Category Archives: decision making

Launch of Voice of the People and its Campaign for a Citizen Cabinet

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Here’s an important announcement from one of our supporting members, Steven Kull. Steven is Research Scholar and Director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. I’ve been watching Steven’s work with great interest over the last few years especially, and I’m exciting about Voice of the People.

Dear NCDD Community,

I would like to announce that our new organization Voice of the People (VOP) and its Campaign for a Citizen Cabinet had its rollout last month. The website is now up at www.vop.org.

VOP seeks to give the American people a greater voice in government by:

  • Working with Congress to establish a national Citizen Cabinet, a large standing panel comprised of a representative sample of the American public, to be consulted on current issues, using new online interactive tools to give voice to the people on an unprecedented scale; and
  • Making these same online resources available to all Americans, so they can get better informed and more effectively communicate their views to their representatives.

In the short term we will be developing interim Citizen Cabinets in a number of states and Congressional districts as well as consulting the public on a national level on issues currently in front of Congress.

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We have also been having many meetings on the Hill with Congressional staffers and some Members and have been getting a very positive response to the idea of establishing a new Congressionally-chartered National Academy for Public Consultation that would run a Citizen Cabinet as well as doing other forms of public consultation.

We hope you will go to the website, find out more, sign the petition and stay in touch.

At the rollout event at the National Press Club members of our advisory board spoke, including former Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), former House Members Bill Frenzel (R-MN) and Martin Frost (R-TX), former House Member and Governor Mike Castle (R-DE), and Wendy Willis of the Policy Consensus Initiative. You can see the video of the event on the site.

The event led to press coverage in Politico, US News and World Report, Roll Call, the Christian Science Monitor and other places, as well as some television coverage.

The plan for the Citizen Cabinet goes like this… It will be comprised of 275 citizens in every congressional district—120,000 nationwide—scientifically selected to accurately reflect the American people, and connected through an online interface. Each Citizen Cabinet member will serve for 9-12 months, and Internet access will be provided to those who do not already have it, to make sure everyone is represented.

On a regular basis, members of the Citizen Cabinet will go through an online public consultation on a pressing issue facing the federal government. For each issue, Citizen Cabinet members will:

  1. Get Briefed: Get unbiased background information reviewed by experts and congressional staff from both parties;
  2. Weigh the Arguments: Learn about the policy options that are actually on the table and evaluate the pros and cons; and.
  3. Make Choices: Choose from a menu of policy options, or go through a more in-depth process that requires making trade-offs (e.g. creating a budget).

Finally, the Citizen Cabinet’s recommendations will be broken down by state and congressional district, and reported to each Member of Congress, the President, the news media and the public.

The Citizen Cabinet will be managed, with bi-partisan oversight, by a new National Academy for Public Consultation. All of the materials presented to the Citizen Cabinet—the briefing, competing arguments, and policy options—will be vetted by a bipartisan group of experts and available online for anyone to see.

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While members of the Citizen Cabinet would be scientifically selected to be a representative sample of the public, VOP seeks to give all Americans the opportunity to use these same online interactive tools–getting briefed, weighing competing arguments and coming to conclusions on key policy options. We will also make these tools available to schools, community groups and other organizations.

Citizens will be able to better engage and make more effective recommendations to their representatives, as their input will be more informed and focused on the actual policy choices and tradeoffs Congress is facing.

We would be interested in hearing from people who have been doing related work. There may be ways we can work together. Please let us know.

Again, please do visit the website www.vop.org and sign up so we can keep you posted on how things develop.

Best,
Steven Kull

Job Announcement from the Jefferson Center

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NCDD is a network filled with impressive and capable people, and we are sometimes asked to share job announcements by organizations looking for just our kinds of folks. We have been impressed by the democracy work being done by the good people at the Jefferson Center for New Democratic Processes in Minnesota (an NCDD organizational member), so we are pleased to be able to share their newest job opening with you. We encourage anyone from NCDD to consider the position, and wish all applicants the best of luck! 

Jefferson Center – Program Associate

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The mission of the Jefferson Center for New Democratic Processes is to strengthen democracy by improving civic discourse and advancing informed, citizen-led solutions to public policy issues. The Jefferson Center envisions a democracy where citizens interact genuinely with public institutions and officials, and where public input becomes an essential component of decision-making dynamics through the implementation and support of deliberative processes and initiatives.

Job Title: Program Associate – Exempt Position

Location: Twin Cities – Full Time

Opening Date for Applications: November 6, 2013

Closing Date for Applications: November 28, 2013

Summary

The Program Associate position supports the Co-Director functions by assisting in policy research and outreach efforts, researching funding opportunities, drafting grant proposals, preparing printed and electronic materials for fundraising and programs, assisting with project implementation tasks, and completing other duties as assigned.

Responsibilities & Duties Breakdown

  1. Research and policy analysis (25%),
  2. Program Assistance (25%),
  3. Fund Development (20%)
  4. Communications (20%),
  5. Other (10%)

Qualifications

  1. Bachelor’s degree in political science or related field; Master’s degree in public policy desirable.
  2. Minimum 2-4 years work experience, preferably in nonprofits.
  3. Outstanding interpersonal skills, including the ability to successfully interact with a wide range of individuals.
  4. Excellent oral and written communication skills.
  5. Strong computer skills, including standard MS Office and Salesforce/cloud-based software formats, strong internet research and data management skills required. Previous experience with Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, and Dreamweaver), WordPress, and basic HTML/CSS coding ability preferred, but not required.
  6. Strong organizational and presentation skills, including the ability to maintain and synthesize large volumes of information into comprehensible summaries and reports.
  7. Exceptional curiosity and intellectual capacity.
  8. Strong interest in governmental reform.
  9. Willingness to travel to various locations across Minnesota and other states.

Certificates, Licenses, Registrations

Valid driver’s license required for travel to community sites (some out of state).

Please send cover letter and resume to: annettescotti@hrtechies.com. Questions, please call: 612-414-4537 

Hot off the presses: The latest issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD)

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JPD issue 9:2 is now available at www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/.  The issue is our largest to date, with 18 manuscripts that include:

Articles on topics such as: stakeholder and citizen roles in deliberation; participation in the New York Public Schools; a new study agenda for deliberative research; the effects of non-neutral moderators; and “communities of fate” and the challenges of international public participation.

Essays on: the politics of decentralization; illiteracy and deliberative democracy; and connecting deliberation, community engagement, and democratic education.

A symposium of articles presenting “New Ideas on Deliberation from Young Scholars.”

A review of Peter Levine’s new book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

In addition to being the last issue produced by editors Tim Steffensmeier and David Procter, this is also the last issue featuring the contributions of Essay Editors Lyn Carson and Ron Lubensky. Based at the University of Western Sydney, Carson and Lubensky have worked tirelessly to ensure that each issue in the last three years includes a wealth of interesting and provocative essays. Please join us in thanking Carson and Ron!

JPD is supported not only by IAP2 and DDC, but by a range of other institutions, including:

  • Center for Democratic Deliberation, Penn State University
  • Kettering Foundation
  • New England Center for Civic Life, Franklin Pierce University
  • Public Agenda
  • The Democracy Imperative
  • Ohio University
  • Wagner College
  • Tufts University
  • University of Western Sydney

Will Decreasing the Voting Age Increase Engagement?

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takoma voteIn honor of Election Day, I thought it would be appropriate to share a recent development I heard about from a Washington Post article that might interest some in the NCDD community: today, the country’s first 16- and 17-year old voters will legally cast their ballots.

It might be that is a bit hard for many to believe, but the city of Takoma Park, Maryland’s election information page confirms the fact, saying,

In 2013, the Takoma Park City Council amended the City Charter to update Takoma Park’s voting and election laws. The amendment expanded the right to vote in City elections to 16 and 17 year old residents…

Earlier this year, the City of Takoma Park, Maryland began considering lowering the voting age to 16 years old instead of 18, and in May, officially made the change to the city’s charter. The change was made by Takoma Park’s city council — and contentiously for some, not by its voters — with a very specific logic.

The reasoning for the decision, which is listed in the amendment to the city’s charter, states that

…allowing 16 and 17 year olds to register and vote will enable them to fully participate in City elections while in high school and before leaving home, thereby encouraging the establishment of a life-long habit of voting.

The Takoma Park city council hopes that by allowing younger people to vote, it will not only increase voter turn out in its elections, but that the people who begin voting so young will develop civic habits that will stick with them.

To me, the reasoning seems sound. If young people are able to engage meaningfully in the political system during formative high school years while they still have the support and encouragement of teachers and parents, they will probably think more about voting and participating in other public forums in the future after they’ve left home.

What’s most exciting to me about this change is that it conceivably opens up space for young people to cut their teeth in civic engagement by participating in local school board elections. It’s not hard to imagine young people being engaged far beyond simply voting if they had a real say in a school board races. They would be the primary stakeholders, after all, because the decision would impact them more directly than maybe any other kind of political competition. Just think how different school board campaigns would look if many of the voters deciding the outcome were current students.

But does the reasoning of the Takoma Park city council hold up? Will letting younger people vote really increase voting and other forms of public engagement in the long run? Would you want to see this kind of change in your community? How do you think it would change the civic sphere where you live if 16- and 17-year olds could vote? Could this be potentially negative?

Interestingly, Takoma Park has been pushing the envelope on engaging its residents by expanding voting rights for some time now. Not only did 16- and 17-year olds gain the right to vote, but this year’s amendment also reestablished the right for convicted felons who had completed their sentences as a way to facilitate their re-engagement with their communities.

In addition, and much more controversially, the Takoma Park website also notes that

Residents of Takoma Park who are not United States citizens have been eligible to register and vote in City elections since 1993.

All of this raises questions about whether and how simply letting more people vote will change the way that the public participates in the broader civic sphere.

What do you think? Can expanding voter franchise increase public engagement? What do these sorts of changes mean for our field? Let us know what you think in the comment section, or share your ideas on NCDD’s Facebook discussion page!

Steve Brigham Interview from NCDD Seattle

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At the 2012 NCDD national conference in Seattle, NCDD member and filmmaker Jeffrey Abelson sat down with over a dozen leaders in our community to ask them about their work and their hopes and concerns for our field and for democratic governance in our country.

Today we’re featuring the interview with Steve Brigham, President of AmericaSpeaks. An organizational member of NCDD and one of our founding members back in 2002, AmericaSpeaks supported NCDD Seattle by co-sponsoring the conference.

AmericaSpeaks is a Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan, non-profit organization whose mission is to “engage citizens in the public decisions that impact their lives.” AmericaSpeaks’ work is focused on trying to create opportunities for citizens to impact decisions and to encourage public officials to make informed, lasting decisions. AmericaSpeaks has developed and facilitated deliberative methods such as the 21st Century Town Hall Meeting, which enables facilitated discussion for 500 to 5,000 participants. Its partners have included regional planning groups, local, state, and national government bodies, national and international organizations. Issues have ranged from Social Security reform, the redevelopment of ground zero in New York and rebuilding New Orleans.

See the “NCDD 2012” tag for more videos from NCDD Seattle, which brought together 400 leaders and innovators in our field. You can also check out Jeffrey Abelson’s Song of a Citizen YouTube channel and our NCDD 2012 Seattle playlist on YouTube.

New Round of Grants from the Taylor Willingham Legacy Fund

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We’d like to encourage all NCDD members to consider applying for a grant from — or donating to — the Taylor L. Willingham Legacy Fund. You can find out more about Taylor, her work in deliberation, and her legacy here. The original NIFI announcement can be found by clicking here.

NIF-logo

Applications are now being accepted for grants from the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) to enable individuals to develop an understanding of deliberative democracy and to launch one or more deliberative forums in their communities or organizations. Grants are expected to be in the range of $500-$1,000.

Applications should consist of:

  1. A completed application form — click on the download link above for a copy;
  2. A resume describing your experience and education;
  3. A cover letter that explains why you are interested in becoming involved in the deliberative democracy movement and what specific course of action you propose to become familiar with this work and how and where you would implement forums; and
  4. A budget indicating how the grant would be spent.

Applications are welcomed from any U.S. resident, with special consideration given to residents of Texas. The application should be received on or by November 15, 2013.  Applications may be either faxed to Bill Muse at 937-428-5353,  e-mailed to bmuse@nifi.org, or mailed to:

National Issues Forums Institute
100 Commons Road
Dayton, Ohio 45459

Grants will be made by January 15, 2014 and will be for use during 2014. A report on activities will be required on or before November 30, 2014. You can find the application here.

Click here for more information about Taylor L. Willingham and her work.

Donations to the fund are welcome and can be made securely online. All donated money will go toward grant awards.

It’s full steam ahead for the Participatory Budgeting Project!

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I’m happy to share some great news from our friends at the Participatory Budgeting Project.  PBP is an organizational member of NCDD, and I’m proud to serve on their Advisory Board and to have attended both of their conferences in New York and Chicago.

PBP-logoEarlier this month, PBP announced that they’re embarking on a new collaboration with one of California’s foremost foundations, The California Endowment (TCE). As part of a new grant, PBP will support local organizing for Participatory Budgeting in 14 low-income communities across the state, through the foundation’s Building Healthy Communities (BHC) program.

BHC is a 10-year initiative focused on empowering residents in these 14 communities to eradicate health inequalities through community organizing and policy change. PB presents a unique opportunity to channel public resources toward services and infrastructure that promote health and foster community economic development.

Already, PBP is are working with groups in Merced, San Diego, Long Beach, and Oakland to launch PB in neighborhoods, cities, and school districts. In addition to their technical assistance work, PBP will hold the first California-based conference for PB practitioners and advocates in September 2014 at TCE’s facilities in Oakland.

In addition to THAT big news, here’s another whopper:

It was announced a couple days ago that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is planning to take Alderman Joe Moore’s Participatory Budget efforts citywide in Chicago!  As many of you know, Alderman Moore of Chicago’s 49th Ward is known for being the first public official in the U.S. to institutionalize PB.  For five years now, Moore has put his annual $1.3 million discretionary budget in the hands of community residents, allowing them to weigh in on capital projects they want done.

Now the idea is going citywide with the proposed creation of a manager of participatory budgeting in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2014 city budget.  Read more here.

Congratulations, Josh Lerner, Maria Hadden, and everyone else responsible for the Participatory Budgeting Project’s success!

Interested in learning more about PB?  A good place to go is the “participatory budgeting” tag in the NCDD Resource Center, where we’ve indexed 31 great articles and other resources on PB.

Making Public Participation Legal launched at Brookings

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Most of the laws that govern public participation in the U.S. are over thirty years old. They do not match the expectations and capacities of citizens today, they pre-date the Internet, and they do not reflect the lessons learned in the last two decades about how citizens and governments can work together. Increasingly, public administrators and public engagement practitioners are hindered by the fact that it’s unclear if many of the best practices in participation are even allowed by the law.

MakingP2Legal-BrookingsPicMaking Public Participation Legal, a new publication of the National Civic League (with support from the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation), presents a valuable set of tools, including a model ordinance, set of policy options, and resource list, to help communities improve public participation.

We released the publication at a launch event on Wednesday (October 23rd) at the Brookings Institution in D.C. Download this free — but extremely valuable — publication today at www.tinyurl.com/p2law.

The tools and articles in Making Public Participation Legal were developed over the past year by the Working Group on Legal Frameworks for Public Participation — an impressive team convened and guided by Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC).

In addition to DDC, NCL and NCDD, the Working Group also includes representatives of the American Bar Association, International Municipal Lawyers Association, National League of Cities, Policy Consensus Initiative, International Association for Public Participation, and International City/County Management Association, as well as leading practitioners and scholars of public participation.

Wednesday’s launch event was opened by Darrell West, Brookings’ VP and director of Governance Studies and the director of the Center for Technology Innovation. Members of an expert panel described the overarching problem as the lack of guiding principles to govern civic engagement. The panelists included moderator Matt Leighninger, executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Lisa Blomgren Amsler, professor of public service at Indiana University, Mike Huggins, former city manager in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Kevin Curry, Program Director for the Code for America Brigade.

MakingP2Legal-coverThe main remedy the panelists proposed was the Model Municipal Public Participation Ordinance. Prof. Amsler said it would be a starting point to set the ground for whoever wants to innovate. The way public participation is defined in the ordinance allows for increased freedom of discussion and innovation. She also advocated for local government offices to appoint an individual to learn about public engagement, pass on that knowledge, and bridge the gap between the local government and the people in regards to public participation.

Leighninger described the situation created by the ordinance as “a model which … does not require public participation in any particular format but enables and supports what we hope will be better public participation.”

Huggins also supported the ordinance because it would create a positive definition of public participation as a public good. He saw it as an important way to foster more communication between the government and the public. To Huggins, the ordinance would build a capacity for local elected officials to have support from the community through discussion and innovation.

See the Brookings Institutions’ full overview of the event here, or download the audio archive here.

Download the publication from the National Civic League site at www.tinyurl.com/p2law.

Discussion of stakeholder and citizen roles in public deliberation

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Here’s a warm invitation from a team of top deliberative democracy scholars and practitioners (David Kahane and Kristjana Loptson from Canada and Max Hardy and Jade Herriman from Australia) to join in an important exploration they’ve embarked on together…

Some public participation exercises bring together people who formally represent different constituencies, other exercises focus on ordinary or unaffiliated citizens, and others combine these.

We’re a team of deliberative democracy researchers and practitioners who wanted to explore the distinction between ‘citizens’ and ‘stakeholder representatives’, and how these groups are brought into public participation exercises. A conversation that began at a workshop in Australia early in 2011 led into a virtual Australia-Canada workshop, and now to a paper in the Journal of Public Deliberation at www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol9/iss2/art2/.

Here’s the abstract for the article:

This paper explores theoretical and practical distinctions between individual citizens (‘citizens’) and organized groups (‘stakeholder representatives’ or ‘stakeholders’ for short) in public participation processes convened by government as part of policy development. Distinctions between ‘citizen’ and ‘stakeholder’ involvement are commonplace in government discourse and practice; public involvement practitioners also sometimes rely on this distinction in designing processes and recruiting for them. Recognizing the complexity of the distinction, we examine both normative and practical reasons why practitioners may lean toward—or away from—recruiting citizens, stakeholders, or both to take part in deliberations, and how citizen and stakeholder roles can be separated or combined within a process. The article draws on a 2012 Canadian- Australian workshop of deliberation researchers and practitioners to identify key challenges and understandings associated with the categories of stakeholder and citizen and their application, and hopes to continue this conversation with the researcher-practitioner community.

We’re hoping that the conversation can continue here on the NCDD blog: we invite you to read the article and chime in with your stories, questions, comments, objections, and qualifications.

Here are a few prompts, to get you thinking:

  • Do you or others in your practice community distinguish between ‘citizen’ and ‘stakeholder’ processes (perhaps using other terminologies)?
  • The article explores reasons to involve stakeholder representatives in public deliberation and some cautions (pages 9-14): is there anything you’d want to add, modify, or challenge in this analysis?
  • The article does the same for citizen involvement in deliberative exercises (pages 15-18): what rings true to you there, or needs to be added or modified?
  • In the table on pages 18-19 and the text on 19-26, we look at different ways of designing deliberative exercises to include citizens, stakeholders, or both: how does this typology fit with your experience?
  • Overall, what’s helpful to you in the analysis we’ve offered? How could it be made more useful to practitioners or researchers? Is there something that you can add from your perspective?

David, Kristjana, Jade, and Max, the authors of the article, are very interested in your perspectives. We’ll watch this space and add our voices to the conversation (though there may be a bit of a lag to our responses, as we have lots going on!).

If there’s strong interest in this conversation, we may work with NCDD to find other ways of connecting with you and the broader community (e.g. a webinar, a session at the next NCDD gathering); suggestions welcome here too.

We know that our analysis so far is just the beginning of a conversation and exploration with the much broader D&D community. We’re grateful to Sandy and NCDD for this chance to keep talking.

Our field’s readiness to engage people online

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As part of the Online Facilitation Unconference that’s going on right now in the midst of IAF’s International Facilitation Week, I’d like to engage people around a compelling report produced by our friends at AmericaSpeaks, an NCDD organizational member.

AmericaSpeaks_LogoThe report is nice and short (just 5 pages long!), and focuses on how we might use new forms of media, digital platforms, and citizen engagement principles to reengage the center and those who have turned out due to apathy and disgust.  Download it here.

It’s a good read, but I wanted to encourage us to reflect on / respond to a few points made in the article that question our field’s readiness to move into the online realm.  For those new to NCDD who might be coming in from the unconference, by “our field” I’m talking about the community of practitioners and innovators whose work centers on participatory practices like dialogue and deliberation.

The authors make a compelling and troubling statement about the readiness of dialogue and deliberation practitioners to move into the online realm:

Many resources exist within the field of “deliberative democracy” about ways to create effective and meaningful citizen engagement that is linked to policy making. However, this field is historically linked to in-person, face-to-face engagement and has been challenged to successfully translate to online and digital engagement….

Some efforts have been made from within the dialogue and deliberation community to create online dialogue forums, but they have not been able to attract participants and have not yet proven that they would be effective with large numbers of participants. Could some form of online tool that combines a reputation system, peer monitoring, language processing, sentiment analysis, and targeted interventions by human facilitators overcome this challenge? This is an area that requires considerable experimentation along with some research and development.

Practitioners of citizen engagement have been hampered by their inability to separate methodology from the principles discussed above. It is difficult for experienced practitioners to set aside their traditional methods. In order to find new ways of achieving these principles in online engagement, extensive collaboration with those experienced in digital engagement will be necessary.

Do these statements ring true to you?  A lot of it certainly rings true to me, but I’m curious whether others will disagree.

And if our community needs to separate our allegiance to specific face-to-face engagement methodologies in order to be more successful engaging people online, how can we best do that?  What principles and practices do we need to hold onto, and what can we let go?  Do you agree with the principles the authors cited as needing to be upheld whether engagement happens face-to-face or online — linked to decision making, diverse representation, informed participation and facilitation?  What else would you add?