Yesterday evening I attended Future Salon, a monthly get-together to "explore accelerated change in science, technology, business & society."

Zack Rosen is extending the wisdom he gained in the techno trenches of Howard Dean's campaign to build a toolset for building communities, CivicSpace Labs. I won't waste the bits recounting Zack's presentation because someone else beat me to it.

Ross Mayfield told us about the genesis of Extreme Democracy, a book that evolved from a chat session with Joi Ito. Good quote: "Direct democracy doesn't work. Look what you get. Arnold Schartzenegger."

Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy, called for more dialog and deliberation in the political process. Now there is no "we the people." Years ago, Maclean's magazine convened a dozen Canadians to discuss the future of Canada over a long weekend. For two days, the Quebecois and the others refused to budge from their positions on separatism. On day three, they came to understand one another's positions and reconciled.

Tom describes the session as wisdom-generation, participatory, holographic, distributed intelligence, and co-intelligent democracy. By contrast, all American politics is adversarial. Asked why he didn't push for something similar to the Maclean's encounter for the U.S., Tom's reply set me back. "I'm a theorist, not an organizer," he said.

Mark Finnern founded Future Salon; they meet at SAP Labs because he works there. Perhaps we need a joint session with Emergent Learning Forum.