Starting tensions: name the one your question sits on
A neighborhood question almost always sits on a real tension. Naming it early keeps the process honest instead of adversarial: belonging and freedom, care and self-reliance, voice and speed, safety and welcome, preservation and change, privacy and knowing each other.
Before designing prompts or picking a tool, name the tension underneath the question, and design so both poles stay respectable. The goal is a room that can disagree well, not a poll that declares a winner.
- Belonging and freedom: everyone's welcome, nobody's obligated. How do we hold both?
- Care and self-reliance: leaning on each other without anyone feeling managed.
- Voice and speed: hearing everyone, and still deciding in time to matter.
- Safety and welcome: feeling secure without turning the block inward.
- Preservation and change: what we keep, what we let grow.
- Privacy and knowing each other: being known without being watched.
Rough cues: newcomers, gentrification, cliques point at belonging and freedom; elders, check-ins, meals at care and self-reliance; meetings, committees, consensus at voice and speed; traffic, cameras, patrols at safety and welcome; housing, zoning, trees at preservation and change; cameras, data, Nextdoor at privacy and knowing each other. A suggestion the group can override, never a classification.
The first three come from RTP's Deliberation Studio work; the rest extend the same move.
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Build prompt
A "what we heard" report page
Build prompt: after the listening, a report page in the Talk to the City pattern: themes with real quotes, minority views kept visible, a…
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Build prompt
A listening wall for one neighborhood question
Build prompt: a Pol.is-style listening wall for one question, two weeks open, QR flyer on every corner, with a printable consensus summary…
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Tool
CivicOS (BLOOM Project)
Infrastructure for public problem-solving: an Open Poll maps the opinion landscape, small-group community conversations work through…
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Framework
Community Lore
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Tool
Decidim
The free participation platform cities and cooperatives run themselves: proposals, assemblies, participatory budgeting, consultations.…
Contributed by Relational Tech Project, Deliberation Studio · relationaltechproject.org
See something to fix or add? Suggest an edit on GitHub — the commons lives in git too, and its history is the changelog.
deliberationframeworktensionsfacilitation