This election is supposed to represent a hopeful advance for humanity, a collaborative effort toward democracy.
"I've never seen a city embrace this at the highest levels," said Ted L. Howard, the executive director of the Democracy Collaborative, an organization that focuses on community economic development efforts in cities nationwide.
According to Democracy Collaborative, the world's largest 300 cooperatives together constitute the ninth largest national economy.
As Steve Dubb of The Democracy Collaborative noted, the World Economic Forum's recent report on three investments with the most potential for high-impact did not include racial inequality.
The Democracy Collaborative has developed a useful anchor dashboard, which includes twenty indicators that help to clarify whether a particular anchor institution is having a positive impact on its surrounding community.
In many ways, socialism of this sort is implied by the work of groups like National People's Action, Democracy Collaborative, but also folks like Criterion Ventures New Economyy, the expanding philanthropic commitments of social justice philanthropy, and other developments.
With help from the Democracy Collaborative, the Cleveland project leaders took the unorthodox step of seeding the Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of worker-owned cooperatives that now grow produce and provide industrial laundry services.
In New Economic Visions, a special five-part AlterNet series edited by economics editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.
She taps into a hunger for a more collaborative, participatory type of democracy in which parties are not the focus of most activity and civil society plays a much more influential role.
See literature on deliberative democracy and collaborative planning for explanation of the deliberative processes and the discursive mechanism, for example Dryzek (2000).
