technological innovation. This is less about how to facilitate a public deliberation and more about the creation of a deliberative system by effectively combini…

Vivien Twyford has been at the forefront of public engagement in Australasia, and internationally, for decades. She established Twyfords in 1988. In this conversation, the focus is on a particular tool, ORID. Vivien describes how she used this tool for a difficult conversation about bushfire recovery. Her approach has relevance for all situations o…

This episode ranges from the democratic potential of the online world to an examination of several particular cases. Dr Dannica Fleuß and her fellow researchers looked at three different online spaces and evaluated them for the quality and forms of their communication. Do different online spaces in a deliberative system affect how people talk and r…

This is a conversation in two parts with Chad Foulkes from Liminal by Design and Viv McWaters from Creative Facilitation, both of whom are skilled facilitators. The aim was to replicate an earlier brainstorming session that took place among a larger group of facilitators. The discussion is about how to use the ‘marginal times’ to create group cohes…

This is a conversation in two parts with Chad Foulkes from Liminal by Design and Viv McWaters from Creative Facilitation, both of whom are skilled facilitators. The aim was to replicate an earlier brainstorming session that took place among a larger group of facilitators. The discussion is about how to use the ‘marginal times’ to create group cohes…

Susanna Haas Lyons has 15 years’ experience, designing and facilitating in both face-to-face and online environments. Here she generously shares her knowledge of multiple tools, as well as expressing her deep concern about how best to achieve equity and include diverse input, as well as building civic capacity. LINKS FOR RESOURCES MENTIONED BY SUSA…

Leanne Piggott is an award-winning and highly-skilled curriculum designer and university teacher. Public deliberations require deep learning by participants who come to a gathering with different levels of knowledge and understanding about a topic. As facilitators increasingly move public deliberations online, understanding the principles of transf…

Emily Jenke is a very experienced facilitator of public deliberations. She is a Co CEO of democracyCo. In early 2020 she was taken out of her comfort zone when Covid-19 forced the world into physical isolation. Emily and her colleagues were mid-project, having started face to face. They were now forced online. This episode is one facilitator’s stor…

Professor Graham Smith is a Professor in Politics at the University of Westminster, London. Graham has a wealth of experience with deliberative democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic led to some swift re-design among those who facilitate face-to-face public deliberations. In this episode, Graham Smith raises many interesting questions and offers some war…

Dr Oliver Escobar is an academic at the University of Edinburgh and has offered training in facilitation for public deliberations for more than a decade. It is this training that provides the focus of the podcast conversation. Oliver is unusual because of this combination of scholarship and being an experienced trainer. In this interview, he explai…

Matthew Taylor is the Chief Executive of RSA, an organisation whose people are thinking about new models for change, influencing policymakers, practitioners and the public to effect long-lasting change. In this podcast, recorded in 2019, Matthew talks about building mandates for change while ‘thinking like a system and acting like an entrepreneur’.…

Two seasoned players in the deliberative field: one from a research foundation, the other from a consulting firm. Iain Walker (newDemocracy Foundation) and Nicole Hunter (Mosaic Lab) bring a wealth of experience to a discussion about public deliberations. They explore: identifying the policy challenge, timeliness, convincing elected representatives…

British Columbia led the way with a citizens’ assembly in 2004, a deliberative method which has been deeply influential among deliberative democrats. In 2006 a similar process, the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform was undertaken in Ontario. Peter MacLeod was part of the secretariat that oversaw the Students' Assembly on Electoral Reform which…

Janette Hartz-Karp has decades of experience as an academic and as an award-winning deliberative practitioner. She has an enormous amount to teach others. She is one of the most experienced facilitators of public deliberations in the world, having designed and conducted many, many trials of mini-publics. Many of these were designed and convened for…

Mark Warren is a political scientist based in North America whose original interest in democracy theory broadened to encompass deliberative democracy when he studied the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly in 2004. Mark’s analysis of that case study and all that followed has been extremely influential in the field. In this conversation, Mark wonder…

This is part two of a conversation with John Gastil during which the history and practice of deliberative democracy is explored. What interests John and Carson is the way in which theory and practice intersect. They reflect on their own academic journeys and also note the many scholars and practitioners who have defined this field of endeavour. Bot…

Lars Klüver, is a skilled innovator, designer and convenor of public deliberations and has been for more than 30 years. His work with the Danish Board of Technology, was an early inspiration for many deliberative designers with his Consensus Conference method—a modification of an approach used in the US among scientists. Klüver understood the impor…

Hans-Liudger Dienel spoke with Carson about the work of his father Peter Dienel who developed the planning cells model of deliberative engagement in the early 1970s and which Hans has continued to work with through the Nexus Institute in Germany. Hans identifies that his father was a missionary for planning cells. Planning cells began out of Peter’…

Ned Crosby is the American inventor of Citizens' Juries. He and his wife Pat Benn have supported and developed these processes over many years. In this interview, he and Pat talk about the development of the process, its refinement over the years and the more recent development of Citizens' Initiative Review in Oregon. Ned created the citizens' jur…

In this episode, Carson speaks with Professor John Gastil from Penn State University about the history and development of deliberative mini-publics. John is the author of many books and papers on deliberative democracy including Democracy in Small Groups and is currently undertaking research on the Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review and has a book …