After more than 40 years in Midtown Manhattan, our offices are moving to a WeWork space in Brooklyn Heights at the end of this week.
Please update your records with our new mailing address, effective Oct 28, 2016:
195 Montague Street, 14th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Our phone numbers and email addresses will remain unchanged.
We look forward to settling into the new space and seeing you there soon!
Best,
Public Agenda
I’m delighted to see that the new edition of America: The Owner’s Manual is out. Senator Bob Graham, a truly dedicated leader for civic engagement, has written it with Chris Hand. They take the research, structure, and impact of the book with the utmost seriousness and have worked hard to revise it for a new edition. As I say in my blurb, “America, the Owner’s Manual is the only book that comprehensively explains how to be effective in American politics and civic life, and it does so brilliantly. It’s consistently practical, realistic, accessible, and inspiring. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to improve the world.” It works very well as a textbook, but you can also use it on your own or with a voluntary group.
Buy it here. Follow it on Twitter, @USAownersmanual; on Facebook, USAownersmanual; or use hashtag #ATOMbook.
We want to encourage everyone our NCDD network to consider registering to attend the Everyday Democracy national convening, The Moment is Now: Democracy that Works for All. The gathering will take place Dec. 8-10 in Baltimore, and it will be a great opportunity to learn from and connect with EvDem’s national network of community leaders and practitioners who are working to create change for racial equity, economic opportunity, and deep democratic engagement through dialogue in their locales. Learn more in EvDem’s announcement below, visit the conference page, or register today!
Everyday Democracy’s National ConveningThere is no time like now to come together, share experiences, learn, and expand our impact.
At Everyday Democracy’s National Convening, The Moment is Now: Democracy that Works for All, this December 8-10 in Baltimore, MD, you will join hundreds of active, engaged and influential individuals from across the country who are making positive change in their communities.
The Convening will be a space for changemakers of all backgrounds and sectors to share lessons and ideas on how to build equity, inclusivity, and increased voice and participation in our communities and our country. You will meet people doing great work – people like the residents of Wagner, South Dakota who, for the past nine years, have used Everyday Democracy’s coaching and materials to organize dialogue circles to work through issues of intergenerational poverty and racism. The program has decreased tensions and helped build trust between native and white residents. Results include a significantly higher native graduation rate and the establishment of a small business incubator with a racially diverse board. Read more about their work here.
This is just one of many examples of people coming together across divides for honest, productive dialogue on tough issues and then solving problems together. Let’s connect these local efforts for greater national impact.
Highlights of the Convening
This will be a collaborative, arts-oriented, multi-cultural event. Some of the noteworthy features include:
The election is almost here, and afterwards, no matter what the outcome, we will need to build on positive examples of dialogue and deliberation and real work towards equity. Please join us in Baltimore, MD, December 8-10, and get ready to be inspired.
Click here for more information about the Convening and click here to register. More stories of change, and resources for all communities, are here at our web site, also.
We hope to see you there!
The following is an interview that Silke Helfrich gave to Michel Bauwens about the assembling and editing of the anthology Patterns of Commoning, which has recently been posted online at Patternsofcommoning.org. In coming weeks, I will be posting selected chapters from the book here.
Bauwens: Silke, could you first give some background about yourself and your collaboration with David Bollier in editing your books about the commons?
Helfrich: I feel cosmopolitan, but my roots are in the hilly countryside of East Germany, near the German border — the “system border” between capitalism and socialism until 1989. I currently live in Jena, Germany, and will soon move to the South where I will try to remodel a house that is exactly 500 years older than I am. This is an experience that makes me feel humbled because it brings me face-to-face with the realities of making something “sustainable.”
Since 2007 I have work closely with David Bollier, an American activist. We often describe what we do (along with you, Michel Bauwens, the third member of the Commons Strategies Group) as “seeding new conversations.” Just like farmers, we cannot really know how big and copious the harvest will be, or when exactly it will come. But we keep seeding to help making the commons visible at different levels:
1. As collective resources, both material and immaterial, which need protection and require a lot of knowledge and know-how;
2. As social processes that foster and deepen thriving relationships; and
3. As a new mode of production that I call the Commons-Creating Peer Economy, or Commons-Oriented Economy.
I’d even say that there is a fourth level: the Commons as a worldview, as the expression of an ongoing paradigm shift now underway.
B: Is Patterns of Commoning an effort to sow seeds that will make the commons visible?
H: Absolutely! It is the second of three books that explore different aspects of the commons. The first began in 2010, when together with David and almost 80 contributors from all over the world, and thanks to the tremendous support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, we started to work on an anthology called The Wealth of the Commons. That book was originally planed to sketch out the philosophical and policy foundations for a commons-friendly politics. But we quickly realized that we first had to introduce the commons and explain why we believe that commons having very different practices and resources – so-called traditional commons of land and water, for example, and digital commons on the other hand – are in fact related. They may look very different based on the resources managed, but in essence they have a lot in common – a social commitment to manage the resources responsibly, fairly and in inclusive ways.
The Wealth of the Commons became longer and longer, and so we ended up doing what commoners often do when there is an unsolvable conflict: we forked the project. David and I started thinking about a volume 2, which in 2015 became Patterns of Commoning, an anthology of profiles of successful commons and an exploration of the inner dimensions of commoning. Mid-way through this book, after maybe a dozen of concept versions of it, we realized that all good things come in threes, so we committed to a third volume, this one on the macro-political, economic and cultural dimensions of a commons-based society.
Earlier this week, I gave a brief lightning talk as part of the fall welcome event for Northeastern’s Digital Scholarship Group and NULab for Texts, Maps, and Data. In my talk, I gave a high-level introduction to the motivation and concept behind a research project I’m in the early stages of formulating with my advisor Nick Beauchamp and my Tufts colleague Peter Levine.
I didn’t write out my remarks and my slides don’t contain much text, but I thought it would be helpful to try to recreate those remarks here:
I am interested broadly in the topic of political dialogue and deliberation. When I use the term “political” here, I’m not referring exclusively to debate between elected officials. Indeed, I am much more interested politics as associated living; I am interested in the conversations between every-day people just trying to figure out how we live in this world together. These conversations may be structured or unstructured.
With this group of participants in mind, the next question is to explore how ideas spread. There is a great model borrowed from epistemology that looks at spreading on networks. Considering social networks, for example, you can imagine tracking the spread of a meme across Facebook as people share it with their friends, who then share it with friend of friends, and so on.
This model is not ideal in the context of dialogue. Take the interaction between two people, for example. If my friend shares a meme, there’s some probability that I will see it in my feed and there is some probability that I won’t see it in my feed. But those are basically the only two options: either I see it or I don’t see it.
With dialogue, I may understand you, I may not understanding you, I may think I understand you…etc. Furthermore, dialogue is a back and forth process. And while a meme is either shared or not shared, in the back and forth of dialogue, there is no certainty that an idea is actually exchanged to that a comment had a predictable effect.
This raises the challenging question of how to model dialogue as a process at the local level. This initial work considers an individual’s epistemic network – a network of ideas and beliefs which models an given individual’s reasoning process. The act of dialogue then, is no longer an exchange between two (or more) individuals, it is an exchange between two (or more) epistemic networks.
There are, of course, a lot of methodological challenges and questions to this approach. Most fundamentally, how do you model a person’s epistemic network? There are multiple, divergent way to do this from which you can imagine getting very different – but equally valid results.
The first method – which has been piloted several times by Peter Levine – is a guided reflection process in which individuals respond to a series of prompts in order to self-identify the nodes and links of their epistemic network. The second method involves the automatic extraction of a semantic network from a written reflection or discussion transcript.
I am interested in exploring both of these methods – ideally with the same people, in order to compare both construction models. Additionally, once epistemic networks are constructed, through either approach, you can evaluate and compare their change over time.
There are a number of other research questions I am interested in exploring, such as what network topology is conducive to “good” dialogue and what interactions and conditions lead to opinion change.
In phrases like “civic education,” “civic engagement,” “civic technology,” or (as in the name of our college) “civic life,” what does the word “civic” mean? In conversations and writing about the topic, I detect several definitions. Each definition can be introduced with a different keyword:
I value all these things. It’s tempting to say, then, that the right definition of “the civic” is the union of all of them. But that seems a bit ad hoc, a miscellaneous assemblage of desirable behaviors and values. It would be better to have an organized account of how they all fit together. For instance, perhaps we need community to provide people with enough support that they can exercise relatively equal power, but power is best when informed by deliberative discourse. In turn, deliberation encourages attention to the commons, allows performance, and both requires and develops republican virtues.
That is a rather discourse-centered theory; one could instead make the various ideas center on the commonwealth, or on democratic exercises of power. It’s also reasonable to weigh some of these ideas much more heavily than others.
See also: what is the definition of civic engagement? and defining civic engagement, democracy, civic renewal, and related terms
I’m pleased to report that Patterns of Commoning is now available online. The book – a collection of more than 50 original essays about lively, productive commons – is the most accessible and far-ranging survey of contemporary commons in print.
The anthology features profiles of such innovative commons as Farm Hack, a global network that makes open source farm equipment…. the Bangla-Pesa currency that has helped revive a poor neighborhood in Kenya…. a collaborative online mapping project that help humanitarian rescue efforts….the theater commons HowlRound, the Obstea forest commons of Romania, and the water committees of Cochabamba, Bolivia.
When my co-editor Silke Helfrich and I published the book a year ago with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, we deliberately bypassed commercial publishers because they demand too much control and deliver too little in return. We self-published the book with the help of dozens of commoners who pre-ordered the book, and then printed and distribute it via Off the Commons Books in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Since we have retained control over the copyright and publication, we were able to use a Creative Commons license and post the book on the Web. This is what we also did for our previous anthology, The Wealth of the Commons, whose website continues to get a lot of readers worldwide.
So head on over to the website for Patterns of Commoning, and check out the many fantastic chapters, each on its own webpage. Don’t be shy about buying a printed copy of the book via Off the Common Books or, if you must, Amazon.com. Because of our commons-based publishing scheme, we are able to offer a handsome 405-page softcover book for only $15 plus postage.
Ebook versions are available in Kindle, Nook and ePub formats. Outside of the US, the book can be ordered from Central Books in London. The German edition of the book -- Die Welt der Commons Muster gemeinsamen Handelns, published by transcript Verlag – can be found here.
Yesterday, Secretary of Education King spoke for quite awhile on civic education and its importance in helping students become the kinds of citizens they should be.
For me, as someone with a passion for civic education and a firm belief in the importance of developing civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions, this was a positive speech. Some of the highlights:
We need to continue to be ever-vigilant to make sure that this right is not taken away. However, as I would tell my students when I was teaching, voting, as important as it is, is only one responsibility of citizenship. The strength of our democracy depends on all of us as Americans understanding our history and the Constitution and how the government works at every level. Becoming informed and thoughtful about local, state and national issues, getting involved in solving problems in our schools, communities, states and nationally. Recognizing that solutions to the complex issues our nation faces today all require compromise. Being willing to think beyond our own needs and wants and to embrace our obligations to the greater good.
Here at the FJCC, we cannot stress enough how important it is that we as citizens understand that we need to do MORE than just vote, no matter your position on issues. In order to be the best citizen that you can you be, you must become involved and engaged within your community. Organizationally, the FJCC has brought on board an Action Civics Coordinator to begin the process of working with students, teachers, schools, and districts in a civics program that moves beyond just civic knowledge and towards a refinement of the other civic competencies that Secretary King stresses here.
Today, all 50 states and the District of Columbia make some civics instruction a graduation requirement. Over the past couple of years, 14 states have also begun requiring students to pass a version of the citizenship exam to get a diploma. That could be a good start, but it is civics light. Knowing the first three words of the preamble to the Constitution, or being able to identify at least one branch of government, is worthwhile, but it’s not enough to equip people to carry out the duties of citizenship.
Without a doubt, this emphasizes again the importance of skills in dispositions as well as knowledge in creating a well-rounded and engaged citizen! It also reinforces the concerns that some have raised about the value of the naturalization test as a measure of civic education and preparedness.
And ask teachers and principals and superintendents to help your students learn to be problem solvers who can grapple with challenging issues such as how to improve their schools, homelessness, air and water pollution or the tensions between police and communities of color. It is also critical that these conversations not be partisan. Civic education and engagement is not a Democratic Party or a Republican Party issue. Solutions to problems can and should be rooted in different philosophies of government. We have to make sure classrooms welcome and celebrate these different perspectives.
I recognize that this could lead to uncomfortable conversations and that teachers will need support and training to foster these conversations in productive ways. Principals will need to be courageous and back their teachers up. Superintendents and school boards will need to make sure their communities understand what they are trying to accomplish.
This is so very important. Discussion of current events and controversial issues within a deliberative framework generally has a positive impact on student civic engagement and awareness of issues, as well as willingness to engage in problem solving. Recent work by Hess and McAvoy explore ways in which teachers and students in ideologically different communities approach this, and both the research and the suggestions can be quite beneficial as we contemplate how to safely approach difficult issues.
So what are the elements of a robust and relevant civic education? First, students need knowledge. They need to know the Constitution and the legislative process. They also need to understand history. Our students ought to be truly familiar with the primary sources that have shaped our nation’s history, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with Sojourner Truth’s, “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, and Dr. King’s letter from a Birmingham jail, to name a few.
But it’s not enough to be able to quote from these documents. They need to know why they remain relevant today. They need to be able to put themselves into other shoes and to appreciate the different perspectives that have shaped our nation’s history.
Well, there is the need for civic knowledge. But is there anything else kids need in order to become the citizens this nation needs them to be?
Beyond knowledge, students also need civic skills. They should be able to write persuasive letters to the editor, or to the mayor, or to a member of Congress, and learn to speak at public meetings. In addition, they should have opportunities to do democracy. When I was teaching, I had my seniors do research projects tackling local problems in the community. I can recall students who worked with a local nonprofit to end the dumping of garbage in their neighborhood, to support urban agriculture projects, and to advocate for more affordable housing.
Ah, there is is! Civic skills! They have to know what to DO with that knowledge! Is there anything else, Dr. King?
We also want our students to learn to look beyond their own interests to their enlightened self interest in the common good. I recently visited Flint, Michigan, and while I may never live in Flint, I recognized it’s in my interest to make sure that children and families in Flint and every other city in the country have safe water to drink and an opportunity to fulfill their potential. Service both helps students understand the challenges in the community, helps them understand themselves and also helps them understand the importance of the common good.
And THERE is is! We need to ensure that students develop those civic dispositions that help them make a difference for the common good! And remember, this is not a partisan issue. No matter the perspective, we want citizens to feel as though they CAN make a difference and that they have the ability to engage in the practice of citizenship!
But the biggest and most important outcome of all is that high quality civic education prepares students to help the nation solve difficult, challenging, complex issues and make it a better, more equitable place to live with genuine opportunity for all. Civic education must be an essential part of a well-rounded education. It must be at the foundation of the future, not only of our economy but of our democracy.
Our schools need to be about more than preparing kids for a job. They need to be about preparing them to be citizens. Another reason we should consider how the C3 Framework can shape our standards, our curriculum, and our instruction.
It was such a pleasure to hear and see strong advocacy for civic education that goes beyond simple rote learning. As this current election season suggests, there is such a great need for building those civic competencies and considering our schools as more than just the place where we send our kids to the spend the day.
You can take a look at the transcript of Dr. King’s remarks here.
