Con Sensus

Decision-making in which the consent of everyone is wanted. This is often treated as a sort of Extreme Voting, and this often leads to difficulties, because it is different from nearly all VotingMethods? on a deeper level. Consensus involves shifting to a non-adversarial way of doing things - objections and conflicts are opportunities to learn, and improve the decision (or at worst, opportunities to address something else that needed addressing). The spirit is ultimately similar to that in NonViolence and AnArchy.

I learned about consensus mostly informally, then hung out with Randy Schutt a bit when consensus was his main thing. His excellent papers: http://www.vernalproject.org/RPapers.shtml#CoopDecMaking

Someday i will write the article/book where i explain that consensus, anarchy and democracy are all pretty much the same thing. See http://ourpla.net/nacd.html for a very rough start. -JohnAbbe

Someone recommends The Collective Book on the Collective Process.