After a hiatus of several months, the eBulletin is back!  First, please welcome the Deliberative Democracy Consortium's new director Matthew Leighinger.  Matt replaces outgoing DDC Executive Director Tonya Gonzalez who left in May.  Tonya is  pursue her passions in the media and media reform in Washington, DC.  Matt comes to the DDC with deep experience in building deliberative democracy at the community and national level, having worked for a long time with the Study Circles Resource Center.  Matt's first book, "The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule is Giving Way to Shared Governance -- and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same" is available from Vanderbilt University Press (http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/bookdetail.asp?book_id=4048).  Congratulations, and welcome Matt!

The next edition of the eBulletin will be September 15. Please send in your news and updates from the field.

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In Memoriam
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Iris Marion Young, a leading philosopher called by a colleague “one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century,” died in her home Tuesday, Aug. 1 after a year-and-a-half long fight with cancer. She was 57.  Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, was known for her work on theories of justice, democratic theory and feminist theory. A complete remembrance is posted to the University of Chicago website:
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060802.young.shtml


1 | [CONFERENCE] Deliberative Democracy Panels at APSA
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David Booher, director of the Collaborative Democracies Network, has identified several panels at this year's meeting of the American Political Science Association that should be of interest.  For more information about the program please visit: http://www.apsanet.org/mtgs/program/index.cfm

- Deliberation, Opinion, and Participation (Kathleen Knight, Barnard College-Columbia University; Tali Mendelberg, Princeton University)
- An Experimental Study of Democratic Deliberation: The Limits and Potential of Citizen Participation (Shawn W. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine)
- The Nature and Origins of Attitude Change in a Citizen Deliberative Assembly (Patrick Fournier, Université de Montréal; André Blais, Université de Montréal; R. Kenneth Carty, University of British Columbia)
- Extremists or Good Citizens? The Political Psychology of Public Meetings and the Dark Side of Civic Engagement (Christopher F. Karpowitz, Princeton University)
- Political Talk and Political Participation: Does Who You Talk to Matter? (Casey A. Klofstad, University of Miami; Jonathan McDonald Ladd, Georgetown University)

To learn more about the upcoming conference, visit APSA online: http://www.apsanet.org/mtgs/program/index.cfm


2 | New Activity on the d-d.net Blog
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A new corps of outstanding thinkers and doer's have been busy recently on the Deliberative Democracy Consortium's blog (http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/blog/).  Recent topics have included political moderation and the meaning of Senator Joe Lieberman's loss in Connecticut (Peter Levine); populism and the undermining of expertise in Kansas (Peter Levine); and how the brain helps partisans admit no grey (Joe Goldman).

Check out these and other articles, and join the discussions at http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/blog/


3 |  [CONFERENCE] PlaceMatters06
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Planners, technology innovators, theorists - all will come together in Denver October 19-21 to share their insights in the ways we can build vibrant, sustainable communities through evolving forms of community participation.  This year's conference has several sessions that should be of particular interest to deliberative democrats, among them:
- Turning on the Lights: Civic Engagement in Energy Facility Siting 
- Stories that Connect: The Role of Media in Local and Regional Planning
- eParticipation: Technology and the Future of Collaborative Decision-Making

For more information about the conference, please visit: http://www.placematters.org/


4 | [PAPER] "What Happened on Deliberation Day?"
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[From the d-d.net blog via Mike Wieksner] In a recent working paper for the American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Institution Joint Center, scholars David Schkade, Cass R. Sunstein, Reid Hastie conclude that, based on the results of "a kind of Deliberation Day" held in Colorado, deliberation  "produced group polarization, in the distinctive form of ideological amplification."  These results fly in the face of everything a practitioner will tell you.  Read the full report to learn more about how these findings were produced.
http://www.aei-brookings.org/publications/abstract.php?pid=1097

5 | Can Consensus Be Achieved on Hard Choices?
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[From the d-d.net blog via Mike Wieksner] That was the gist of the question behind a recent experiment in deliberation conceived by The Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the Concord Coalition and carried out by Viewpoint Learning.  Three deliberative sessions of a dozen participants each were carried out in Kansas City, San Diego, and Philadelphia.  According to a recent New York Times article, "Participants in the session were given a whirlwind tour of the nation’s fiscal woes and then prodded to find out what solutions they could — and could not — agree on... The question for the researchers was this: do American voters, in their diversity and their focus on self-interest, share any consensus about making hard choices, or even on the need to make hard choices?"

Read the full article online at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/business/yourmoney/30view.html?ex=1156305600&en=9d9d93297b7e4858&ei=5070


6 |  Table of Free Voices
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Nearly 10,000 questions from people around the world, winnowed down to 100, will be posed to some of the world's luminaries on Sept. 9.  Read by the American actor Willem Dafoe in Bebelplatz Square in Berlin, these questions will address topics from national security to personal values, racism to environmental concerns and enable ordinary citizens and leading intellectuals to engage in a discussion of international issues.  According to one of the project's visionaries, Dr. Ceasar L. McDowell of MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice, “We're launching what we think will be an infrastructure for a global community of citizens.”

Read more about the Table of Free Voices and droppingknowledge.org online: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14216322/

7 |  Ontario Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform
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On August 15th, 103 citizens from the Canadian province of Ontario were appointed by the Minister Responsible for Democratic Renewal.  The Assembly, composed of 52 women and 51 men, were selected randomly from the Permanent Register of Electors for Ontario and will come together for their first meeting on September 9, 2006.  The Ontario Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform, based on the reknown British Columbia Citizens Assembly, will study Ontario's electoral process, consult the public on what it values most in its electoral system, and recommend whether Ontario should keeps its present system or adopt a new one.

Read more about the Ontario Citizens Assembly online at: http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca


8 |  Regional Development Strategy Launches Deliberative "Choicebooks"
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Voices & Choices, a three-year economic revitalization initiative of the Fund for Our Economic Future, launched a massive public education campaign in the region to help residents learn about the tough choices facing the region and to vote for the actions they think should be taken.  The Choicebooks, developed by Dialogue Circles, tackle six separate issues identified by more than 17,000 citizens and leaders alike as priorities for the region through community discussions and workshops.  The issue areas are: public school financing, government, a 21st century workforce, race and inequality, the business environment, and sprawl.  Participants prioritize their recommended actions by allocating limited "NEO Bucks" in each category of solutions.

View the Choicebooks online at: http://www.voiceschoices.org/choicebook


9 | New Online Consultation Products by Dialogue by Design
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Dialogue by Design, one of the UK's leading developers of online consultation solutions, has developed two new products in 2006.  "Smart Panel" (TM) offers a way to collect qualitative data from large, representative sample of the public online and offline using nearly identical comment-driven processes.  "Smart Dialogue" (TM), an online consultation process, uses apparently similar online forms to collect information from the public through a series of structured questions.

View these and other products from Dialogue by Design at: http://www.dialoguebydesign.net/


10 | Reflective Democracy, Deliberative Democracy, and the American Narrative
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In his recent work, "American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be A Better Nation Fall Short," the Princeton University sociologist Robert Wuthnow discusses American stories --"narratives about individualism, immigration, success, religion, and ethnicity" -- and how they both advance and hinder our progress as a nation.  Among the point he covers is the notion of deliberative democracy and something he calls "reflective democracy, which holds that, "whether a person is in a group or alone, that person has a responsibility to think critically about the values on which the society is based."

Learn more about this and other insights on the American narrative at Princeton University Press online: http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8140.html

11 | IAP2 and Kettering Foundation Conduct Joint Decision-making Research
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[Snipped from IAP2.org]  In early 2005 the International Association for Public Participation and The Kettering Foundation began work on a joint research project that explores public-government decision making in seven country/regions of the world: Africa, Australasia, Canada, Latin America, Southeast Asia, UK/Western Europe and the United States.   

The intent behind “Painting the Landscape” reflects the larger strategic missions of both IAP2 and the Kettering Foundation. For IAP2, this research project will lay a foundation for future research initiatives on behalf of the organization’s 1,000 members worldwide. The project also supports the Kettering Foundation’s research with professional administrators and public officials who see that utilizing key democratic practices to bridge the gap between the public and the formal institutions of government is essential to their work.

For more information about "Painting the Landscape," visit IAP2 online: http://www.iap2.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=150