For those interested in tech-based citizen reporting tools (such as FixMyStreet, SeeClickFix), here’s a recent interview of mine with Jeffrey Peel (Citizen 2015) in which I discuss some of our recent research in the area.
CIRCLE has been soliciting and editing guest posts for the home page, which amount to short publications that reach the field of youth civic engagement pretty broadly. The latest call went out today:
CIRCLE is seeking proposals for guest posts to our website, civicyouth.org, focused on relationships between electoral engagement and civic life and democracy more generally.
Over the next year, a great deal of time and money will be spent on reaching voters—including young voters—in the U.S. We would like to convene a conversation about whether and how efforts to promote youth electoral engagement (e.g. voting, learning about candidate positions, volunteering for a campaign) help to increase the prevalence, equity, and quality of youth civic skills, attitudes and engagement generally. We define civic engagement broadly. Questions to discuss could include:
We are looking for proposals from a variety of perspectives, including people who run youth programs, researchers, funders, teachers, etc. We will consider proposals that share or reflect on qualitative and/or quantitative data, as well as program evaluations and reflections on programs and theoretical arguments. We will give preference to posts that discuss any connection to K-12 schools and curricula, households as settings for discussions or civic activities, or ways in which young people learn and practice being civic through cultural and peer influences.
We are so sorry to be sharing the heartbreaking news that Laura R. Chasin – co-founder of the Public Conversations Project and a pillar of the D&D field – passed away on November 17th. Many of us knew and loved Laura Chasin, and greatly admired her work at PCP. She was a great supporter of NCDD, and a dear friend of mine. Please take a minute to read PCP’s message about Laura below, and if you knew Laura, I encourage you to click the link at the bottom of the message and share a reflection about Laura.
Remembering Laura R. ChasinWith heavy hearts and deep sadness, we share the news that our founder and greatest supporter Laura R. Chasin died unexpectedly on the evening of Tuesday, November 17th.
A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, with masters degrees in Government from Harvard and social work from Simmons College, Laura’s interests spanned political science, social work, psychodrama, family systems therapy, dialogue, and transpartisanship.
Public Conversations Project began as a question that Laura, a family therapist, asked herself – and her colleagues at the Family Institute of Cambridge – after watching a televised debate progress from disrespectful to angry to chaotic. Essentially: could the same methods that help families have safe, constructive conversations in counseling sessions also help people talk with each other in situations where there are deep differences in identity, beliefs, and values?
Laura became a co-facilitator of a multi-year, clandestine dialogue between Boston area pro-choice and pro-life leaders (following the murder of two women outside local abortion clinics), a story of sustained relationships across deep differences famously covered in The Boston Globe in 2001. From there, Laura and Public Conversations facilitated dialogue on a wide range of divisive issues, including Public Conversations’ work with the Anglican Communion. She also did extensive post-graduate training in marital and family therapy in conjunction with a private psychotherapy practice.
In the field of dialogue and deliberation, she is widely known and deeply respected for a foundational guide to she produced with Founding Associate Maggie Herzig, Fostering Dialogue Across Divides: A Nuts and Bolts Guide from The Public Conversations Project. Laura previously served on the boards of the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Spelman College. She has also served on the boards of the Children’s Defense Fund, the Conflict Management Group, and the Institute for Faith and Politics, and on the steering committee of the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice. Deeply passionate about the transpartisan movement, Laura also worked closely with No Labels and other organizations that encourage collaboration across the aisle.
Laura and Dick Chasin were married in 1971. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family, including Laura’s three children and three step-children, as well as her grandchildren. Recently, as pictured below, Laura and Dick were honored by the New York State Dispute Resolution Association.
Here is the original note to friends and followers (including a poem) from Public Conversations Project. If you would like to share your memories of Laura, we encourage you to do so here. Finally, here are some images of Laura and her colleagues throughout Public Conversations’ history.
You can find the original version of this PCP announcement at www.publicconversations.org/news/remembering-laura-r-chasin-founder#sthash.BIgyT0yy.dpuf.
Now here is an improbable idea: an activist hedge fund. Out of Tampere, Finland, comes the Robin Hood Asset Management Coop, which legally speaking, is an investment cooperative. It is designed to skim the cream off of frothy investments in the stock market to help support commoners. As the website for the coop describe it:
We use financial technologies to democratize finance, expand financial inclusion and generate new economic space. Robin Hood’s proposition is no different than it was 600 years ago in Sherwood: arbitrage the routes of wealth and distribute the loot as shared resources. Today we just use different methods to achieve the same: we analyze big data, write algorithms, deploy web-based technologies and engineer financial instruments to create and distribute surplus profits for all. Why? Simply, we believe a more equitable world is a better one.
The Robin Hood Coop currently has 808 members from some 15 countries, and manages about 651,000 euros in various stock market investments. Started in June 2012, the coop has generated over 100,000 euros for its members and to its common pool, which is used to support commons projects. Robin Hood reports that in its first year, it had “the third most profitable rate of return in the world of all the hedge funds.” 
Anyone can join the coop for a 30€ membership fee, which entitles members to invest a minimum of 30€. Members can then choose eight different options for splitting any profits (after costs) among their own accounts, Robin Hood Projects and the general Robin Hood Fund. Most members choose a simple 50-50 split of profits to themselves and Robin Hood Projects. For the past two full years of its operations, the project has been profitable. (As of November 19, however, net asset value was down 6.38%.) Robin Hood says that its operating costs are quite low compared to normal asset management services provided by banks.
The enterprise is driven by Robin Hood’s “dynamic data-mining algorithm,” which it calls “Parasite,” because it tracks actual transactions in US stock markets and mimics the best market actors. The coop’s website explains: “The parasite listens to the feed of the NYSE, watching for traders and what they trade. Then it competency ranks traders, identifying ones that are constantly making money on specific stocks. When it sees that a consensus is forming among such competent traders, it follows.” Robin Hood appears to be out-performing many leading hedge funds and reaping impressive returns, and it provides a modest but welcome source of income for some commons projects.
As I mentioned previously, for one of my classes I am constructing a network of superheroes with an eye towards gender diversity in this medium.
Using data from the Grand Comics Database, I filtered down their 1.5 million unique stories to look specifically at English language comic books tagged as being in the “superhero” genre.
Each comic book record includes a list of the characters appearing in that comic book, but, unfortunately, the database doesn’t include information on characters’ identified gender. So I went through and added this information to the data set.
More generally, I also wanted to identify the unique identity of each person under a given mantel – a non-trivial task.
In the end, I ended up with the below super-hero social network. Female characters are indicated by green and make up 28% of the network. Yellow nodes indicate male characters.
Nodes are sized by degree (number of connection to other characters), and you can see from the above that male characters have, on average, a higher degree than female characters.
Since the above visualization is not very helpful, I’ve included a visualization of the top 50 nodes (by degree), below. The top 5 men and top 5 women are labeled – I had to split it up because Wonder Woman was the only woman in the top 10. If you’re wondering, the yellow node off to the top left is one Commissioner James Gordon.
Stay tuned for future analysis!
Released today is a strategy paper entitled Returning to Our Roots: Educating for Democracy. The authors are Generation Citizen plus a committee from other groups, including my CIRCLE colleagues and me. I’m pleased to have been part of the discussions that generated this paper. It is distinctive in that it puts political engagement at the center of civic education and addresses both schools and out-of-school opportunities.
Generation Citizens’ executive director, Scott Warren, also has a piece entitled “Student protests reveal thirst for a dialogue on democratic process” in the Hechinger Report. Scott uses this article to summarize the recommendations of the report.
Last month, another great D&D-public radio partnership came to fruition – this time between Public Agenda, an NCDD member organization, and WNYC. PA conducted a survey of metro NYC residents’ opinions on key public issues and released its results in an in-depth report and a series stories on The Brian Leher Show all accompanied by PA blog posts. We encourage you to check out the results of their partnership in the PA announcement below or find the original here.
New York Metropolitan Area State of MindOver the past year, we’ve been working with WNYC to survey residents of the New York metropolitan region. We wanted to know how area residents are thinking about public issues like education, income inequality, housing costs, taxes, crime and police-community relations.
Throughout the fall, we’ll be releasing results from that survey in coordination with WNYC. Starting Monday, October 15, tune in each day to The Brian Lehrer Show at 10 a.m. ET to hear about what we found. Will Friedman and Carolin Hagelskamp, our president and director of research, respectively, will be talking with Brian about a different story each day. If you’re not in the area, you can listen online, live or after the show.
The segments will be accompanied by blog posts from us, which we’ll post below, and reporting from WNYC’s newsroom and data viz team. Don’t miss out on any of it: follow us on Facebook and Twitter, where we’ll be providing links in real time.
In November, we’ll release a couple of formal reports summarizing everything we’ve learned. Be sure you’re registered for our email list if you want to receive those reports.
The Public Agenda/WNYC Survey is the first annual Deborah Wadsworth Fund Project and is possible thanks in large part to the generosity of our donors. The survey will help inform our next annual Deborah Wadsworth project, through which we’ll seek to find collaborative solutions to an issue local residents care and worry deeply about…
The Public Agenda/ WNYC New York Metro Area Survey was conducted between June 29 and July 21, 2015 with 1,535 residents in the New York metro area, including New York City, Long Island, Southern New York State, Northern New Jersey, and Southern Connecticut. Additional responses were collected from 219 residents on a small subset of questions between August 25 and September 4, 2015. Some questions were posed to random subsamples of the overall sample, including the reported questions on people’s view on policing and crime, which explains why the total number of responses on these questions is smaller than the total survey sample. Data were collected via phone, including cellphone, and online, and weighted to be representative of known demographics in the region.
This PDF summarizes main findings from the 2015 Public Agenda/WNYC New York Metro Area Survey.
This document includes a full description of the questions asked in the survey, complete survey responses and a comprehensive methodology report.
New York Metropolitan Area Residents Feel Trapped by Economic Insecurity, According to New Public Agenda/WNYC Survey; Most Say Government Responds to the Wealthy, Not Them
Black and Hispanic Residents Twice as Likely as Whites to View Police-Community Relations as a Serious Problem
Regardless of where they live, affordability is what residents of the greater NY metro region worry about the most.
Most New York area residents say it’s ok for wealthy people to get wealthier as long as everyone else also has a good chance to get ahead. The problem is, people don’t feel like they’re getting that chance.
New York area residents see a place for both the government and for themselves in solutions to the region’s problems.
New York area residents say high taxes are a big problem, yet they want more government spending on housing and education. What gives?
Results from our recent survey with WNYC suggest that the communities that may need police the most are also likely to say their relations with the police are most problematic.
You can find the original version of this Public Agenda posting at www.publicagenda.org/pages/wnyc-new-york-metro-area-survey#sthash.F1GGrsYj.dpuf.