African Youth’s Visioning for Re-inventing Democracy in the Digital Era: A Case of Use of Structured Dialogical Design

Multi‐stakeholder structured dialogues: Five generations of evolution of dialogic design

“…The aim of a large‐scale process is to support the group in developing shared understanding and shared vision and ultimately to generate collaborative action towards a desired future. Laouris (2022a, 2022b) presented two models of large‐scale interventions. In the first model, the same type of intervention is delivered more or less synchronously to multiple distributed groups.…”

“…For example, around 2005, practitioners started experimenting with pre‐collecting ideas via email (e.g. Laouris et al, 2017, p. 249) or collecting votes by email (Laouris, 2022a, 2022b, p. 5) in‐between sessions. The corresponding applications were referred to as hybrid .…”

“…Deviations 6 and 7 refer to the cases where all or some participants complete the clustering (Case 6) or extend the structuring (Case 7) individually asynchronously, and their individual products are merged into one (e.g. examples reported in Laouris, 2022a, 2022b).…”

“…Structured Democratic Dialogue (SDD) is a participatory design methodology that seeks to bring together diverse stakeholders to collectively address complex socio‐technical problems (Christakis & Bausch, 2006; Flanagan, 2020). SDD has been recently added to the repertoire of Community Operations Research (COR: Laouris & Michaelides, 2018; Laouris & Romm, 2022a, 2022b) tools as a powerful Problem Structuring Method (PSM), especially appropriate for large‐scale societal interventions. The method has been featured in the ONLIFE manifesto (Laouris, 2015) of the European Commission, the Reinventing Democracy project (Laouris & Romm, 2022a, 2022b; Manifesto: Reinventing Democracy in the Digital Era, 2016), several large‐scale reform interventions, including local authorities (Laouris & Michaelides, 2018), regional planning for developing the wine villages of Cyprus (Michaelides & Laouris, 2023), and promoting peace and reconciliation in the Middle East (Laouris, 2022a, 2022b).…”

Method to integrate asynchronously produced individual influence maps into an extrapolated population influence map following the face‐to‐face stage of a structured democratic dialogue

“…Bausch & Flanagan, 2013; Christakis, 2004; Christakis & Bausch, 2006; Christakis & Harris, 2004; Christakis et al, 1999; Cisneros & Hisijara, 2013; Flanagan, 2020; Flanagan & Christakis, 2009; Hays & Michaelides, 2004; Laouris, 2012; Schreibman & Christakis, 2007). The authors' group alone has applied the SDD process in more than 100 different contexts, 1 including peace and conflict resolution (Laouris, 2004; Laouris, Michaelides, et al, 2009; Laouris, Erel, et al, 2009; Laouris et al, 2015); discovering and collectively agreeing on research agenda priorities, thus influencing European Commission funding (Laouris & Michaelides, 2007; Laouris et al, 2011, 2017; CARDIAC 2 ); capacity building of youth and civil society 3,4 ; reforming and bridging gaps in education and democracy (Laouris, 2015; Laouris & Laouri, 2008; Laouris & Romm, 2022; Laouris et al, 2010); and response to the COVID‐19 outbreak in Africa (Laouris et al, 2022). More recently, the SDD has been proposed as a problem structuring method (PSM) within the repertoire of operational research (OR) tools (Laouris & Michaelides, 2018; Laouris & Romm, 2022).…”