All are invited to test drive the freshly renamed civil discourse digital platform, AllSides Connect, and give your feedback! For the next three days, August 18th, 19th, and 20th – NCDDers AllSides and Living Room Conversations are hosting the AllSides Connect “Hackathon”, and we encourage you to check it out! Folks may remember the platform by its’ former name, “Mismatch”. This platform is an opportunity to build connections and share conversation, which many of us are greatly in need of during these times of increased physical distancing due to the coronavirus. Read more in the post below and sign up here! Thank you so much to Kristin Hansen, Director of AllSides Connect, for sharing this announcement with us!
AllSides Connect “Hackathon!”
AllSides and Living Room Conversations request your help! Please sign up for the AllSides Connect “Hackathon,” taking place thisweek – August 18th, 19th, and 20th. What is AllSides Connect?
A realtime video platform that is purpose-built to foster civil discourse and dialogue across geographic distance and political, racial, faith-based, and other divides in America. AllSides Connect has been built collaboratively by Living Room Conversations, AllSides, and Bridge the Divide. AllSides Connect is intended to broadly serve and scale the bridging/dialogue/civil discourse field. (You might know the platform by its prior name, “Mismatch.”)
What’s the Hackathon, and how do I sign up?
Join the hackathon to experience online civil discourse, test drive the realtime video platform, and give the AllSides Connect team your feedback on the experience … all in 30 minutes or less!
Best of all, you don’t need to be a techie to “hack” AllSides Connect … non-techies needed!
All you need to do is sign up for one 30-minute slot on Tues Aug 18, Wed Aug 19, or Thurs Aug 20. Up to six people can sign up for each time slot.
Here’s the link to sign up: AllSides Connect Hackathon – Sign Up Form – Aug 18, 19, 20
What happens next? Next, you’ll receive a calendar invite, a URL link, and some basic instructions about how to join your scheduled conversation. You’ll be joined with one or more other “hackers” to hold a short online conversation, with a built-in guide.
Thank you for helping these organizations to scale civil discourse, respectful dialogue, and empathetic listening across America!
Let the 2020 All-America City Award Competition begin! This beloved annual community event hosted by NCDD partner organization, the National Civic League, kicks off today and continues until the Weds. August 19th. This inspirational event recognizes communities that leverage civic engagement, collaboration, inclusiveness and innovation to successfully address local issues. This year has gone virtual but you can still join by heading on over to the NCL site linked here. If you are looking for a great boost of spirit, then we strongly encourage you to join the live stream via the AAC Facebook page and cheer on these #AAC2020 finalist communities! Learn more about the event below and on the NCL website here.
The 2020 All-America City Award Event Kicks Off!
This event recognizes communities that leverage civic engagement, collaboration, inclusiveness and innovation to successfully address local issues. The All-America City Award shines a spotlight on the incredible work taking place in communities across the country. By celebrating the best in local innovation, civic engagement and cross-sector collaboration, the All-America City Awards remind us of the potential within every community to tackle tough issues and create real change.
The 2020 All-America City theme is “Enhancing health and well-being through civic engagement.” The 2020 All-America City Award is focused on celebrating examples of civic engagement practices that advance health and well-being in local communities. We are looking for projects that demonstrate inclusive decision-making processes to enhance health and well-being for all, and particularly for populations currently experiencing poorer health outcomes.
Since 1949, the National Civic League has recognized and celebrated the best in American civic innovation with the prestigious All-America City Award. The Award, bestowed yearly on 10 communities (more than 500 in all) recognizes the work of communities in using inclusive civic engagement to address critical issues and create stronger connections among residents, businesses and nonprofit and government leaders.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you’re pulling on a door marked “pull” only to realize that you have to “push” to open it? These ubiquitous poorly designed doors are called “Norman doors” that both confuse and embarrass door openers.
Online, certain experiences are not so different from physical Norman doors. Imagine that you are trying to accomplish a task online, such as requesting a service or paying a bill, but you just cannot understand what you have to do to get it done. It’s not your fault: you have just been victim of bad user experience (UX) design.
Less visible to the public, civil servants themselves are also victims: software developed to conduct simple and menial tasks are so poorly designed that training to use them is required. In the worst, and unfortunately common scenario, civil servants refuse to adopt a new piece of software, despite training that often substitutes for real change management to usable digital processes. And behind narratives of “resistance to change” and “poor ownership” of software, often hides poor UX design; something that cannot be solved by decrees or dollars alone.
In the private sector, poor UX gets you out of business. In the public sector, exceptions apart, users are blamed for low uptake. But it doesn’t always have to be this way.
Enter UX research and design
The term user experience was coined in 1993 by the famous cognitive psychologist and designer Don Norman, while conducting human interaction research and application at Apple Computers. As put by Norman, going beyond human-computer interaction, user experience covers “all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.”
In the private sector, the concept of user experience has been operationalized through user research. In general, the term user research refers to a continuous research process, that allows to learn about users and create services that increasingly meet their needs. Focusing on understanding users’ behaviors, needs, and motivations, user research employs a number of methods, such as card sorting , task analysis, and usability testing. Companies like Google, Netflix and Airbnb take user research seriously, dedicating sizeable budgets to these activities. There are good reasons for this: research estimates that on average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 in return , an ROI of 9,900%, with firms considering UX capacity “a matter of survival”.
A growing number of governments are starting to give UX research the attention that it deserves, such as the UK’s Government Digital ServiceUnited States Digital Service Unit, and Team Digitale in Italy, to cite a few. A smaller number of governments in lower- and middle-income countries are also starting to embrace this approach. For example, Argentina’s government created a new digital driving license, replacing physical cards with a digital document stored on users’ smartphones. Through a combination of user research and agile software development, the government delivered the new license in 65 days. In a similar vein, in Moldova, the combination of user research and process reengineering led to the elimination of several steps for parents’ enrollment in the country’s child care benefits program: workload for enrollment and processing benefits were reduced by 70%, dramatically reducing the time for benefits to reach the families.
Service design and the empathy gap
Studies by cognitive scientists and psychologists consistentlyreveal an empathy gap where decision-makers overestimate the similarity between what they value and what others value. Part of this effect stems from decision-makers’ natural incapacity to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. In this respect, one of the core functions of user research is precisely bridging this empathy gap, allowing the researcher to better capture the user’s perspective.
If by now user research should be a prerequisite for the design of any services, this is even more true for services in developing countries. This is so because, the more different the realities of two individuals, the larger the empathy gap between the two of them. This includes socio-economic background, including age, gender, ethnic background, or disabilities, as well as digital literacy. And all else equal, the less developed a country the less likely public services are designed by people who use them, or who share experiences that are closer to that of the end-users. In that case it is common to find, for instance, designers of public transport systems who use private drivers and health experts who never received treatment in a public hospital. The result are services built on a larger empathy gap, conceived by people whose frame of reference is even more distant from everyday users.
If governments are willing to deliver digital services that truly add value to their users, they will have to start paying significantly more attention to user research than they currently do. In practice, closing the empathy gap requires a number of steps that are worth highlighting. First, governments should be directly employing public servants who have skills in user research, combined with professionals with additional Internet-era skills such as digital design and agile project management. Second, governments should adopt a “users’ needs” first approach when prioritizing which services are digitized. That is, instead of relying on a checklist approach to ‘eServices’, governments let user research guide them on which services should be digitized. Finally, governments should abandon the number of services provided as a measure of success and instead, focus on the number of users who get services that are faster, cheaper and more efficient.
We are cognizant that for some government and development professionals, these three steps may be considered a tall ask. But that’s the only way forward if we want to avoid reproducing digital Norman doors, wasting resources and further frustrating public service users.
*Co-authored with Kai Kaiser and Huong Thi Lan Tran, originally postedin the World Bank’s Governance for Development blog.
The newest Civics in Real Life is now available! Our election season series continues as we explore how elections serve as an example of federalism and the most visible symbol of the American democratic system. We hope that you find this useful!
As a reminder, so far our fall topics have addressed Voting Rights
These will be updated once a week throughout the school year, addressing or relating to current events and civic concepts, without necessarily directly connecting to any particular state standards and benchmarks. We hope you find these one page resources useful! You can find an overview of the ones from spring here! These are all still available over on Florida Citizen.
This announcement comes to us from our friends at the David Matthews Center for Civic Life. ICYMI on Friday, August 21st, the Matthews Center will be hosting their annual Civic Institute with this year’s theme, Common Bonds: Collective Purpose and Civic Resilience in Uncertain Times. The event this year will be entirely online and open to folks outside the state, as well as free-of-charge! Make sure you see Dr. David Mathews, President and C.E.O. of the Kettering Foundation, give the keynote address sharing from his experiences at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, during a past global epidemic. Read more in the article below and find the original posting here.
Common Bonds: Collective Purpose and Civic Resilience in Uncertain Times
The Mathews Center will host its annual Civic Institute on August 21st, 2020. The event will be held entirely online. The theme of this year’s event is Common Bonds: Collective Purpose and Civic Resilience in Uncertain Times.
Dr. David Mathews, President and C.E.O. of the Kettering Foundation, will deliver a (pre-recorded) keynote address drawing on his experiences at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—where he served as Secretary during the Swine Flu outbreak of 1976.
Our first digital-only Civic Institute will explore strategies deployed by individuals and communities as they respond and adapt to the challenges posed by a global epidemic. Community leaders across Alabama will showcase the innovative ways in which they have resisted social isolation by forging new connections with their fellow citizens and by exploring alternative perspectives uncovered through local historical research. This three-hour event (9:00am – 12:00pm CST) will be packed with the same quality thoughtful discussions and meaningful connections that you have come to expect from us each year.
9:00 am – Opening Remarks by Cristin Brawner
9:05 am – Pre-Recorded Keynote by Dr. David Mathews
10:00 am – Short Talks with Panelists
Terrance Smith, Director of the Mayor’s Innovation Team in Mobilewill discuss how his city is adapting to the challenges posed by the pandemic.
Margaret Morton of SAFE Sylacauga will discuss a new community resilience initiative with Laura Strickland (Director of the Sylacauga Chamber of Commerce) and Brigadier General Robert Holmes (retired).
Dr. John Giggie of the University of Alabama’s Summersell Center and students from Tuscaloosa’s Central High School will discuss The History of Us, a year-long course created to help students explore the African American history of their own community. Dr. Giggie co-taught the course with his graduate teaching assistant, Ms. Margaret Lawson, who will join the panel alongside students from the course.
11:15 am – Breakout Discussions: Rebuilding, Recovering, and Reimagining Our Future
11:50 am – Closing Remarks
Because the event will be offered entirely online this year, registration will be free of charge! If you are able, we ask that you consider making a donation to the Jean O’Connor-Snyder Fund here. One-hundred percent of your donation goes directly to support the JOIP internship program, which provides immersive civic learning opportunities for college students to research deliberative practices and asset-based approaches for working with Alabamians in community-based projects. Those who donate $25 or more will receive a DMC care package full of our latest resources and a special gift!
ICYMI NCDDer, the Participatory Budget Project, recently celebrated over a decade of service and earlier this year, Shari Davis, assumed the role as their new executive director! The release of their 2019 Impact Report is now available and provides a full view of their initiatives. Highlights of their incredible journey, in addition to processes and projects underway this current year, can be found in the article below or in the original post here.
Our Impact: Real Money, Real Power
2019 marked a monumental year for PBP. Our organization turned 10 years old, helped launch or continue over 170 PB processes, and successfully transitioned our leadership to a national Black-led organization committed to equity.
As we grow our work to reimagine democracy and dismantle oppressive systems, we know the road ahead will not be easy. It will require us to evaluate and re-evaluate how we show up in our work to advance equity across the country. It will require us to reach out and ask for the support, input, and creativity we need. And it will require us to challenge ourselves and each other to imagine beyond what we have seen before – and reach for what is possible.
Participatory budgeting (PB) in North America is in a vastly different place than it was just one decade ago. To acknowledge the movement around PB and key issues like climate resilience and equity, we built new tools to better address these challenges.
In the last year alone, we’ve…
Launched PBcan.org, an interactive website to help imagine how PB can address concerns including affordable housing, transportation, climate resilience, and equity.
Disseminated new digital PB tools to 150 policymakers, community leaders, and funders involved in developing our Democracy Beyond Elections policy platform that centers equity and real community power.
Expanded or launched 173 PB processes that allocated over $55 million to community-driven solutions in North America.
Empowered young leaders across the country to shape their reality by launching PB in schools in over a dozen cities and towns, including partnering with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to engage students at two Brooklyn high school campuses in deciding how to spend over $1 million and new policies to make their schools safer and more supportive. That’s 10x more funding than in any other school’s PB process!
Transitioned our organizational leadership. In April 2020, Shari Davis stepped into a transformative leadership role as our Executive Director. We have undertaken an intentional transition process as an organization to make sure the newest chapter of PBP is resilient, visionary, and ready for what this moment demands.
As we plan for the next iteration of our work, building community control over public budgets has never felt more urgent. A global pandemic coupled with a nationwide movement demanding justice for Black lives has shed a new light on a real reality: our most impacted communities are under-resourced and overpoliced. People across the country are leaning into conversations and demands in ways that will have lasting implications for decades to come.
This moment marks a turning point for our country and PBP to recommit to who and what we stand for. We commit to demanding real community power over the budgets, policies, and decisions that impact their lives.
Reimagining what’s possible is one important step to moving to real community control – and it won’t be easy. It will require all of us and we’d like to invite you to play a role by making a donation to our work.
We thank our hardworking staff, board members, donors, and supporters like you who have consistently shown up for us over the years.
We mentioned previously thatCivics360 was getting some new resources and registration changes. While the registration changes are still underway, the new resources are now available!
Over the summer, we worked with some excellent civics teachers in Orange County Public Schools (Kacie Angel, Richardo Delfosse, Lindsey Russell, Michelle Preiser, Jennifer Horton, and Jennifer Moats Cunningham) to create new resources for Civics360, supported by a grant from the Elizabeth Morse Genius Foundation. These resources are intended to provide scaffolded readings and enrichment learning activities across some of the more difficult benchmarks and concepts. Let’s take a look!
We are grateful to the wonderful teachers in OCPS for helping us create these, and to the Elizabeth Morse Genius Foundation for helping to make it happen! We hope you find them useful!
For my ‘Frontiers of Commoning’ podcast, Episode #5, I recently interviewed Professor Neera Singh, a geographer at the University of Toronto, who has long studied forest commons in India. Singh’s scholarship specializes in conservation, “development,” and the governance of natural systems.
I wanted to interview Neera because I have a keen interest in the role of subjectivity in a commons. How does a person participating in a commons feel as a result of that participation, and what effects does that have for the community and ecosystem?
One of Neera’s key findings is that the “affective labor” of commoners produces healthier, more resilient forests than corporate or bureaucratic state management. But in a world dominated by state and corporate power – and therefore by impersonal institutions with rigid logics -- a key challenge is how to honor the soft, creative power of affective stewardship.
A forest in Odisha, India. Photo by Diptiman Panigrahi, Creative Commons BY 3.0 license.
In my podcast interview, Neera describes how, as a young academic, she was walking through one forest plantation after another, each filled with orderly rows of acadia and eucalyptus trees and little else. Then, to her astonishment, she stumbled upon a lush, green forest. “For me, at that time, it was like….’oh my God!’,” she said.
The lush, inviting forest was in fact a community forest. The nearby villagers loved and cherished it. Because of their deep emotional care for the landscape and its health, the forest was a beautiful, thriving ecosystem – unlike the nearby factory-style plantations whose trees are raised as commodity timber, with little regard for the long-term ecological health and biodiversity of the forest.
Singh’s early encounters with forests in India led her to study community forests more intensively. In 2012, she published an article that summarized some of her key findings in Geoforum journal under the title, “The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India.”
After comparing industrial-style monoculture forests managed for productivity and predictable outputs, with the social practices of community forests, Singh concluded that the subjective identities that people develop in the course of caring for their forests -- their “affective labor” -- makes a big difference.
Unlike wage-labor or state-mandated behavior, affective labor develops people’s inner selves and fuels higher, nonmarket aspirations. People become eager to bring emotional connections and spiritual commitments to their "work." They are stewarding “care-wealth." They are taking care of the things that matter to them, with dramatic results.
What made Neera’s 2012 article so compelling to me was its willingness to abandon the standard idiom of “resource management” used by economists, social scientists, and even some commons scholar. Instead she focused on the subjectivity of commoners as a serious topic for empiricalinvestigation.
Instead of presuming that every villager was an isolated individual making rational calculations about how to extract as much value for herself (as Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” fable does), Neera wanted to explore “the role of affect and environmental care practices in the production of new subjectivities.” There is a collective culture and commitment into which individuals are integrated as "Nested-I's." Given that there are about 10,000 villages actively protecting state-owned forests in Odisha, it makes sense to explore how elaborate community-based arrangements actually work.
Singh’s paper documented how “villagers’ daily practices of caring for and regenerating degraded forests in Odisha can be seen as affective labor in which mind and body, reason and passion, intellect and feeling are employed together. Through the environmental care practices involved in ‘growing forests,’ villagers not only transform natural landscapes; they also transform their individual and collective subjectivities.”
In other words, the inner lives of commoners, as commoners, have direct consequences for the external, material world. They are engaged in a symbiotic dance with living natural systems, a call-and-response conversation with the more-than-human plants and creatures of the forest.
Of course, traditional communities and indigenous peoples have known this for generations. It is western science and business that have not really understood this. It has taken novels like Richard Powers’ The Overstory – a series of stories about people’s intimate, intergenerational relationships with trees – to give a sense of how animism is alive and well and uplifting, even in western societies that consciously deny “superstition.”
Far from being gratuitous, human care lies at the core of everything. (Ah, but how do you measure it, the scientist and business executive responds!) Georges Braque, the French painter, once said “I do not believe in things. I believe only in their relationships.” The German physician Hans Peter Dürr agrees with this conclusion: "Basically, there is no such thing as matter. At least not in the common sense. There is only a fabric of relationships, constant change, vitality. We have trouble imagining this. What is primary is only the interrelationships that exist – that which connects. We could also call it spirit. Something we can only experience spontaneously and cannot grasp.”
The stewardship of forests in Odisha brings many of these ideas into focus.People’s affective labor makes something vital and alive. It's how we co-create the world with other living organisms. That is what creates value and meaning – far more than the “utility” or price that economists regard as value. Give a listen to my podcast interview with Neera Singh to get a richer sense of her research.
To read more of Neera Singh's scholarship in this area, here are a few thoughtful articles:
Ephemera 17(4): 751-776: "Becoming a commoner: The commons as sites for affective socio-nature encounters and co-becomings"
Book (2018) PDF): Ecologies of Hope & Transformation: Post-Development Alternatives from India, coedited by Neera Singh, Seema Kulkarni, and Neema Pathak Broome.
Good afternoon, friends! Yesterday, we were invited by Orange County Public Schools to provide some of their civics teachers with a webinar overview of resources available over at Civics360 and Florida Citizen. This video covers our middle school civics lesson plans, Civics360, the mock election, Students Investigating Primary Sources, and more.
We are always happy to meet with folks to provide professional development about pedagogy and content, as well as simple things like resource overviews, to anyone anytime anywhere (within reason!). Feel free to email us!
Last week NCDD hosted our special July Confab Call for our Higher Education folks. On the call, 30 participants engaged around how they are planning to teach dialogue and deliberation pedagogy this coming fall, and what resources or tools they could use to assist them. Thanks again to all who participated, and to those who captured notes from the breakouts!
During this event three topics were discussed by participants as they explored their plans for fall. The notes from these breakout groups have been captured in the Google Doc accessible here. This is the start of a gathering of resources for folks in Higher Ed which NCDD will pull together over the coming weeks and months. If you have a resource you would like to share so others know about it, or if you are interested in offering your expertise in a brief video, as a guest speaker, etc. please fill out this brief survey so we can get you in touch with those interested!
In addition to the notes, the event recording includes brief report-outs from each of these groups on their discussions. Check out the recording here.
Many thanks to Lori Britt for helping organize this event, and to all who participated! NCDD is pulling together resources to share more broadly, so if you know of something that could benefit the Higher Ed community, let us know below or in the survey linked above! We’ll follow up once this resource page is up and running.
To learn more about NCDD’s Confab Calls and hear recordings of others, visit www.ncdd.org/events/confabs. We love holding these events and we want to continue to elevate the work of our field with Confab Calls and Tech Tuesdays. It is through your generous contributions to NCDD that we can keep doing this work! That’s why we want to encourage you to support NCDD by making a donation or becoming an NCDD member today (you can also renew your membership by clicking here). Thank you!
AllSides and Living Room Conversations request your help! Please sign up for the AllSides Connect “Hackathon,” taking place this week – August 18th, 19th, and 20th.
This event recognizes communities that leverage civic engagement, collaboration, inclusiveness and innovation to successfully address local issues. The All-America City Award shines a spotlight on the incredible work taking place in communities across the country. By celebrating the best in local innovation, civic engagement and cross-sector collaboration, the All-America City Awards remind us of the potential within every community to tackle tough issues and create real change.
The Mathews Center will host its annual Civic Institute on August 21st, 2020
2019 marked a monumental year for PBP. Our organization turned 10 years old, helped launch or continue over 170 PB processes, and successfully transitioned our leadership to a national Black-led organization committed to equity.
