Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Delphi Method [was Consensus, Majority vote, blocks

[R Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

Sorry, not with you on this one.

Anonymous doesn't work for me, and I steadfastly refuse to accept anonymous 
input.  I have, for instance, been approached by a co-member who says, "Phil, 
you need to be more careful, there are some people who think you are a jerk."  
I say, "What people?"  The reply is something like "Well, I'm not going to name 
them ..."  And so I say, "Over and out.  Next topic?"  (This co-member, of 
course, may be trying to tell me that s/he thinks I'm a jerk, but we can't do 
business if s/he cannot stand up for his/her own views.)
Written summaries be very tricky, and often prejudiced.  If, for instance, you 
ask five smart people to read and condense a long and complex story about, say, 
political corruption, you will get five very different summaries.  Our 
participatory groups cannot and will not (or should not) converge to the 
idiosyncratic interpretation of a single summarizer.

In other words, the group needs to learn how to do business with itself, and 
this, virtually by definition, cannot include either much anonymity, or much 
third-party synopsis — both of which undermine the idea of "group" itself.

R Philip Dowds AIA
Cornerstone Cohousing
175 Harvey Street, Unit 5
Cambridge, MA 02140
617.354.6094


On Sep 29, 2011, at 9:18 AM, Sharon Villines wrote:

> Rounds are also designed to achieve this result but I think the anonymous 
> written summaries are best.