4th Int’l Conference on PB in N. America Opens Call for Proposals

Posted on November 23, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

Before you check out for the holiday this week, we encourage our members to consider responding to the call for proposals for the 4th International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in North America, which will be hosted in Boston, MA from May 20th – 22nd, 2016 by the Participatory Budgeting Project, one of our great NCDD member organizations.

The deadline to submit for the conference is December 18th, 2015, so don’t wait too long! You can read the full call for proposals here.

This year’s conference will coincide with the voting phase of the Boston’s youth participatory budgeting process, which adds an exciting focus on young people’s participation in deliberative processes to the gathering. Here is how PBP describes the conference:

The 4th International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in North America, organized by the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, USA during the voting phase of their award-winning, city-wide, youth PB process.

The conference is a space for participants and organizers of PB processes to share and reflect on their experiences so far, alongside interested activists, practitioners, scholars, elected officials, and civic designers.

The PB Conference will be organized around three themes this year:

2016 Conference Themes

Youth power through PB: PB in schools, youth-only processes, and nearly every other PB process in North America uniquely gives real power to young people – as young as 11! What can we do to encourage even more youth leadership with PB?

PB in practice: What is working well? What has been less successful? What improvements can be made in the way the process is implemented? How can we do better and be more effective with existing PB processes and how can we put more processes in place across North America and around the world.

Measuring impact: How do we define a good PB process? What are the best ways to define success in this context? What are innovative, effective tools and methods we can use to assess the impact of processes that are currently underway as well as to shape new PB processes.

Any proposals for workshops, presentations, panel discussions or other creative formats focused on one of these three themes will be welcomed for consideration, and you can send in proposals via the submission form at www.pbconference.org/submit. For more information, email PBP at conference@participatorybudgeting.org.

Again, the deadline for submissions is December 18th, so send in your proposals soon! Registration for the conference is slated to open in January, and early registration will end in April. We can’t wait to see how this great gathering turns out!

For more information on the 2016 PB Conference, you can visit www.pbconference.org.

Is Local Engagement Weakening National Engagement?

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

The team at the Davenport Institute, one of or NCDD member organizations, recently shared what some might see as a provocative interview by NCDD Supporting Member Caroline Lee on the pitfalls of what she calls the public engagement industry. Caroline’s new book worries that wider spread public participation may encourage average citizens to focus solely on local politics while leaving larger scale politics to big organizations and institutions.
Are there negative impacts of public participation work that we need to pay more attention to? If so, what are they? Let us know what you think – read the Davenport piece and the interview linked below, and share your reactions in the comments section.

On The Public Engagement Industry

Caroline Lee, a sociologist at Lafayette College, has a thoughtful and critical view of what she’s dubbed the “Public Engagement Industry.” In her book Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry, she considers the successes of the rise of public engagement and poses worthwhile questions about its future. On the one hand, public engagement efforts generate a sense of tangible involvement, lacking from traditional public hearings:

A public hearing where everyone gets three minutes at a microphone is really unsatisfying. This new kind of public engagement involves people talking in small groups, telling their stories, giving reasons for their ideas and maybe even changing their minds.

On the other hand, she argues, “some problems are too big for individuals to fix.” She argues that if citizens focus too much on the local level, important national issues will take a backseat:

These processes have short-term impacts on people’s attitudes towards politics and their sense that individuals are key to social change, but this new kind of public engagement shifts people’s expectations of the institutions that we all rely on. Participants tend to see the local level as the only reasonable place for action and to leave the larger politics of public life up to those organizational clients and institutional sponsors. We face such challenging systemic problems – climate change, the global financial crisis – that we just can’t afford for the ambitions of the electorate to be limited that way.

This is a very different take on local engagement from that of 19th century observer Alexis deToqueville who saw in the ability to collaborate on small local concerns a training ground for large scale undertakings. Is local engagement really drawing people away from areas of national interest? Or is, as Tocqueville might have suggested, an era where voter turnout is much lower for local than national elections an era where decreased civic engagement at all levels should be expected?

You can see Lee’s interview with U.S. News and World Report is here, and her website is here.

You can find the original version of this Davenport Institute post http://incommon.pepperdine.edu/2015/10/on-the-public-engagement-industry.

1st Community College Student PB Program Launches in CA

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

Our friends with the Participatory Budgeting Project – an NCDD member organization – recently announced that Palo Alto College will become the nation’s first community college to open a participatory budgeting process to students in Spring 2016. More young people being exposed to this powerful form of D&D is great news for our field and for the students themselves, and we commend PAC on taking this step! Learn more in PB’s post below or find the original here.

Participatory Budgeting for Community Colleges – Palo Alto College in San Antonio

We’re excited to share that Palo Alto College, a community college in San Antonio, is expanding its participatory budgeting process. Representatives from Palo Alto came to our conference in 2013 and were so inspired that they started a PB process for faculty and staff – the first at a community college in the US. In 2015, they’re opening the process us to students. With a budget of $25,000, the top projects will come to fruition in Spring 2016.

See below for an update from PAC’s blog on the first community college PB process in the US!

– — –

Palo Alto College students now have the opportunity to propose and vote on how institutional funds are used due to a worldwide project called Participatory Budgeting. Participatory Budgeting is a different way to manage public funds by engaging stakeholders to collaborate and decide how to spend public funds.

“Participatory Budgeting (PB) means a very simple way of showing transparency on how we spend our money, “ said Carmen Velasquez, PAC Participatory Budgeting Core Team Member.

PB started at Palo Alto College in 2013 with groups of faculty and staff. Since then, faculty and staff members have been able to work together to submit project ideas with budgets up to $5,000. Walking around campus, visitors can see the PB process firsthand, such as the Ray Ellison Center bike trail, Palomino Patio near Concho Hall, which were among the handful of projects proposed and voted by faculty and staff.

Now in its fourth cycle, the program has expanded and will now be available for student submissions starting in Fall 2015. A total of $25,000 has been set aside specifically for students to propose and turn ideas into action.

“What we are looking for are projects that benefit the college as a whole,” said Anthony Perez, Participatory Budgeting Core Team Member.

PAC sophomore Robert James Casillas said, “It will be cool to see something on campus and say ‘that was me, my idea or I had a say in that.’”

All PAC students currently enrolled will be allowed to take part in the voting process in the Fall 2015 semester, and the projects with the most votes will be funded and implemented in Spring 2016. However, only student groups and organizations will be able to propose and submit ideas this year.

Currently, Palo Alto College is the only community college in the United States taking part in the Participatory Budgeting process.

“I am really excited to see what the students come up with, I know they are going to be very creative,” said Velasquez.

For more information about Student Participatory Budgeting visit Student Life at Palo Alto College in Student Center Room 124 or call 210-486-3125.

You can find the original version of this PBP blog post at www.participatorybudgeting.org/blog/participatory-budgeting-for-community-colleges-palo-alto-college-in-san-antonio.

Mental Illness in America: How Do We Address a Growing Problem? (NIFI Issue Guide)

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Keiva Hummel

The 13-page issue guide from National Issues Forums, Mental Illness in America: How Do We Address a Growing Problem?, was published November 2014. The issue guide gives three options for discussion on how mental illness can better be addressed in the US. Below is an excerpt from the guide and it can be downloaded from NIFI’s site here.

From the guide…

Many Americans share a sense that something is wrong when it comes to treatment of mental illness. More and more of us are taking medications for depression and other disorders. Meanwhile, dangerous illnesses are going undetected and untreated. What can be done to keep us safer and healthier?

One in five Americans will have mental health problems in any given year. Unaddressed mental illness hurts individuals and their families and results in lost productivity. In rare cases, it can result in violence.

This issue guide presents a framework that asks: How can we reduce the impact of mental illness in America?

The issue guide presents three options for consideration:

Option One: “Put safety first”

This option holds that more preventive action is necessary to deal with mentally ill individuals who are potentially dangerous to themselves or others. We should identify those who need help and intervene where necessary to prevent them from harming themselves and others. These individuals should be sought out and their needs addressed.

Option Two: “Ensure mental health services are available to all who need them”

This option holds that people should be encouraged to take control over their own mental health and be provided the tools to do so. We should make sure that everyone who wishes can get the needed help.

Option Three: “Let people plot their own course”

This option holds that we should not rely on so many medical approaches. We should reduce our dependence on drugs and allow people the freedom to plot their own course to healthy lives. In many cases, simple changes to lifestyle can improve mental health.

More about the NIFI Issue Guides
NIFI’s Issue Guides introduce participants to several choices or approaches to consider. Rather than conforming to any single public proposal, each choice reflects widely held concerns and principles. Panels of experts review manuscripts to make sure the choices are presented accurately and fairly. By intention, Issue Guides do not identify individuals or organizations with partisan labels, such as Democratic, Republican, conservative, or liberal. The goal is to present ideas in a fresh way that encourages readers to judge them on their merit.

Issue Guides are generally available in print or PDF download for a small fee ($2 to $4). All NIFI Issue Guides and associated tools can be accessed at www.nifi.org/en/issue-guides.

Follow on Twitter: @NIForums.

Resource Link: www.nifi.org/en/catalog/product/mental-illness-america-issue-guide-downloadable-pdf

Missed the Confab Call on Brain Science? Watch It Now!

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

Last week, NCDD hosted another installment of our Confab Call series, and we are excited to report back about how great the conversation was. We were joined by around 35 members to hear a wonderful presentation from NCDD members Mary V. Gelinas and Susan Stuart Clark titled Planning from the Inside Out: How Brain Science Supports Constructive Dialogue and Deliberation. You really missed out if you weren’t there with us!

Mary & Susan’s talk was incredibly educational and had a lot of useful nuggets of knowledge on what the field of brain science can teach us about making D&D work more effective. We discussed how a poorly structured meeting can activate our fight or flight response, that public comment periods can create severely limiting performance anxiety, and how something as simple as inviting folks to pause for a deep breath can dramatically shift the way participants are connecting in a meeting – plus a lot more. There were so many D&D applications of brain science that we could have spent several more hours more talking about it!

If you missed this Confab Call conversation, we encourage you to check out the recording of the call by clicking here. We also recommend taking a look at Mary and Susan’s slideshow presentations that they were kind enough to share with us, and you can find those by clicking here.

Thanks so much to Mary and Susan for all the valuable information and to all of those who participated in the call!

To learn more about NCDD Confab Calls and find recordings from past presentations, visit www.ncdd.org/events/confabs.

Evaluating Participatory Budgeting Toolkit

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Keiva Hummel

Public Agenda (PA), in collaboration with the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), created the 29-page Evaluating Participatory Budgeting (PB) Toolkit in September 2015. The toolkit has 15 metrics to support the evaluation of a specific PB site and use the data to inform the larger movement. Read more in the article below or directly from Public Agenda’s site here.

From Public Agenda…

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget.

Evaluation is a critical component of any PB effort. Systematic and formal evaluation can help people who introduce, implement, participate in or otherwise have a stake in PB understand how participatory budgeting is growing, what its reach is, and how it’s impacting the community and beyond.

We developed the Evaluating Participatory Budgeting Toolkit for people interested in evaluating existing PB efforts in their communities. It is meant to encourage and support common research goals across PB sites and meaningfully inform local and national discussions about PB in the U.S. and Canada.

Anyone involved in public engagement or participation efforts other than participatory budgeting may also be interested in reviewing the toolkit for research and evaluation ideas.

Click here to fill out a form and download the toolkit.

The toolkit includes:

15 Key Metrics for Evaluating Participatory Budgeting: 15 indicators (“metrics”) that capture important elements of each community-based PB process and the PB movement in North America overall

Key PB Metrics Research Instruments: A set of Research Instruments (all customizable) to support local evaluation and facilitate the collection of data that address the key PB metrics:

Idea Collection Participant Survey Template

Voter Survey Template

Questionnaire for Evaluators and Implementers

Introduction to the Instruments and Evaluation Timeline: An introduction to the above instruments, which also includes a timeline for how evaluation can fit into PB roll-out

New to PB and looking to introduce it to your community? You should start here instead! Once your PB effort is under way, come back to this page for tools to evaluate how you’re doing.

Click here to read more about Public Agenda’s work with participatory budgeting.

To develop the 15 PB metrics, the North American Research Board, Public Agenda (PA) and the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) drew on previous evaluations of PB in the U.S. and around the world, the academic literature on PB as a democratic innovation and the experience of local evaluators in the U.S. and Canada. To create the research instruments, Public Agenda and PBP adapted surveys originally developed and used by local evaluators in various PB sites across North America.

About the Participatory Budgeting Project
The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) is a non-profit organization that helps communities decide how to spend public money, primarily in the US and Canada. Their mission is to empower community members to make informed, democratic, and fair decisions about public spending and revenue. They pursue this goal by working with governments and organizations to develop participatory budgeting processes, in which local people directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. Follow on Twitter @PBProject.

About Public Agenda
Public Agenda is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that helps diverse leaders and citizens navigate divisive, complex issues and work together to find solutions. Through nonpartisan research and public engagement, we provide the insights, tools and support people need to build common ground and arrive at solutions that work for them. In doing so, we are proving that it is possible to make progress on critical issues regardless of our differences. In all of our work, we seek to help build a democracy in which problem solving triumphs over gridlock and inertia, and where public policy reflects the thoughtful input and values of the nation’s citizens. Follow on Twitter @PublicAgenda.

Resource Link: www.publicagenda.org/pages/participatory-budgeting-research-and-evaluation

New Toolkit Streamlines PB Evaluation in N. America

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

We were excited to learn recently that Public Agenda and the Participatory Budgeting Project – two of our prominent NCDD member organizations – have released a new participatory budgeting evaluation toolkit in collaboration with the North American PB Research Board. The toolkit will help municipalities across the continent document the impacts and effectiveness of their local PB efforts. We encourage you read more about it in the Public Agenda article below or find the original here.

Evaluation Matters: A New Toolkit for Assessing Participatory Budgeting

For those of us exploring ways to deepen and expand public participation in democracy, we know how essential evaluation is to our cause. Both government officials and the public have limited time, energy and resources. And furthermore, many may already be disillusioned by current and past efforts to include the public in decision making.

We need to be able to demonstrate to officials, the public, interested funders, community partners, and others that their investment in new public engagement methods will be worth it. Will more people participate, particularly those who have been historically less civically engaged? Will the new form of engagement lead to better decisions and policies that residents support? Will the public feel like their voices have been heard, and will they come to understand the complexities and trade-offs inherent in many policy decisions? Will the method build trust among officials and the public and open pathways for collaboration among community-based organizations and the government?

At the same time, we as public engagement practitioners are very busy. Evaluation can be time consuming and complicated, especially when we’re attempting to measure something amorphous like deeper public participation. As such, evaluation too often gets lost among everything else we’re doing.

For these and other reasons, we are particularly excited about one of our current projects: an initiative to help make it easier for practitioners to evaluate participatory budgeting efforts.

Communities across the country are experimenting with participatory budgeting (PB for short), which is one potential avenue for deeper public participation and engagement. Through PB, local residents get to decide how their community will spend a set amount of public money. Many of these communities, including some in New York, Chicago, Long Beach, CA and Dieppe, in New Brunswick, Canada, are also trying to track and measure how PB is affecting residents, officials, and neighborhoods.

Community members evaluating PB often have questions that are locally unique and relevant. At the same time, because many PB processes across the U.S. and Canada follow a similar structure, these evaluators are also often looking to answer common questions shared by communities.

To help foster collaboration among evaluators and facilitate shared learning on these questions, we have been working since the start of 2015 to support and coordinate local evaluation work. Ultimately, we hope that this will also lead to a better understanding of the successes and challenges of the PB movement as a whole.

One of our first steps has been to develop a toolkit for those tasked with evaluating PB in their communities. We developed the toolkit in concert with the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), the North American PB Research Board and local evaluators from numerous PB sites across the U.S. and Canada.

The toolkit includes key metrics – 15 in all – for capturing important elements of each local PB process specifically and the movement in North America generally. These metrics describe the way PB could impact things like civic life, equity, and governance.

To help ease the evaluation process and data collection, these metrics are paired with survey instruments that address the 15 key metrics. Evaluators can customize these survey instruments and use as needed. We also developed a questionnaire for evaluators that will help us and local evaluators to collect and share comparable data about PB processes across North America and over time.

The toolkit also includes a timeline to help evaluators best determine where and how to undertake PB evaluation at different stages of the PB process.

Download the Toolkit Here

While we developed the metrics and survey instruments for participatory budgeting, the underlying concepts are applicable to evaluating other forms of public engagement, like deliberative meetings, community conversations, and citizen juries.

We hope these tools will help those working on participatory budgeting in their communities by taking some of the guesswork out of measurement and making time for other things like constituent outreach and engagement. If you’re interested in hearing more about evaluation and our work with PB researchers, you can join our listserv for the participatory budgeting community by sending an email here.

Have you voted in a PB process and want to get more involved? Or are you curious about PB and looking to introduce it to your community? The website and people of Participatory Budgeting Project are a great resource for those who are new to PB and want to know more. Introduce yourself to the Participatory Budgeting Project.

You can find the original version of this Public Agenda blog post at
www.publicagenda.org/blogs/evaluation-matters-a-new-toolkit-for-participatory-budgeting#sthash.SQWKGkAR.dpuf.

An 8th Grader’s Path into D&D

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

As NCDD continues to seek ways to bring more young people in our field, we wanted to share a piece from NCDD supporting member Alissa Schwartz of Solid Fire Consulting that captures the powerful difference that involving young people in D&D processes can make. The young person she writes about happens to be her son, but his story highlights the wonderful results that are possible when D&D is in schools. We encourage you to read more about it Alissa’s piece below or find the original here.

8th Grader Lands $225K for NYC School: An Inspiring Story of Facilitation and Youth in the Civic Process

It’s March. Cedar, Max, and I are pumped. My daughter’s feet are coated in blue paint, my son has pasted on the final image he has photoshopped to perfection, and I’m knuckle bumping Jeff, our design angel who adopted our proposal as his own and helped shape our ideas into beautiful, presentational form. Cedar is darting through the crowd for cookies, glitter paper, and glue. I’m reviewing action words we’ve brainstormed, and Max is giving an interview. We’re working on one of 13 community-generated projects, crowded into a nonprofit media production studio, bent over trifolds, creating visual representations of dreams for Brooklyn’s District 39 in a tight, exciting, hilarious two hours. This is the Mardi Gras moment of Participatory Budgeting.

How did I get here? I didn’t choose this path. Max did. In 2011, I was asked to facilitate a Participatory Budgeting brainstorming session for Brad Lander’s district. Sure! Sounds like fun. I brought along my kids. Cedar happily played with a few other children in the school gym. Max joined me at our table, caught the facilitation bug, and began what I can now see with 20-20 hindsight a journey that brought him, his sister, and me to this glitter strewn table.

That first evening three years ago, Max very ably co-facilitated with me. He took on the role of scribe, writing everyone’s ideas down and later spoke before the full assembly of perhaps 75 participants about our group’s favorite ideas. He was a hit, and he wanted more. A few years passed, and Max and I co-facilitated another brainstorming session in the fall of 2014. This time, the bug bit him hard. “I want to join a delegate committee,” he told me. “Yeah, really?” “Yup.”

OK. This was some serious leveling up. Being a delegate meant going to lots of meetings, sifting through dozens or possibly hundreds of ideas, putting the best ones in proposal form, and basically seeing the project to the end. I was intrigued by Max’s interest, though, and I told him I would join a committee with him and follow his lead. He chose Education.

It turned out that a few ideas had been generated for Cedar’s school and needed follow-up and research. One was to renovate an old room in a basement into a movement studio to serve the overcrowded school of 1,400 kids, in Pre-K through grade 12. We happily took her school’s ideas on, meeting with the principals of Brooklyn New School and its sister middle/high school Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies. We crafted a proposal, tweaked it so it could be approved by the municipal authorities, and then delighted in witnessing it become among the three proposals (from about 10) that our committee chose to put on the public ballot. A few weeks after the Mardi Gras poster-making session, Max spoke persuasively about the project with person after person at the Expo showcasing our proposals.

Brad Lander taking Max’s picture (Alissa Schwartz)

Wow!… This could actually HAPPEN! I began to allow myself the fantasy of our proposal turning into reality. Max’s and my efforts might bring nearly a quarter million dollars to a worthy project for Cedar’s school. Amazing! Not that Max or I could even vote for the project we worked on. He’s 13 years old, one year shy of the lowered age requirement for this process. And we don’t live in District 39, so I couldn’t vote either. A number of students from Cedar’s sister school went on a field trip to Brad Lander’s office and exercised their rights, however. A rare privilege for youth normally excluded from making civic decisions based on their age.

Voting happened in mid-April, and Max and I waited a very long week to be among the first to learn of the results. As we gathered with delegates and many other volunteers, we watched as Brad Lander dramatically unveiled the results. The largest number of votes went to a different school initiative, and the second largest number of votes went to…. our project!!!! Wow, wow, wow, wow!!! We did it! Max and I high-fived and whooped and jumped up and down in joy. People came up to Max and told him that his persuasive speaking helped them decide to vote for the project. We were pumped!

After the initial excitement, Max took it all in stride, not even mentioning it to friends, teachers, and relatives. I, however, keep telling the story to everyone I come across. I am in awe of what can happen when you combine the energy and curiosity of youth with a participatory process with teeth. Great things can happen.

You can find the original version of this Solid Fire Consulting blog piece at www.solidfireconsulting.com/8th-grader-lands-225k-for-nyc-school-an-inspiring-story-of-facilitation-and-youth-in-the-civic-process. We first read this story on to the Participatory Budgeting Project’s blog – thanks PBP!

Don’t Miss Our Tech Tuesday Call with QiqoChat

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Roshan Bliss

As we recently announced, we are hosting another one of our free NCDD Tech Tuesday webinars this Tuesday, September 29th from 12-1pm Eastern/9-10am Pacific, this time featuring Lucas Cioffi and Michael Herman, the creators of the phone-based dialogue and video chat tool QiqoChat.

QiqoChat supports a variety of online D&D processes, and it is a great tool for practitioners to be familiar with. But spots for the webinar are filling up, so make sure to register today!

This Tech Tuesday event will be full of great insights on hosting online engagement events as well as a demonstration of the QiqoChat platform’s capabilities. Lucas and Michael have also hosted two online open space conferences for a global audience, and we will discuss the rich lessons they took from those experiences as well.

Join us this Tuesday to learn more about the wide world of open space and online facilitation – you won’t want to miss it!

What Should Go on the Internet: Privacy, Freedom and Security Online (NIFI Issue Guide)

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Keiva Hummel

The National Issues Forums Institute published the 12-page Issue Guide, What Should Go on the Internet: Privacy, Freedom and Security Online (2013) and is an update to an earlier guide about the Internet. This guide is designed to help facilitate balanced deliberation about what should go on the internet.

From the guide…

The same Internet that has given us new ways to socialize, learn, and engage in civic life has also given criminals new avenues to steal from us and scam us, often using information gleaned from public government documents now posted online. And because no one’s in charge, there’s no single authority we can call to complain.

When does our personal information become public? What data collection is acceptable? Should there be limits on what we can do online? It’s time to find a way to balance our needs to safeguard privacy, preserve free speech, and ensure security for all our citizens, young and old.

It’s time to answer the question: What should go on the Internet?

This issue guide was prepared for the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) in collaboration with the Kettering Foundation, and is an updated version (2013) of a previous guide about the Internet.

This issue guide presents three options for deliberation:

Option One: “Protect Individual Privacy”
Privacy is a fundamental American value. But the Internet has obliterated the line between public and private, forcing Americans to live in a virtual fishbowl. Our top priority must be to safeguard personal information on the Internet.

Option Two: “Promote Freedom of Speech and Commerce”
The Internet is a revolutionary leap forward for democratic societies and free markets. Direct or indirect censorship by concerned citizens, special interests, or government could stifle this great resource.

Option Three: “Secure Us from Online Threats”
The Internet is a Wild West of criminal activity that threatens our personal safety, our economic vitality, and our national security. Our top priority must be protecting our children and ourselves.