Monthly Archives: May 2014

CommonsFest in Greece: A Movement Expands

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For a country suffering from economic devastation and political upheaval, Greece is not accustomed to bursts of optimism.  But last weekend provided a showcase of hopeful, practical solutiions at the second annual CommonsFest, held in Heraklion on the island of Crete.  The festival brought together a dazzling array of commons and peer production communities:  hackers, open knowledge advocates, practitioners of open design, hardware and manufacturing, open health innovators, sustainable farming experts, among many others. 

Vasilis Kostakis, a political economist and founder of the P2P Lab in Greece, noted that the “key contribution of CommonsFest has been to bring together so many components of the commons movement and raise awareness amongst them.  People had the chance to meet, talk and learn from each other with the aim of creating the seed of a larger movement.” Kostakis said that the crowdfunded festival “illustrates that the philosophy that has emerged from free software and open content communities actually extends to many aspects of our daily lives.”

The event drew hundreds of people to twenty-four talks, nine workshops and an exhibition of many commons-based technologies and projects.  Kostakis said that CommonsFest participants are preparing a forthcoming “declaration for the protection and the strengthening of the Commons” that will soon be published in Greek and then translated into other languages.  [I will add the declaration to this blog post as an update when it is available. –DB] 

CommonsFest also featured an open art space with more than 30 video works licensed under Creative Commons licenses and the screening of a new documentary, “Knowledge as a Common:  Communities of Production and Sharing in Greece,”organized by the Cinema Group from the University of Crete.  The film’s director, Ilias Marmaras, spoke afterwards.  Both events were intended to “highlight the collaboration that we can build working together as peers” and show that “the freedoms provided by the Creative Commons licenses help us share easily and create cultural value.”

Commons projects and activism seem to be really hopping in Greece:  just last week a collaborative ebook, Πέρααπότοκράτοςκαιτηναγορά: Ηομότιμηπροοπτική, was published in Greece as a free, downloadable pdf file.  The ebook presents a vision for a commons-oriented economy and society.  Print copies will be available at the end of May, at a price defined by the reader.

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Group Works Facilitation Training in BC, May 24

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You’re invited to attend a facilitation training from our friends at Group Works this Memorial Day Weekend in British Columbia. The training will be a great professional development opportunity, so we encourage you to check out the announcement below or find out more by clicking here. 

Deepening Your Facilitation Practice

Workshop in Burnaby, BC - May 24th

Calling all project leaders, teachers, facilitators, coaches, public engagement practitioners, non-profit board members, and others whose work involvesempowering people to participate in groups, workplaces, and communities in a more dynamic and effective way!

We invite you to attend a professional development session where you will have the opportunity to:Â

  • Reflect on your practices
  • Share dilemmas with colleagues
  • Get support on upcoming meeting design
  • Storyboard events - past and future - to identify opportunities for more effectively employing the patterns of excellent group process
  • Integrate exemplary patterns into yourr professional life and start to speak the shared “pattern language” of facilitation
  • Engage with others who care about these things!

We’ll be using the card deck Group Works: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings as our lens. While familiarity with the deck will be helpful, it’s not essential – you’ll recognize the patterns from your own practice and pick it up quickly.

If you participated in the last workshop Group Pattern Language Project offered in BC, we expect this session will be sufficiently different to make it worth your while to join us again.

When: Saturday May 24, 10:30am to 4:30pm. A simple soup/salad/bread lunch (vegan & gluten-free) will be provided.

Where: Cranberry Commons Cohousing, 4274 Albert St (at Madison just north of Hastings), Burnaby, BC.

Cost: Sliding scale $25-$150.

Registration

Please register in advance so your hosts can plan appropriately. Sign up at: http://groupworksdeck.org/event_reg/GPL_Reg.php. If you have any further questions contact Daniel Lindenberger at daniel@smallboxcms.com.

Pre- and post-event Work Sessions

The day before and the day after the workshop, we’ll be hosting work sessions for those committed to supporting this work in terms of growing the language, articulating potential new applications, and promoting and nurturing the project. Some of the issues we’ll be exploring are developing curricula for self-guided study of how to use the cards, new “e-versions” of Group Works, and outreach activities to spread the word.

Come participate and let others know too! This should be a great networking and peer learning opportunity. Hope to see you there!

Please share this invitation with other people you think might be interested in attending. If you’d like to participate or learn more about this, please email Dave at dave.pollard@gmail.com.

Social Accountability: What Does the Evidence Really Say?

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So what does the evidence about citizen engagement say? Particularly in the development world it is common to say that the evidence is “mixed”. It is the type of answer that, even if correct in extremely general terms, does not really help those who are actually designing and implementing citizen engagement reforms.

This is why a new (GPSA-funded) work by Jonathan Fox, “Social Accountability: What does the Evidence Really Say” is a welcome contribution for those working with open government in general and citizen engagement in particular. Rather than a paper, this work is intended as a presentation that summarizes (and disentangles) some of the issues related to citizen engagement.

Before briefly discussing it, some definitional clarification. I am equating “social accountability” with the idea of citizen engagement given Jonathan’s very definition of  social accountability:

“Social accountability strategies try to improve public sector performance by bolstering both citizen engagement and government responsiveness”

In short, according to this definition, social accountability is defined, broadly, as “citizen participation” followed by government responsiveness, which encompasses practices as distinct as FOI law campaigns, participatory budgeting and referenda.

But what is new about Jonathan’s work? A lot, but here are three points that I find particularly important, based on a very personal interpretation of his work.

First, Jonathan makes an important distinction between what he defines as “tactical” and “strategic” social accountability interventions. The first type of interventions, which could also be called “naïve” interventions, are for instance those bounded in their approach (one tool-based) and those that assume that mere access to information (or data) is enough. Conversely, strategic approaches aim to deploy multiple tools and articulate society-side efforts with governmental reforms that promote responsiveness.

This distinction is important because, when examining the impact evaluation evidence, one finds that while the evidence is indeed mixed for tactical approaches, it is much more promising for strategic approaches. A blunt lesson to take from this is that when looking at the evidence, one should avoid comparing lousy initiatives with more substantive reform processes. Otherwise, it is no wonder that “the evidence is mixed.”

Second, this work makes an important re-reading of some of the literature that has found “mixed effects”, reminding us that when it comes to citizen engagement, the devil is in the details. For instance, in a number of studies that seem to say that participation does not work, when you look closer you will not be surprised that they do not work. And many times the problem is precisely the fact that there is no participation whatsoever. False negatives, as eloquently put by Jonathan.

Third, Jonathan highlights the need to bring together the “demand” (society) and “supply” (government) sides of governance. Many accountability interventions seem to assume that it is enough to work on one side or the other, and that an invisible hand will bring them together. Unfortunately, when it comes to social accountability it seems that some degree of “interventionism” is necessary in order to bridge that gap.

Of course, there is much more in Jonathan’s work than that, and it is a must read for those interested in the subject. You can download it here [PDF].


Going Upstream: Prisons and the Social Determinants of Health

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A couple of weeks ago, I joined with hundreds of other students and scholars at Johns Hopkins for a conference on prisons and the social determinants of health. The star of the conference was this story:

One day three men were fishing in the river when they noticed a baby floating towards them. Two of the men jumped out of their boat to save the child, and the third brought the baby and the boat to shore to care for it. As they stood around comforting it, one of the men spotted a second baby floating downstream! As he ran back towards the river, he was shocked to see his friend turn and run upstream. “What are you doing?!?” he cried. “There’s a baby in the water!” His friend shouted back over his shoulder: “I’m going to find the asshole throwing kids into the river!”

It was repeated and referenced throughout the day; it is a story about root causes and priorities, and it’s quite appropriate in a public health context where there’s always a tension between treating the symptoms or identifying the etiology. “Going upstream” means looking for the systematic and institutional causes of the illnesses and deaths public health workers encounter every day. We have to save the babies in the water, but we can’t ignore how they got there.

What we heard time and time again at this conference was a curious mix of ideas and arguments: on the one hand, many of Baltimore’s and America’s worst public health problems could be laid at the feet of the mass incarceration of its least advantaged residents. The nexus of poverty and educational failures were closely correlated with racism and prisons, and these were closely correlated with premature mortality, disease, and lost capacities. Put simply: prisons are one of the primary mediating terms for the creation of disparate health outcomes for whites and blacks.

And yet: we heard from a number of scholars who tried to give us a window onto criminality and delinquency through the neurobiology of adolescent impulsivity or the experience of substance abuse and dependency. These scholars didn’t even mention these racial disparities, and so they seemed to offer us little hope of a connection between the putative objectivity of brain and addiction science and the clear biases in arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and incarcerations. We even heard from one scholar who spent a long time touting his credentials and then accused African-American men of “compensatory narcissism.” (What was *he* compensating for?)

by Flickr user John Watson

Each panel was punctuated by a student poet from Dew More Baltimore, and these sizzling lyrics gradually seemed to impress the speakers that they could not ignore race any more. As the day went on, we heard from Elijah Cummings and Eddie Conway. We heard from a group of formerly incarcerated men who ran non-profits working on reentry and job placement. And we started to hear more talk of solutions: ways to reduce the number of people in jail, divert juveniles from the school-to-prison pipeline, and deal with substance abuse issues. David Kennedy‘s work with SafeStreets is designed to reduce the number of crime victims, and as a side effect reduce the number of people incarcerated: this is certainly laudable work worthy of all the celebration it has received, but it’s not really about abolishing prisons so much as it is about better-managing policing to increase efficacy,  reduce costs, and mitigate harms. In that sense, it’s meliorist rather than abolitionist. It goes upstream, but does it go upstream enough? Or does it tarry there in the water because there are lives to be saved right now?

What I never heard was a response to Vesla Weaver‘s challenge from the beginning of the day: African-Americans who encounter the criminal justice system are increasingly socialized with a dual logic: they are held responsible for the outcomes in their lives, while being actively disenfranchised in the decisions that will affect the conditions that produce those outcomes. The language of personal responsibility is rampant, even in public health; yet we know that demographic and institutional factors will play a major role in shaping outcomes. Disenfranchisement is the ultimate “up stream” moment; building social capital and public health seems to require re-enfranchisement.

Of course, Weaver herself didn’t tell us how to accomplish that. And so I return to Elinor Ostrom: you have to create an alignment between responsibility and the power to act. Ostrom showed that institutions can “crowd-in” responsibility: those who will experience the consequences of an action have to be the ones who control it. Civic capacities are hampered by medical and social incapacities, but at the same time civic capabilities can produce better outcomes in medicine and the economy.

Right now, we seem committed to more expert management of disenfranchised populations, and so we continue to create the mismatched logic of powerless responsibility and unaccountable power. The alternative is to let the Dew More poets take center stage and ask the scholars to wait for the intermission.

Calluses

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I’ve got calluses on my hands.

I thumb them mindlessly
On the street
In meetings
Feeling every ridge
Every crack of skin

Some days bright red
Rubbed raw
Some days dull and hard
A thick coat of impenetrable skin
Exhausted, they rip off.
Healing and loss.

I’ve got calluses on my hands.

Gripping so tightly
Knuckles white
Muscles tensed
The corrugated metal
Of a straight bar or hex bar
Of a dumbbell or kettlebell

A scream and it’s aloft.
Muscles burning,
Heart racing,
Hands stinging.

I’ve got calluses on my hands.

My father had calluses.
His hands gnarled and bruised.
Nails, hammers, saws, and wood.
They all left their mark.
So much depends upon…
Calluses on his hands.
The heavy tax of time.

I pay for my calluses
Though he was paid for his.
I wear them with pride.
Battle scars of
Wars I chose to fight.
Deeper scars remain.

Unseemly, perhaps,
But seemly all the same.
Battered but not broken
Broken but not beaten
Beaten but not defeated
Defeated but not destroyed.

I’ve got calluses on my hands.

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17-year-olds voted at a higher rate than their parents in Chicago

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In Chicago, 17-year-olds were permitted to vote in the March primary election. Chicago is a hotbed of excellent youth civic engagement groups, and they came together to register high school students and encourage them to vote. In the coalition were frequent partners of ours, including the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago and the Mikva Challenge. The result of their work–and students’ own enthusiasm–was a youth turnout rate of 15%. That doesn’t sound very impressive until you learn that students beat their elders in a low-turnout primary. The same thing happened in Takoma Park, MD last year.

I have advocated lowering the voting age to 17, and our Commission on Youth Voting and Civic Knowledge recommends considering that policy. While kids are still in school, they can be taught about the voting process and the governmental system before they vote. Most are still at home at 17 and connected to family and neighborhood networks that encourage voting. A year later, many have moved away for the first time into age-segregated youth zones–college dorms or apartments populated by young workers–where turnout is low. This matters because voting is habitual. Mark Franklin even argues that making 18 the age of eligibility permanently lowered turnout in many industrialized democracies. I certainly wouldn’t raise the age, but I would strongly consider lowering it by one year.

The post 17-year-olds voted at a higher rate than their parents in Chicago appeared first on Peter Levine.

Telling history

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On May 10, 1869, the Golden Spike, ceremonially driven at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory, signaled the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

The 1,907-mile contiguous railroad line had been under construction for six years. Irish immigrants working west from Iowa and Chinese immigrants working east from California. They were joined by civil war veterans, Mormons, and others seeking to earn a living in the new frontier.

History doesn’t properly record how many people built the transcontinental railroad, nor how many people died in the effort.

But on that day 145 years ago, all that mattered was that east and west had finally come together. With a few dignitaries on hand, the dirty, scraggly laborers who had sweated over those tracks came together in celebration, as captured in this photograph taken by A.J. Russell:

Transcontental_original

Of course, the liquor bottles adorning the center of the image were tastefully removed from some later prints in deference to the temperance movement.

And perhaps feeling that the photograph did not appropriately convey the true greatness of America’s manifest destiny, painter Thomas Hill illustrated this same moment in his The Last Spike (1881).

Notice anything different?

The_Last_Spike_1869

A real scholar of these things could point out all specific dignitaries who were absent from the actual event but somehow made it into the painting.

Technically, there are workers, officials, and people of different backgrounds in both images, yet the feeling of each image is vastly different. The photo is raw, the painting is clean.

I used to pass both these images, side by side in Sacramento’s California State Railroad Museum. By father would stop and point them out. This is how history is made, he’d say. And this is how history is told.

No further commentary needed.

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the kind of organization we need

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Our important civic organizations can be arrayed from “big” to “deep,” where the big ones touch lots of members, and the deep ones engage relatively small numbers in intensive ways. Meanwhile, the groups can be arrayed from “unified” to “diverse,” where the former organize people who share some common trait–such as an ideology or a social disadvantage–and the latter specialize in convening people who are different from each other. Here are some illustrative examples (with apologies to my friends who are shown below, if you think you should be a placed a little differently).
Screen Shot 2014-05-09 at 3.00.46 PM
The top right quadrant (big and diverse) is empty. Charles Tilly said that all social movements needed WUNC: “worthiness,” “unity,” “numbers,” and “commitment.” If your group is demographically or ideologically homogeneous, you can achieve unity along with numbers pretty easily–you just need the mass membership to demonstrate worthiness and commitment. And if your group is small, you can make it unified by bringing everyone into close relationships with each other.  But if you want all the people in a diverse nation to engage with each other, that requires numbers, commitment, worthiness, and unity in the face of diversity. The nation-state is supposed to achieve that, but it is not working well. It is no surprise that we lack mass, committed organizations capable of generating unity out of diversity–it is a tall order. But we have done better in the past, and we suffer from the lack today.

The post the kind of organization we need appeared first on Peter Levine.

Group Decision Tip: Feedback please

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Group Decision Tips IconIn principle, when we ask for feedback we increase our chances of making good group decisions. If we don’t ask we can’t expect people to tell us what’s going well and not so well. When we do ask we should be open to all answers. Asking for feedback takes courage but gives enlightenment. It helps us see things in new light, reflected off others.

Practical Tip: Ask how you are doing among those who care about what you do. What’s working well? What could be better? What questions or ideas do your stakeholders have? Be thankful for all invited feedback, positive or negative. Be open to how you might use it to make improvements.

Take positive comments to heart and share credit with others. When you receive a negative comment, consider that it’s probably not about you. It’s more likely about a particular idea, behavior, or situation. And, consider that negative comments are sometimes all about the world of the commentator and not about the topic at hand.

A Public Voice 2014

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The Kettering Foundation’s annual DC event, “A Public Voice,” took place yesterday at the Newseum in Washington DC. The content of the event is off the record, so those from government can feel comfortable engaging in a deeper conversation in front of the audience that attends.

This year’s topic was Health Care: What Do We Want and How Can We Pay For It?, and the proceedings will inform the development of a National Issues Forums Institute discussion guide on this very timely and contentious issue. This roundtable panel bought together leaders with a deep understanding of healthcare policy, along with others who have similarly deep experience in engaging citizens on contentious public issues.

I was honored to have been asked to invite a dozen NCDD members to attend — members representing prominent organizations in our field and large networks of facilitators:

  1. Kyle Bozentko, Director of Policy and Research, Jefferson Center
  2. Courtney Breese, Board Member, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)
  3. Steve Brigham, Former Executive Director, AmericaSpeaks
  4. Steve Clift, Executive Director, e-democracy.org
  5. David Isaacs, Co-Founder, The World Cafe
  6. Steven Kull, Founder and President, Voice of the People
  7. Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Executive Director, University of Arizona National Institute for Civil Discourse
  8. Martha McCoy, Executive Director, Everyday Democracy
  9. Bill Potapchuk, President, Community Building Institute
  10. Sarah Rubin, Program Manager, Institute for Local Government
  11. Steve Waddell, Executive Director, Networking Action
  12. Wendy Willis, Executive Director, Policy Consensus Initiative

I serve on the planning committee for A Public Voice, and also helped select the four panelists who represented the deliberative democracy community: Jean Johnson of Public Agenda and NIF, Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Val Ramos of Everyday Democracy, and Gloria Rubio-Cortes of the National Civic League.  In addition, I facilitated and helped organize a planning meeting at Kettering in February with about 8 of the NCDD representatives, to talk about their role in Public Voice and glean their valuable input for Kettering.

Here is a snapshot of most of the NCDD members who were present yesterday, including my invitees, the panelists, and some Kettering guests who are members of NCDD.

NCDD Group Attending Public Voice 2014

I also helped with the content of the event brochure and some great postcards that were distributed yesterday.  The event brochure included descriptions of the deliberative democracy organizations represented by my invitees.  It was designed to give policymakers who were present a sense of the breadth and expertise available to them if they are interested in engaging citizens more deeply.

The postcard (which I’m really excited about) features a map of the United States that highlights the areas where you will find members of the NCDD community, the National Issues Forums network, and Everyday Democracy community leaders. Look at all of the blue circles that represent NCDDers! The larger circles indicate a larger cluster of contacts.

PV14-postcard-600px

I really enjoyed yesterday’s event, and loved having the chance to introduce some new NCDD members to the Kettering crowd. NCDD is proud to be developing such a strong partnership with the Kettering Foundation, and we look forward to engaging more and more of you in our work with Kettering.