NOTES · USES
True Causes runs Structured Democratic Dialogue, a method with fifty years of practice. What is new is that it now runs at the size of a city rather than a seminar room. In practice that means: municipal government and public consultation · a large organisation whose problem crosses departments · a regulator weighing a system it did not design · a union or workforce whose knowledge is spread across shifts · a university or professional association · a serious incident review, where the question is what actually caused what · and the strategy work that usually ends in a consultant's ranked list.
A municipality. Not a consultation that produces a list of complaints ranked by how loudly they were made, but a map showing which of those complaints cause the others — with the disagreements published rather than smoothed away, and every connection traceable to how it was settled. A council that acts on the roots can say why it chose them, and a resident who disagrees can point at exactly which question they would have answered differently. On a published question this is civic intelligence: the people a problem affects work out its causes themselves.
A workplace or a union. Fifteen people in a warehouse already know why the picking errors happen; the knowledge is distributed across shifts that never meet. This assembles it without anyone having to be in a room at the same time, and the reserved seats mean the night-shift observation that nobody upvoted still reaches the map if someone can point at the log. A company's private room can take in what the public rooms on the same question found, with nothing of its own going out.
A movement or a campaign. Sixty people who want the same thing changed rarely agree on why it is the way it is, and a demand without a cause behind it is easy to refuse. Here the roots are the demands; the actions, each judged against each root, are what to ask for first; and the record — every pair, every vote, every prediction — is what you bring back a year later when the answer was “we will look into it”. Nobody has to run the whole of it: the question is the organiser, and a room opens to anyone with an address at the place it concerns.
A regulator or a profession. Where expertise is real but contested, the split between what is certified (empirical and causal claims, at 75% of votes cast) and what is only measured (importance, values) means a body can publish a causal account without pretending its priorities are facts.
A diaspora, or anyone the room excludes. The binding constraint on a hall is physical presence. Remove it and the people who could not travel, could not take the day off, or live three time zones away are in the same deliberation as everyone else — on one shared timer, with the same five stickers.
Two old devices, doing real work. Selection by lot: a deadlocked question goes to groups drawn at random from the rest, never to whoever volunteers. And equal standing: nothing here weights a vote by reputation, stake or seniority. Both are ancient. What is not is asynchrony — an assembly needed everyone in one place on one day, which is precisely the ceiling this removes.
Who counts is still a political choice. Every dialogue declares who may take part, and every map can be read against the variety of the room that produced it. The platform does not decide that question; it refuses to let it stay implicit.
What you get, and what stays yours. A causal account with its provenance attached, and a record of what a group could not agree on. Deciding what to do, funding it and answering for it stay with you and your institutions.
For social movements and protest, see After the squares: what the 2011 movements left open.