Perry Walker writes: This was the question that the people who came to our online event on June 11th, 2025, part of the York Festival of Ideas, wrestled with. And wrestle they really did. More of that later. To start with though, more about the issue. Marl has a population of 1,000 people in 400 households. It is struggling to stay viable. The pub has closed, the bus service has got worse, and the primary […]

Tackling Disinformation Throughout history the powerful have been able to control and distort the news for their own gain, but, in the modern digital age, has disinformation become a much more serious problem? Our Win-win workshop on May 6th 2025 explored how to tackle such disinformation. From our research we discovered three main approaches – see the bullet points below. We opened the workshop by declaring that this topic might be one where common ground […]

“We’re trying to get to a win-win and we don’t believe this is unachievable” Sir Chris Bryant, Minister of State for Media, Tourism and Creative Industries, House of Commons, 12th February 2025 In Feb 2025, we at Talk Shop sent this letter to Sir Chris’s enquiry into Big Tech’s use of others’ original material for training AI Large Language Models (LLMs): Introduction The purpose of this short notice is likely different from the other submissions […]

Introduction By the start of 2024, the Win-Win Workout (the other WWW!) was ready to tackle live issues. We secured a grant from the Andrew Wainwright Reform Trust, with a top up from THINK, The Transport and Health Integrated research NetworK at the University of Aberystwyth. We used this to run a number of events: this blog covers two of them. Both were on reducing speed limits, run with councils in York and in Worthing […]

A group of headteachers in St Albans are asking parents not to let their children have a smartphone until they are 14. According to a BBC report in May 2024 “Most of the primary school headteachers in the city say they are backing the ban, as they are worried children are exposed “to a number of negative risks” when using smartphones.” Naturally, there’s a lot of conversation in St Albans on this topic. We at […]

Perry Walker writes: If you’ve been to any of our Win Win Workouts, or watched our video, you’ll know that we’ve been concentrating on identifying the aims – the interests, needs, values and principles – that underly the policies around which so much political argument takes place. We do this because it is at this deeper level that common ground is to be found. This event was different. Given aims for housing policy, how did […]

Perry Walker writes: For this workshop in Hereford we decided to adapt Pol.is, which is a website that: Gets people to make statements about some issue Invites others to say whether they agree or disagree with those statements Uses that information to sort people into attitude groups Then invites people to suggest statements that might command agreement across those groups We decided to adapt this to a small-scale meeting. We felt that the lack of […]

Perry Walker writes: Introduction For people who haven’t come across the Win-Win Workout before, here’s a summary. The aim is to find solutions to tricky and divisive political issues that work for everyone. We do that in two stages: Identify a set of shared aims that everyone can live with Seek solutions that meet those shared aims This two-stage solution is critical. In this divisive and divided age, discussion of solutions so easily gets stuck […]

Perry Walker writes: This is the name of a book, just published, by Manon Loisel and Nicolas Rio. They are two practitioners of…wait for it… participatory democracy, running a consultancy called Partie Prenante, or Stakeholders. The book is full of provocations, as you might guess from the title, and well worth a blog. I confess that I’ve not read the book. My French is not up to it, and it is not (as yet) available […]

Introduction For people who haven’t come across the Win-Win Workout before, here’s a summary. The aim is to find solutions to tricky and divisive political issues that work for everyone. We do that in two stages: Firstly by identifying a set of shared aims that everyone can live with; and then looking for solutions that meet those shared aims. This two-stage solution is critical. In this divisive and divided age, discussion of solutions so easily […]