I've seen some interesting consensus online software.
First, the software has tools for the promotion of information about 'the project' to potential interested parties. The potential core group will be found using search optimization, visitor tracking, email monitoring and all the other tools for reaching a specific audience.
Then it allows this core group to formulate questions that must be asked in order to find the consensus. Anyone can add as many questions as they like. All visible RT. The usefulness of each question is tested by a simple response by any user - in a 10 point agree/disagree range. There's a closing date for the circulation. A quorum of registered responders is needed (TBD)
A forum allows discussion at any stage.
Then the list of questions is asked with the same mode of response and limitations. This process is intended to filter out extreme views. The data analysis on this kind of process (depending what you want to find out) is relatively simple. What you really want to know is, is there a consensus? That's what this software does.
In some beta-testing they did, admittedly with a fairly captive audience of thousands of university students, 3 days of iterations were enough to find a consensus, with many users changing their answers as they saw what other people were answering - but at a late point there was a massive shift all in one direction. Thus people were compromising on their individual views to some extent, in some kind of loyalty to the ideas under discussion. This kind of phenomenon is present on a smaller scale in ET.
3 days is a short time.
There are, so I was told, web applications already existing for this kind of consensus seeking, although all are intended for a corporate organization. I haven't come across any of them. But my Den Haag guru will no doubt know them.
I am sure that face to face remains vital in local situations. But this type of software will have a major effect on national campaigns imho. You can't be me, I'm taken
My frame of reference is workplace-level organizing. There the problem is that employees have adopted the employer's narrative, and the challenge is to convince them to ditch that in favor of a solidarity-based view. And the reality (in my experience, anyway) is that given a choice, people choose to side with the powers that be. So this process takes a whole lot of one-on-one time. This is not to say that tech tools cannot help, but they cannot supercharge the process.
Once consensus is reached on that level, of course, the tools you describe become awesomely effective. But the hard part is getting granny to bring out her pots and pans. The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
I'm writing about Smart Grids at the moment for a client. Smart Grids enable two way communication within an energy system, and can accommodate all the intermittent sources (wind, wave, solar, etc). I'll post it here once the client has published it.
What we need for organizing is a Smart Grid of a different kind. You can't be me, I'm taken
