Città di Torino

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Meeting Peace

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Comune > Olimpiadi 2006 > Meeting Peace > Young Words > programme

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Methodology - What is a Town Meeting?

The meeting on Thursday, September 22, will be structured according to a new method: the Electronic Town Meeting [e-TM]. The event will consist of a participatory discussion between 2,000 young people from all over the world as part of the three days focused on dialogue as a peaceful alternative for conflict resolution.

The uniqueness of the event lies in the fact that the participants will be involved in a veritable experiment of deliberative democracy built around three key elements which will be repeated throughout the day:

• an initial phase of information and questioning with the help of impartial documents and issue experts;
• a second phase of facilitated small group discussions which will be summarized by each table and sent using wireless laptop computers to a team of people who will then synthesize all the discussions and report back to the larger group;
• a third phase in which the most common themes from the table discussions are used to create questions and proposals that will be posed to the entire room, and on which participants will be able to express themselves individually by voting using polling keypads.

For more information on the methodology, download the attached .pdf (53 Kb).