Submitter:

Name:Owen Ambur

Email:Owen.Ambur@verizon.net

Organization:

Name:e-Deliberation

Acronym:eD

Description:
e-Deliberation™ is a collaborative platform for decision making and strategy building. It is used by teams and communities to resolve multi-stakeholder & multifaceted challenges and problems.

Stakeholder(s):

• Teams: Innovation: Top-driven innovation worked for Steve Jobs. For the rest of us, taking fragile ideas from incubation to market is a team effort. Teams use e‑Deliberation to absorb resistance through collaboration.


• People Impacted by Change: Preparing Change: Big changes sap productivity especially when these are imposed. Use e‑Deliberation to engage the people impacted by the change to help define the best way to make it happen. This creates a critical mass of persons who want to make it happen.


• Management Teams: Devising Strategy: Management Team meetings and Board meetings are great for updates and connecting, but not great for team building and creating superb strategy. For these, e‑Deliberation is the ticket.


• Boards


• Self-Managed Teams: Many organizations are moving away from the hierarchical paradigm, replacing it with self-organizing teams where policy decision making is team-based. e‑Deliberation assists by providing such teams with a strong process of deliberation and decision making, and the use of consent, instead of an elusive consensus.


• Governments: Government Effectiveness -- Public Participation & Engagement: e‑Deliberation is the only online solution that covers the entire public participation spectrum defined by the IAP2. Getting Real Collaborative Engagement: Most governments have embraced an e-Government strategy, and are using the Internet to inform and get feedback on planned policies. e‑Deliberation enables the next level of engagement: Collaboration to define and plan the roll-out of these policies. Defining Policy: Unwanted policy effects and unintended consequences can be minimized by encouraging those who will be impacted to be part of the thinking process. e‑Deliberation makes it easy for people to get involved constructively without having to take to the streets or even travel. Defining Policy Roll-out: Once a policy has been approved, the next challenge is to deploy it as smoothly as possible, mitigating harm and surprises. By engaging the stakeholders in an e‑Deliberation about the policy roll-out, hiccups can be preempted in the planning stage and the stakeholders become the evangelists for the change.


• Communities: Community Development -- Synergy: Communities are more than their local governments. When community synergy is enabled and orchestrated, often by the local government or by community leaders, the community can reinvent itself to face difficult times. e‑Deliberation is a tool for community reinvention and quality of life improvement.


• People Who Care: Community Activism: Change always starts with one person deciding to become part of the solution. Using e‑Deliberation s/he can assemble a critical mass of persons and perspectives to find strong solutions and strategies to issues they care about. And then, move to action. The Qualified Citizen: Today people are qualified enough to be able to weigh in on issues and decisions what will impact them. e‑Deliberation is a respectful, egalitarian and democratic process that allows people to collaborate and define their collective future.


• Associations: The Value of Association -- Value for the money: Association membership dues are always under pressure to be stretched further. People use e‑Deliberation to meet virtually and get the connection and the meeting of the minds without the need for travel. Effective Leadership: Association members look to the leadership to provide processes that maximize the value of association. e‑Deliberation complements annual conventions by allowing members to develop strong strategies to promote the goals of the association in between. Volunteer Governance: Association elections concentrate accountability in the hands of the few and often asks them to do way too much - an alternative but complementary model is possible with e‑Deliberation, where the membership can get involved with some of the heavy lifting.