We have all experienced the benefits of dialogue when we openly and thoughtfully confront issues. We have also experienced the frustration of interminable discussion that does not lead to progress. Co-Laboratories of Democracy enable large, diverse groups to dialogue and generate positive results. Many group processes engender enthusiasm and good feeling as people share their concerns and hopes with each other. Co-Laboratories go beyond this initial euphoria to: Discover root causes; Adopt consensual action plans; Develop teams dedicated to implementing those plans; and Generate lasting bonds of respect, trust, and cooperation.Co-Laboratories achieve these results by respecting the autonomy of all participants, and utilizing an array of consensus tools including discipline, technology and graphics that allow the stakeholders to control the discussion. These are explained in depth in a book authored by Alexander N. Christakis with Kenneth C. Bausch: Co-Laboratories of Democracy: How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom to Create the Future (Information Age, 2006).Co-Laboratories are a refinement of Interactive Management, a decision and design methodology developed over the past 30 years to deal with very complex situations involving diverse stakeholders. It has been successfully employed all over the world in situations of uncertainty and conflict. On Cyprus, for example, it has been used to bridge the divide between the Turkish and Greek factions on the island. It is currently being employed on that island to help Palestinian authorities organize their government.Co-Laboratories in one day can draw together a diverse group of people on an issue, elicit authentic feelings and respectful listening, generate agreed upon language, and identify leverage points for effective action. Participants will be able to generate a consensual action plan. Co-Laboratories generate real respect, understanding, and cooperation among participants and do it rapidly.

This book explores the concept of multi-species relationships and suggests critical systemic pathways to protect shared habitats. This book discusses how the eradication of species as a result of rapid urbanisation places humanity at risk. This book demonstrates how narrow anthropocentrism has focused on the rights of human beings at the expense of other species and the environment. This book explores a priori norms and a posteriori measures and indicators to include and protect multiple species. This book aims to strengthen institutional capacity and powers to address and extend the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda by drawing on local wisdom but also the need to implement laws to prevent ecocide. This book highlights that our fragile interdependence requires a recognition of our hybridity and interconnectedness within the web of life and suggests ways to reframe policy within and beyond the nation state to support living systems of which we are a strand.

This book addresses the social and environmental justice challenge to live sustainably and well. It considers the consequences of our social, economic and environmental policy and governance decisions for this generation and the next. The book tests out ways to improve representation, accountability and re-generation. It addresses the need to take into account the ethical implications of policy and governance decisions in the short, medium and long term based on testing out the implications for self, other and the environment. This book recognizes the negative impact that humans have had on the Earth’s ecosystem and recommends a less anthropocentric way of looking at policies and governance. The chapters discuss the geologic impact that people have had on the globe, both positive and negative, and brings awareness to the anthropocentric interventions that have influenced life on Earth during the Holocene era. Based on these observations, the authors discuss original ideas and critical reviews on ways to govern those who interpret the world in terms of human values and experience, and to conduct an egalitarian lifestyle. These ideas address the growing rise in the size of the ecological footprints of some at the expense of the majority, the growth in unsustainable food choices and of displaced people, and the need for a new sense of relationship with nature and other animals, among other issues. The chapters included in Balancing Individualism and Collectivism: Social and Environmental Justice encourage readers to challenge the sustainability agenda of the anthropocentric life. Proposed solutions to these unsustainable actions include structuralized interventions and volunteerism through encouragement and education, with a focus on protecting current and future generations of life through new governmental etiquette and human cognizance.

Why would the first family of oil so ardently support environmental climate research and activism? Join author and researcher Jacob Nordangård as he uncovers the whole sordid truth. The Rockefeller family is one of the richest in the world. Yet, why would the family that made the world dependent on oil fund environmental and climate research since the 1950s, help shape climate policy measures since the 1980s, and supported climate activism since the 1990s? Rockefeller: Controlling the Game is the thrilling and paradoxical story of one of the world's most influential global players. Through its top position in American business, close contacts with the White House, and with their immense financial power as one of the world's leading private research funders, the Rockefellers have been able to anchor the climate issue both scientifically and politically. Yet what is the reasoning behind doing so? Author and researcher Jacob Nordangård follows the family from the founding of Standard Oil and the Rockefeller Foundation, up through the aftermath of the Paris Agreement, with the declaration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in January 2016, to the present day. Nordangård's in-depth research includes the large quantities of new material recently made available on the Internet, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation's own annual reports. Nordangård's main focus is the Rockefeller family's involvement in climate research and politics, but the actions and motives of some of their allies are also explored, as well as the family's influence on the development of modern medicine, family planning, agriculture, art, architecture, behavioral science, information technology, and politics. The Rockefeller family's utopian dream of a perfect world will have serious consequences for the survival of the human species and life as we know it. The Rockefeller Foundation's stated mission to "promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world" has a dark flipside, as, Nordangård will prove, the Rockefeller family's long-standing battle against climate change contains elements of sophisticated propaganda techniques, futurism, and New Age philosophy, aiming at a complete transformation of the whole earth system, including economy, ecology, culture, and even humanity itself.

The four-volume set LNCS 6765-6768 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, UAHCI 2011, held as Part of HCI International 2011, in Orlando, FL, USA, in July 2011, jointly with 10 other conferences addressing the latest research and development efforts and highlighting the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The 57 revised papers included in the first volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: design for all methods and tools; Web accessibility: approaches, methods and tools; multimodality, adaptation and personlization; and eInclusion policy, good practice, legislation and security issues.

The Talking Point is all about how people learn within groups. People can be much smarter than crowds if you measure “smart” as decision-making speed. Crowds can be much wiser than individuals if you measure wisdom by depth of understanding. It is possible to understand a great deal of information yet (or maybe because of this) you can also be slow to make decisions. If rushed, crowds will make poor decisions in spite of their wisdom. So... to get good group decisions on a time scale that will keep pace with policy development needs and social necessities, groups have to be supported so that their decision-making process can be accelerated. Much has been said and written about this problem over the years. It is dangerous to have the power of groups without the wisdom of groups, and it is tragic to have the wisdom of groups without the power of groups. The Talking Point presents a meeting point for the wisdom and power of groups through the use of Structured Dialogic Design. With hopeful intentions, as a culture we have poisoned the well just when we need it most. We have touted design charettes and stakeholder processes as engagement vehicles and then ignored, marginalized or corrupted the very input that we swore to hold as sacred. This has created a myth that large scale collaboration is not possible, and the myth has led to considerable disillusionment among would-be participants and could-be sponsors. Structured Dialogic Design seeks to bust the myth about our limited capabilities to sustain boundary spanning collaboration. To bust this myth, Structured Dialogic Design needs to usher in a new wave of collaborative planning. Scholars have identified the Structured Dialogic Design methodology as the cutting edge of “third phase” science - where the reality of a situation embraces interactions between objective findings and subjective intentions. The Talking Point provides a window for observing how Structured Dialogic Design has been put into practice and paints a panorama of the issues that confront complex social system design. This book is itself a bridge between scholarship and practice, written to be accessible yet anchored to major themes in cognitive psychology, information systems, social systems, and models of group learning. The book is an invitation for transformational leaders and those who support transformational leaders to pick up a new tool in the essential quest to put our nation and our world back on track toward sustainable futures. The Talking Point is a fresh source of water in a world that is thirsty for new ways of solving complex problems.

Praise for The Handbook of Conflict Resolution "This handbook is a classic. It helps connect the research of academia to the practical realities of peacemaking and peacebuilding like no other. It is both comprehensive and deeply informed on topics vital to the field like power, gender, cooperation, emotion, and trust. It now sits prominently on my bookshelf." —Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate "The Handbook of Conflict Resolution offers an astonishing array of insightful articles on theory and practice by leading scholars and practitioners. Students, professors, and professionals alike can learn a great deal from studying this Handbook." —William Ury, Director, Global Negotiation Project, Harvard University; coauthor, Getting to Yes and author, The Third Side "Morton Deutsch, Peter Coleman, and Eric Marcus put together a handbook that will be helpful to many. I hope the book will reach well beyond North America to contribute to the growing worldwide interest in the constructive resolution of conflict. This book offers instructive ways to make this commitment a reality." —George J. Mitchell, Former majority leader of the United States Senate; former chairman of the Peace Negotiations in Northern Ireland and the International Fact-Finding Committee on Violence in the Middle East; chairman of the board, Walt Disney Company; senior fellow at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University "Let's be honest. This book is just too big to carry around in your hand. But that's because it is loaded with the most critical essays linking the theory and practice of conflict resolution. The Handbook of Conflict Resolution is heavy on content and should be a well-referenced resource on the desk of every mediator—as it is on mine." —Johnston Barkat, Assistant Secretary-General, Ombudsman and Mediation Services, United Nations

A new approach to addressing the contemporary world’s most difficult challenges, such as climate change and poverty. Conflicts over “the problem” and “the solution” plague the modern world and land problem solvers in what has been called “wicked problem territory”—a social space with high levels of conflict over problems and solutions. In Design Strategy, Nancy C. Roberts proposes design as a strategy of problem solving to close the gap between an existing state and a desired state. Utilizing this approach, designers and change agents are better able to minimize self-defeating conflicts over problems and solutions, break the logjam of opposition, and avoid the traps that lock problem solvers into a never-ending cycle of conflict. Design as a field continues to grow and evolve, but Design Strategy focuses on three levels of design where “wicked problems” tend to lurk—strategic design (of private and public organizations), systemic design (of networked and overlapping economic, technical, political, and social subsystems), and regenerative design (of life-giving realignment between humanity and nature). Within this framework, Roberts presents refreshingly interdisciplinary case studies that integrate theory and practice across diverse fields to guide professionals in any domain—from business and nonprofit organizations to educational and healthcare systems—and finally offers hope that humanity can tackle the existential challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

This book develops a debate around responsible social inquiry into new racism. A variety of ways of researching new forms of racism (for example, aversive, modern, cultural, purportedly color-blind, and new racism) are addressed. Experiments that have been undertaken to inquire into group identity and people’s implicit bias in relation to those perceived as "other" are critically explored and their potential consequences reconsidered. The book also critically explores survey research, which, it is argued, can serve to reinforce the notion of the existence of ethnoracial groups with defined boundaries that inhere in social life. The book considers interviewing (including focus group interviewing) and case study research (including participant observation/ethnography) in terms of possibilities for moving beyond new forms of racism. Action research (defined by the understanding of an inextricable link between knowing and acting) is examined in-depth in terms of the hopes to "make a difference" at the moment of inquiry. Types of retroductive logic that are used to examine underlying structures that arguably unduly constrain people’s life chances and render human relationships inhumane are also explored. The book draws together the different arguments; and it proposes ways in which the design of research into new racism can better approached as well as ways in which dialogue around processes of inquiry and the products thereof can be better fostered. Suggestions for nurturing humane social relationships that provide for transcultural meaning-making are threaded through the text.

We live in the worlds that we help to create every day. Every activity either supports an existing system or effects some change, however small. But is it possible to consciously create the worlds in which we want to live? This volume brings together systems theorists and practitioners who have worked on that question for decades. It explores connections between design and systems ideas to explain why some efforts have been more successful than others, and what is needed if we are to move forward. It offers reflections on early and large-scale attempts at impacting societal systems, as well as proposals for taking those ideas into the future. Examples date back to the Club of Rome in the 1960s and look forward to the creation of ecologically sustainable systems in the future. They address the need for collaboration and inclusion in settings from communities to corporations. And while theories are presented as support for the examples, they are explained in practical ways meant to be accessible both to students and to general readers.