Here’s a question I get asked often by organization managers considering getting more active in social media — Facebook in particular.
One best practice when it comes to Facebook Pages is to set the default setting so that visitors are looking at posts not only by the page owner but also by fans.
But: “What do we do when people start posting a whole bunch of stuff to our Wall?” asks the boss.
Excellent question. By and large, most organizations will get innocuous notes from fans. But for organizations with a cause that some may find controversial, or that are for some other reason possible targets of attention, may attract less desirable kinds of posts. What do you do? Just delete them from the Page? Engage?
New DC-local journalism startup TBD.com (with which the local blog I co-lead, Rockville Central, is associated) is one such organization. It’s a news outlet. People are attracted to it, as a way of promoting their own causes or bringing up their own issues.
TBD.com is committed to engaging with audiences, though — and not hiding behind an organizational wall. How they are handling their Facebook Page is a good case example of a classy move.
Recently, someone who says they are a veteran (I believe it, but can’t verify) left numerous notes and posted document scans about spraying Agent Orange in Guam. It’s a serious issue, but the tone is also more intense than most organizations might want to get behind.
Rather than just delete the posts, TBD.com Page admins wrote this:
Thanks for sharing the docs. We generally only cover local DC/VA/MD area news, but I made sure to copy down all your info here. I’m removing the repeat posts from the page, but keeping record.
Not only is the poster now more likely to be a friend and see TBD.com as honest brokers — so are other people. Here’s a tangible demonstration of the commitment to two-way.
Now, I am excited to let you know about a webinar we have just scheduled to discuss the paper and some of the ideas it may spark.
This from the PACE announcement:
Report available from PACE
In May of this year PACE-Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement released ‘An Evolving Relationship’, a white paper based on a briefing memo prepared for a White House meeting held earlier this year between leaders of the philanthropic community and a variety of Obama Administration officials representing both the White House and the Corporation for National and Community Service. The paper argues that a number of key trends in Administration approaches to civic engagement are now intersecting and suggests a great deal of possibility for moving forward in the near future.
Promoting civic engagement is a clear priority for both the Obama Administration and key leaders in the philanthropic community. More and more foundations are making increased commitments to the fields of deliberative dialogue, civic engagement and democratic practice. The white paper explores both the recent history of the relationship between the Executive Branch and philanthropy and prospects for future collaboration.
Chris Gates, the Executive Director of PACE, will moderate the webinar.
Brad Rourke, the author of the white paper, be be the presenter.
Title: PACE Webinar, ‘An Emerging Relationship: The Executive Branch, Philanthropy and Civic Engagement’
Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM EDT
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.
Andrea Jarrell drew my attention to this talk by one of the deepest thinkers about the new structures in society, Clay Shirky. In this talk, Shirky describes the idea of cognitive surplus, and relates it to the way media gets produced and consumed.
The large point Shirky makes is that society is only now beginning to figure out what to do with what he calls the “cognitive surplus” that was created as the prosperity kicked off after World War II gave people leisure time that they had not had. For decades, television was what people “did” with the time they had in the evenings and weekends — time society had not had before.
Now, as technology has expanded the options of “things to do” with leisure time, we have seen the growth of new activities. People are creating their own media, and sharing what they create. This is not just popular media, it is also new online projects, lines of research, and creative efforts. Old-line media production organizations (TV networks, movie studios, and publishers) see this interest in self-production as a blip, but Shirky sees it as a fundamental, one-time shift that is not unlike the Industrial Revolution in scope.
His point: there were always three things people liked to do with media (consume it, produce it, and share it). But until recently the high cost of production and sharing allowed a structure to grow up that focused only on producing media for consumption. Now that it is easier to produce and share, the three legs of the stool will equalize, as people pay more attention to their own.
Shirky ends with a story of a dinner party where a friend’s four-year-old daughter is watching a DVD. Suddenly, she gets up and runs behind the TV, rooting around in the cables. “Whatcha doing, honey?” asks her father. “Looking for the mouse,” she replies.
“A four-year-old knows that a video screen that ships without a mouse ships broken,” observes Shirky. The little girl wanted to interact with her show.
Current and future generations know intuitively that media that does not allow for interaction will seem flat and useless.
Cognitive Surplus and Institutions
In the work John Creighton and I have done on the new citizen-centered society, we’ve seen a similar phenomenon. Citizens are less and less willing to adapt themselves to the needs of institutions, and are demanding that things go the opposite way. Institutions that do not recognize this have a rude awakening coming.
It is instructive to relate Shirky’s argument to public institutions and politics in general. Richard Harwood’s landmark report for the Kettering Foundation in 1991, Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street, pointed out that Americans are not apathetic but instead feel pushed out of politics. Politics is no longer relevant to the day-to-day concerns of Americans — and political institutions are no longer looked to as a means of solving problems.
(Note that I am not saying the “government” should solve problems. I am describing the use of political structures for helping us decide what to do and organize our response. For instance, the town meeting.)
Since 1991, Harwood’s research and others shows that, if anything, the alienation of people from formal public life has increased.
“Looking for the Mouse” In Public Life
At the same time, however, in other areas of life, the new realities have begun to take hold. People are “looking for the mouse” when they deal with institutions.
What will this nascent change look like as it moves forward?
Some public institutions have begun to respond, in small ways and not always the best ways — but it’s begun. Florida, for example, now requires all school districts to have a formal online learning component. You can view the rise in voluntarism, in part, as an element int he same trend.
We are also seeing experiments where the formal structures are designed to allow citizen involvement (for instance, changes in how Californians operate their primary elections). Some of these experiments will work and others will fail. But the overall trend will be toward more citizen control not less.
One small trend that seems positive is the growth of on-the-ground efforts at more participatory democracy. Localities are the true laboratories of democracy, and some are beginning to rely more on dialog and engagement with citizens in order to make decisions. This is only happening in pockets, but it represents a response to the new citizen-centric demands that public life is placing on formal institutions.
As cognitive surplus increases, and as people begin to understand what they can do with it, such experiments will gain momentum and some may even become new norms.
We don’t know what the change will look like, but we can bet that it will involve “looking for the mouse.”
I’m excited to announce the release of a new report I wrote for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), an important group of funders who do grantmaking in the civic participation and dialogue field.
Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) is pleased to announce the release of its latest publication, “An Evolving Relationship: Executive Branch Approaches to Civic Engagement and Philanthropy.” This white paper is based on a briefing memo prepared for a White House meeting earlier this year between leaders of the philanthropic community and Executive Branch officials. The meeting focused on the topics of service, civic engagement, social innovation and public participation and where there might be shared interests between the two groups. . . .
“We are at a moment that many in the civic engagement field see as a threshold. Fundamental changes are taking place in the way that citizens interact with institutions, demanding new and more creative approaches to civic engagement,” said PACE executive director Chris Gates. “The new Administration and the field of philanthropy have both made it clear that they want to be a part of the conversation about how our nation can craft a new kind of relationship between citizens, civil society and government.”
An Evolving Relationship was prepared for PACE by Brad Rourke of The Mannakee Circle Group. The paper provides a broad overview of Executive Branch approaches to civic engagement, participation, and service over the past two decades. It also describes how philanthropy has worked with the federal government on these issues over the same time frame.
The paper argues that a number of key trends in White House approaches to civic engagement are now intersecting and suggest a great deal of possibility for moving forward in the near future. Civic engagement is a clear priority for this administration and has becoming increasingly embedded in the policies and practices of a number of Federal agencies. At the same time, key philanthropic institutions are making increasing commitments to the fields of deliberative dialogue, civic engagement and democratic practice.
For more information about PACE or this paper contact:
I recently shared a report with a colleague that I had not looked at for some time. I thought it might be interesting to my readers and friends.
Click image to open report (pdf)
It’s called Mr. Boyd Connects, and it is a report on one legislator’s experience with seeking to engage his constituents in a different way than usual. The legislator is Congressman Allen Boyd (FL-2), and I wrote the report in 2005. Boyd had embarked on a series of town hall meetings across his district to hear what his constituents had to say about health care. This was long, long before the fiascos we saw more recently, and Boyd’s approach was much different: he listened.
My client, the Kettering Foundation, had asked me to explore the question: What was Boyd hoping to learn? In what ways is a listening approach useful?
The report, I think, still holds resonance (perhaps more) today.
From the introduction:
Being a participant in Public Television’s A Public Voice gave Representative Allen Boyd of Florida a view of the public he usually doesn’t get. “[These citizens] weren’t talking to elected officials,” Rep. Boyd says. “They were just sitting around in a room talk- ing . . . with each other.” The subject was health care. “And then we [policymakers] got a chance to see what they said, and reflect on it. . . . [T]hat is an unusual sort of setting.” Singular enough, in fact, that Rep. Boyd went on to repeat it on his own, hitting the road throughout his Panhandle district to hear what his own constituents had to say about health care. What he heard by using this approach proved useful to him both as a leader—and as a fellow citizen. In a recent interview in his Washington office, Rep. Boyd spoke in detail about what this experience meant to him.
As many of my readers know, I have been thinking with my colleague John Creighton about the role of institutions in public life. We have been discussing the rise of the citizen-centric world and the resulting erosion of our previous institution-centric lifestyles.
In his most recent article at the Washington Times Communities in his blog Dispatches From The Heartland, John has just about the best explanation of the concept that I have seen yet. The argument we have been building is in three parts. First, why do we have institutions? Here’s how John puts it:
People once were dependent upon institutions to decide and do things on their behalf. The capital and transaction costs required for people to decide and do things for themselves were too high. . . . It made practical sense to delegate authority and dollars — with representative community oversight — to centralized organizations.
Communities once were so dependent upon institutions the social expectation was that people should conform their lives to the operational needs of institutions. For instance, people were expected to show up for work, take breaks and vacations at institutionally prescribed times. Our language reflects these expectations — working 9 to 5, lunch break, night shift, spring break, summer vacation, etc. Institutional parameters are baked into public policies — 40 hour work week, mandatory school hours, etc.
The second part of the argument relates to why institutions (or, better put, institution-centric institutions) are no longer working as they used to:
New (and not so new) technologies now make it practical for people to decide and do things for themselves. The capital and transaction costs that once made independent action impractical are moving toward zero. . . . Indeed, the problems that led communities to delegate authority and dollars to centralized organizations are slowly — and in many cases rapidly — going away. Yet, institutions continue to do what they were originally designed to do. . . . Now that people have access to tools that make it practical to decide and do things for themselves a new set of public attitudes, values and expectations are emerging. People are no longer willing to conform their lives to the needs of institutions. They won’t accept mass-market products. They won’t accept being forced to be part of an institutionally (geographically) defined community. And, they aren’t willing to accept an institution’s authority at face value. Indeed, many people would rather abandon an institution than try to influence its direction.
The third part of this concept is forward-looking. People still need institutions — only they must look different than they have in the past. They must be citizen-centric. Whereas people in years past have conformed their lives to the needs of institutions, this has inverted and now institutions must conform to the needs of citizens.
Here is the rub: There is no consensus about what that would look like. It is easy to point to successful organizations, mostly for-profit companies, and say that these collectively make up the best practices when it comes to what new institutions ought to look like. For instance, look at Facebook, Apple, Google, and (yes) Microsoft — what do they have in common that makes them useful as institutions to their constituents?
But this may not be a useful comparison. Organizations with a public trust may not be able to model themselves fully on private, for-profit organizations. On still another hand, though, entities like Facebook are becoming de facto public institutions in many important ways. Simply pounding the table and saying “companies can’t be public institutions!” is not an adequate response.
There is not enough concrete work on this in the civic engagement field (my field). Among “practitioners,” people have divided into camps over which technical method of engaging citizens is best. Among the thinkers, much more energy is spent making the case that “civic engagement is good” than is spent thinking about what new and useful institutions might look like.
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.
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