Monthly Archives: September 2013

Gathering photos of public meetings for Legal Frameworks project

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NCDD is working with the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and National Civic League to “crowdsource” some great photos of public meetings.  What photos do you have that you feel depict what “bad” public meetings look like?  And do you have favorite photos that show what “good” public meetings can look like?

Send in your photos this week via email, to NCDD’s Creative Director Andy Fluke (andy@ncdd.org). Send in the highest-quality versions you have, and include a by-line (photographer name, where taken, etc.) and verifies that this is your photo to use/share.  We’ll ask more questions if we need them, and we’ll check with you before using the photos in print.

Your photo may be chosen to help promote an important project we want to bring your attention to. For the past year, Matt Leighninger (director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium) has been spearheading a Working Group on Legal Frameworks for Public Participation with representatives of the American Bar Association, International Municipal Lawyers Association, NCDD, National Civic League, National League of Cities, and International City/County Management Association, as well as leading practitioners and scholars of public participation.

The group has developed several new tools, including a model local ordinance and model amendment to state legislation, in order to help create a more supportive, productive, and equitable environment for public participation. These open source documents will soon be released as a publication of the National Civic League (where your photo could be featured!).

Why develop new legal frameworks for public participation?

Most people dislike official public meetings. This is true for both the public officials who preside over them and the citizens who attend them. Over the last two decades, a wide range of participatory meeting formats and dynamic online tools have emerged – so why do we continue conducting public business in such an outdated fashion?

There are a number of reasons, but one is the legal framework that governs public participation.

Most of these laws and ordinances are over thirty years old; they do not match the expectations and capacities of citizens today, they pre-date the Internet, and they do not reflect the lessons learned in the last two decades about how citizens and governments can work together.

We’re looking for photos from the field to help us illustrate the need for better laws to support better public meetings.  We also welcome your anecdotes and examples that help bolster the need for more a supportive legal framework for public participation.  How have existing laws made it harder for high-quality engagement to take place in your community?  How have you worked around those laws to make sure citizens can be informed by each other and heard by public officials?  Have you help upgrade your city’s legal framework already?  Please send your responses to Andy so he can collect them for the team.

If you want to continue this discussion face-to-face, please join us at the Brookings Institution on October 12 from 9:30 to 11:30 am for “Making Public Participation Legal Again,” a session that will launch the model ordinance and the NCL publication.  Brookings is located at 1775 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC.

the new framework for social studies

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One of my projects for the last several years has been to help write the C3 (College, Career and Citizenship) Framework for the social studies. It was released today by the National Council for the Social Studies, and CIRCLE issued a supportive release.

All states have social studies standards, but these documents tend to be incoherent, excessively long and detailed, and poorly aligned with tests, textbooks, and course requirements. The same has been true in other disciplines, and the now-controversial Common Core is an effort to standardize the standards for English and math to a better model. Our C3 Framework, instead, recognizes the right, power, and obligation of states to set their own standards. But it provides general guidance. Maryland and Kentucky are implementing the C3 Framework, and I hope other states will follow suit. The more states use it, the more the market will grow for improved texts and materials, tests and assessments, and teacher education. Unless they are implemented well, new standards will not make much difference. But they are a start.

One thing I especially like about the C3 is the “instructional arc,” which goes from “developing questions and planning inquiries” to “communicating conclusions and taking informed action.” We authors realized that students don’t get to decide what questions to ask, in a vacuum. The teacher decides that it is time to study Native Americans or the New Deal. But we wanted to indicate that asking questions is the start of real intellectual work.

“Taking informed action” may be controversial, but it is essential, because we learn advanced civic skills through practice. I would make two points in support of the “Informed Action” section: 1) Action can mean many things, not just community service or activism. Solving problems within the classroom or managing a student group would also count. And 2) action is not a newfangled addition to the social studies curriculum. It was a stronger component of civics in the mid-20th century, when courses called “community civics” and “problems of democracy” were very common. It is already mentioned in many state standards, albeit in miscellaneous ways. If anything, action has diminished as political science has become the model for high school civics. We are just putting a bit of it back in.

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Next Coffee Hour Call is at 8pm this Thursday

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Last week’s coffee hour was great, with just a handful of people we compiled a great list of resources and notes (these useful notes are also pasted below).

Whether or not you have participated in past coffee hour calls, your feedback on improving the design is welcome through this survey.  If you are interested in participating on this week’s call, please add your name to the collaborative notes page for the September 19th call.

When: 8pm EST (new time) on Thursday, September 19, 2013

Dial-in number: 1-213-342-3000 Access code: 444839 (hasn’t changed since week 2)

Agenda:

5 min - Small talk as we wait for everyone to join the call.

5 min- Very brief intros (Name, organization, and location in one sentence.  The question/topic that you’d like to discuss on the call in one sentence, if any.)

50 min- Free form discussion.  I’ll provide very light facilitation to periodically bring up the questions that the group raised at the beginning of the call.  If there are late-comers, I’ll ask them to introduce themselves when the conversation comes to a natural break.

NOTES FROM SEPTEMBER 12 COFFEE HOUR (link)

Question: What form could an international online dialog event take in the future if it was at sufficient scale to affect the international political conversation about a situation like the present one in Syria?  I recognize that the moment for something like this has passed, now that the world is primarily talking about diplomacy and non-military options, thankfully. (Lucas Cioffi)

  • Answer: Perhaps these are some elements of a solution here: It would have to be large enough so that everyday citizens from various countries thought that the outcome is representative of their views.  It would have to have multiple ways for people to participate, because people are busy and are available at different times of the day; some people are very passionate about particular issues, so they might have lots of time to participate, however people with limited time should still be able to participate in a meaningful way– i.e. it shouldn’t be a “tyranny of the minority that has lots of time on their hands”. (Lucas Cioffi).
    • There are several online tools also working on other ways to mitigate the “tyranny of the minority that has lots of time on their hands”  (Bentley)
  • Answer: What about forming a community of interest that allows for sharing of data, questions, criteria for making decisions at data.gov? Communities of interest can be critical to the solution, and Data.gov is a great example of how these communities of interest are collaborating.  This helps get past they cynicism that people may have about government-initiated dialogue events.  Existing communities of interest generally have momentum and legitimacy.  Exploring the interrelationships between multiple communities is essential to solving inter-disciplinary problems.  (Sarah)
  • Answer: Look at what the World Bank did in getting a discussion started about poverty: http://blogs.worldbank.org/category/tags/poverty (perhaps this is a better link: https://strikingpoverty.worldbank.org/ which was shared by NCDD member Tiago Peixoto who organized this at the World Bank)  How to get one started about peace and security that is hosted by an entity also keyed into the formal decisionmaking process?
  • Answer: The online space should allow for digressions into many sub topics as necessary. One of the challenges is that issues like this are very complex and currently even threaded discussions get confusing after several levels and multiple threads can be on the same topic. This challenge is currently being tackled in several experimental online tools. (Bentley)
  • Comment: Having large numbers of people on an online tool quickly seems to get out of hand (i.e. newspaper comments).  Large numbers of people do need to participate for credibility/legitimacy but that brings up the problem of structure needed for better participation.  (Bentley)
  • Comment: Integration of in-person and online is necessary, because if something was filmed either live or recorded, it would seem much more “real” and can make it into mainstream TV news.  (Lucas)
  • Comment: Need the analogy of a mute button for online dialogue for moderating the discussion.  Also, http://join.me is a great tool for screen sharing with a free option.  The easier the platform, the better the participation.  (Steve)
  • Follow-up question: What organization(s) could host something like this?  How can Americans hear about something like this and believe that it is worth their time? (Lucas)
    • Answer: There needs to be a way for people to find out about public participation opportunities in general– in addition to this large-scale use case.  Once the data for public notices is made available by local governments (coming soon, it seems) then the app ecosystem can take over and app developers can take the initiative and create apps to notify citizens.  (Steve)
    • Answer: It helps if the government says officially “we want to hear from you” or if there is a process for taking the outcomes through an official channel for action in government.  That’s what I’ve noticed at the state and local level in MA.  Skepticism of the public is high, so it’s a barrier to overcome– people may not think that the process is worthwhile. (Courtney)
    • Answer: It can’t seem like a pre-determined outcome; there has to be an expectation that the conversations are open to new ideas.  (Steve)
    • The Manor Labs model which used Spigit was great both at allowing the public to raise issues and at informing the public of what others thought and fiscal or other data driven realities.  So a model with both dialogue, ways of weighting issues an concerns, and moving certain input on for public decision, or returning it to the public with an explanation of why it wasn’t advancing (by posted video after deliberations by dept heads) is a model that might be adaptable.
    • Some system of identifying an issue/question with the corresponding level on the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation would be one way of letting the public know the type of dialogue they were in.

Question: What are some of the alternatives to “town hall” meetings that are being effectively used to engage citizens in conjunction with more formal government decisionmaking processes? (Sarah Read)

  • Answer: Here’s an answer about what doesn’t work… Telephone townhalls (link to a Google search on the topic) seems to be a weak substitution for the in-person event for a few reasons: 1) they are quite expensive– around $3000 for a 90 minute call to auto-dial perhaps 10,000 residents of an area 2) they do not allow for dialogue; they are very similar to press conferences where residents get to ask the questions, however there’s a statistically low chance that any one individual would have an opportunity to get their question asked and 3) the format takes the form of leader at a podium rather than participants around small group tables having a discussion, however if MaestroConference was used, an organizer/facilitator can have a much more dialogic & participatory event.  (Lucas Cioffi)
  • Yet that is a format many seem comfortable with and suspicious of actual dialogue: http://www.deliberative-democracy.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=176:bridging-the-gap-between-public-officials-and-the-public&catid=47:contributions&Itemid=89  And that is a question – how to help elected officials become more comfortable with more productive dialogue models
  • Answer: I’ve seen some different formats used at the state and local level for public officials to engage the public around a project for which they need public input or engagement. Usually these meetings are heavily facilitated (by a third party) and the officials make it clear from the start the purpose of the meeting and what they will do with public input. Or, they take a different direction and allow for the public to primarily engage with one another, with the public officials present and listening. (Courtney)
  • I agree that facilitation, pre-planning, and a clear link to what comes next (even if its more dialogue) all help dialogue!

Question: What is the difference between buy-in and ownership? (David Plouffe) Clarification (Lucas Cioffi): what is the context for this question– are we talking about ownership of a solution that comes out of a dialogue event?

  • Answer: One can buy-in without owning, right? For instance, members of a working group can buy-in to a decided action/next step, but they don’t have to own it – perhaps there is a convenor who owns it (Courtney)
  • Answer: Buy-in can be translated as showing up with some belief that the process will make a difference; ownership means being willing to be responsible for keeping it productive, following through in some way, and showing up again
  • Answer: Buy in can mean will allow the result. Ownership implies a co-creator in the results.

Question: What are some effective ways to handle an unruly participant at a town hall meeting? (Lucas Cioffi)

  • Answer: A lot of this comes down to how the meeting is structured, and how the process and ground rules are outlined at the outset of the meeting. If participants are provided the ground rules and explained the process outright, then those who are not acting in accordance with the rules/process can be reminded of that and there is a bit of pressure from the group (If we can abide, you can abide). There are tools too that can help – taking comments in multiple formats, to allow for more collection of input (e.g. written and spoken input), or focusing the meeting on dialogue in smaller groups, rather than in the larger setting (where there is usually more observed posturing). I took part in a public meeting where following a presentation from state agency staff, the public was invited into small group dialogues to raise questions, concerns, and exchange information that would be shared with the agency. Agency staff also roamed the room and listened in, were available to answer questions. Following, at the request of some members of the public, a more traditional “listening” session was held, where members of the public had two minutes at the microphone. Many people left at that point, because they felt they had been heard. That also quieted the more disruptive people, who no longer had the audience they wanted. (Courtney)
  • Answer: Structuring the participation as small-group discussion rather than audience vs. podium increases peer-to-peer pressure for civil behavior by creating a sense that the space is shared and by communicating from the outset that this is a place for dialogue and solutions rather than just complaints.  (Lucas)
  • Reviewing at the outset “guidelines for discussion” and asking participants if they agree to follow or have proposed additions or concerns, makes it much easier to refer troublesome participants to more civil behaviors.  And something else that I find really helps – if someone is venting (sincerely, not just to disrupt) it can very steadying to say something like “that is clearly very upsetting to you, and makes it difficult to discuss calmly. [Value/concern] is very important to you”.  Once people feel accepted they can often listen and participate more effectively.

Question: Does anyone know of any measurement/assessment tools for classroom deliberations, particularly around STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) topics? (Sara Drury)

Question: What online tools are in use by NCDD member? (Bentley)

  • Answer: NCDD members compiled this list of four dozen tools in use by NCDD members in 2010, but there is certainly room for updating that list or improving it by displaying it in a new format.
  • Answer: ICMA.org has a knowledge network related to local gov and some dialogue (Sarah Read)
  • Answer: Two sites that publish useful studies about online platforms that government entities can use for collaboration include the IBM Business of Government site, and the Knight Commission site which focuses on the information needs of communities in a democracy.
  • Answer: ParticipateDB
  • Answer: http://commons.codeforamerica.org/apps has nearly 700 tools for public engagement, and they are categorized.
  • Comment from several folks: Know where you’re starting and what goals you want to achieve, because one can get misguided if they have a tool and are looking for ways to apply it.  The better way is to choose a tool after deciding on the session’s desired purpose (e.g., informational, discussional, etc.)..

Question: Is there anything like a recipe book that can help pretty much anyone become a good facilitator with online tools?  How does one know where to start? (Stephen)

Seeing Food as a Commons Opens Up Creative New Possibilities

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What would the world look like if we began to re-conceptualize food as a commons?  Jose Luis Vivero Pol of the Centre for Philosophy of Law at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium has done just that in a recent essay, “Food as a Commons:  Reframing the Narrative of the Food System.”  

The piece is impressive for daring to imagine how the world’s estimated 668 million hungry people might eat, and how all of us would become healthier, if we treated more elements of the food production and distribution system as commons.  Instead of managing food as a private good that can only be produced and allocated through markets, re-conceptualizing food as a commons helps us imagine “a more sustainable, fairer and farmer-centered food system,” writes Vivero Pol. 

One reason that the commons reframing is so useful is that it helps us see the ubiquity of enclosures in the food system.  We can begin to see the galloping privatization of farmland, water, energy and seeds.  We can see the concentration of various food sectors and the higher prices and loss of consumer sovereignty that comes from oligopoly control. 

Enclosure is snatching shared resources from us and preventing us from managing them to maximize access and good nutrition.  This is often known these days as “resource grabbing,” as companies and national governments race to seize as many abundant, cheap natural resources as they can on an international scale.  This is one reason for the many pernicious enclosures of land commons in Africa and Latin America in recent years. There is a huge exodus from traditional and indigenous lands as China, Saudi Arabia, Korea, hedge funds and others buy up natural resources.  These enclosures are moving us “from diversity to uniformity, from complexity to homoegeneity, and from richness to impoverishment,” writes Vivero Pol.  

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for reform of testing

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Over at the National Journal, Fawn Johnson reports that the Common Core standards for English and math have become controversial because of testing. “Now that it’s time for states to actually measure how their students are doing, it’s a lot harder to gloss over the problems with feel-good talking points.”

In an invited response, I argue that the existing standardized tests are bad–19th century tools–and the Common Core offers the opportunity to improve them. Progress may be halting, controversial, and painful, but I still favor innovation. In my comment, I argue that the existing tests are bad because they are separated from learning; overly standardized; completely private (so that they don’t assess how children communicate and collaborate with each other, even though that’s actually the purpose of English/Language Arts); and secret in ways that reduce legitimacy.

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Online Education: Taking Stock of Employers & Students to Improve Higher Ed

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In our most recent research, employers and community college students expressed doubt about the quality of online education. Just 17 percent of employers said they'd prefer a graduate from a top-tier college with an online degree over a student from an average college with a traditional degree. Forty-two percent of community college students say they think people learn less online than in-person, and many students who are currently taking online classes say they wish they could take fewer.

Of course, online education is a rapidly evolving issue. The field and its technology will get more sophisticated, and students and employers will gain more experience and exposure. As such, we anticipate their attitudes will evolve as well.

Still, many people are banking on online education as an avenue to increased access and decreased cost. As such, online is increasingly becoming part of the higher ed mainstream. All types of post-secondary institutions are offering various online programs, from universally-accessible MOOCs to online/in-class hybrid programs to online-only degrees.

About a third of all undergrad students today take at least one of their classes online. Past research does suggest that some forms of online education can result in equal or better learning outcomes for students compared to traditional instruction. Plus, online education provides the flexibility many students need to combine school with work and family responsibilities. Online classes can also sometimes be the only way to complete requirements for often oversubscribed or problematically scheduled courses.

At the same time, low-achieving students seem to benefit more from in-class or hybrid instruction over online (for example, see here and here). Those who are already struggling to keep up with their college work are more likely to drop out of online classes than classes taught face-to-face.

Within this rapidly-changing, high-stakes context, the findings from this research raise some very important questions that leaders in higher ed really ought to examine.

It is unclear whether the current trajectory of online education is adequately meeting the diverse needs of community college students. What can colleges do to make sure online education is an effective option for the students who want it or can best benefit from it and keep it from becoming a burden or obstacle for those who don’t?

It also seems employers remain wary of online degrees and continue to prefer candidates with traditional degrees from average institutions over candidates with online degrees from top-tier universities. What do higher ed leaders need to do to ensure that students who have made vast investments in their education are competitive in the workforce? Employers' skepticism may also indicate a general need for better communication between colleges and employers about the knowledge and skills the latter seek in their employees.

Other stakeholders matter in this discussion as well, and we must also take continuous stock of their perspectives. We need to hear from other student groups, of course, but also, and in particular, from faculty, who will of course be key in adopting, improving and expanding online education.

And we can't afford to wait - among the community college students we spoke to, 46 percent said they took at least some of their classes online, and 5 percent said they took all of their classes online. Online education already affects many current students. It behooves us to make sure that online learning is adopted in ways that meet the needs of students and society.


Documentary: Participatory Budgeting in Belo Horizonte

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Through the Facebook Participatory Budgeting group I came across a documentary about Belo Horizonte’s PB. The documentary, by Joao Ramos de Almeida, provides a unique view of the functioning of one of the oldest PBs in Brazil.

Among other things, the documentary shows how the process leads to a degree of civic empowerment and activism rarely seen in traditional governing models. It is particularly interesting to see how citizens contest, for instance, the cost estimates of public works made by the city administration. The documentary also shows how PB manages to engage citizens in an extremely time consuming process. It is also interesting to see that, while there is some degree of deliberation in the PB process, much of it is also about negotiation between the different communities involved.

Among other things, it shows that Belo Horizonte’s PB is far from perfect, and the suspicion of some degree of co-optation of some PB participants by the administration highlights difficulties that are inherent to many participatory processes. To some, it might come across as a sobering message. Yet, when looking at participatory initiatives, we should not only compare their functioning to an ideal vision of democracy. In this case, we should also compare it to the status quo, that is, how public budgeting takes place in the absence of public participation.

For those interested in citizen engagement this documentary (English subtitles, 55 mins) is worth watching.

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Also read

Participatory Budgeting and Digital Democracy: the Belo Horizonte Case

The Effects of Participatory Budgeting on Infant Mortality in Brazil

Participatory Budgeting: Seven Defining Characteristics

Participatory Budgeting and Technology: Innovations in Open Government

The Participatory Turn: Participatory Budgeting Comes to America


why engineers should study Elinor Ostrom

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(New Haven) Next week, I will lead a discussion of the Nobel-Prize-winning research of the late Elinor Ostrom. I will be with a group of engineers, natural scientists, and social scientists who are concerned about water, one of the basic scarce and contested natural resources.

Ostrom studied water-management, but she was a political scientist concerned with “civic engagement,” especially the practices that ordinary people develop to manage common resources. Why should an engineer or a scientist concerned with water care about civic engagement, as Ostrom analyzed it?

One reason is that ordinary people’s deliberate and creative action is a more important condition of successful resource-management than analysts had thought before Lin Ostrom wrote. The dominant 20th century view held that resources were either public or private. If they were private, the owners would have incentives to protect them (although market failures might occur under specific conditions). Public resources, however, would be destroyed by the Tragedy of the Commons in the form of free-riding, overuse, underinvestment, etc. Thus public resources had to be privatized or else governed by a central state. Water was quasi-public because you can’t own the oceans or clouds (“fugitive resources”), although you can own a gallon of water or a spring. Applying the theory that public goods were doomed, 20th century regimes either privatized or nationalized forests, grazing lands, and water. The results were frequently catastrophic, contributing to mass human and animal death. (See Governing the Commons, p. 23. All subsequent quotes are also from that book.)

Ostrom discovered that, contrary to the simplistic theories of collective action, people were capable of managing public goods, including waterways and fisheries. They did not always succeed, but they did not always fail, either. Variation in the ways that they worked mattered to the outcomes. To succeed, they needed institutional arrangements, skills, norms, motivations, and habits. All of these factors then became important predictors of preserving or destroying natural resources. An engineer or a chemist cannot ignore these factors if she actually wants to contribute to good water management. Discovering a process or inventing a technical system does no good unless someone uses it. That someone cannot be an omnicompetent and incorruptible state, because there is no such thing. Somehow, people have to adopt any technical innovation, and often they can contribute to designing it as well.

An example is a crisis of overfishing off Alanya, Turkey (pp. 19-20). The fishers solved the problem through an ingenious system of randomly assigning all the licensed boats to specific starting points and rotating these locations on a fixed schedule. Privatization could not have solved the problem because this was already a system of private boats and workers, and the fish are a “fugitive resource.” Nor could it have been solved by the state, except at high cost. The fishers knew exactly where to put each location, and the state would have had to recreate that knowledge—assuming that it acted fairly and without corruption. The best solution was a self-created one.

If the first reason to read Ostrom is that she studied citizenship and found that it mattered, the second is that she was a citizen. She was a scientist who won countless NSF grants as well as the Nobel and a MacArthur “genius” award. But she was a scientist who wanted to improve the world, and that made her a model citizen. For instance, after introducing the prisoner’s dilemma, she writes, “As long as people are described as prisoners, policy prescriptions will address this metaphor. I would rather address the question how to enhance the capabilities of those involved to change the constraining rules of the game to lead to outcomes other than remorseless tragedy (p. 7).”

This is a complex pair of sentences, worth unpacking. Ostrom’s ultimate goal is to avoid “remorseless tragedy.” The stakes are high, and they are defined in moral terms, even though Ostrom is a scientist. To avoid tragedy, she will not propose direct solutions. Instead, she wants to “enhance the capabilities of those involved.” These people will not merely act within a system, discussing issues and making choices. The limiting case of a person who makes a choice within a fixed system is the prisoner in a prisoner’s dilemma. “Individuals who have no self-organizing and self-governing authority are stuck in a singe-tier world. The structure of their problems is given to them” (p. 54). In contrast, Ostrom wants people to change the rules. And she is part of that process, because she discloses her own goal in the first-person singular: “I would rather address. …” In real life, Ostrom actually worked with peasants and fishers because she had to learn from them and because she wanted them to benefit from her findings.

In short, Ostrom not only discovered that complex social/environmental systems involve deliberate human collective action. She also treated social science as part of those systems, and herself as one of the human beings who was trying to manage the commons.

Other insights from Governing the Commons:

“Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low-cost by external authorities, I argue that ‘getting the institutions right’ is a difficult, time-consuming, conflict-invoking process” (p. 14).

“… as long as analysts assume that individuals cannot change … situations themselves, they do not ask what internal or external variables can enhance or impede the efforts of communities of individuals to deal creatively and constructively with perverse problems such as the tragedy of the commons” (p. 21)

“Empirically validated theories of human organization will be essential ingredients of a policy science that can inform decisions about the likely consequences of a multitude of ways of organizing human activities. Theoretical inquiry involves a search for regularities. … One can, however, get trapped in one’s own intellectual web” (p. 24)

“The basic strategy is to identify those aspects of the physical, cultural, and institutional setting that are likely to affect [the results.] Once one has all the needed information, one can then abstract from the richness of the empirical situation to devise a playable game that will capture the essence of the problems the individuals are facing” (p. 55).

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The Case for Stewardship (not Ownership) of Antiquities, Language, DNA and More

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In this age of marauding markets, it almost seems quaint to ask, “Who owns culture?”  We know the answer.  When push comes to shove, the owners of copyright, trademarks and patents own everything.  We may think that the music, images and stories of our culture belong to us, but as a matter of law, in the 165+ countries that have signed the Berne Convention, our designated role is....to buy (and not use someone else's "property.")   

A new book of essays complicates this picture.  Negotiating Culture:  Heritage, Ownership and Intellectual Property -- just published by the University of Massachusetts Press -- points out some of the distinct limits to “intellectual property’s” dominion.  The book is a series of essays by academics from various disciplines that explores how social practice and culture have their own moral legitimacy and social power -- enough to push back on claimed property rights. 

The book chronicles controversies over who should have legal rights of ownership and control over Native American remains, Green and Roman antiquities, works of art looted by the Nazis, among many other objects and resources.  We are asked to consider whether culture should be treated as property that can be bought and sold (and treated accordingly), or whether it must be considered inalienable, or not suitable for sale on the market, and treated with the utmost dignity and respect.  

These are the magic words:  It seems that the core issue in so many of these disputes is a matter of identity, dignity, respect and, of course, power.

Museums are increasingly at the epicenter of cultural ownership issues these days.  The 2005 trial in Italy of Marion True, the former curator of classical art at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is a beautiful case study of how social norms about the ownership of ancient antiquities have dramatically shifted.  Prior to that trial, museums often bought or accepted donated antiquities without too much thought about the provenance of the work.  After all, antiquities don’t usually come with title deeds or receipts, and it was an open secret that many of them were dug up by looters and spirited out of the country into the hands of profit-minded dealers.

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Discovering Justice

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I am proud to have joined the board of Discovering Justice and will attend my first board meeting later today. Discovering Justice teaches younger children about the law and the justice system in ways that increase their appreciation of legal norms and institutions while also encouraging them to use “the power of their own voices.”

Civic education is delivered by the 165,000 full-time social studies teachers in American schools. It is funded by states and localities as part of the general education system. However, independent nonprofit organizations serve important roles in producing materials and lesson plans, developing new models and approaches (“R&D”), convening and educating teachers, and advocating for supportive policies. For instance, I am proud to serve on the board of Street Law, Inc., and my organization works closely with iCivics and Generation Citizen on their evaluations.

Discovering Justice is highly unusual in focusing on younger children. Although some of the other civics NGOs have programs for grades k-8, they all emphasize adolescence. Much less is known about the civic development of young children and the lasting impact of providing civic education in the early grades. As the eminent political scientist Sir Bernard Crick lamented in 1999, “there is no political Piaget.” The way to find out what actually works is generally to develop, test, and refine interventions that may work. Usable research almost always begins with practical experimentation. Discovering Justice is doing that work for civic education k-8.

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