Freshwater HiveMind Enters Week 2 – New Statements Added

Thursday, 27 July 2017, 6:03 am
Article: Hivemind

After only one week we have already had almost 60 people take part in our HiveMind consultation on the issue of freshwater quality in NZ. The participants have cast a total of 1663 votes on existing statements and suggested a number of new statements with different perspectives on the issue and solutions.

We are aiming to reach at least 150 participants by the 2nd of August closing date so please join us to have your say and spread the word.

We have just added 10 new comments to the discussion so even if you have already participated, please make sure you drop by again this week to vote on these new statements which expand the conversation.

Nine of these statements were drawn from submissions by participants, but Scoop has also added a tenth statement regarding a possible solution that is currently getting a good deal of attention and gathering support.

Freshwater Rescue Plan

The 10th new statement concerns the steps proposed by a number of advocacy groups who have collaborated to create the Freshwater Rescue Plan. This plan suggests 7 tangible and achievable steps that the government could take right now to address the freshwater crisis in Aotearoa.

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The Seven steps of the Freshwater Rescue Plan are:
1. Prioritise the health of people and their waterways by setting strict and enforceable water quality standards, based on human and ecosystem health limits.
2. Withdraw all public subsidies of irrigation schemes, as they increase pressure on waterways.
3. Invest in an Agricultural Transition Fund, to support the country's shift away from environmentally-damaging farming methods by redirecting $480 million of public money earmarked for irrigation.
4. Implement strategies to decrease cow numbers immediately.
5. Reduce freshwater contamination by instigating polluter pays systems nationally.
6. Address the performance of regional council’s on improving water quality through quarterly reports from the Ministry for the Environment on enforcement, breaches and monitoring.
7. Adopt OECD recommendation to establish a whole-of-government, multi-stakeholder process to develop a long-term vision for the transition of New Zealand to a low-carbon, greener economy.

For more information – www.freshwaterrescueplan.org

We look forward to the views of all our participants on these new statements and on whether you believe this suggested solution has merit.

Remember to vote on this HiveMind before it closes on Weds 2 August at 9pm.

Joseph and The HiveMind Team

HiveMind

What is HiveMind?

Welcome to HiveMind - Scoop's new public engagement platform. HiveMind is an experiment including our readers in co-creating a more participatory and interactive public media conversation.

We believe online public engagement tools can help groups of people interested in an issue to find new points of commonality and novel solutions to complex societal problems. Such problems require broad-based and inclusive debate and decision making.

It's all too easy for us to remain stuck in polarised worldviews or our social media bubbles. HiveMind seeks to get beyond these echo chambers and to allow people to:

- Engage in a meaningful process
- Learn from other perspectives
- Identify common ground in disparate viewpoints
- Create potentially innovative and practical solutions to real world issues

HiveMind uses Pol.is - an online tool for collecting open-ended feedback from large groups of people. Through a HiveMind exploration you can voice your opinion about a story or issue, and can also agree and disagree with what others are saying, one statement at a time. New statements go through a moderation process and then are added so that participants can vote on them.

Pol.is runs statistical analysis on these voting patterns in real-time. It produces opinion groups and surfaces the comments that brought each group together. It also identifies comments that found broad consensus among participants.

Contact HiveMind

Email - Joe Cederwall - joe@scoop.co.nz

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