"The Regents did not routinely receive, nor did they demand, the information necessary to support vigorous deliberation and well-reasoned decision making," the document said.
They have adopted a set of seven principles: educate participants, frame issues neutrally, achieve diversity, get buy-in from policy makers, support quality deliberation, demonstrate public consensus, and sustain involvement.
Criteria were defined based on an extensive analysis of the literature and decision processes around the world, as well as discussion with stakeholders; tools were developed to stimulate reflection on priorities, to support systematic deliberation and to facilitate pragmatic knowledge transfer [ 21, 22].
Guided by the ideals of deliberative democracy, these forums involved the provision of detailed information to support participants' deliberation on the question of how best to structure the public funding of ART, and were designed to elicit colloquial and experiential knowledge to enhance the structured evidence base arising from the review and supplementary analyses.
Web 2.0 technologies, such as forums and wikis, are enabling an explosion of global knowledge sharing through distributed large-scale conversations, but they seem to be less successful at supporting collaborative deliberation around complex and controversial questions.
Abelson et al. [67] describe this arduous interconnection: "Even when fully supported, public deliberation operates within a complex array of organisational settings and political structures that shape the degree and manner in which it is likely to exert tangible influences on policy making and other aspects of collective problem-solving".
CE creates the human infrastructure necessary to support the deliberations and discussions that are necessary to discover, and to be responsive to, this range of interests.
While Powell supports long deliberations before taking any action overseas, the retired general will have to move quickly during international crises and adapt to the fast pace that comes with being secretary of state.
The single graves inside the circles are probably of people sacrificed and buried there - human offerings to the gods, to assure their support for the deliberations.
