Cutting Through The Many Perspectives On Participative Processes

Informal participative processes not only go by many different names, the perspectives on them are also highly divergent in scope. That's a real problem, because without a common framework for all of these processes, the phenomenon can not adequatly be perceived, analyzed, evaluated, improved, and lobbied for.

Here's a quick list (to be updated in the future) of just some of the perspectives on informal participative processes:

• Citizen participation, or public participation, as with the International Association for Public Participation
• citizen engagement or citizen involvement, as with the CanadianPolicy Research Network
  
• civic practice, as in the Civic Renewal Movement
• public involvement, for example Involve
• Communication and Civic Engagement, for example Center for Communication and Civic Engagement
  
• Dialogue and Deliberative Processes, for example the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation
• Multistakeholder Processes, for example Wageningen University. Also, check Jouwert van Geene about MSP's here on DiaYou
  
• participatory group processes, as with the Center for Group Learning
• participatory planning, for example, in urban contexts, or participatory decision-making, or participatory consensus-building
• co-intelligent community processes, collective wisdom, or wisdom of the crowds
• facilitated group meetings
• creating inclusive and just social systems
• Change Management or Change Facilitation, for example the Change Management Blog. Also, see Holger Nauheimer on Change Mangement and Facilitation here on DiaYou
  
• Community Organizing, where people initiate their own participation
  
• global action networks
• collaboration or cooperation processes
• politics of change
  
• deliberative democracy
• innovations in democracy
• governance
• project management, with the project being a a) cooperative team effort to b) reach a common goal within c) a specified and limited temporal setting, as described here

Over at Learning Exchange at the NCDD, they describe seven streams of practice of dialogue and deliberation.

At Procedere, we propose to cut through that mesh of perspectives and simply say:

• all these participatory processes are informal political processes, as distinguished from formal political processes, which are regulated by law
• what is not decisivly important about these informal participatory processes is that they are participative - because it's the nature of any process that it is integrative of its elements, and in all those cases, the elements happen to be citizens, experts, or whatever type of stakeholder engaged
  
• but what is important is that they are informal processes
• in other words, it is decisive to understand the process character, if you want to design such informal political processes
• and that someone is the facilitator, leading the process. Her know-how and competence is decisive.

Participation, to be sure, is relevant, not the least for its normative implications. But it's not participation itself which makes participatory processes effective as collective change processes. It's process that matter: what happens when, in what order. It's the how-question that matters: how to proceed?, that needs to be answered.

Organized Dialogue is a model based on these insights. This blog serves the process facilitators by exploring OD as a tool for change.

The Procedural Approach: Practitioners and Theorists of Procedere.org

Cooperative procedures, their design and their relevance are at the heart of the work of the German Procedere - Verbund für prozedurale Praxis in Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft @ http://www.procedere.org (Procedere - Association For Procedural Practice In Politics, Economy, And Society).

Founded in 2005 by both practitioners and theorists, this network around an email list of over 60 participants aims to advcance the theory and practice of participatory procedures, and to unify the knowledge, and discourse of the many different subscenes of participatory, deliberative, cooperative, learning, change management, conflict resolution, problem resolution and other procedures. With three to four official meetings per year, Procedere organizes a dialogue between theory and practice.

The Central Idea Of Procedure
Central to Procedere is the idea of "procedure", which is the key answer to what Procedere identifies as the main question of our time: the question HOW we do things, organize interactions, such as communication, trade, politics, in short: societal practice.

What is a procedure, then? A "procedure" is a "process guided by intentions", as opposed to a process that is just a sequence of unintended events. Basically, all human action (as opposed to behaviour) takes the form of procedures, though it's not always "process-smart", that is, conscious of it's own character as a process; and though all procedures have unintended side-effects.

Procedere's founder Raban Daniel Fuhrmann proposes to subsume all possible manners of proceedings, such as programs, algorithms, strategies, methods, techniques, modes and models, under the family name of "procedure", with the further proposition that they are aimed to resolve given problems. Fuhrmann views all of human history through the prism of procedures, arguing that the history of human inventions is really a history of man-made procedures, and that improvements in procedure, in "HOW we do things", has made all the difference in the progression from tools of stone to agrarian improvement, printing, trading, adminstration, and upt to the industrial, and the digital revolution.

As one of the three initiating founders of Procedere, I share and advance all these views.

Participatory Procedures
The rise of participatory procedures in all different forms is seen as an indication that "procedure has become a problem" itself, and is a deeply political issue. Since participatory procedures - from Large Group Interventions to facilitation methods and models to Multistakeholder Processes - are innovative expressions of ways how people should best interact, they are believed to be treasure chests, and experimental examples, of procedural know-how in action.

In other words, what is so exciting to Procedere people is not that participatory procedures are participatory, (or deliberative, cooperative etc. for that measure), but that they are procedures, intentional processes, certain sequences of interaction. They are figures or shapes of time, "Zeitgestalten", intentional patterns over time.

Again, I share and advance all these views.

The Importance Of Time
Consequentially, Time is a central phenomenon to proceduralists. Procedere distinguishes between chronos, and kairos. Chronos is the driving beat of the rhythm of the irreversible progress of time, time in a quantitative sense. Kairos denotes the quality of a given time: a special, and ripe moment, such as a tipping point, a turning point, a low point, a point of no return, or a window of opportunity. Chronos and kairos define the temporal chain of situations, as guided by any procedure: first, do A and B, secondly, do x and y, and thirdly, begin parallel work on this and that...

I sure share and advance those views!

First Issues of Procedere: Typology, Competence
One of the first aims was to establish a typology of cooperative procedures.
The definition of a cooperative procedure is as follows: "A cooperative procedure guides a regulated process of interaction, achieving agreed upon goals through a composition of methods" (from the taxonomy-workshop in Heidelberg, March 2006). Fuhrmann distinguishes between methods (short term, measured in minutes), procedures (Verfahren) in a narrow sense of (median term - measured in hours or days), projects (long term, measured in weeks or months) an organizations (no deadline).

These distinctions my vocabulary does not share, because I'm not burning up such precious vocabulary to denote mere chronological characteristics.

In March 2009, Procedere will hold its second workshop at the Evangelic Academy in Loccum, this time on procedural competence. We will ask what skills designers of procedures need to have, what kind of abilities, but also what kind of authority and responsibility for the whole of the process. The aim is to identify what makes you a master of procedural design. I'll discuss competence in more detail later.