Now We Know: Participatory Budgeting in the U.S. and Canada
Reply
Monthly Archives: May 2016
Register for D&D CAN Call on Climate and Elections, 5/17
This post is a reminder to our members that the next D&D Climate Action Network (D&D CAN) conference call coming up on Tuesday, May 17th from 5-7pm Eastern / 2-4pm Pacific!
D&D CAN is a network led by NCDD supporting member Linda Ellinor of the Dialogue Group that is working to foster shared learning, networking and collaboration among those seeking to use dialogue, deliberation, and other process skills to address climate change.
The monthly D&D CAN conference calls are a great way to connect with the network, and we encourage you to register to save your spot in their next conversation by clicking here.
The title of this month’s D&D CAN call is Peril & Promise: Climate Activism, Elections, & Dialogue, and it will center on discussing the nexus of climate dialogue and the election cycle. Some of the questions to be explored on the call will include:
- What ways have you seen or been part of bringing climate issues into candidates’ campaigns, platforms, citizen initiatives and propositions?
- How are electoral issues and climate concerns converging, or not?
- What roles do skilled process work and intentional conversations play?
- What’s working and how?
The D&D CAN calls are being hosted on the QiqoChat platform, which is run by NCDD member Lucas Cioffi and about which we hosted a recent Tech Tuesday call (you can hear the recording of the call here).
The combination of online D&D technology and powerful ideas makes this call an exciting and dynamic conversation, so be sure to register today at https://ddcan.qiqochat.com. We hope to hear many of our members on the call!
The FJCC is Looking for Item Writers!
Update: We have sent out invitations. Thank you for your interest!
Do you teach social studies in Florida, particularly civics? Do you have or would like some experience developing EOCA type items? Do you understand the 7th grade civics benchmarks and the role of the benchmark clarifications? Then we would like to bring you in to the Lou Frey Institute on the 13th and 14th of June to work on helping us develop items for EOCA practice and review!
This will be a two day session. While the agenda is still being crafted, it will be led by our Dr. Terri Fine and yours truly. Day One will provide and overview and experience with the process and Day Two will give you the opportunity to write items! You will be compensated for your time, travel, and effort. We are hoping to recruit up to ten folks for this project, and would like at least regional diversity in participants. If you are interested, please shoot me an email, describing your teaching experience, item writing experience if any, and your district and school. Once we have ten folks, we will be ready to go. Thanks for your willingness to help your fellow teachers here in Florida!
Florida African American History Task Force Summer Institute
The Florida African American History Task Force here in Florida is recruiting participants for its summer institute! The Institute is June 16-18 in Tallahassee, and is definitely worth your time. The application is available here:
2016 Summer Institute Application.
EDIT! Please be advised that the deadline to submit applications for the 2016 AAHTF Summer Institute has been extended to Thursday, May 19th by 5:00 p.m. EST.
Summer Writing Goals
As a Ph.D. student in the summer, I have, it seems, quite a bit of freedom. I’ll be working, of course, and I have no shortage of things to learn, but I’m faced with a vast expanse of time in which there is much to accomplish but little which is due. My time is my own.
It’s a gift, really, but one which requires some discipline and forethought to accept successfully. I spent much of last week putting together week-by-week learning goals for myself; papers to read, specific topics to study.
Looking through it now, though, I am struck by just how mechanical my goals are; I want to learn specific algorithms and approaches, catch up on specific literatures and authors. These are good and important uses of my time, but it strikes me, too, that something is missing.
I started this blog three years ago in part because – as a generically over-busy employee and adult – I wanted to ensure that I took time out in my life to think. I bunt on a lot of days, to be sure, but nonetheless it seems a worthwhile goal to try to think at least one interesting thought a day.
Perhaps what’s most exciting about the summer, then, is that it’s a time that allows for stepping back to look at the big picture; to remember the broader questions which motivate my work. I have learned a great deal of valuable knowledge in my classes, but they have done little to relieve my Wittgensteinian doubt that people can’t deeply communicate or my Lippmannian skepticism that ‘the people’ aren’t ultimately up to the task of governance. I have found, on the whole, my writing drifting away from questions of justice and equality towards questions of implementation and practicality.
I have written before that my primary motivation comes from the civic studies question: what should we do? In that sense, it seems fair to say that my attention lately has been focused primarily on the ‘what‘ and the ‘do,‘ while, perhaps, neglecting the ‘should.‘
This is entirely to be expected, of course – the three elements are equally important but traditionally divorced in the academy. If I were a humanities Ph.D. student I’d no doubt be finding that I focus too much on the should with an unfortunately loss of practicality.
My summer writing goal, then, is to explore this should. I will continue to use the bulk of my time to study more practical topics of implementation, but this blog will be my space to step back and think about the broader questions. That’s what I want to make time for.
I’ll also keep writing, of course, about whatever random facts or interesting historical notes come my way. I wouldn’t want to miss out on that.
Broadly, then, and entirely for my own benefit – as this blog unapologetically is – here are just a few of the questions on my mind which I plan to spend some time thinking and writing about this summer:
Power – what is the role of power in the Good Society? How does it shape interactions and experiences? Is it achievable to eliminate power dynamics? Would we want to?
Dialogue – what are the strengths and limitations of dialogue as a tool for the collective work of governance? What institutions ought to be supplemented with public dialogue and when should public dialogue be supplemented by institutions? What are the realities of power dynamics in dialogue? Can they be overcome?
Institutions of democracy – What institutions are vital to democracy? How should they function and what should they accomplish? What institutions detract from democracy?
Historicism and morality – if human institutions and ideals are constantly subject to change, how do we know what is good? What would a continually Good Society look like? How would it change and adapt without simply falling into fads of the day?
Global society – why does it seem that the whole world is going to hell and what do we do about? What structures and institutions can support the Good Society on a global scale? What are our individual responsibilities as global and local citizens?
Pessimism and skepticism – why hope is not always required. Or warranted.
Divergent views – What does it truly mean to make space for divergent views? How do you distinguish from creating space to consider unpopular opinions and giving a platform to trolls and bigots? Can one be accomplished and the other avoided?
Phronetic and computational social science – what is the role of measurement in social sciences? What does it add? What does it detract? Is social science trying too hard to be ‘science’? What results from seeking predictive social science?
Participatory Arts with Young Refugees
May 11 '16
The first version of this article was researched and written by Christina Hayhow, May Maani, Naqibullah Salarzai & Leslye Womack and uploaded to Participedia for them by Naqibullah Salarzai on May 11th, 2016. Participatory Arts with Young Refugees Abstract Participatory arts are forms of artistic expression – through media such...
Diversify or Die
There’s an interesting piece in the Stone today on the consequences of philosophy’s Anglo-European blinders: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is. Garfield and Van Norden suggest that the systematic failure to address non-Western sources impoverishes the discipline and belies any claim to universality. And what a wonderfully provocative list of addenda they suggest!
We hope that American philosophy departments will someday teach Confucius as routinely as they now teach Kant, that philosophy students will eventually have as many opportunities to study the “Bhagavad Gita” as they do the “Republic,” that the Flying Man thought experiment of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) will be as well-known as the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-2016), that the ancient Indian scholar Candrakirti’s critical examination of the concept of the self will be as well-studied as David Hume’s, that Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Kwazi Wiredu (1931- ), Lame Deer (1903-1976) and Maria Lugones will be as familiar to our students as their equally profound colleagues in the contemporary philosophical canon. But, until then, let’s be honest, face reality and call departments of European-American Philosophy what they really are.
Thus, the more appropriate title for our departments would be “European and American Philosophy.” On balance, I applaud this argument: we ought to aim to live up to the universality of our disciplinary self-conception, or give up that self-conception entirely.
When I think about diversifying my own syllabi, I almost never reach for Asian philosophers. I aim for gender parity first, racial diversity second, and usually end up with only a few thinkers from outside the Euro-American tradition. Sometimes none. I am scared to get Confucius or Mencius or Wiredu wrong, and I’m worried about orientalizing or exoticizing their traditions. These are obviously resolvable anxieties, given a sincere commitment, but they exist. I have a comfort zone, I push against it in some ways but not in others, and there are biases in the patterns of which ways I leave the comfort zone that I must address.
My biases, though, largely reproduce the biases in the discipline as a whole. And it would be much easier for me to correct my individual failings if the profession would work with me, if my training had worked on me. Why didn’t my graduate school train these biases out of me? Kristie Dotson’s How is this Paper Philosophy? is my go-to answer for this question. I think it’s crucial, but it’s hard to excerpt well, so read it!
… … …
Okay, you’re back? Basically, philosophers are constantly engaged in a dual game of legitimating their work as philosophy and working to reconstitute the borders of what counts as philosophy. These practices–simultaneously forcing people to justify their projects and choices in terms of a shifting standard of legitimate philosophical research–are how we end up treating Chinese or Native American philosophy as merely “inert ideas,” or worse, as “religion, mythology, storytelling, poetry, or ‘dancing’ (as Levinas once so generously declared).”
This has the effect of making philosophy a mostly white man’s game, because what Dotson calls “diverse practitioners” usually find that philosophical borders are being continually redrawn to exclude them. Of course, she writes the essay in defense of Black American, feminist, and queer philosophy, but the point stands: Asians are excluded by the kind of discipline that philosophy has become.
So I think it’s not enough to say philosophy has a budget problem. It does! But maybe it wouldn’t have quite as bad a budget problem if there weren’t so many faculty working on the semantics of the left parenthesis. The discipline became scholastic to avoid the big ideological fights of the last half century, and now is paying the price.
Attending to other traditions might produce more majors and philosophy departments would be richer both financially and ideologically and could then be doing better work. But it’s still an open question which traditions to prioritize, since these decisions get made one hire at a time. The Garfield/Van Norden piece gestures towards African and Latin American philosophy, but it’s part of a project to specifically increase attention to Chinese philosophy. That seems good, but I do also want to see a continued? renewed? nascent? long-delayed emphasis on Black American philosophy, as well as a re-commitment to feminism.
P2P Foundation Wins Golden Nica from Prix Ars Electronica
Congratulations to my colleagues at the Peer to Peer Foundation, and especially founder Michel Bauwens, for winning the 2016 Golden Nica for Digital Communities from Prix Arts Electronica! This is a great and well-deserved honor. There were a total of 3,159 entries from 84 countries for this venerable prize this year.
In the prize citation, the jury wrote:
“The P2P Foundation is a new generation of communities that help to build communities. It is dedicated to advocacy and research of peer to peer dynamics in society. Established ten years ago, it evolved into one of the main drivers of the ‘commons transition’.
“As a decentralized and self-organized non-profit organization, the P2P Foundation analyzes, documents and promotes peer-to-peer strategies that seem to be well-suited to facing the challenges and problems of our times in ways that display great future promise. The focus is on three key traits: sustainability, openness and solidarity. Since its inception, the community of the P2P Foundation has input over 30,000 entries that document the history and development of the peer-to-peer movement. The P2P Foundation Wiki has been accessed more than 27 million times, and is thus the platform that has assembled the world’s most massive collection of knowledge about P2P.”
A shout-out to the P2P Foundation core team, consisting of James Burke, Bill Niaros, Vasilis Kostakis, Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Tr
oncoso, and of course, Michel – my dear friend and colleague on the Commons Strategies Group. Michel, it is so heartening to see your years of toil, tenacity and leadership in building this global community receive this recognition.
three cores of contemporary social science
At the risk of annoyingly oversimplifying and omitting important exceptions,* I’d propose that three major efforts drive most of social science today:
1. Causal explanations of concrete human behaviors
People buy commodities at a given price, or vote for a given candidate, or even die at a given age. To explain why, social scientists often use either statistical models or controlled experiments. These two methods are conceptually related, because one interpretation of a regression model is that it mimics the results of an experiment.
Regression models are used across the social sciences, including such applied social sciences such as business and education. Economics is the discipline that historically has had the most influence on these methods, because economists tend to be good at math, the discipline is large and influential, and lots of concrete data on economic behavior is available. However, economists increasingly study all kinds of behavior that have nothing to do with money, and some sophisticated techniques for these purposes originate in other disciplines. For instance, education researchers developed Hierarchical Linear Modeling because they so often encounter individuals nested in classrooms, nested in schools, nested in communities. HLM is now used in other contexts as well.
2. Detection of unobserved psychological factors
Some important human characteristics are not concrete behaviors and are not directly observable. For instance, you can’t tell how much a teenager knows about US history by just looking at her. You can give her a 100-item test and compute a knowledge score from her answers, but much science and art goes into designing the test and interpreting the data. The same is true of emotional states, character traits, etc.
Once you have valid and reliable measures of such inner psychological states, you can put them into the kinds of causal models described in #1. But it is a major task just to determine who has which inner traits. By the way, if people know and can be trusted to disclose their own inner psychological states, then all this research is unnecessary. We’d just ask people whether they know US history, trust their teachers, or feel angry. An important premise is that we have unconscious or unarticulated inner lives that can be revealed better from outside. For instance, I’d find out how much US history I know by taking a test written by someone else.
Psychology–like economics, a large and influential discipline–has driven the development of these methods, but they are used across the social sciences.
3. Interpretation of purposive human activity in context
People’s behavior can (sometimes) be causally explained, but it also requires interpretation. Voting is a concrete act, but what does it mean for an American to vote in a church basement? (Note that this is not the same question as why some of our polling places are in churches. The causal explanation might have little bearing on the significance of this phenomenon.) Likewise, what are the meanings of a Balinese cockfight to the people who watch and participate–and, specifically, what does it mean when cockfighting is traditional yet illegal?
In ethnography, the emphasis is on interpretation, particularity, context, and translation rather than generalizable explanations or unconscious states. A characteristic method is to ask people what things mean to them in their most familiar settings.
Ethnography has–to me–an odd origin. Late-Victorian anthropologists wanted to turn traditionally philosophical questions about the nature of “Man” into empirical questions. They were Darwinians, so they presumed that our essential natures were evolved, clearly evident in prehistoric contexts, but obscured by subsequent cultural variation. So they visited so-called “prehistoric” communities to understand how they worked. Now most of that conceptual apparatus has been criticized. For instance, hunter-gatherer societies are in history, have often developed from other kinds of societies, and vary profoundly. But ethnographic techniques remain illuminating in all kinds of settings that no one would call “prehistoric,” including Silicon Valley office parks and even departments of anthropology. They are used across the social sciences, and they overlap with the humanities.
I haven’t mentioned a host of specific techniques or even whole disciplines, such as sociology and political science. But I’d propose that the three methodological programs described here are dominant. A field like political science takes its name from the phenomena it studies–government and politics–but it draws on, and contributes to, causal modeling, psychometrics, and ethnography. To the extent that all of these approaches make problematic assumptions (e.g., methodological individualism, or a simplistic fact/value distinction), then those assumptions are pervasive in the social sciences.
*e.g., Community Based Participatory Research, or historically-informed political theory, or research on social entities other than people.
Beyond Business as Usual: Leaders of California’s Civic Organizations Seek New Ways to Engage the Public in Local Governance
The 68-page report, Beyond Business as Usual: Leaders of California’s Civic Organizations Seek New Ways to Engage the Public in Local Governance, was published 2013. The report was in partnership with Institute for Local Government and the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership at Pepperdine University. Below is an excerpt from the report and you can read the original report (or download the PDF version) from ILG’s site here.
From ILG…
What opportunities do Californians have to engage with public issues and influence decisions that affect their lives? What stands in the way of productive dialogues between local officials and the residents they serve? What are the possible ways to strengthen relations between local government and the publics they serve?
The perspectives of civic leaders and their organizations
To provide some answers to these questions, we conducted a research study that sought the opinions of more than 900 local officials and 500 leaders of civic and community-based organizations in California. We asked these local officials and civic leaders about their efforts to engage the public in decision making, their experiences with traditional public hearings at council and commission meetings and their interests and attitudes toward newer forms of public engagement—especially methods that seek to give broad cross sections of the public the opportunity to deliberate over local issues and weigh the trade-offs of policy decisions that affect their lives.
This report—the second of two summarizing this research—presents what we learned from surveying and interviewing leaders from civic and community-based organizations across California.
This report is divided into two parts. We first present the findings from our statewide survey of 462 leaders of civic and community-based organizations. These findings complement those from our research on California’s local officials’ attitudes, experiences and concerns regarding the state of public participation in local government decision making, experiences and concerns of local city and county officials regarding the state of public participation in local government decision making. The second part of this report zeros in on the views of leaders from 20 community-based organizations that work predominantly with traditionally disenfranchised communities, including low-income, ethnic minority and immigrant populations. Finally, we discuss a number of important practical recommendations that emerge from this research and its companion study on local officials.
Executive Summary
What opportunities do Californians have to engage with public issues and influence decisions that affect their lives?
What are ways to strengthen relations between communities and their local governments?
We asked leaders of California’s civic and community-based organizations about their views on the state of public participation in local governance. The following report explores what these civic leaders say is working, what’s not, and how public engagement can be improved. Traditional models for including the public in local decision making, these leaders say, fail to meet the needs of both residents and local officials. Most see significant value and potential in more inclusive and deliberative forms of engagement, and many agree local officials are making increasing efforts to include residents more meaningfully. Overall, this research suggests civic and community-based organizations are looking for newer and more effective ways to engage the public and may be ready for stronger collaborations with local government.
The report also includes concrete recommendations for local officials and their institutions, civic leaders and their organizations, and foundations and other funders. The recommendations can help improve public engagement in local governance throughout California and, we hope, beyond.
Read the full report on ILG’s site here.
About the Institute for Local Government
The Institute for Local Government is the nonprofit research education affiliate of the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties. Its mission is to promote good government at the local level with practical, impartial and easy-to-use resources for California communities. The Institute’s goal is to be the leading provider of information that enables local officials and their communities to make good decisions. Founded in 1955, the Institute has been serving local officials’ information needs for 55-plus years. Some of the highlights of that history are detailed in the story below. While respecting and honoring its past, the Institute is also intently focused on the present and future. In these difficult economic times, the need for the Institute’s materials for local officials is even greater.
Follow on Twitter: @InstLocGov.
About the Davenport Institute
Since our founding as a multi-partisan and non-profit organization in 2005, The Davenport Institute (formerly Common Sense California) has worked to engage the citizens of this state in the policy decisions that affect our everyday lives. It is our firm belief that, in today’s world of easy access to information, and easy connectivity to others, California’s municipal and education leaders are seeking ways to involve the residents of their communities in the important issues they confront. Done legitimately, this new kind of leadership produces better, more creative policy solutions and better, more engaged citizens committed to the hard work of self-governance.
Follow on Twitter: @DavenportInst
Resource Link: www.ca-ilg.org/sites/main/files/file-attachments/beyondbusinessasusual_publicagenda_2013.pdf