Loomio
Mon 27 Apr 2020 10:21AM

Do you know of any videos of inspirational examples of democracy in action?

PT Paul Thistlethwaite Public Seen by 151

As part of the Community Transformer Programme under the Trust the People banner we are aware of how crucial harvesting stories are. We are recording 15 min interviews with democracy notables from around the world to subsequently disseminate to those in the programme for inspiration.

It seemed obvious to also make use of existing examples of great and inspiring projects/people/methods that are in the form of great videos.

If you know of any good ones please share them below and we will collate them. Many thanks

RK

Robert Kolodny Tue 28 Apr 2020 2:37PM

Here are links to two videos about large-group deliberative processes (termed "21st Century Town Meetings") conducted by America Speaks in the United States during the first two decades of this century. The first is 8 mins long and shows scenes from a meeting considering health care policy n the state of Maine, along with some brief mention of other notable processes conducted by America Speaks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJBgTFm8ZPQ

The second video (11 mins) covers a 3,500 person, simultaneous multi-city deliberation on US Federal budget and deficit policy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfOqh_yKPR0

TA

Tom Atlee Thu 30 Apr 2020 2:45PM

Check out Rosa's resource page on Civic/Citizen Councils in Austria https://diapraxis.com/home/translations-of-germanlanguage-resources-on-df-and-cccs and the detailed public affairs documentary of the amazing citizen conversation sponsored by Maclean's magazine in Canada in 1991 https://www.co-intelligence.org/Macleans-CTV-PeoplesAccord.html (the unprecedented coordinated magazine and TV coverage of this event is why I've chronicled it so thoroughly). There's a great video about the Rogue Valley Wisdom Council https://www.wisedemocracy.org/rogue-valley-or.html (the actual council reportage starts around 3:30). NCDD (the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation) has a searchable resource database where you can specify videos - which turned up this in one search I did http://ncdd.org/rc/item/7739/ - with many more possible. I also picked a process (Open Space Technology, just for starters) and Googled it (actually with a search on DuckDuckGo) with a request for videos - and there were a whole lot of them. That could be explored for a LOT of process videos.

AC

Alex Cooper Fri 1 May 2020 3:10PM

These are not examples of self-organising groups engaged in deliberative democracy and making decisions, but may have some relevance to what you're looking for ... of course you may already be aware of these:

Pia Mancini's TED talk - https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era?language=en

Citizen's Assemblies - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjpuDk9_BWI

I can't speak for how the vision has been realised in practice - but the aims of OGP are worth checking out: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ursu7GP85qs

The idea of American style "Town Halls" needs to be supported - under the slogan "No representation without consultation"?