The "fist to five" technique for voting or consensus decision-making (see "Dedocracia" can be used for rapid, on the fly, evaluation. It gives people an easy way to practice an important technique for democratic decision-making and the experience of expressing their judgment in a group context. For the facilitator(s) and the group, it provides important information about the usefulness of the techniques being used.
This game is for practising consensus and ensuring the participation of every player.
Joker gives the same question or proposition to all players.
Every player writes down their answer.
Players then share their answers in pairs. If they have consensus, they then find another pair and try to reach consensus again.
If the pair does not agree, they try to convince each other, or to modify the answer until they can both agree.
The goal is to reach consensus among all the players.
Loomio was one of the platforms featured at the Platform Cooperativism conference in NYC in Nov. 2015. It is designed to help groups make collective decisions. It seems to work for both consensus and voting approaches, but I have not really tested it yet. I will use it in my courses and maybe in other projects.
By Matt Noyes; the cuento vivo technique on which this is based comes from Alforja, Tomo I.
Summary:
Just like the parliamentary procedure that most unions use, in one form or another, an alternative democratic procedure for making decisions needs to be learned and practiced before it becomes efficient. Using a "Cuento Vivo" (live story) technique, this activity has people act out a scene from a union meeting using consensus instead of voting. The scripted parts help people practice the technique and shows how the procedure is designed to work.
Materials:
