Rhizome
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1 website that will make you want more!
Welcome to our new website. It’s a bottom-up redesign that aims to give you the information you need about what we offer, who we are, our approaches and understandings we can’t wait to share with you, and how we can support you. From the start of Rhizome’s journey in 2010, we have evolved and learned. […]
Ways to consensus: the same outcome supported for different reasons
This by far the least interesting of the ways of reaching consensus that I have discovered. It doesn’t involve different groups exploring each other’s needs and values and thereby finding common ground. It is much more a matter of chance, and the agreement generated feels much less stable. But I think it’s worth describing it, […]
Exploring Class – a training of trainers weekend residential workshop, 3rd-6th August 2017
Do you want to strengthen your workshop facilitation skills? Do you want to help social change groups and mission-driven NGOs deal more skillfully with social class and classism in their own organisations, in their members’ lives and in the wider society? If so, Exploring Class may be for you. Our lead trainer is Betsy […]
Ways to consensus: developing shared values
If you read the earlier blog on the British Columbia Citizens Assembly (BCCA), you may recall that that the assembly recommended Single Transferable Vote (STV) rather than Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) as their preferred way of voting to replace First Past the Post. One reason for this is that the members of the assembly gave […]
Ways to consensus: Schiphol airport
One approach is to identify the different perspectives at play on a contentious issue. Here’s an example from the Netherlands, about the debate over whether to expand Schiphol airport. Stakeholders were locked in disagreement, with two contradictory views: The economic advantages made expansion essential The environmental costs meant that no expansion could be allowed An […]
Liquid Democracy and Martin Haase, German Pirate Party
On March 22nd, we published a blog on liquid democracy. It’s not always easy to understand when written in the abstract; hopefully the story of Martin Haase brings the theory of liquid feedback system to life. The one statement that most helped me understand the internet was that ‘filter then publish’ had been replaced by […]
Ways to consensus: being explicit on values
This Canadian example, the British Columbia Citizens Assembly (BCCA) is a very clear example both of the translation of values into a decision, and of the challenges in so doing. The BCCA was set up by the government of British Columbia to review the electoral system, after two perverse election results with a large mismatch […]
Decision-making in Mandorla Co-housing group
I am a member of Mandorla, which is a co-housing group in Herefordshire. The UK Co-housing Network defines co-housing as housing “…created and run by their residents. Each household has a self-contained, personal and private home….residents come together to manage their community, share activities, eat together. Cohousing is a way of combating the isolation many […]
Forum and Legislative Theatre in practice
In the middle of February, my colleague Gill posted a blog about Forum Theatre. I’d like to build on that by showing two other uses to which it has been put. First, in the 1990s, Augusto Boal, who invented Forum Theatre, linked it with politics in a procedure that he called ‘Legislative Theatre’. After being […]