I opened the talk with a discussion of wicked problems. Among many of my colleagues in the dialog and deliberation field, wicked problems are old hat and not very interesting. However, among more normal folks, the idea never fails to generate energy and very interesting “ah-ha!” moments as people ponder the implications.
That was what I saw yesterday, as people nodded their heads and their facial expressions betrayed discovery.
Ordinary Problems
A lot of problems in public life that communities face are technical in nature. How large should the dam be? How do we plow snow most efficiently? How should we invest the City’s retirement funds? These are the kinds of problems that it is best to ask experts to address. They can tell us what the best, right answer is and then our political leaders can drive the appropriate solutions.
Other problems are educational in nature. Some people don’t know that they shouldn’t park on certain streets in snowy weather and plow operations get fouled up. Other people are not aware of the services available to them as low-income residents, so they do without things they need. These kinds of problems can also be solved in straightforward ways by getting more information out to the right people (not to say they are easy to solve, just straightforward).
Still other problems are just political problems, or engineering problems, or scientific problems.
Wicked Problems
Then there are wicked problems — these are often problems that beset communities over and over. Persistent poverty is a wicked problem. So is persistent crime. What we do about health care as a community (or nation) is a wicked problem.
Wicked problems were first formally defined and described by a pair of planners, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973:
Now that . . . relatively easy problems [like shelter clean water, and roads] have been dealt with, we have been turning our attention to others that are much more stubborn. . . . A growing sensitivity to the waves of repercussions that ripple through . . . systemic networks and to the value consequences of those repercussions has generated the recent reexamination of received values and the recent search for national goals. There seems to be a growing realization that a weak strut in the professional’s support system lies at the juncture where goal-formulation, problem-definition and equity issues meet. . . .
As distinguished from problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable, the problems of governmental planning – and especially those of policy or social planning – are ill-defined; and they rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution. (Not “solution.” Social problems are never solved. At best they are only re-solved – over and over again.)
What Wicked Problems Look Like
Rittel and Webber identify ten characteristics of wicked problems. That’s a lot of characteristics to keep in mind, and many are in fact corollaries of one another, so I tend to simplify it a bit.
Here are the key factors I usually talk about:
There is no agreement on the cause of the problem, or the cause is not clear
There is no definitive solution to the problem
Every solution has trade offs
Any solution will take multiple actors (e.g. community groups, individuals, and government)
It boils down to this: Wicked problems are so intractable because they involve conflicts between values and every solution has a downside.
For instance, one contemporary wicked problem is what to do about the possibility of terrorism on U.S. soil. We don’t agree on the cause – is it radical Islam, is it porous borders, is it oppression of developed nations, or something else? There is no definitive solution – will jailing all potential terrorists do the trick, or deporting them, or how about educating people around the globe about the freedoms America represents? Every solution has trade offs — for example, if we drastically restrict air travel that may be effective but at the cost of curtailing our fundamental freedom of movement. And, any solution will take multiple actors — government can’t just do it themselves, not can individuals just be more watchful on their own.
Solving And Re-Solving Wicked Problems
We seem to be destined to solve and re-solve wicked problems, precisely because we have to re-strike a social covenant each time we face the problem. In the terrorism example, in 2001 we were willing to live with sudden dramatic travel restrictions in pursuit of security. Today, in 2010, our willingness to go along with that deal is not as wholehearted.
For communities (and nations) to face wicked problems, we simply must deliberate together and weigh the options. This is not an educational question, but a deal-making question. We must decide together what deals we will strike. Otherwise, we will be faced with imposed solutions from leaders that have tepid support at best.
It has been my honor to work in various ways on exactly these kinds of questions over my career, exploring and articulating the values trade-offs inherent in difficult public problems. It is rewarding, and sometimes difficult, work. But it is work that we in communities will need to keep plugging away at.
The problems we solve today will be back later – not because we did a bad job solving them, but because circumstances change.
Because they are wicked problems.
By the way, here is the presentation I used at my talk, in case you are curious:
The discussion guide is called: Childhood Drinking: How Can We Prevent And Reduce The Number Of Children Drinking Alcohol? (Available here as free PDF.) It is meant to help communities deliberate over this issue and develop common ground for action. I am the author.
Underage drinking: How can we prevent and reduce the number of children drinking alcohol?
Here’s an introductory overview, from an abbreviated version:
Alcohol is the drug of choice for America’s youth. By age 15, half of the nation’s children and adolescents will have had a whole drink. Among 15 year olds who do drink, one study shows that on average they binge drink (five drinks or more per session) twice a month.
How many children are drinking that way? According to a federally funded survey conducted by the University of Michigan, 8 percent of eighth graders (13 years old) have binged in the past two weeks, and 18 percent of tenth graders (15 years old) have done so.
Underage drinking is not just a problem for parents to worry about. It can have ripple effects that spread throughout the community. Recent studies indicate that drinking at a young age can derail a person’s later development, which can harm communities.
Childhood drinking is a problem for the entire community. It does not have a single solution. It can increase crime, lower productivity, and raise health care costs.
It must be addressed by many different kinds of people, because solutions will depend on actions by everyday people, community organizations, and government.
Here are three options for addressing childhood drinking, along with the major trade off or drawback to each:
Option One: Reach Children With Problems Early — Some children have problems when it comes to alcohol and other issues. We need to find them as early as possible and help them. But: Professionals will intrude in families’ lives; the issue may get pushed underground.
Option Two: Remove Access and Incentives — If we are going to make it so our children don’t drink, we will need to change the community. This includes not only making it harder to get access to alcohol, but also stronger enforcement of the laws. But: We will need more control over children’s day-to-day activities as well as more restrictions on adults’ behavior
Option Three: Help Children Through A Difficult Time In Development — We need to help children through the difficult elementary and middle school years so they do not get derailed. But: Responsibility for parenting children will shift from the family to professionals.
Here is an introductory video made using Xtranormal that gives an overview of the options and trade offs:
I enjoyed working on this project and I thank the National Issues Forums and the Leadership Foundation for the opportunity!
Next week I will be talking to a group of civic participation experts about social media and how it may (or may not be) affecting democracy, dialog, and deliberation. I began to put my thoughts together in a series of bullet points and it rapidly became an outline for a longer paper. I thought I would publish it here and point my colleagues to it, in order to jump start our conversation.
Social Media And Emerging Alternatives To Top-Down Professionalization In Public Life
What are we talking about?
The Internet has simply become infrastructure (email, static web pages). Social media is emergent now, but it is also on the way to becoming ubiquitous. Facebook, for example, has 350 million users worldwide, half of which sign in every day. More than 60 million accounts are in the U.S.
Social media is also known as Web 2.0, a term which is almost obsolete. What it means is an approach to the Web in which individual contributions are paramount.
Social media’s inherent difference — the core difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 — is that the contributions, comments and other responses of users are seen as intrinsically important. This is a shift in thinking from masses accessing content to masses creating content online.
The key, for civic purposes is: Social media allows many-to-many communication unmediated by central institutions or organizations.
A Study Of Emergence
Asking what effect the Internet will have on public life is similar to the question of how the telephone changed American life. This is an apt comparison for a number of reasons. At its most basic level, the Internet is a new mechanism for communications.
The definitive social study of the telephone is Claude S. Fischer’s America Calling: A Social History Of The Telephone To 1940. This book, published in 1992, studied the spread of the telephone throughout California through primary source material as well as through interviews with people who were alive in the 1910-1940 timeframe.
Telephone by Flickr user Esparta
The parallels to social media are uncanny and persistent. For example, the worries that the establishment had about this new technology and its possible deleterious effects were very similar to what we hear today. In 1926 the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee discussed the topic “Do modern inventions help or mar character and health?” Among the specific questions the proposed by the committee were “Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?” [and] “Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”
Another common response as the telephone emerged into ubiquity was derision at the triviality of the uses made of the telephone. “We are at the mercy of our neighbors, who have facilities for getting at us unknown to the ancient Greeks or even our grandfathers. Thanks to the telephone . . . and such-like inventions, our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions, and the more leisure they have the more active do they become in destroying ours,” wrote one professor.
Also of interest is how the use of the telephone evolved from its intended purposes. In 1910, Bell was advertising the telephone as an efficiency tool, suitable for business and, to a lesser extent, for making the running of a household easier (for example, ordering groceries became easier). Just thirteen years later, people’s actual use of the telephone had evolved to the point where sociability was the main point. A 1923 Southwestern Bell training manual for sales staff said: “[T]he telephone . . . almost brings [people] face to face. It is the next best thing to personal contact. So the fundamental purpose of the current advertising is to sell the company’s subscribers their voices at their true worth – to help them realize that ‘Your Voice is You,’ . . . to make subscribers think of the telephone whenever they think of distant friends or relatives.”
From Emergence To Ubiquity
The best examination of using new technologies to organize — that is, of individuals self-organizing outside of the constraints and plans of institutions — is Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing without Organizations (2008). Shirky points out — as does Fischer — that change happens when new technology becomes ubiquitous. Text messaging has driven much more change than has Facebook. The telephone drove change when it became normal to call people and converse for sociable purposes.
The parallel with telephone adoption, and the point about ubiquity, are important ones to keep in mind because they can help frame conversation about engagement and social media, and also stave off alarmism.
Conversations about social media often devolve into conversations about techniques: How can we use our Facebook page to get more donations? That’s an uninteresting way to approach the conversation. It is little different than saying, how can we best use the phone to solicit donations?
Of greater interest are the questions like these:
What is going on that we can point to as alternative ways of civic organizing?
What are the implications for democracy?
Can we name what is needed that evolves away from organization-first thinking?
What is going on?
What are alternative ways of civic organizing? The best way to describe what is going on is to say that people are getting used to new mechanisms for engaging with one another.
In looking at what is happening, we should look at (sometimes spontaneous) efforts that unfold over time, and that involve many people interacting with many.
By Flickr user Beverly & Pack
People point, for instance, to the “green revolution” in Iran — people around the world spontaneously developed ways for Iranian people to get information past government censors about what was going on. People outside of Iran began collating and collecting the information. Institutional news sources began using this information in their reporting. The piece in Iran that is interesting is the way spontaneous individual actions (creating repeater sites) was picked up by institutional entities (news organizations). The key driver of the Iran effect was text messaging (a ubiquitous technology).
Another example, this one from Shirky’s book. A 2002 Boston Globe story on Father John Geoghan revealed he had a history of fondling or raping boys and had been moved from parish to parish. In response to this, a small group of laity met in a church basement in January that year. The 30 gathered church citizens decided they ought to organize and so “Voice Of The Faithful” was born. Within six months they were 25,000 strong and international. Their pressure was key in the decision of Cardinal Bernard Law to resign near the end of that year.
This is in stark contrast to a similar set of circumstances ten years earlier, when the story of Rev. James R. Porter came to light, also in the Boston Globe. Similar laity outrage, in that case, simply “dissipated,” according to Shirky.
The difference between 2002 and 1992 was the advent of ubiquitous means of sharing news. “In 1992, the Globe wasn’t global, and the Porter story stayed in Boston,” writes Shirky. “In 2002 the Globe didn’t need to spread the Geoghan story to the world’s Catholics; the world’s Catholics were capable of doing that themselves.”
The key elements here were: News on the Web, email, and blogs repeating and republishing. These ubiquitous technologies had coalesced into an ecosystem.
What are the implications for democracy?
This is a harder question to answer than “what is happening” because it is inherently speculative. The answer is we do not know what use citizens will make of brand-new tools as they become ubiquitous. But one good guess is that people will use new technologies to do the same things they already do in civic life: kvetch, discover problems, name them, and consider how to solve them.
To the now-entrenched ecosystem described above, social media has now been added in, primarily in the form of user forums such as Craigslist and through Facebook. Civic organizing outside of institutions now takes place in these areas, as a dynamic ecosystem: blog posts and comments, forums, email lists, and Facebook. The linchpin of neighborhood organizing is increasingly the email list. Most computer literate citizens are a part of some community list (for parents, it is often a school list).
These lists — because of their ubiquity — are areas where emerging civic issues crop up, and get named and framed (to use terms from deliberative theory) before crossing into more institutional regimes (for instance, being brought up in community meetings).
Social media is also acting as a gateway for new people to enter — or feel a sense of efficacy in — public life.
Here is a very small example. I founded a community blog, Rockville Central, which I run with a partner, Cindy Cotte Griffiths. It has grown to become the second most-read local blog in Maryland. This has brought new readers. As this has happened, a number of people who did not see themselves as civically active before, now expressly point to online activity as having opened the door for them to be involved in public life. They now contribute and pitch in on community meetings, some have become community activists and speak up at city council meetings. More importantly, many have become “connectors” in the community-leadership sense of the word.
To sum up: New means of communication have become ubiquitous and are already being integrated into the already-existing community ecosystem dynamics.
Can we name what is needed that evolves away from organization-first thinking?
My colleague John Creighton and I have been doing work on the difference between institution-centric and citizen-centric public life. There is a confluence of factors that make for a coming revolution in many of the public institutions. Citizens are taking matters into their own hands — in part because they can, and in part because that is their expectation. Both of these are as a direct result of ubiquitous new technologies.
These new demands are driving radical change. For instance, Florida now requires all school districts to have an online education plan.
A citizen-centric organization will understand and work with the ubiquity of these new channels and the desire for people to use them.
This had local officials worried, according to a government spokesperson: “If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000 [the local equivalent of 911], so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway.”
This is an institution-centric view of what happened: The girls did not use bureaucratic systems properly. But they actually were communicating in as effective a way as they knew. It is the problem of the institution that it has not caught up to the way people increasingly communicate: through social media where one comment can go out to many people at once.
It’s not just teenagers, either. In Atlanta in May 2009, a city councilman was worried that his cell phone battery would go dead while he waited on hold for 911. So, he sent a message to Twitter: “Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson St. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet.”
One thing that we can watch for in terms of less organization-first thinking is for these institutions to acknowledge that social media is a part of the ecosystem people use to communicate, and not a “channel” to be “managed.”
Consider a comment that I heard at a recent working session on social media and community benefit organizations, which was organized by the National Conference on Citizenship, the Case Foundation, and PACE. At this working session, Scott Heiferman, founder of MeetUp.com, complained: “You know how all these organizations have links to their Twitter and Facebook accounts? Most of them say ‘connect with us.’ But why would I want to do that, and why do you want people to ‘connect’ with you? That still sees your organization as the mothership. Get people to connect to each other somehow.”
That’s the point of the Atlanta councilman’s “Pls. Retweet” note. His plea got picked up and quickly made its way to the right person — not because he sent it to through the right channel, but because a connection of his did. This is the power of the many-to-many facet of social media, and the largest change for public life. The many-to-many is becoming ubiquitous.
This is the crux of the difficulty for organizations. The whole notion of an institution wanting to “connect” with its public is problematic. Organizations that move themselves away from being the focal point will contribute the most to public life.
But, for an institution, to take itself out of the equation and getting people connecting with one another may be the toughest discipline of all.
On the morning of President Obama’s first State of the Union address, I published a rather dispirited prediction for the talk. One commenter asked me:
I am very downhearted at how casually people dismiss the possibility of our government doing much good. I definitely agree that the structures don’t feel like they are working.
I am cautiously reassured at how many of these points the president touched on. Not to exaggerate the point, but it almost felt like a speech that was consciously designed not to be the kind that inspires the skepticism you express here.
Any second thoughts?
Now that the dust is settling, I thought it might be worthwhile to look less at the state of the Union address itself, but at the state of the administration. As most readers know, my main focus is on civic participation and I look at government through that lens. In other words, one of the major problems I see in politics in America is that most people see no place for themselves in it. Under these conditions, government and politics is not about how we solve our problems together; it is how they provide us the services we need.
From The White House
This is anathema to the fundamental notion of self-governance.
One reason candidate Obama gave such hope to many is that they sensed in his rhetoric and biography that his bias is towards collaboration and participation when it comes community problem solving.
So far, however, it appears that the vastly greater share of energy has been spent on the “transparency” piece. This has been well-spent energy (although there’s a far piece to go in implementing the Obama transparency mandates).
But there are two other legs of the stool — participation and collaboration — where progress is lacking. An example of this is health care reform. This would have been a terrific area to actively, and authentically, reach out to people from all walks of life and craft what the proposals ought to look like. Instead, the political class developed its proposals and sold them to the public using fake town halls.
The agenda so far has been strong on service and transparency, but almost entirely missing participation or collaboration–equal pillars in the original executive order. Service does not necessarily build civic skills or address fundamental problems; besides, even an expanded AmeriCorps offers no role to most people. “Transparency” means feeding information to organized interest groups, reporters, and a few independent citizens who have deep interests and skills in particular areas.
These forms of civic engagement are not nearly “edgy” enough; there is no fight in them. People are angry, in America–from the Tea Partiers to MoveOn. When citizens try to solve serious social problems, they identify enemies. They do not just hold hands and serve together; they strike back at those whom they perceive as threats. If “active citizenship” reduces to non-controversial “service,” it will completely lose touch with the legitimate anger of the American people.
I agree with Peter’s critique, which is far better supported than this brief excerpt can do justice to. (So read it.)
Where Does Participation Go?
One critique of the civic participation movement is that it is all about talk and no action. This is a valid concern. Conversations on the community level can’t go nowhere; they need to connect to real changes.
Another friend of mine, Lars Hasselblad Torres, has put it this way, in a comment on Peter Levine’s piece: “We need to push through the veneer of ‘discussion’ as a good and reasonable outcome to policy implementation.” He’s right. He goes on:
I’d also like to see work up front, setting the policy agenda. The State of the Union is one such focusing opportunity. Instead of lecturing (possibly humiliating, alienating) Republicans, how about building truly post-partisan mechanisms?
At the same time, I applaud the work happening in the Office of Science and Technology Policy to engage the public participation community in framing up priorities for agency reform. Its a great start; now we need teeth.
So far, I agree: the focus has been on data and on internet-based outreach. This is insufficient, as both are far too subject to intermediaries and manipulation. Direct participation that takes the conversation into communities, states and regions is needed.
I agree with Lars, too. And this, in the end, is my critique of the State Of The Union address. The language has shifted from “we” to “me.” No longer are ordinary people being called on to work together — instead, the solutions come from moves made by the administration or by Congress.
The State Of The Union Falls Short
While there were excellent moments of humility in the address, and a laudable restraint when it comes to trotting out Main Street people as emblems of various things, the focus was all on government as doing things for the American people.
This is fine on one level. However, Obama has expressly portrayed himself as a different kind of political leader. Many of the markers that have led us to believe that this is the case, appear to have fallen by the wayside.
In a May 2007 speech, according to Peter, Obama said:
“[W]hen politics gets local, when the person talking to you is your neighbor standing on your front porch, things change.” In that speech, he called for dialogues in every community on Iraq, health care, and climate change.
The call for neighbor to talk to neighbor about important issues of the day appears to be withering under the heat of actual governance.
Instead, we hear this, on jobs:
Now, the House has passed a jobs bill that includes some of these steps [a jobs bill]. As the first order of business this year, I urge the Senate to do the same, and I know they will. They will. People are out of work. They’re hurting. They need our help. And I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay.
On financial reform:
Now, the House has already passed financial reform with many of these changes. And the lobbyists are trying to kill it. But we cannot let them win this fight. And if the bill that ends up on my desk does not meet the test of real reform, I will send it back until we get it right. We’ve got to get it right.
On climate change legislation:
I am grateful to the House for passing such a bill last year. And this year I’m eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate.
On education:
When we renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we will work with Congress to expand these reforms to all 50 states. Still, in this economy, a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job. That’s why I urge the Senate to follow the House and pass a bill that will revitalize our community colleges, which are a career pathway to the children of so many working families.
On health care reform:
[T]this is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering, ”What’s in it for me?” . . .
[A]s temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we’ve proposed. There’s a reason why many doctors, nurses and health care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo. But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.
Here’s what I ask Congress, though: Don’t walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people. Let’s get it done. Let’s get it done.
(The bold is added by me for emphasis.)
On all these issues, the picture painted is of a political class doing things for Americans. Obama faults himself for not “explaining” health care properly. But mostly, he calls on Congress to act in the ways he wants them to. (And harshly at that.)
Republicans complain that they are not treated as colleagues by the majority Democrats. They’re right. Meanwhile, Democrats say the Republicans have just become the party of “no.” They’re right too. Obama, for his part, chides Congress for arguing too much.
Ordinary people are left out of this troika. They have no role. This is my chief disappointment with the last year. I see little concrete action taken to invite ordinary people back into politics in any meaningful way.
My friend Peter Levine is, in my estimation, the gold standard when it comes to blogging about civic engagement in general and youth civic engagement in particular. His content stream includes a terrific combination of big-think ideas, small observations, and off-topic seasoning to make sure it all holds our interest. When I started blogging in 2003, I viewed him as an icon that I hoped to try to emulate (I still do).
Occasionally Peter writes a piece that wraps up a number of thoughts into one clear statement. I treasure these. Today’s article is one of those sorts of pieces.
In pulling together his thoughts to make a presentation to a number of Boston high school students who are part of a program focused on engagement.
He outlines a handful of the key issues facing our society today, and he does so in a clear, compelling, non-ideological way:
Peter Levine, from his website
We have put 2.3 million of our own people in prison, far more than any other nation in the world. (China comes second with only 1.5 million incarcerated people.) That is incredibly expensive, and it represents millions of tragedies for all those convicts and their victims. Yet imprisoning all those Americans doesn’t make us safe. Our homicide rate remains at least three times as high as the rate in any other wealthy nation in the world.
We spend more per kid on education than almost any other country, yet one third of our young people drop out before they complete high school. Considering that almost all stable and well-paying jobs today require more than a high-school diplomat, the dropout crisis is a human disaster.
We spend far more on health care per citizen than any other country in the world, yet unlike any other wealthy nation, we provide no health insurance at all for many of our people. Something like 45,000 Americans die every year for lack of medical care. Even if Congress passes a reform bill this year, we will still have the most expensive system in the world, with some of the worst outcomes for poorer people.
Most scientists believe that humans are causing the atmosphere to warm by taking stored carbon out of the earth in the form of oil, gas, and coal and burning it. The consequences of global warming may range from intense human suffering in the poorest parts of the globe, plus the extinction of animal and plant species, to a worldwide catastrophe. The United States burns more carbon per person by far than any country in the world except the tiny kingdoms of the Persian Gulf.
Plainly, our institutions do not work. Their failure is not just wasteful; it is deadly. They are not just broken; they are corrupt–making some people rich and comfortable while failing the rest of us. These are the institutions that we older people are handing over to you.
While it is tempting, for each of these problems, to want to throw money at it or to write a new law to fix it, Peter points out that this response is insufficient. “To make schools and neighborhoods and hospitals work better, you have to get inside them and change people’s hearts and minds–not reform just the rules or provide more cash,” he says.
In general, our politics is governments-centered. Liberals want the government to accept new tasks, such as health insurance; whereas conservatives believe that problems would be mitigated if the state were shrunk. . . . [A] state-centered view of politics leaves citizens little to do but inform themselves and vote. Generation Citizen [the program these youth are a part of] is an example of citizen-centered politics, in which people form relationships with peers, express their interests and listen to others, and then use a range of strategies, some having little to do with the state. . . .
Programs like Generation Citizen model open-ended politics. . . . We give [citizens] opportunities to deliberate and reflect and then act in ways that seem best to them. In a time of increasingly sophisticated manipulative politics, these opportunities are precious.
I do not normally quote at such length, and I hope Peter will not mind. You should read the whole piece, as he makes many more important points than the few I excerpt here.
Thank you, Peter, for an important addition to my day.
Much has been written about the Obama administration’s early commitment to create a more open and transparent government. In May the White House announced the Open Government Initiative, whose mission is to make all of government more open.
Yesterday, in a move watched closely by many in the civic participation field, the administration released the Open Government Directive. (pdf)
OG (Open Government) gang sign by Flickr user joebeone
The Open Government Directive is the result of much internal work as well as comments from people across the transparency and civic participation fields. It contains the basic instructions to every agency for how they are to comply with the overall mandate of “being more open.”
The basic mechanism is that each agency must create a web space (”someagency.gov/open”) that is devoted to the Open Government Initiative. At this “/open” site, the agency must house at least three high-value datasets that are not now available.
Within 45 days: establish a working group that focuses on transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration within the Federal Government. …
Within 60 days: create an Open Government Dashboard on www.whitehouse.gov/open. The Open Government Dashboard (to include each agency’s Open Government Plan, aggregate statistics and visualizations)
Within 120 days: each agency shall develop and publish on its Open Government Webpage an Open Government Plan that will describe how it will improve transparency and integrate public participation and collaboration into its activities.
Of interest: According to Politico, “Each agency [also] will be required to post its annual report to the Justice Department on Freedom of Information Act requests, including the total number of requests granted and denied and the reasons given for the denials.”
While the move was applauded by the transparency community (for instance, the policy director of the Sunlight Foundation referred to it as “enormous,” and indeed the list of commitments from agencies when it comes to transparency is already impressive), many in the civic participation field are less sanguine.
“I was underwhelmed,” wrote Fielding Graduate University professor emeritus W. Barnett Pearce in a post to an influential mailing list run by the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. “[I]t seemed very much like the ‘town hall meeting’ concept – the government shows/tells/lets us look on the website to see what they are doing, and then we can line up for our three minutes/send in our comments to their email inboxes or a listserve.”
In the first-ever study of its kind, a new report released today by the public policy research firm Civic Enterprises shows that the new generation of veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan are eager to serve their communities and offer their leadership to the home front.
Photo by U.S. Army via Flickr
However, according to the report, the nation’s returning veterans face a number of obstacles including a lack of information about how to connect to such service, and a majority says no local organization has reached out to them to seek their involvement upon their return. The report was underwritten by Target and by the Case Foundation.
“Our young troops and their families have done everything their country has asked of them,” writes Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen in a foreword to the report, which is the first representative survey of this generation of veterans. “Their lives have been changed forever by war, but their dreams haven’t changed at all. They want to raise their children, own a home, go to school, find work and even find new ways to contribute. Most of all, they want to be good citizens. They want to reconnect and renew their relationship to their local communities.”
In fact, according to the survey, almost 9 in 10 veterans said Americans could learn something from their example of service. And 92 percent of Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) veterans say that serving their community is important to them. But just half considered themselves leaders in their communities as a result of their military service. And almost seven in ten say they have not been contacted by any community institution.
I have been working on a project with a number of collaborators to create an issue guide for communities to deliberate on the issue of childhood drinking. Our framework is in an early-draft state, but it is gettting better with each iteration. (By “better,” I mean that it will stimulate dialogue.)
In preparation for a recent review meeting, and as a bit of a lark, I used the amazing tool Xtranormal to create a video introducing the framework. The results may be of interest:
(Please remember that this is an initial draft that I am sharing just because I thought you might find it interesting. I will make the finished framework more widely available.)
Among 15 year olds who drink, one study shows that on average they binge drink twice a month. By age 15, half of the nation’s children and adolescents will have had a whole drink.
There is an emerging understanding that the negative effects of drinking on a child’s development may be greater than once thought.
Children today have to navigate many high risk situations. With respect to drinking, what may have been seen as harmless experimentation decades ago is no longer considered without risk. People who drink at a young age are at higher risk for alcoholism down the line.
The issue of childhood drinking does not have a single solution. It must be addressed by many different kinds of people, all through the community.
To make decisions, we need to look at our main concerns and examine possible solutions. Every option has advantages as well as drawbacks. How do we help young people grow up in an environment in which alcohol is widely available?
Option One: If we are going to make it so our children don’t drink, we will need to change their environment. This includes not only children’s surroundings, but also stronger enforcement of the laws.
This first option says that we should change structures throughout society to better keep children away from alcohol. We would increase school and community activities so there are fewer “idle spaces” in children’s days. We would also enforce laws against serving alcohol to children in the home, cracking down on adults who host parties where children drink.
But if we do this, it will involve tighter control over children’s day-to-day activities as well as more restrictions on adults’ behavior. Children will become even more scheduled than they already are. And parents may begin to face more legal consequences too.
Option Two: We need to help children through a difficult time in their development. Elementary and middle school can be difficult years for children. We need to provide resources, support, and information so all children can develop without turning to negative influences.
This second option says that we should create a better support system that focuses on wellness and healthy development for all children. We should help parents improve their parenting skills so they can provide the right balance of nurture and discipline. And we should teach children ways to avoid drinking and make other healthy decisions through substance abuse prevention programs and other ways.
But if we pursue this option, responsibility and decisions about healthy development will shift from parents to professionals and possibly conflict with parents’ values. Some parents will have to change their parenting styles. And, there are many programs and initiatives designed to provide life skills to children and their effectiveness is questionable.
Option Three: Some children have problems when it comes to alcohol and other issues. We need to find them as early as possible and help them. We should provide vulnerable children and their families with the support they need in order to recognize and deal with such problems.
If we’re serious about this option, then we’ll make sure there are early warning systems and effective intervention plans. We’d educate parents and families to look for signs of alcohol use and we would significantly increase the availability of treatment programs designed for adolescents.
But if we do all this, professionals will intrude in more families’ lives and more children will be identified as having problems. Many families will turn a blind eye towards childhood drinking because it is an uncomfortable topic. What’s more, Twelve Step alcohol treatment programs are already widespread and free. Special programs might just duplicate effort.
"American Democracy" by Flickr user Poldavo (Alex)
Recently, for various reasons, I’ve been going through my old folders and documents. At various times in my life I’ve toyed with the idea of establishing an institute or center devoted to improving civic life. I’m glad to be able to say that just about all my work over the last decade has been in the pursuit of that overall purpose, even though I have not established that particular nonprofit. (Especially work with The Harwood Institute and the Kettering Foundation.)
This morning I came across some of the foundational documents for this “Center For Civic Life,” written at a time when I was doing a great deal of due diligence and was on the cusp of actually creating it. At a time like that, one thing you do is begin to develop your mission and vision.
The vision for the aborning Center For Civic Life caught me up short:
A nation in which every citizen sees a place for her or himself in the institutions of democracy.
I think that vision still holds strong. We live at a time when people feel shut out of politics and government — spectators at best. At the same time, there are structural reasons (social and economic) that some people don’t have a place in the institutions of democracy.
There are beginnings of change, but they are nascent. I think we need to keep pushing for this vision.
I was glad to run across this vision, and am glad to reaffirm it today.
One of the ironies of the current transition in community and network building is that we seem to have forgotten or ignored the previous transition. The “institution-centric” mode of civic engagement (to use Brad’s phrase) is a relatively recent invention, at least in America. (For a variety of historical reasons, an argument can be made that the institution-centric model has been around somewhat longer in Europe and elsewhere.) In our not-too-distant past, community engagement was much more along the “citizen-centric” model that seems to be emerging, albeit with some important catalyzing functions played by significant social and political institutions.
Here’s a prime example. I teach American Government at the Community College of Rhode Island. I talk in my classes about the decline of political parties in our system. Part of this decline is due to the reduction or elimination of the role that political parties once played in helping connect people to their communities and to each other. A hundred years ago, local political party organizations published newspapers, held dances, sponsored amateur sports teams, arranged for social services. One of the most important functions they served was to help integrate recent immigrants into existing immigrant/expatriate communities. (Anyone who has seen the film “Gangs of New York” will have some idea of what I’m talking about.)
Lots of other public and quasi-public institutions served similar functions. They brought people together so that they could pursue their interests better — not to serve the needs of the organization per se (although they did do that), but to help people serve their own needs. Parties recruited volunteers for campaigns, mobilized voters for elections, and developed partisan loyalty. But they also helped people, especially vulnerable, isolated individuals and nuclear family groups, establish roots and connections that they needed to survive, and that enabled communities to flourish.
Over the last century, these kinds of institutions made a transition from fulfilling a social networking function (in addition to their other roles) to being merely service providers. Now we are beginning to (re)discover the importance of the social networking aspect to the viability of our communities, and discovering that the institutions that used to help do that for us (or should I say with us?) no longer do.
Beginning at the turn of the last century, the political party system began to be remade. The passage of anti-patronage laws in civil service hiring undercut the ability of political organizations to cement people’s loyalty through the distribution of public-sector jobs. Over the course of the 20th century, campaign finance reforms made individual candidates more responsible for their own campaign development, further reducing the need for strong party loyalty ties. Today, the relation between political parties and voters is basically a customer-brand relationship; we’re important to them for our numbers, and they provide us with a choice of elected representatives. But there’s no other real mechanism (or reason) for fostering those deeper ties, for making interpersonal connections, and for developing community bonds. The institutions that once helped us build networks now only want clients.
Eric Siegel is a lecturer in Political Science at the Community College of Rhode Island, and co-Chair of the Green Party of Rhode Island. And a big Martin Scorsese fan.
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