Deliberations

[UPDATE 13 Apr 2013] I’m a third of the way to my fund-raising target! And riding farther!

If you don’t know already, I am living with advanced prostate cancer. It was diagnosed in 2010, when I had a radical prostatectomy and adjuvant radiotherapy. Unfortunately, the disease was discovered too late and had already spread elsewhere in my body. However, the disease is not yet visible in scans, only as a PSA level in a blood test. I am currently undergoing hormone therapy: without testosterone, the disease turns off for a while. I have time to tackle a few ‘bucket list’ adventures!

One day I will depend on the services of the publicly-funded Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. I believe strongly in the public health system, which has served me well so far in my treatment. It is shocking that the Government has recently reduced their annual budget allocation for Peter Mac.

Therefore, I have decided to attempt the 200 km Ride to Conquer Cancer in October to raise money for the Centre and raise awareness of the facility. The ride will occur over two days.

Please help me raise at least $5,700 for the Centre through my ride. That’s $100 for each year of my age, but feel free to contribute what you can. I might not know enough people personally, so please extend my call to your friends and colleagues.

I have been a cyclist all my life. In the early 1980s I cycled across Netherlands, Belgium and France. When I immigrated from Canada in 1987, I arrived in Brisbane with a bike that I rode down the Pacific Highway to Newcastle (if I could survive that, I can survive anything). Later I did bike tours from Sydney down to Eden, and around the west coast of Tasmania. In 1990 I was one of the first (foreigners) to travel independently for two months with my bike in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.

Riding 200 kms will be a challenge for me. While I remain active, the lack of testosterone has changed my physiology so that I cannot build muscle mass and aerobic capacity. I live with perpetual fatigue and mild arthritis. But I have a very good road bike which will make the journey easier. I get out walking and riding every day, and I am an active geocacher. Unlike many men who struggle with depression in a similar situation, I have been able to maintain a level attitude that has helped carry me forward. The encouragement and support of friends has been crucial.

I look forward to sharing the challenge of the ride with many others who are living with cancer. It will be a fantastic experience, and I hope you will follow my progress.

So I hope you are in a position to support my Ride to Conquer Cancer now with a donation. Please follow me on Facebook as I prepare for the ride.

Url to my campaign page: http://ml13.conquercancer.org.au/goto/support-ron-lubensky

Up-to-date training log: http://goo.gl/3owIe

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 12:10 PM | Link

You open your mail to find an invitation from a facilitation consultancy, but with the Mayor’s picture on it. A residents’ forum is being convened on behalf of your local government council to discuss urban planning priorities for the next ten years. You are one of a hundred residents who have been randomly selected to participate, ensuring a diverse cross-section of community perspectives, needs and values.

With increasing frequency, democratic scenarios like this are occurring in localities across the globe to tackle a broad range of public policy concerns.

The problem is that most people believe such forums are either glorified focus groups or tokenistic consultations that never really intend to take residents and citizens seriously. It doesn’t help when some forums are run that way.

Suppose you are not infected by this cynicism. You confirm your attendance.

The weekend arrives. You and your fellow residents are welcomed by the convener. Everyone expresses good fortune to be invited. During the early session participants are encouraged to describe their situations and what they like most about where they live. Everyone is friendly.

The agenda then opens to a series of table exercises to explore the diversity of perspectives, needs and values in the room. You listen carefully, and genuinely want to understand the others just as well as you want them to understand you. You raise questions about what facts and terms mean to people. You shift tables a few times and meet residents who express both similarities and differences in ways that you did not expect. Everyone speaks frankly, yet there is no argument.

Such forums are deliberative in that they draw participants into calm and sensible decision-making about matters that are important not just to them, but across their community. Participants in public deliberation get to the core of the issues without the usual finger-pointing, rhetoric and media-fueled fear-mongering.

Various options are presented and dialogue about their merits ensues with government staff, local politicians, stakeholders, experts and activists. You bring the earlier discussions to your views and understanding about the options. As you try to settle on your final priorities, many realise that it is not easy to decide what is ‘best’.

While individual and special interests build a mosaic of competing aspirations that should be respected, the overall well-being of the community inevitably rises to become the shared goal of the forum. This mutual understanding grows session by session, expressed in terms of fairness, inclusivity, freedom and other democratic ideals applied to the concrete options that are being weighed up.

Participants in public deliberation neither change their fundamental political or philosophical convictions, nor are they expected to. However, you might alter your orientation to a situation after hearing new stories from residents who have a very different relation to its issues.

The emergence of a shared concept of a particular community differentiates public deliberation from the common antagonistic approaches which stifle mutual regard.

Participants always report that they learn a great deal. You learn at least as much from one another as from the authorities who are there to influence and inform you.

You are empowered through the group process, and have genuine agency as an active contributor. It is your mutual activity that is crucial. Your engagement should be presented as a project rather than as a group, forum or panel. A project is an activity with a single mission, carried out by people with commitment to its success. That is what actually occurs in public deliberation.

A project of public deliberation is not only acted out by its dedicated contributors, but also the authorities who assist and influence them directly. The facilitators (including process designers) have their special role to play in mediating the project fairly.

The notion of a project captures the complexity of the work. Contributors are not expected to be trained up as authorities, but rather to understand the options sufficiently to make judgements about them in the various contexts of community life. This is what contributors can and should bring to policy generation.

Authorities should both support and be supported by projects of public deliberation.

Reframing deliberative forums as projects may make them more compelling for take-up both by authorities and by people invited to contribute. This may shift us closer to a deliberative democracy.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 02:00 PM | Link | Comments

When I set out on the Ride to Conquer Cancer adventure, I had counted on some corporate support from EMC Bikes who made my bike, and from the shop that sold it to me. Unfortunately the shop went out of business. And multiple emails and messages to EMC have not even prompted a polite reply even though they still appear to be a going concern.

So this makes my fundraising target for Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre a bit harder to achieve. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far, you have helped me reach one-third of my goal so far! Please extend my ride profile link to anybody who might be willing to assist.

Caring for my young daughters during their Easter school term break set my training back a bit, but I’m not complaining as we had a good time together. I did do a wonderful Sunday morning ride with a good friend of mine while holidaying in East Gippsland on secondary roads between Metung and Lakes Entrance. Now I’ll return to regular riding without worrying about leaving youngsters at home alone.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 11:39 AM | Link | Comments

I am so pleased that already 214 days before the Melbourne Ride to Conquer Cancer® I have attracted donations amounting to 25% of my $5700 fund-raising target. I am so grateful to those who have demonstrated their support for me and for the work of the publicly-funded Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. When I wake up feeling really tired, I just have to remind myself of the support I have received and the promise I have given to complete this, which gets me out of bed and onto my morning training ride.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 03:12 PM | Link

Eric Gordon believes that transactions between people and their governments are generally motivated by their particular interests, desires and needs. I like how he is using an online gaming approach to explore how these elements of participation can be cultivated into in-depth civic engagement that encompasses learning. His view of learning comes from John Dewey, “requiring the structure of interaction, facilitates the learners actions and directs them to a greater purpose,… an end-view that involves foresight of the consequences which will result from acting upon impulse.” Eric says,

If we take these actions, of people acting upon impulse, and we provide an end-view, if we create a structure, a system that makes sense, then we can arrive at what Dewey talks about as being ‘learning’, which is the ability to associate not only the action with a particular end goal, but having the possibility of reflection within taking that action. What I’m interested in is how can we take this civic space and cultivate something like civic learning, where we add within these various participatory actions that are happening through multiple modes of connection, can we take that and actually organise it so that sense-making within that space is possible for individual citizens, and the ability to reflect is possible and even desirable.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 12:25 PM | Link

During my undergraduate years at Simon Fraser University in the 1970s, I had the good fortune to be invited by the Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies Dr Tom Calvert, and the Chair of the Kinesiology Department Dr Eric Banister to do some ICT work on an important research project. It was the early work for which Banister has become famous, his Training Impulse or TRIMP.

At the time, capitalist countries were playing catch-up to the East Germans and Russians who were winning all the medals in the Olympics. Banister’s TRIMP formulation provided a standard method for measuring the amount of training athletes went through. In physics an impulse is the integral of a force through time. Contemporary sports physiologists track heart rate as an objective indicator of exercise force, but at the early stages of research, without the micro-electronics of today, Banister was allowing athletes (especially swimmers) and coaches to estimate the training intensity on a numeric scale. For publication, I produced the graphs that demonstrated how athletes raise their TRIMP capacity in training, and provided a method to ascertain the ideal ‘tapering’ method of lowering training loads before performance events. This is now taken for granted, but I was lucky to be there when this idea first became well understood, predictable and as it turned out, distinct for each athlete.

My training log for the Ride to Conquer Cancer in Melbourne is now calculating and tracking my TRIMP, using an estimated intensity level (I don’t have a heart monitor) and distance rather than time travelled on my bike.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 08:35 PM | Link

I gave my daughters a small cold-water aquarium for Christmas. But they live with their mother most of the time. So I rigged up Allison’s 7” Android tablet as an IP webcam so they can see their fish from afar.

Note: IE users need to use the Java feed instead.

• If it’s black, it’s night time.
• If it’s not showing, that means that the tablet is offline—please come back later.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 07:26 PM | Link

I just spent a gripping hour viewing an interactive reconstruction of an avalanche last February at Stevens Pass, in Washington state, which took the life of three skiers. I know the ski area, as my father took me skiing there in the 1960s, but not to the backcountry back then. Whether you are a skier or not, you’ll learn something here. Superbly published by New York Times Online, but brutally sad.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 07:07 PM | Link

Excellent overview of activist deliberation by Daniel Little, whose blog I recommend to anybody with a bent for social philosophy.

Public deliberation is an invited space for a microcosm of a diverse population to discuss and make recommendations about a contested policy issue. But many both in and outside of the deliberative democracy movement conflate it with activist deliberation, conducted by members of a community with a particular perspective and motivation, including a predilection for change. In other words, activist deliberation builds cohesion amongst people pre-disposed to a particular interest, while public deliberation is about satisfying a population across contested interests. The project of public deliberation takes shape through its activity, it is not presumed. It is a bigger challenge.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 03:50 PM | Link

I’m bookmarking this terrific speech by Pete Peterson at NCDD Seattle 2012. Practitioners (especially working at the local government level) should know the reasons for engaging the public in a particular context, understand the inherent fear that public officials have because of very real experiences they have had with the public: “the three-minute at a microphone rant-a-thons”, and then “working with them to say that this isn’t the way it has to be” to build relations that “will move this field forward.” Video by Jeffrey Abelson.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 11:00 PM | Link

As I was just getting off a tram near my home in Melbourne last week, a car sped by in the lane I was about to cross to get to the kerb. It was a very close call. Some of the following video, or something similar and less dry, should be shown on television regularly. I’m surely not the first person to think of it, so I wonder why it hasn’t occurred? It also explains how to do Melbourne’s infamous hook turn.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 11:05 PM | Link