1) Tom created the "Revitalizing
Democracy Project," the guiding vision and central focus
for the Co-Intelligence Institute's work this year -- and effort
largely largely funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation..
2) He has brought consultant Jim
Rough's Dynamic Facilitation
-- the most advanced approach to creative dialogue that he's found
-- out of the corporate world into networks dedicated to positive
social change and cultural transformation. He organized and attended
three trainings that produced
Dynamic facilitation is featured in a number of essays posted on this website, including an innovative article, "How to make a decision without making a decision", that Tom wrote for Communities magazine. Of particular importance is Tom's and Rosa Zubizarreta's Comparison of Robert's Rules of Order, Consensus Process and Dynamic Facilitation.
Tom designed a research project with social scientist Paul
Ray (co-author of The Cultural Creatives) to demonstrate
the efficacy of dynamic facilitation at helping citizens from
widely disparate values systems do collaborative problem-solving
on significant social issues. (The Co-Intelligence Institute is
seeking collaborators and funding for this major project.)
3) He has advised Henriette
Bastrup-Birk, a European Union official who is designing a
cross-border, multi-sector, two-year dialogue about sustainable
development in the Seattle/Vancouver bioregion. He also worked
with the City of Eugene Human Rights Commission on dealing with
divisive clashes between local anarchists, police and community
members, and with the innovative Virginia Natural Resources Leadership
Institute program which integrates a number of co-intelligent
practices into a year-long activity to resolve polarized local
conflicts over resource issues in Virginia.
4) After new research and writing, Tom has been engaging a number
of activists on the West Coast in dialogues about new
forms of activism grounded both in the holistic sciences --
chaos and complexity theories, ecology and living systems studies,
quantum and field theories -- and in current knowledge about our
individual and collective potential (including the spiritual dimensions
of activism).
5) Tom has advocated -- in articles, correspondence, conversations,
workshops and public forums -- the importance of collective intelligence,
citizen consensus councils and dynamic facilitation. He has reached
a wide variety of people, including city officials in three Western
cities, community organizers, corporate consultants, The State
of the World Forum and computer experts -- including conversations
with high-tech guru Bill Joy. In particular, he promoted Citizen
Technology Panels as a way to democratize
technological development -- an issue made urgent by Bill
Joy's April WIRED article, which Tom distributed widely.
6) Tom has done significant commentaries on a number of works
by others, including Arny Mindell, Peggy Holman, David Korten,
Ken Wilber, Richard K. Moore, James Fishkin, The Center for Y2K
and Society, and The Tahoma University of Transformative Studies.
7) Tom has established a web
page about community co-intelligence. Among the items posted
there is a curriculum he wrote of 26
Ways to make a Community Stronger, Wiser, More Resilient and Engaged.
8) In addition to writings noted elsewhere in this list, Tom has
written on a broad range of other topics -- including
9) Tom has arranged for the Co-Intelligence website to host materials from other co-intelligent activists who don't have sites of their own -- particularly sustainability economist Paul Hawken, Australian conversation instigator Alan Stewart, and communication specialist Susan Strong (whose Metaphor Project uncovers metaphors to promote sustainability more effectively to mainstream audiences). Tom has also promoted and posted on his site more than a dozen excellent analyses of the Seattle WTO demonstrations by participants, which became one of the best such collections on the Web.
10) Tom established a website of links and articles that deal with sustainability and the co-intelligence dimension of sustainability.
11) Tom promoted numerous additional approaches to co-intelligence (or added extensive new material to his site on various approaches), including
12) Tom publicized two leading guidelines for public participation
(from The International Association for Public Participation and
The Community Development Society) and added to these a set of
co-intelligent public participation principles. See Principles
of Public Participation
13) Tom has done extensive work with the elections, from his acclaimed article Beyond positions: a politics of civic co-creativity to forwarding scores of valuable articles and links to hundreds of people, ranging from data about electoral irregularities ... to suggestions for action ... to different forms of voting .. to democratic theory ... to the advent of electronic democracy... to the need to seek common ground with our political opponents that's based on hearing each other and co-creativity, rather than denial and blind patriotism. In his work, he engaged respectfully with all parties, from Nader advocates ... to Bush and Gore partisans ... to fundamentalist Patriots and LaRouche supporters.
14) Tom has also sent an often overwhelming stream of high-quality information and insight on non-election topics to his list. This material ranged from new ways to look at intuition ... to unusual information about world problems ... to information about the role of Native Americans played in the formation of our governmental processes and structure ... to new forms of online interaction, and more. (Many of these and the items in [13] will be posted on the site, but not before 2001.)
15) Through writing, networking, dialogue instigation, presentations and meetings, Tom created or facilitated philosophical and practical bridges between a number of co-intelligent practices, including
Tom participated in -- and advised on the progress of -- a Fetzer Institute study of the emerging field of group methodologies that promote "collective intelligence and spiritual wisdom". His particular contribution was expanding the investigators' focus from group and spiritual matters to the implications of this field for political, community and societal health and wisdom.
16) Tom was involved in a number of inquiries about monitoring corporate power, including an online conference exploring whether corporations are a newly evolved type of organism; and the "Simultaneous Policy", an effort to pass laws limiting corporate power simultaneously in every country in the world.
17) Tom wrote about and promoted the idea that wealth and philanthropy have a special role to play in cultural transformation, and developed an inquiry about ways to improve the synergy between people of wealth and change agents. (He also wrote an article tying the worldwide wealth gap to our society's inability to observe what's happening in and around it, and reflect and act coherently on that.)
18) Out on his own leading edge ("off the leading edge") Tom has been exploring the deeper dimensions of democracy as an evolutionary step to true social self-organization. His inquiries have led him to
More on these next year....
19) And finally, at the beginning of the year, Tom helped Y2K activists digest the significance of the unexpectedly calm century-rollover with articles written by himself, Cynthia Beal, Paloma O'Riley, Peter deJager, Margaret Wheatley, Ed Yourdon, Warren Bone, John Koskinen, Michael Brownlee, Paula Gordon, and others.
20) PS: How do we categorize the hundreds of conversation and emails, networking, exploring, advising, sharing, learning....
Feel free to send support for such work to
Tom Atlee
The Co-Intelligence Institute
PO Box 493
Eugene, OR 97440.Donations to The Co-Intelligence Institute are fully tax-deductible.