1.15 The G1000 in the Netherlands

Real Democracy Now! a podcast

The G1000 model has expanded beyond its home in Belgium and has been particularly popular in the Netherlands. In today’s episode I speak with one of the founders of the G1000 in the Netherlands, Harm van Deijk. Harm has a background in facilitation and used these skills together with the underlying principles of the G1000 to develop a model which has been used in numerous local government areas across the Netherlands as well as being adapted for regional and industry issues. Harm explains how the G1000 was introduced in the Netherlands as well as providing a detailed description of how 1000 people are able to identify key issues and discuss these in detail in one day. Like the G1000 in Belgium, which we heard about in last week’s episode, in the Netherlands the G1000 is focused on agenda setting. Harm gives an example of how a politician, who doesn’t see much value in the G1000, promotes a new idea for his local area, not realising that it came from an earlier G1000 process. In next week’s episode (Ep1.16) I’ll be talking with Professor James Fishkin the creator of Deliberative Polling about what this is, how it works and where it has been used. I hope you’ll join me then. To listen to every episode when it is released please subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher.