What is Dotmocracy?
Have you ever taken part in a decision-making meeting with many people and felt frustrated with the lack of progress?
Have you ever attended a forum or workshop where dozens of people brainstormed a long list of ideas, but there was no sensible way to collectively prioritize all the results and recognize the best suggestions?
Dotmocracy and the Dotmocracy Handbook provide a solution for these kinds of challenges.
Dotmocracy is a transparent, equal opportunity, and participatory large group decision-making tool.
Dotmocracy is a simple method for recognizing points of agreement among a large number of people. Participants write down ideas on specially designed paper forms called Dotmocracy sheets and use pens to fill in one dot per sheet, recording their levels of agreement. The result is a graph-like visual representation of the group's collective opinion.
Compared to surveys, voting, or typical meeting formats, Dotmocracy provides unique and valuable opportunities. In a Dotmocracy process, every participant can simultaneously present his or her own ideas anonymously in writing. The level of popular support for each idea can be quickly and accurately discovered through the dotting process. Feedback comments for each idea can also be recorded.
Dotmocracy helps people quickly recognize their collective preferences, which can then lead to the crafting of popularly supported plans.
Dotmocracy can be used within large meetings, conferences, and forums, and also outside of meetings through the use of Dotmocracy walls. Along with the Dotmocracy sheets, there are also prescribed steps , and rules and requirements that help to ensure the results of a Dotmocracy process are reliable and constructive.
Dotmocracy has also been proven to:
- Recognize collective priorities and direction from all participants.
- Engage and empower diverse groups of people.
- Recognize agreement on unique and specific ideas, as well as general and thematic ideas.
- Give an equal voice to even the quietest of participants.
- Help avoid verbal debates and "soap box" style speech-making.
- Support friendly discussions while efficiently leading to practical conclusions.
- Provide fully documented results that can be easily turned into action plans.
The Dotmocracy process is fun and takes only minutes to learn and apply
Download free PDF forms, charts, and instruction handbook from www.dotmocracy.org
Last Modified: September 23, 2014