the struggle to control images from Baltimore

“10,000 Strong Peacefully Protest In Downtown Baltimore, Media Only Reports The Violence & Arrest of Dozens”

There is a struggle underway to influence how Baltimore is portrayed visually to America. My news feed is full of images like the one above–of peaceful protests or hardworking Baltimoreans cleaning up the streets. I doubt many of those photos are getting through to the mass TV audience that is watching hurled stones and burning police cars.

For my own part, I believe the property damage and physical conflicts with police were pretty much inevitable; but images of them don’t communicate two other crucial facts: that thousands have protested peacefully (which is difficult to organize and sustain, by the way), and that everyday life in cities like Baltimore is deeply oppressed.

The experience of the 1960s teaches us that it matters which images predominate.

In 1964, the summer’s urban riots/insurrections were seen to benefit Barry Goldwater’s campaign. Johnson’s aides called them “Goldwater rallies” because they played into the Republican presidential nominee’s narrative about America. LBJ nevertheless beat Goldwater soundly. But 1968 was different. As Clay Risen writes in the Guardian,

The [1968] riots thus provided an entrée for conservatives to finally, fully assert law and order as a national political issue. Something that had been brewing for decades at the local level, and which had played a role in the GOP victories of 1966, became after April 1968 the single most important domestic concern in the 1968 presidential race. Polls repeatedly put it at par with, and even above, the Vietnam war. Richard Nixon, who had largely avoided talking about riots and civil rights before April, now made law and order – and the revulsion of white suburbia against the violent images of rioters reacting to King’s death – a central theme in his campaign.

The riots also vaulted Nixon’s eventual running mate, the obscure Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, to national prominence. In the wake of the violence in Baltimore, Agnew had called local civil rights leaders to a meeting and then ambushed them with accusations that they had facilitated the racial militancy that he – and much of white America – believed to be the cause of the riots. Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan clipped a news story about the speech and handed it to his boss. And while Nixon toyed with other running mates, he ultimately chose Agnew based on his newfound fame as the standard-bearer of the “silent majority”.

To be clear: I don’t care whether Democratic or Republican politicians benefit or suffer from the images from Baltimore and other cities. But it is important which direction the nation takes. And (fairly or not) it’s people far from Baltimore, Ferguson, and Cleveland who will decide. That is why we should all be drawing attention to the alternative images from Baltimore.

The post the struggle to control images from Baltimore appeared first on Peter Levine.

What the Hell is Happening in Baltimore?

Last night, as news spread of protests, riots, and looting in Baltimore, I was struck by just how difficult it was to follow what was going on.

There’s something about today’s capacity for instant, constant, and hyper-local news that makes me feel like I ought to know everything accurately right away.

Of course there are regular disruptions to that rule – confusion and conflicting stories are regular features of breaking news, often fueled by interruptions in communication.

But the stories coming out of Baltimore were different – like a real-time view of “history being written by the victors.” It wasn’t that diverging stories were coming out of Baltimore – there were divergent narratives unfolding.

Now, I want to be clear about something: I know nothing about Baltimore. I’ve got friends in the area and I’ve watched The Wire, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. I make no claims at expertise and everything that follows should be taken for what it is – an outsider’s attempt to follow a major news story.

Freddie Gray’s funeral took place yesterday, Monday, April 27. Twenty-five year old Gray was arrested in West Baltimore on the morning of April 12. He died in police custody on April 19 from a spinal injuries.

According to the Atlantic, its unclear why Gray was arrested and it’s unclear how his injuries were sustained. Video of Gray’s arrest show Gray, seemingly with a broken leg, being dragged off by police.  The Atlantic describes that “Gray didn’t resist arrest and that officers didn’t use force.”

The Baltimore Sun says that “Gray’s family has said he underwent surgery at Maryland Shock Trauma Center for three fractured neck vertebrae and a crushed voice box — injuries doctors said are more common among the elderly or victims of high-speed crashes.”

The Baltimore Police are investigating, but no information has been released.

The Baltimore Sun further reports that yesterday’s riots “started Monday morning with word on social media of a “purge” — a reference to a movie in which crime is made legal.”

What’s great is that since Twitter has an advanced search feature you can search for tweets including a specific keyword, like purge, within a specific time frame.

As early as April 26, you can start seeing references to the purge on Twitter, with people saying things like:

  • The purge anarchy or just regular Baltimore?
  • #FreddieGray we purge for you shun!! #Justice4FreddieGray
  • All this bullshit happening in Bmore makes me wish The Purge was a real thing………#justsaying

That continues for awhile, and on Monday, you start seeing things like:

  • Breaking: Baltimore shut down because of plot of the warriors, possibly the plot of the purge
  • Student ‘purge‘ threat shuts down Baltimore businesses, schools http://fw.to/sETY3pS

So, while there are many social networks out there, young people don’t seem to have planned a riot on Twitter. There are plenty of analogies to the Purge, but few threats and even less planning.

Maybe they were on Yik Yak, I don’t know.

Now, this is where I find it really confusing.

The Baltimore Sun reports that at 3pm, a group of 75 to 100 students were heading to Mondawmin Mall. Presumably, this was a group of ne’er-do-wells who were setting out to start a riot they supposed planned on social media.

As the Sun points out, “The mall is a transportation hub for students from several nearby schools.”

So…at 3pm, were kids just…heading home from school?

One teacher shared her eyewitness description publicly on Facebook. (And since teachers are public employees, it’s easy verify that the poster is in fact a teacher.)
“We drove into Mondawmin, knowing it was going to be a mess. I was trying to get them home before anything insane happened,” she wrote. Presumably, the fact that the mall is a transportation hub necessitated going there? I don’t know.
She continues: “The police were forcing busses to stop and unload all their passengers. Then, Douglas students, in huge herds, were trying to leave on various busses but couldn’t catch any because they were all shut down. No kids were yet around except about 20, who looked like they were waiting for police to do something. The cops, on the other hand, were in full riot gear marching toward any small social clique of students who looked as if they were just milling about. It looked as if there were hundreds of cops.”That’s a far cry from the idea that local thugs decided to cause a riot and the police did the best they could to stop it.I mean, I’m no expert, but the presence of such a large police force at the site of what I understand to be the place of the 1968 riots following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. seems like it might be trouble waiting to happen.Add to that the long history of tensions between Baltimore residents and law enforcement officials, and, well, none of this seems like a good plan. I don’t want to be anyone at this party.And then there was word from the Baltimore Police Department that gangs were “‘teaming up’ to take out officers.”

I’m confused about that, too, since the Sun also reports that “a group of men who said they were members of the Crips — they wore blue bandannas and blue shirts — stood on the periphery and denounced the looting.”

So, if they had a pact…they are really bad at it.

It’s taken a lot to sift through all this information. To come in as an outsider and try to find credible, verifiable information.

I still have no idea what the hell is going on in Baltimore, but from what I can gather, I’m skeptical of the police narrative. It looks to me like the police went in way over powered into a tense situation and made everything far worse than it should have been.

Should you blame the people who looted and destroyed property? Sure, but also blame the situation that put them there –

Baltimore police and leadership failed them.

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learning exchanges at Frontiers of Democracy

There is still space for registrants at Frontiers of Democracy 2015, and we have just posted a preliminary list of the interactive concurrent sessions, or “learning exchanges.” More details here, but the headings are:

Additive/Replacement Engagement

Organized by Stephen Abbott, Great Schools Partnership, and the Glossary of Education Reform

Advancing Equity in Civic Deliberation

Organized by Chad Raphael, Santa Clara University

The Civic Media Project

Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, Emerson College

Civic Potential of Modernity: Civic Studies as an Antidote to Civic Despair

Peter Levine, Tisch College, Tufts University
Joshua A. Miller, George Washington University
Karol Soltan, University of Maryland

Community—Police Relationships: The Critical Intersection of Race, Rights, and Respect

Bruce Mallory and Michele Holt-Shannon, New Hampshire Listens and the University of New Hampshire
Carolyn Abdullah and Val Ramos, Everyday Democracy

Continuum of Civic Action

Jason Haas, MIT Media Lab/Education Arcade
Cindy S. Vincent, Salem State University
Christy Sanderfer, University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service
Sarah Shugars, Tisch College at Tufts University

Creative Democratic Work at the Intersection of Faith and Community

John Dedrick, Kettering Foundation
Elizabeth Gish, Western Kentucky University
Robert Turner, Mathews Center for Public Life

Democracy through Text Messaging

Timothy J. Shaffer, Kansas State University

How does conflict resolution theory and practice contribute to the field of public deliberation?

Tina Nabatchi, Syracuse University, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Lisa-Marie Napoli, Indiana University, Political and Civic Engagement Program

Innovations in Civic Technology

Charlie Wisoff, Kettering Foundation
Nick Santillo, Conva

Is there a place for social justice in higher ed? Practitioners and academics share their experiences

Margaret Brower, Tisch College at Tufts University
Ande Diaz, Allegheny College
David Schoem, University of Michigan

Next Generation: Training Lawmakers for a Different Kind of Politics

Ted Celeste, NICD
Democratic and Republican legislators from Massachusetts

Schooling and Citizenship (P-20)

Lori D. Bougher
Phil Martin
Jim Scheibel
Rebecca Townsend

From Protest to Policy

Allison Fine

The post learning exchanges at Frontiers of Democracy appeared first on Peter Levine.

Discomfort with Ancestors

Years ago, my mother – who is really into genealogy – told me that one of my (white) ancestors had been lynched in the south because he’d been helping African Americans through the underground railroad.

I was so proud.

That’s the kind of person I wanted to be related to.

I, of course, don’t remember the details of what happened or how this person was related to me, but I remember – I’m descended from people who worked on the underground railroad. Folks who were on the right side of history. Who died for what they knew was just.

Several years after that, my mother was sharing another genealogical finding. It’s possible that I was not as attentive as a good daughter ought to be, until she said something that caught my ear. Something about an ancestor owning slaves.

No, no, I piped in. You told me that our family worked on the underground railroad!

My mother looked at me blankly as if I’d made the most nonsensical declaration she’d ever heard. Then she patiently explained to me that I was white – a fact she seemed to think had somehow eluded me.

Yes, yes, we have relatives who worked the underground railroad, she told me, but any white person whose family’s been in this country awhile is related to slave owners.

She hadn’t mentioned it before just as she hadn’t mentioned the sky was blue – it was obvious.

And yet there I was – a woman in my early 20s, just putting those pieces together.

There was a bit of a to-do last week about a certain actor who expunged his family’s slave-owning history from a genealogical documentary.

I can appreciate what he might have been thinking at the time – no, no, I’m not related to the bad guys.

Who would want to admit that?

The truth is, though, there is privilege even in that denial.

How many African Americans, do you suppose, who know their family has lived in this country for generations, tell themselves – no, no, my ancestors weren’t brought to this country as slaves.

Between 1525 and 1866, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World with an estimated 450,000 Africans arriving in the United States over the course of the slave trade.

I’m not sure that’s a piece of their past they have the luxury of denying.

Not as easily as I can casually claim ignorance of my own family’s slave-owning past, at least.

It’s important to recognize this history. To accept it.

The truth is – I didn’t work on the underground railroad and I didn’t own slaves. Those people are in my history, but they are not me.

I can’t claim divinity from one relative’s actions while claiming absolution from another’s. I have to make my own path, make my own choices. Informed by my history but not bound by it.

Indeed, we are all shaped by our past – but we are not doomed to repeat it.

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All-Expenses Trip to Train on NIFI’s Online Deliberation Tool

We want our members to know that the Kettering Foundation and National Issues Forums Institute are offering an amazing opportunity for NIF moderators to attend an in-person training on their new online deliberation tool, Common Ground for Action, this May 18-19 in Ohio. Kettering is generously offering to foot the while bill, but you must register by April 29! Read more below or find the original announcement here.


NIF logo“We need some way to be able to take National Issues Forums online.”

NIF moderators and conveners have been telling us this for years.

Well, we heard you.

NIFI and Kettering Foundation have been collaborating with a working group of NIF members for over two years on an online version of the NIF forums we all know and love. It’s called Common Ground for Action, and it’s now available to all NIF moderators to use anytime.

Best of all, there’s no technical mumbo jumbo – CGA runs in any web browser, and has a simple, intuitive design. If you’re an experienced in-person moderator, all you’ll need is a little practice with the platform.

And to do that practice, we’re offering a special in-person moderator prep workshop at Kettering Foundation May 18-19. We have 15 spots available for the workshop, and Kettering takes care of all travel and lodging expenses as well as meals. These 15 spots are available on a first-come, first-serve basis, so register right away if you’d like to attend. REGISTER NOW!

Once you register, we’ll be in touch shortly with instructions on how to make travel arrangements through the foundation, as well as an agenda and prep materials. All travel arrangements must be made by Apr. 30, so registration will close Apr. 29!

This workshop will run from noon, Monday May 18 – noon, Tuesday May 19. We’ll be splitting into small groups to give everyone the maximum opportunity to practice moderating, and we’ll have time for lots of feedback and questions. In addition to ensuring you master the technology, we’ll also be focusing on how moderators can make these forums as deliberative as possible.

If you have any questions, email Amy Lee at alee[at]kettering[dot]org, the Kettering Foundation program officer who developed the platform with NIFI.

You can find the original version of this NIFI blog post at www.nifi.org/en/groups/attend-person-workshop-about-using-new-online-deliberation-tool-common-ground-action.

Are Young People Good Protesters?

It seems as though there’s been a quite, but steady stream of complaints about the way young people protest.

Even among progressives who are supportive of the cause, I commonly hear remarks about how today’s protests – orchestrated by today’s young people – are ineffective, poorly executed, or even damaging to the cause.

Millennials Can’t Even Protest Right, declares a Daily Beast article reflecting on a successful 1976 Title IX protest. Forbes asks, Are Millennials Lazy Or Avant-Garde Social Activists? And, of course, there is ongoing debate about whether young people are real activists or just, in the words of the New York Times, Tumblr activists.

NPR is far more generous, detailing how young people near Ferguson, Mo. used social media as a tool to “plan and participated in the most recent large protest.”

So, the jury is still out on the effectiveness of today’s activism, but for the moment, let’s play a little game – let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that no, Millennials can’t even protest correctly.

If that is indeed, the case, it begs the question – why not?

Those who argue most fervently against the effectiveness of young people seem predisposed against the generation – and I imagine they might summon reasons like:

Young people can’t protest correctly because they think social media is all you need.

Young people can’t protest correctly because they are too self-absorbed to see how their actions will impact others.

Or perhaps: Younh people can’t protest correctly because they are so entitled, they protest stupid things without even knowing how good they’ve got it.

But let’s try out another option – if it is indeed the case that young people can’t protest correctly –

Is it possible this is because our parents have failed us?

In Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer his core argument is that the activism of the 60s and 70s was really launched by the white students who participated in 1964’s Freedom Summer.

In part, these young people were deeply radicalized by the experience – returning to their home states with a critical and politicized view of their lives.

But more practically, these young people were trained by their experience.

The movements of the 60s and 70s – those efforts which today’s elders declare so successful while sneering at the efforts of today’s youth – benefited tremendously and directly from SNCC organizing tactics developed in the 50s.

SNCC trained 1000 young people in their organizing techniques. Those young people used what they learned and became the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s liberation movement, and more.

Perhaps these movements were successful because someone had trained their leaders.

As a somewhat young person now looking back on this history, it seems that yesterday’s young people made a critical mistake –

After their battles were fought and their skirmish won, the thought the war was over.

We’re in a post-racial society. A post-sexist society. All our problems are solved.

There’s no need to train young people as organizers. No need to develop their skills in putting their passion for social justice to practical use.

We solved everything 40 years ago. And we figured it out ourselves.

No.

If indeed today’s young people are terrible protestors, it’s their parents, their mentors, their elders who are at fault.

It is yesterday’s leaders who have failed us. Not today’s.

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The Future of Civic Tech: Open Data and Open Gov’ts

We recently saw a fascinating interview that NCDD supporting member Della Rucker recently published on her website EngagingCities that we wanted to share. Della interviewed the head of a key civic tech company, Accela, on the results of a recent paper on trends in civic technology, and the conversation is quite educational. We encourage you to read the interview below or find the original here.


How big is Civic Tech and where is it going? One on one with Mark Headd of Accela

engaging cities logoIn late 2014, Accela released a white paper with the International Data Corporation that quantifies the potential scope, value, and growth potential of the Civic Technology field.  Accela’s Developer Evangelist, Mark Headd, appears frequently at EngagingCities through his thought-provoking personal blog, civic.io.

I caught up with Mark a couple of weeks ago to talk about the present and future of civic technology.  We touched on the message that open data sends about a city, the unique challenges that smaller cities face in opening data, and the role of technology vendors in helping make that happen.

My thanks to Mark for the great conversation and to Accela for the white paper, which you can access here.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Della Rucker, Managing Editor, EngagingCities:  First of all, tell me a little bit, in your own words, about Accela and why it is that Accela commissioned the study that IDC did?

Mark Headd, Developer Evangelists, Accela:  Well, Accela is a company that provides software to governments in support of their business licensing, land management, permitting, food safety inspection, service requests, and so on, so we have a whole suite of software that helps government do the job of governing,

Our flagship product is the Accela Civic Platform. It’s used by hundreds of governments around the world. Several years ago, the decision was made to engineer it so that there was an API that would provide access to the platform so you could connect third party applications to it.

I think Accela very rightly could be described as a company that saw the potential of civic technology before it was cool. Before it was widely accepted as being cool.

We very much bet our hand on the fact that third parties, that civic software developers, civic startups, and others would want to build things on top of our platform. Because of the things that governments use Accela’s platform for, our platform is chock full of really valuable information. The transactions that our platform supports – business licensing, permitting, all of these things – are critical functions of government.

One of the things that attracted me to Accela was that the fact that we can open up this kind of data and support transactional interactions on our platform through an API and through publishing open data. It’s been really exciting.

The report is a complement to that earlier investment in the platform around civic technology. It looks at, where are we going? What does the future of civic technology look like?

We’re not the only ones who do this. The Knight Foundation did recently, too. The reason we did it was because we wanted to articulate one of the reasons why, several years ago, we started to position ourselves to be ready for this trend in civic technology. I think universally, the outlook for the development of civic technology is pretty bright.

Della: Was there anything in there that surprised you, that confirmed something that you were already sort of aware of but hadn’t fully seen documented? Was there anything in there that particularly was revelatory for you?

Mark:  Well, certainly the size of the impact, which is in the billions, to quantify that impact, I think that’s a good thing. I think that’s a really good outcome of the report.

Like anything else, predicting the future is difficult. To me, that’s the primary takeaway, that this is something we’re going to continue to see. Governments are going to start investing heavily in this area. It’s an area that’s going to start to mature.  To me, that’s something that I think will resonate with the people, that I think most of them innately had this sense that it was going to mature and going to really start to solidify.

Even to folks that aren’t in the civic technology field, I think this would probably wake some folks up and really help to shine a light on what civic technology is and how it’s changing what governments do and the potential future benefit for that.

Della: The report does a good job at a high level of identifying a lot of the broad factors that are driving governments’ need, their impetus to be investing in civic technology. That ranges all the way from demands on their own budgets and the need to increase internal efficiency, to how citizens increasingly prefer, and assume that they should be able, to interact with a government of any kind, whether local or state or larger.

What do you see as the current and near future barriers? What’s keeping this from being a full‑blown thing already, for lack of a better word?

Mark:  Well, I talked about this a little bit at the Code for America Summit last year. Open data is a really critical part of all this because it’s usually one of the core ingredients that we see in civic technology solutions. But, even where it’s not directly used, when governments publish even simple open data, the government is essentially saying, “We’re ready. We’re ready to collaborate.”

That kind of an expression is critical, because what’s unique about civil technology is that it’s something that’s not wholly in a government. It requires people outside of a government. It requires citizen engagement. It requires a new way of partnering.

Governments are able to articulate that they are ready to collaborate and willing to collaborate through opening data.  Open data is sort of the expression of that intent; without that you have a big impediment to the technology. The ability of government to collaborate in a new way, that’s what makes civic technology special.

If we look at who’s doing open data right now, it tends to be larger cities. More and more of the larger cities are doing it and fewer of the small‑to‑mid‑sized cities are doing it.

If you just look at the city level, there’s a stark contrast between big cities, the biggest cities in the country. If you look at the 20 biggest cities in the country, the 10 biggest cities in the country, I think nine out of 10 are doing open data.

If you look at the cities that have populations between 100,000 and 500,000, and there are a lot more of those cities in this country than big cities, the minority of them are doing any sort of work on open data. We need more governments, particularly municipal and local governments, to embrace open data, even if they’re not releasing vast troves of data because they may not have them.

If you’re a city of 75,000, you may not have a vast trove of data. But by starting down the road of open data, you have expressed a willingness to work with people. You’ve expressed a willingness to collaborate in a new way and that’s an essential ingredient to civic technology. In my mind, that’s one of the biggest impediments.

Della: That’s intriguing because there’s a technical component or maybe a functional component to that. First of all, a smaller city typically has relatively minimal internal staff. And often they’ve got less exposure to broader trends in the world because they’re trying to manage the issues of their community with a very shoestring budget.

But there’s also the issue of, do they have the technology? Can they find the technologists or the technology‑savvy people within their communities, or that they can access in one form or another, to help make that happen? Do you have any thoughts on how these smaller communities where this need is so prevalent may be able to start overcoming some of those barriers?

Mark: I think one of the things these smaller governments can and should do is they need to start insisting that their vendors are building open data – or the ability to support civic technology, if you want to think about it more generically – into their products. One of the things we do at Accela, we try and educate our customers on civic technology, what it is, and how they can publish data, how they can leverage our platform to support civic technology.

I think that’s critical that the vendor community start to do this more, but to some extent they’re not willing to do it unless their customers demand it. I think that’s something we’ll start to see.

Whether they’ll work with groups like ICMA and National League of Cities and others who pool their influence, I think we’ll probably start to see that as well.  But, that’s something they need to do.

Smaller governments, more than others perhaps, rely on outside vendors for technology expertise. It’s critical that vendors, and we’re one of them, start to walk the walk on civic technology.

Della:  But it’s not in the vendor’s self‑interest typically to push the clients to take on something that the client doesn’t have any clue how to do yet, and I’m overstating that obviously.

Mark:  Well, if we’re right that the market for government civic technology is north of $6 billion in spending, then even self‑interested vendors are going to see the benefit of that. They’re going to want to get with the program because it is in their interest to do it. I don’t think vendors who do that are acting in a particularly self‑interested way.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing, right? Companies have shareholders and their responsibility is to maximize the return for their shareholders. Also the government is getting the benefit. I don’t think those two things need to be at odds.

I think we’re approaching the place where vendors are acting in a predictable self‑interested way, also providing a benefit to their customers. It’s in vendors’ interest to make their customers look good and be successful.

Certainly it’s in our interest to do that. I don’t think that’s at cross purposes with governments wanting to make their jobs easier by being able to leverage civic technology more efficiently.

I think we’re coming to a point here, where it is beneficial for governments to get involved with civic technology and support it more. I think it will actually be profitable for companies to do as well.

Della:  I appreciate you articulating that so clearly. Let me ask one more question and that is, we have here in this report a pretty concise picture of the existing and near‑term state of the broader market.

When we’re having a conversation like this two years from now, whether it’s at a Code for America summit, whether it’s a conversation like this, if you try to put on your prognosticator hat here, what do you think we might be talking about at that point, a couple of years from now?

Mark:  Well, I don’t know if I can give you an accurate prediction two years from now. I think we’ll still be talking about open data. I think we’ll be talking more and more about open standards, standards for data. I’m optimistic that we’ll have many more of them in two years because they actually make it easier for governments to adopt civic technology.

I don’t know all of the things we’ll be talking about, but I guarantee you in two years we’re still talking about open data and, increasingly, we’re talking about standards for open data that make it easier for vendors, civic start‑ups, and even civic hackers to build things for one government that can be easily ported to another government without a lot of difficulties.

Della:  That’s such a critical component. First of all, with the multi‑pronged ecosystem around this issue, there has to be a common language amongst them. Certainly, that’s starting to develop, but that’s something that, I think, is going to become more and more crucial.

That’s also, I suspect, going to take away some of the fear. Essentially, there’s a little bit of a fear of the unknown for a lot of governments and, probably, vendors for whom this is new territory.

I think that’s so insightful of you to put your finger on standards, which sounds boring, but that’s such a crucial piece for making this something that people from wherever within this system can transition into and make it effective. There’s a functional side, but there’s also a cultural side that

Mark:  I don’t know that I can emphasize it more strongly than to say that the standards are what are going to take civic technology to the next level. The recognition that open data is more than just this raw material, even though it’s that, it’s more than that.

It’s a way for a government to advertise that they are ready to collaborate in new ways. To me, that’s one of those foundational agreements for civic technology. You can’t do this without governments making that articulation.  Especially smaller governments.

Cities like New York and Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston – they’re big cities, so the data that they release, all on its own, is compelling because it involves so many people. Smaller governments don’t have that same kind of data. It’s more than just the data itself.

It’s a government’s way of advertising to the world that they’re ready to collaborate in a new way. If you don’t have that, I don’t think you can do civic technology correctly.

Della:  At some point, it would be interesting to have a follow‑on conversation with you, maybe we can pull in some other folks, to talk about what is starting to emerge in the smaller markets. We’ve all heard a lot about Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, et cetera. That might be a really interesting follow‑up conversation.

Mark:  Sure. Absolutely.

Della:  Thank you so much, Mark, for taking the time to talk.

Mark:   I look forward to chatting with you again soon.

You can find the original version of this EngagingCities interview at www.engagingcities.com/article/how-big-civic-tech-and-where-it-going-one-one-mark-headd-accela.

the Clinton Foundation and the new gift economy

The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer [that] has excited the political world with allegations of quid pro quos, in which foreign governments gave to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton, then serving as secretary of state, did them favors—essentially alleging bribery in foreign affairs.” (For additional coverage, see Jonathan Chait, “The Disastrous Clinton Post-Presidency” or Graham, “A Quick Guide to the Questions About Clinton Cash.”)

I don’t think the real issue here is potential bribery. According to the federal bribery statute, 18 U.S. Code § 201, “a public official” receives a bribe if she or he, “directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for: (A) being influenced in the performance of any official act …”

So bribery would have been committed if the Clinton Foundation accepted money “in return for” some favorable treatment by Secretary Clinton. That is the kind of quid pro quo that the Justice Department alleges in the pending case of Senator Menendez. But it isn’t how things usually work in power politics, and it isn’t the heart of our systemic problems with money in politics.

A New York Times’  news story, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” suggests how things actually work. A financier gives the Clinton Foundation $31.5 million. At an event with Elton John and Shakira to celebrate the gift, Ms. Clinton lauds the donor’s “remarkable combination of caring and modesty, of vision and energy and iron determination,” … adding: “I love this guy, and you should, too.” The same financier later on receives US State Department approval for a joint venture with a Russian uranium firm that affects control over this military/strategic commodity.

In a contract-based economy, parties agree to some kind of exchange before the goods, services, or money change hands. That has the advantage of efficiency and reliability. But when it comes to money and politics, such an agreement has the disadvantage of being a felony that can lead to imprisonment of no more than 15 years. There is an alternative, however–the older culture known as a gift economy. In a gift economy, goods circulate because A gives presents to B in the hopes that B will later give favors to A, but A studiously avoids any contract or explicit expectation.

The traditional reason is honor: it’s dishonorable in many societies to expect a return. In the current political environment, honor has the additional buttress of 18 U.S. Code § 201.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial, after raising “questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation,” hastens to acknowledge: “Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton.” However, the editorial warns, “accusations … will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public. [Hillary Clinton] needs to do a lot more, because this problem is not going away.”

I’m actually not sure what Ms. Clinton could do or say that would reduce criticism of the nexus between huge contributions to the Clinton Foundation, favorable treatment of its donors by the US government, and personal benefits to the Clinton family. It’s a gift economy, and exhaustive investigation is unlikely to reveal a quid pro quo or lead to any legal action (or legal exoneration).

Donors to the Clinton Foundation don’t necessarily know what they want when they give; they may have a mix of motivations, including altruism. The Clintons don’t take specific actions for donors just because of the money. But they do accept their gifts at glitzy events with Shakira and express their love for the donors. As in Beowulf, “treasures will change hands and each side will treat /the other with gifts; across the gannet’s bath,/ over the broad sea, whorled prows will bring/ presents and tokens” (Heaney trans., lines 1859-63) The public can see what this amounts to, with or without additional disclosures. The question is whether voters should tolerate it.

The post the Clinton Foundation and the new gift economy appeared first on Peter Levine.

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