PROVISIONAL RECORD FORUM FOR THE CROSS-EVALUATION OF PROPOSALS FOR A RESPONSIBLE, UNITED AND PLURAL WORLD

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2.3 CRITERIA FOR THE SYNTHESIS

The proposals were written in articles to facilitate a simple evaluation similar to how legislative texts are evaluated. Since the articles are conceived and written as self-sufficient elementary propositions, in terms of their content, it allows a very wide range of combinations between the articles, it being possible to obtain in each combination a new text. In this way, through the isolated evaluation of each article, we will be able, in the end, to obtain a conceptually coherent synthesis that groups the most favourably evaluated elementary proposals.

A first synthesis criterion with respect to the most favourably evaluated proposals has been the thematic grouping. In this sense, we have made 4 large thematic groups which are the Alliance’s Poles for a Plural, Responsible and United World: Humanity and Biosphere; Socio-Economy of Solidarity; Governance and Citizenship; and Values, Culture, Art, Education and Soci-ety. The synthesis allows us to obtain 4 new texts of proposals on the gen-eral problematic of each pole with a large degree of consensus on the con-tents.

A second synthesis criterion has been the construction of a cross-proposal for an alternative model to neo-liberal globalisation. This has been possible based on the latter article aggregated to all the texts referring to global evaluation. Following these lists of proposals made in the comments on the latter, we have managed to extract the most favourably evaluated elementary proposals for an alternative global proposal.

On the Number of Proposals of each Synthesis
From the point of view of the syntheses presentation, we have considered it appropriate to make texts of around 30 articles.

Given that, for the time being, we have not managed to submit for evalua-tion the 57 planned texts but only 35, we are facing the problem that there is a highly unequal number of evaluated proposals belonging to each Pole. Consequently, the number of articles to be selected in each text has varied according to the number of texts submitted for evaluation in the correspond-ing Pole. Thus, we have 8 texts from the “Values, Culture, Art, Education and Society Pole”; 15 texts from the “Socio-Economy of Solidarity Pole”; 5 texts from the “Governance and Citizenship Pole”; and 7 from the “Humanity and Biosphere Pole”.

On the Synthesis of each Pole

A first criterion for the selection of articles has been to guarantee the greatest thematic scope of the synthesis of each pole establishing that, in all cases, the most favourably evaluated article of each text was included in the synthesis.

A second criterion for the selection of articles was to take all those most favourably evaluated texts which did not contain any red evaluation in order to select articles on which there was no disagreement. In the case of the most favourably evaluated article having a red evaluation, the previous criterion has been modified and the second article of this text has been se-lected in order to guarantee the thematic scope of the synthesis. This criterion has involved making an exception with proposal “12. Economy of Solidarity”, which has been evaluated in red in the totality of its articles. However, none of these red evaluations has a clarifying comment and even the red evaluation for the last article of the world evaluation is accompanied by a approving comment for several articles as valid for an alter-native global proposal. Moreover, the most favourably evaluated article of this proposal has 30 green evaluations, none yellow, none black and one red without explanation. We have no record of disagreement, either partial or total. It seems as if a participant has made a mis-take when using the telematic tool and has placed a red evaluation in all the articles but this does not mean that she/he was against.

A third criterion for the selection of articles has been to consider as most favourably evaluated those which, with an equal number of green evaluations, had been more evaluated. This also means that a proposal which has yellow and black evaluations may be more favourably evaluated than another which has all the evaluations green given that the first has more evaluations and may even have more green evaluations than the sec-ond. In this sense, it was necessary to solve the fact that there is a great imbalance in the number of evaluations between the different texts, which must be interpreted as a more favourable evaluation of the proposal that prompted greater participation. Thus, an article with all the evaluations in green but which amount to a total of 14 must be less favourably evaluated than another article with 5 yellow and 4 black but which has 44 green. The idea is that if the quantity of evaluations was homogenised for all the texts from the same pole, taking into consideration the text with the greatest number of evaluations, then to the articles of the texts which have less favourable evaluations should be added black evaluations (default vote in the “Delibera” system).

A fourth criterion for the selection of articles, applicable in the cases of an absolute tie in the evaluations, has consisted of selecting according to the content, in function of the contents of the general synthesis, remembering to avoid reiteration of contents with other selected proposals.

A fifth criterion for the selection of articles is related to the selected ar-ticles according to the former criteria that have a similar content. In this case, the most favourably evaluated article of the two of equal content is selected and the other is suppressed and substituted with any other article which meets the preceding criteria.

A criterion for the selection of new suggested articles has consisted of selecting those which widen the thematic content of the text with a concrete proposal which is not opposed to the articles selected as most favourably evaluated. This is due to the fact that there was no evaluation by the par-ticipants of these articles and, therefore, it would have no meaning to in-clude in the synthesis proposals that in themselves involve disagreement. In some cases, the selection of a new article has been made by rewriting or se-lecting a part of a comment by a participant.

Once the 30 most favourably evaluated articles for each Pole and the new suggested articles that widen the proposal have been selected, the sequence of presentation in the Cross-Synthesis of the Pole does not follow an order of evaluations of the articles or the numeric sequence in which the proposals to be evaluated were presented but rather an expositive order according to the content so that the cross-synthesis is coherent. At the end of each article, on a brief numeric table is the number of opinions collected in the evaluation when starting the synthesis in July 2003.

On the global cross-synthesis

30 articles from the 35 texts that participants considered in each text “key proposals for the preparation of alternatives to the current globalisation model” have been selected.