Agora Project Research Articles

The Agora Project: the New Agoras of the twenty‐first century

AbstractThe Agoras of the City States of the Classical Greeks were public spheres where democracy was lived by citizens who made collective decisions about issues affecting their daily lives. The Agora Project—New Agoras—is a metaphor for social action contexts in which people can make collective decisions about their future. People in the settings of their families, neighborhoods, community groups, organizations and institutions have the potential to organize themselves as evolutionary design communities. Participants in the Agora Project collectively enjoin to establish a new public sphere that can sustain a meaningful actionable design dialogue among individuals within and across New Agoras. These New Agoras, communicatively linked, would serve as the infrastructure for democratic civil society and a system of public spheres animated by evolutionary conversation and guided by evolutionary design with purpose of self‐guided evolution of the society—cultural evolution of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens. Critical to the Agora Project is the establishment of stewardship communities. The task of these communities is to create knowledge bases for evolutionary inquiry, develop resources for evolutionary learning and explore suitable approaches, methods and technologies. This article will present an overview of the Agora Project and the Agora Steward Community that has evolved in relation to the project. Organization of the article includes: (1) an examination of the evolution of humankind, (2) a discussion of conscious purposeful evolution, (3) an examination of the Agora of ancient Athens, (4) an introduction of the New Agoras as a metaphor for social action in contemporary society, (5) a discussion of the New Agoras as public spheres for democratic civil society, (6) a description of the Agora Project, and (7) a discussion of the New Agoras as public spheres for evolutionary design. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A collaborative workspace environment: experience of evaluation and selection in the Agora project

The Agora project recognises that effective communication is a key to achieving successful project outcomes. One of its objectives is to develop an integrated communications environment for both internal and external communications. Collaborative workspace software to support asynchronous communication is seen as the core application within such an environment. Requirements for such software were developed, together with an evaluation plan. Three collaborative workspace products (Web4Groups, BSCW and AltaVista Forum) that passed preliminary criteria were selected for detailed evaluation. Results showed that BSCW met Agora's needs most closely and the project is currently in the process of implemention.