A new draft of What Do We Think? Divining the Public Wisdom to Guide Sustainability Decisions is now available. Download PDF
Archive for the ‘Deliberative Polling’ Category
What Do We Think? available
Posted in Decision Making, Deliberation, Wisdom of Crowds, Opinion, Collective Wisdom, Deliberative Polling, Sustainability on November 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
What do we think? Part 3: A virtual forum, and why it might work
Posted in Collective Wisdom, Deliberation, Deliberative Polling, Democracy, Opinion, Polling, Sustainability, Wisdom of Crowds on October 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
List the features you’d want to see in a mechanism for identifying public wisdom. These requirements mean the mechanism would have to be internet based – i.e. a kind of national virtual forum. Such a forum would face a range of major challenges, but there’s reason to think these could be handled.
What do we think? Part 2: Why we should know but don’t
Posted in Collective Wisdom, Deliberation, Deliberative Polling, Democracy, Opinion, Polling, Sustainability, Wisdom of Crowds on October 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
We need the public wisdom because politically it would help governments make decisions; and on some issues would be the best guide to what the right decision would be. However we almost never know what the public wisdom is. Deliberative polling is our best current mechanism for finding out, but is too cumbersome and expensive to fully meet the need.
What do we think? Part 1: Public Attitude versus Public Wisdom
Posted in Collective Wisdom, Deliberation, Deliberative Polling, Democracy, Opinion, Polling, Sustainability, Wisdom of Crowds on October 14, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Governments must make lots of decisions for Australia to make a smooth and timely transition to sustainability. Those decisions are constrained by public opinion; therefore we need to know what the public thinks. Standard opinion polls identify the public attitude, which falls far short of the public wisdom.
Four Grades of Collective Wisdom
Posted in Deliberation, Wisdom of Crowds, Collective Wisdom, Deliberative Polling on August 16, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Much of what Austhink does these days is concerned with “collective wisdom” – the knowledge that a group as a whole has. As Surowiecki famously pointed out, when the conditions are right, the wisdom of the group can be superior to that of the individuals making it up. However finding out what that collective [...]
