Welcome, Neighbors and Friends!

Our Mission

Neighborhood Democracy Network (NDN), is a new citizen engagement 501c3 organization based in Milwaukee, WI and Washington, DC that plans to leverage online technology to link citizen assemblies across neighborhoods so that thousands of people can easily, efficiently, and regularly participate in collaborative problem-solving to express shared public policy priorities and solutions that clearly represent the consent of the governed.

Our Vision

We aim to fill a niche unfilled in the civic engagement space. Specifically, most organizations provide the necessary executive function of civic engagement: Most facilitate either deliberation or collaboration. Yet, not one organization provides the needed legislative function of civic engagement: political representation per policy. Beyond inadequate polls or public priorities in the form of policy recommendations, the public remains powerless in its ability to network different deliberative or collaborative efforts from disparate locations to collectively draft online citizen-generated and representational 'consent of the governed' that would eclipse the value of representation by the periodic electoral vote. The executive function of civic engagement, though necessary and important, cannot protect the disproportionate influence of lobbying or political consultants on the legislative process.

Our Role

Upon support, NDN's main activities will focus on (1) organizing in a nonpartisan manner, a network of neighborhood assemblies dedicated to providing forums for all adult citizens of the United States to meet and freely discuss local, state, federal, and global issues and government actions and to conduct internal polls, workshops, online work studios, and Wikis on or about proposed solutions or resolutions of principle, in order to generate an evolving, informed consent of the governed among participants per geographic locale, and (2) organizing in a nonpartisan manner, other supporting forums that provide information on each issue to help assemblies reach that informed consensus.

Such forums will follow a series of interchanging online and face-to-face shared learning and inquiry that follows a process of exploration, conflict resolution, decision-making, collaboration, and voting. To accomplish this central goal, NDN will develop and provide a website with comprehensive internet tools, web partners, and software downloads to interconnect, coordinate, support, and serve these forums and committees so that citizens can organize and deploy these forums.

Still in our early beginnings, the purpose of this meetup for now is to bring together folks living in DC together who are interested in discussing political philosophy, values, and ideas for change via citizen-led research and legislative bodies. For the remainder of 2009, we will focus our attention on getting to know each other and simply discussing ideas.

For more information about our current activities, please see: http://www.democracydelegates.org and http://socratescafe.meetup.com/126/