Monthly Archives: December 2013

Fun & Games with CommunityMatters

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Our friends and partners at CommunityMatters have been having a lot of fun recently, and we wanted to share a bit about it so that NCDD members aren’t missing out! CM recently hosted a conference call on Creating Fun Places, and you can find the notes for the call here and/or listen to the audio of the call here. We also encourage you to check out their follow-up blog post about lessons from the call below or find the original on the CM blog by clicking here.

5 Tips for Creating Playful Places in Your Town

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Mike Lanza of Playborhood and Brian Corrigan of Oh Heck Yeah take play pretty seriously. Mike turned his front yard into a neighborhood gathering place focused on play, and Brian’s organizing a large-scale street arcade in downtown Denver. Mike and Brian both love having fun, but they also know that play is beneficial for their communities.

Mike’s house is an epicenter for play, attracting kids and adults alike with fun fountains, sandboxes and even an in-ground trampoline. He’ll tell you that after creating this neighborhood gathering spot, people on his block are more physically active, more social and they have more fun. These benefits are characteristic of third places – spaces outside of work or home where people gather.

For Brian, Oh Heck Yeah’s focus on turning downtown Denver into an immersive street arcade is about building trust among strangers, generating new ideas and inspiring partnerships that can make the city an even better place to live, work and (of course) play.

On our last CommunityMatters conference call, Mike and Brian shared their ideas for creating more playful places. If you want to reap the benefits of play in your own community, here are five tips for getting started:

1. Think Like an Inventor

Have a vision for transforming a dull space in your community into a vibrant and playful place? Go ahead, dream big! But, when it comes to making things happen, think like an inventor and start with a prototype. The iterative approach of prototyping means you can experiment with an idea to refine the concept and work out the kinks.

Take Brian’s advice and start with the 1.0 version of an idea.  What does your grand idea look like when it is stripped down to its simplest, easiest and least expensive form? As you grow toward the 10.0 version, you’ll gain momentum by building a cadre of supporters, ensuring your biggest version of your big idea is successful.

If you’re interested in learning more about prototyping, don’t miss our December call on A Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper Approach to Community Action. Register now! 

2. Legalize Fun

It’s easy to talk about creating great places, but altering public spaces around town means taking risks. If your local laws hinder improvised solutions to traffic problems, start advocating for a local city repair ordinance.

Inspired by the success of Share it Square, a neighborhood project to make a traffic intersections more interesting, safe and playful, the City of Portland created an ordinance allowing for locally-led improvement projects. As long as adjacent property owners approve and safety is maintained, citizens can receive permits for intersection improvements. Use Portland’s ordinance as the foundation for legalizing fun in your town.

3. Create a Draw

Build places where people want to stay.

Public spaces rely on one essential element for success – the presence of people. If you want people to engage in a playful space, make it visible. Mike suggests starting with a bench – just a place to sit. Add a solar-powered tea or coffee stand as an attractor. Or, take a playful approach by installing a ball pit or swing set. Invite people to come to the space at a particular time, and give them a reason to be there.

Find more ideas for attracting people by listening to our call on Third Places.

4. Engage Creative Minds

Capitalize on the ideas and talents of the creative sector, the artists, designers and actors in town. How can you enliven a public space with musicians or dancers?

Through Oh Heck Yeah, Brian is partnering with organizations like the Colorado Symphony and the Denver Art Museum to bring his project to life. In Mike’s front yard, a local artist created a mural of the neighborhood to help kids explore and understand their environment.

There are endless ways to engage creative minds in placemaking projects, especially when you’re focused on play. But, if you want something that resonates with your community, seek art that is culturally meaningful, that incorporates the skills of local people and showcases the distinct assets of your city or town.

5. Try Something!

Get outside and try something. If you’re starved for ideas, start with our list of 75 Seriously Fun Ways to Make Your Town More Playful. Or, check out our follow up: 25 (More) Ways to Make Your Town More Playful. And, don’t miss the playful ideas from Mike, Brian and our fabulous callers. You can find their thoughts by reading our call notes or listening to the call recording here.

You can find the original blog post from CommunityMatters at www.communitymatters.org/blog/five-tips-creating-playful-places-your-town.

Is There Really a Generation Gap on Social Security?

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It’s reasonably clear that younger and older Americans think differently about tattoos. And maybe there’s a divide over e-mail versus texting. But now that Congress and the President are resuming talks about long-term federal budget issues, proposals to reform Social Security to stabilize its costs are back on the table.

In contrast, opinion leaders like Paul Krugman and Senator Elizabeth Warren say we should expand Social Security, arguing that current retirement policies will leave too many Americans living in poverty in their later years.

So that raises a question: Are the views and preferences of younger and older Americans really at odds when it comes to Social Security? What do polls show, and what happens when Americans of all ages have a chance to talk together about this issue?

The answers to these questions will be important for us to explore as we and our elected officials discuss and negotiate solutions to the issue of Social Security.

A quick glance at some recent polling does seem to show some wide gaps among the generations:



As you can see in the charts above, a solid two-thirds of people over 65 say preserving Social Security is more important than reducing the federal deficit, while less than half of Americans under 30 agree. Also, fewer older Americans worry that the costs of Social Security and Medicare will burden the next generation.

Numbers like these fuel claims that the nation’s seniors are “greedy geezers” preoccupied with protecting their turf no matter what the consequences. Looking at these numbers alone sets up an “us-versus-them,” zero-sum public discussion from the get-go. That might be unavoidable in some situations, but it doesn’t look to be the case here.

For one thing, a closer look at a range of polls suggests that the country isn’t neatly divided into diametrically opposed camps. As you might expect, ninety percent of seniors say Social Security is very important to them personally, but so do a whopping 8 in 10 Americans between 35 and 64. The numbers drop for people under 35, but more than half of this group also says the program is personally important to them.



Furthermore, if you ask about some widely-discussed ideas for stabilizing Social Security’s finances for the coming decades, you’ll also find the generations pretty much in agreement.



  • More than 6 in 10 Americans of all ages support the idea of raising payroll taxes on higher income earners, with only a few percentage points difference between older and younger people.
  • More than half of Americans of all ages say reducing benefits for high-income seniors is an idea they can support, again with very little variation by age.
  • But proposals to increase the retirement age aren’t that popular with anyone. Among people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, fewer than 4 in 10 back this approach. Since nearly all proposals phase in the higher retirement age, most people over 65 wouldn’t even be affected by it. Nonetheless, fewer than half of seniors see this as a good solution.

The prospect of the generations warring over Social Security, with “greedy geezers” blocking any and all reforms and younger Americans blithely cavalier to the economic problems facing seniors, may make good headlines, but the public’s views on Social Security are actually far more nuanced. And this is even more evident, we find, when people of all ages have time to think and talk about the issue together.

"Nobody wants to touch it, but it has got to be looked at."

Last year, when the National Issues Forums convened citizens in conversations across the nation to deliberate on the federal budget, older participants repeatedly said they had decided to attend specifically because of their worries about how government debt might affect their grandchildren. Rather than refusing to talk about Social Security, seniors in the forums often brought it up. Younger and older participants alike agreed that political leaders lack the courage to discuss needed modifications. A Kansas man made a fairly typical comment: “Nobody wants to touch it, but it has got to be looked at.”

But forum participants also talked repeatedly about the need to protect Americans who struggle economically in whatever decisions we make about the budget—especially in the wake of the Great Recession: “Some people lost a lot,” one woman in the DC area pointed out. “They lost a lot of their IRA money.”

It’s normal for people to approach public policy issues based on their own experiences and situations. People on Social Security or nearing retirement see the program as a concrete factor in their personal lives. At ages 25, 26 or 27, not so much.

But that doesn’t mean that younger and older Americans are gearing up for battle on the future of Social Security. In fact, as we’ve seen in the National Issues Forums, given the chance, citizens of all ages are ready to weigh the options pragmatically, bringing a spirit of empathy and good will to the discussion.

Beyond the Polls is a joint endeavor of Public Agenda, the National Issues Forums, and the Kettering Foundation. Sign up to receive an email update when we have a new Beyond the Polls post.

Welcome to Beyond the Polls

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Welcome to Beyond the Polls, our regular commentary on what Americans are thinking about pivotal issues our country and communities face. Each month, we offer a second look — a deeper look — at public opinion. We try to put survey results in context and enrich them by drawing on our extensive experience listening to citizens in both research and community settings over the years.

Our aim is to explore and understand the hopes, values, concerns, and priorities people bring to today’s issues — the public questions and controversies we think about every day. Just as important, we want to juxtapose the views that polling typically captures with what happens to those views when citizens have a chance to absorb and weigh different options for addressing issues and hear what other citizens have to say about them.

So what led us to develop Beyond the Polls? Here is some of what’s behind the series:

  • Polls often reflect top-of-the-head thinking. Surveys capture what people may be thinking at any given time, depending on how they’re feeling about things, what they know, what they’ve heard, and what’s happening in their own lives and communities and in the media. Unless we also take a look at this context, polling results have limited value.
  • The public's views are not static. Polling results can change over time as people move beyond this top-of-the-head thinking and consider the questions at hand more deeply. As Pubic Agenda co-founder Dan Yankelovich has pointed out, people's views tend to shift based on whether or not they have had time and opportunities to learn about an issue, consider it from different perspectives and decide where they stand. When they do this, sometimes their thinking becomes clearer. Sometimes their outlook becomes less dogmatic and more flexible. Sometimes people re-arrange their priorities as they recognize and think through trade-offs. Sometimes people, by talking with others, discover something that is very important to them that may not have been evident beforehand. Polls can fail to discriminate between top-of-the-head reactions and these more stable views.
  • Leaders cherry-pick at times. With so many polls available, and so many people quoting them for all sorts of reasons, what appears in the media can be piecemeal and, at times, misleading. In addition to the reasons we mention above, survey results often change depending on how questions are asked and what aspect of an issue a survey organization chooses to address. Sometimes pundits, elected officials, candidates and others zero in on one or two poll results—the ones that best match their own preferences—and blithely ignore the rest. We don’t do that. We examine and comment on all the best polls and look at what they’re saying—taken together.
  • Polling can’t substitute for democracy. Don't get us wrong, we love opinion polls. Public Agenda designs and conducts surveys, and the National Issues Forums and the Kettering Foundation regularly consult opinion research in their work to get citizens talking about tough problems and working together to solve them. But democracy means much more than conveying poll results on citizens’ preferences to elected officials. Citizens have a real job to do grappling with tough issues and listening to the views of others.
  • Sometimes polls are on the wrong side of history. Because all of us move through a learning curve as we think through issues and hear from others, polls can change dramatically over time. In some of the most important moments of our history, public opinion lagged behind the arc of change. For example, few public views have shifted more radically than those toward women in the workforce. In a 1938 Gallup poll, more than three quarters of respondents disapproved of "a married woman earning money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her." Twenty-two percent approved. In the late 1980s, opinion had nearly reversed, with 77 percent approving and 22 percent disapproving. These days, the question seems outdated. Gallup and other polling organizations are now asking questions about equal pay for women and men staying home to care for the children. Historical shifts like this mean we need to view polling as one piece of information. Polling is not a full or complete rendering of what the American people support, or what they may come to support — and consider indispensable — over time.

We’re eager to hear your responses to Beyond the Polls. Sign up to receive an email update when we have a new Beyond the Polls post. And, if you have a question or issue that could benefit from our review, let us know. We’d be pleased to consider adding it to our list of potential topics. Interested in continuing the conversation? Join us on Twitter with the hashtag #BeyondPolls.

The Right of Initiative to public consultations

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Method: The Right of Initiative to public consultations

Dec 2 '13
Author: 
Laurence Bherer
The Right of Initiative to public consultations was adopted by the Montréal city council in September 2009 and has been in effect since January 1, 2010. This new democratic tool allows the Montrealers to initiate a public consultation on any matter that concerns the city or their borough. It is...

Québec city neighbourhood councils

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Method: Québec city neighbourhood councils

Dec 2 '13
Author: 
Laurence Bherer
Neighbourhood councils have been a part of Québec city’s democratic life for 20 years. The first experiences were implemented by the Ville de Québec in 1993, in order to get the citizens more closely involved in municipal politics. The concept was extended to the whole city territory in 1997. Today,...

The National Dialogue Network Begins Its Public Analysis Phase

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We are pleased to highlight the post below, which came from NCDD Sustaining Member and 2012 NCDD Catalyst Award winner John Spady of the National Dialogue Network. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Hello to all our NCDD friends,

NDN logo

The National Dialogue Network (NDN) — recipient of the 2012 NCDD Catalyst Award in “Civic Infrastructure” — has entered “Cycle 4″ of its original 5-cycle process to design and demonstrate a system for coordinated and collaborative conversations on important national issues. The first issue selected for national conversations was Poverty & Wealth in America.

I am asking readers of this NCDD blog to make a small contribution of time during this brief public analysis phase. Click on both of the links below and just focus on what interests you. Try to understand “what the data is saying.” Then add a comment at the end of this post with any insights you are able to glean from the preliminary report or Excel file. In this current phase, the general public is urged to help interpret the preliminary results received and to submit insights for review and inclusion in the 2013 Summary Report. All assistance will be acknowledged.

If you want a special “cross tab” for analysis, or have any other questions, just let me know — leave a comment below or call our toll free message line: 800-369-2342

Thanks for your help… and now here are the links you’ll need:

Number of self-selected participants who answered the national Opinionnaire® Survey as of Nov. 23, 2013: 105

Preliminary graphic report: http://is.gd/2013NDNPrelimReport.

Excel data (XLS) download: http://is.gd/2013NDN105XLS.

MOOCs are old and shopworn

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This is from a Connected Planet article in 1997:

Ah, spring – the time of year when students decide to skip classes en masse and sit outside enjoying the sun and fresh air. For the students of the University of Phoenix Online Campus, however, that ritual loses something in the translation: To duck their professors, all they have to do is turn off their PCs and unhook their modems.

But it’s a tradeoff that they’re willing to make in order to earn their undergraduate and graduate degrees on a part-time basis from the comfort of their own homes. The University of Phoenix opened its doors to its first 12 on-line students in 1989, and it now boasts 2500 students, 250 faculty members and eight degree program. …

However, one education industry analyst wonders how much credibility an on-line degree really has in the marketplace. “I would imagine there would be a bias against on-line degrees of any kind,” said Rick Hesel, principal at Art & Science Group. “Face-to-face contact with the faculty is considered to be a mark of quality, and because this program doesn’t have that, I think both employers and prospective students would be wary.”

But that could change soon, as the big names in education get into the on-line arena, Hesel said.

“Once you see Harvard or other prestigious MBA programs getting into it, all bets are off,” he said.

And Hesel believes that will be sooner rather than later.

Contrast that with the talk of a “MOOC Revolution” in (for instance) this 2103 Tom Friedman article. Friedman, like many others, presumes that MOOCs (massive open online courses) are very new, rapidly spreading, highly promising, originating in institutions like Stanford and Harvard with distinguished educators like Michael Sandel, and motivated by the goals of better and more accessible education. But, as Aaron Bady argues in Liberal Education, even the word “MOOC” is now almost six years old, and the basic practice dates to 1989. Even then, students were assigned to online discussion groups and showed videos of lectures. MOOCs did not originate at luminous, global intellectual powerhouses but at the University of Phoenix, which is now rapidly shrinking and faces widespread criticism for achieving a loan default rate higher than its graduation rate. Dispersion of the MOOC model has been slow and halting due to poor reputation and questionable impact. The prediction that “Harvard and other prestigious MBA programs” would soon adopt MOOCs turned out to be 16 years premature.

As Bady argues, there is no reason to rush to adopt MOOCs. We are not going through a “MOOC revolution.” Rather, we have extensive experience and it is not encouraging. To be sure, online courses have educational potential; a CIRCLE paper outlines some advantages. But we must avoid the hype. If college administrators were asked whether they wanted to implement the University of Phoenix’s 1989 model instead of Stanford’s latest MOOC, I doubt they would feel as excited.

(I take this overall argument from Bady, but I found the 1997 article quoted above.)

The post MOOCs are old and shopworn appeared first on Peter Levine.

Peter Levine on Making Public Participation Legal

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This post is shared from the blog of supporting NCDD member and professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Boston, Dr. Peter Levine. Peter shares a humorous take on the not-so-funny state of public meetings, and highlights the NCDD-supported Making Participation Legal report. For more info about this important intitiative and how it was created, check out our write up on its release.

Making Public Participation Legal

This is pretty much how “public participation” looks when it takes the form of a meeting with officials at the head of the table defending their policies, and their fellow citizens lining up to speak:

The “Parks and Recreaton” satire hits so close to home because public forums usually use awful formats and methods. As Matt Leighninger writes:

The vast majority of public meetings are run according to a formula that hasn’t changed in decades: officials and other experts present, and citizens are given three-minute increments to either ask questions or make comments. There is very little interaction or deliberation. Turnout at most public meetings is very low – local officials often refer to the handful of people who typically show up as the “usual suspects.” But if the community has been gripped by a controversy, turnout is often high, and the three-minute commentaries  can last long into the night. On most issues, the public is either angry or absent; either way, very little is accomplished (Making Public Participation Legal, p. 3).

One reason is the laws that allow or require public participation: they are poorly structured. The Working Group on Legal Frameworks for Public Participation has developed frameworks for better state and local laws. Their model legislation and other materials are presented in a new report, Making Public Participation Legal, available from the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC).

You can find Peter’s original post here: http://peterlevine.ws/?p=12660.

New Zealand’s Freerange Explores the Commons

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A New Zealand publication, Freerange, has published an artful collection of essays about the commons for a popular readership.  The publication focuses on a wide range of commons themes, including urban commons, global pharmaceuticals, Maori society, the commons possibilities in food activism, and early childhood education as a commons.  A free download can be had here, or a beautifully designed print version can be ordered here.

I was captivated by an interview with Anne Salmond, a New Zealand historian and anthropologist, who pondered the different cosmological outlooks of Māori, as commoners, and Westerners, as neoliberals.  She notes that, for the West, “the Order of Things, which is based on Cartesian logic, divides mind from matter, the observer from the observed, and culture from nature…..”  

But for the Māori, not to mention quantum physics, brain sciences and the life sciences, a very different order prevails – “the Order of Relations.”  This worldview, she explains, bases its forms of order on “complementary pairs of elements and forces linked in open-ended arrays, often ordered as networks or webs (for example, the internet), interacting in exchanges that drive change while working toward equilibrium.” 

Such relational perspectives are much more adaptive and open to collaboration and incoroproation of other ideas, says Salmond, than the non-adaptive myths of Western thought” that are destroying our bio-physical systems.  It is easy to slip into the dualism of Western thought that polarizes “the material” with “the spiritual.”  The point is that in relational worldviews, the two are integrated.

In an essay, Barnaby Bennett reflects on “the commons that can’t be named” -- and that therefore remain invisible  He notes that our own language establishes “a veil between our lives and that which-is-not-named, the things and stuff that are too big, too small, too complex, too profound, too obvious, too complete or too ubiquitous to see.  In doing so it is too easy to forget the common grounding of reality.”

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