Category Archives: field news

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.

VOP-largepic

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.

VOP-graphic

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

Launching a 3-year learning exchange with the Kettering Foundation

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NCDD is pleased to announce that we are embarking upon an exciting three-year “learning exchange” with the Kettering Foundation.

This research with Kettering focuses on documenting and making explicit what NCDD is learning in areas of mutual importance to Kettering, to NCDD, and to our field. Specifically, under this agreement, we will:

  • Explore the capacity and track record of collaboration among practitioners in public dialogue and deliberation, while exploring new opportunities as well. This joint research will give us the opportunity to think through—with many of you—the obstacles to collaboration in our field and how to overcome them.
  • Leverage our network to help quantify the level of dialogue and deliberation in the U.S. We’ll be surveying you in a number of ways to find out where, when, and how often you’re engaging people; what your organizations’ strengths and specialties are; and what your hopes and challenges are. The goal is to inventory the assets that exist in our field as a whole—and present that information in ways that public administrators, funders, potential sponsoring organizations, the media, and all of you can access.

We will certainly need your help for these efforts to be successful. Many of you are working together on a wide variety of projects already. We ask that over these next few years, you help us to learn from your work and explore with us what’s possible. We’ll also be looking for people to help us catalog, report on, and map what we’re learning. Ideas, input and involvement from our members will be critical in all our upcoming work with Kettering.

I am so excited about this opportunity to work more closely with the Kettering Foundation and to create a better climate for dialogue and deliberation, at a time when our world so desperately needs it. Please join me in celebrating our new venture.

About the Kettering Foundation…

The Kettering Foundation is a nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering’s primary research question is “What does it take to make democracy work as it should?” Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation.

The foundation seeks to identify and address the challenges to making democracy work as it should through interrelated program areas that focus on citizens, communities, and institutions. Guiding Kettering’s research are three hypotheses. Kettering’s research suggests that democracy requires:

  • Responsible citizens who can make sound choices about their future;
  • Communities of citizens acting together to address common problems; and
  • Institutions with public legitimacy that contribute to strengthening society.

The foundation’s small staff and extensive network of associates collaborate with community organizations, government agencies, researchers, scholars, and citizens around the world. A monthly meeting series brings together Kettering staff, associates, researchers, and others with whom the foundation works to explore a tightly focused research question or area. Those working on related problems share what they are learning at the foundation’s many meetings, which provide space for an ongoing exchange of ideas and stories in an effort to develop research interests.

As the foundation’s learning progresses, Kettering shares its research findings through books, research reports, occasional papers, videos, and its website. The foundation also disseminates its research in three periodicals: Connections, the Higher Education Exchange, and the Kettering Review.

In addition, Kettering produces materials, including issue books and starter videos, for the National Issues Forums (NIF), a network of civic and educational organizations whose common interest is promoting public deliberation. The foundation collaborates with NIF as part of its research efforts.

Established in 1927 by inventor Charles F. Kettering, the foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization that does not make grants but engages in joint research with others. It is an operating foundation headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Registration open for Nov 20th Confab call on Rockefeller’s GATHER

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Want to build your toolkit as a convening designer? Join us for our next NCDD “Confab Call” on Wednesday, November 20th from 2:00 to 3:00 EST to speak with the authors of the Rockefeller Foundation publication GATHER: The Art & Science of Effective Convening.

Leading the conversation will be:

  • Rob Garris, Managing Director at Rockefeller Foundation. Rob oversees their Bellagio conference center, and oversaw the creation of GATHER
  • Noah Rimland Flower, Monitor Institute. Noah is one of GATHER’’s two co-authors and led the content creation

Gather-coverEarlier this year, Rockefeller Foundation and Monitor Institute released GATHER as a free hands-on guidebook for all convening designers and social change leaders who want to tap into a group’s collective intelligence and make substantial progress on a shared challenge.

GATHER provides simple frameworks for the questions that are often ignored: whether convening is the right tool to use to advance a strategic agenda, and how a convening can be used to achieve a specific purpose. It then helps you understand how to customize the design to fit that purpose, laying out a clear series of steps for what is a naturally chaotic workflow. It then offers principles to use for each of the many tactical choices involved. GATHER and its accompanying workshop materials are designed for you to use in your own work, with a team, and with larger groups both inside and outside an organization.

On this Confab Call we’ll be discussing:

  • An introduction to how convening is a strategic tool for foundations
  • A case study of how convening can be used for social problem-solving
  • The top three mis-steps that convening designers make, and how to avoid them

A word on the format:  NCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members of the NCDD community to talk with innovators in our field about the work they’re doing and connect with each other around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is required to participate in this call, as space is limited and we suspect this one will fill up fast.

Dues-paying members (supporting, sustaining and org members) get first dibs on this one, but non-dues members may register starting next Wednesday (November 13th) as space allows. A max of 150 people will be able to participate on the call.

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

New Leadership for the Journal of Public Deliberation

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Our friends at IAP2 and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium just announced a great new leadership team for the Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD). We’ve been talking to some members of the team about the potential of NCDD helping the JPD with outreach and dissemination to the dialogue and deliberation community. Stay tuned for updates, and check out the full announcement below.

Announcing changes in the leadership of the Journal of Public Deliberation 

IAP2 logo

DDC logo

 

 

 

DDC and IAP2 Federation are pleased to announce exciting changes in the leadership of the Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD). After three highly successful years at the helm of the journal, Tim Steffensmeier and David Procter are stepping down, and a new editorial team is taking over:

  • Laura Black of the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University will serve as the new Editor.
  • Tim Shaffer, who directs the Center for Leadership and Engagement at Wagner College, will be an Associate Editor and the Book Review Editor.
  • Nancy Thomas of the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, who also directs The Democracy Imperative (TDI), will be an Associate Editor.

Since its inception in 2004, JPD articles have been downloaded over 82,000 times. The journal occupies a preeminent role in a growing, global, cross-disciplinary field. Black, Shaffer, and Thomas plan to expand the types of articles published, create a new section for shorter articles that focus on innovative ideas and best practice examples, continue the journal’s success with special issues and symposia, incorporate book reviews, and explore new possibilities for interactivity and social media. The new team will soon be issuing their first call for proposals.

Under the leadership of Steffensmeier and Procter, who are based at the Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy at Kansas State University, JPD has made great progress. Article downloads have tripled and submissions have doubled over the past three years. The production schedule accelerated to two issues per year. Special issues on Participatory Budgeting and (De)liberation Technology garnered wide attention. Steffensmeier and Procter also husbanded the journal’s transition to a new platform at Berkeley Electronic Press, www.publicdeliberation.org, which provides the new editorial team an expanded range of online tools.

In their work, Steffensmeier and Procter have benefited enormously from the work of Associate Editor William Richter, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Kansas State, and Chandra Ruthstrom of the university’s Center for Engagement and Community Development.

Laura Black is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Ohio University. She studies group deliberation and dialogue with a special focus on storytelling, conflict, and group facilitation. Some of her research has also investigated the use of online tools in deliberative forums. She has worked on several research projects with organizations such as the Kettering Foundation and the Interactivity Foundation and local civic organizations. Her research is published in JPD, Small Group Research, and several communication journals as well as edited books on deliberation and democracy.  She has served on the editorial board for JPD and also co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of Public Participation on the communication practices in public meetings.  Laura received her Ph.D. in communication from the University of Washington in 2006.

Tim Shaffer is Director of the Center for Leadership and Engagement at Wagner College. His research interests include historical and contemporary forms of civic engagement and the public philosophies that animate citizens. He has published on topics such as environmental leadership and deliberative democracy as well as higher education’s role in cultivating and supporting civic life. He earned a bachelor’s degree in theology from St. Bonaventure University, master’s degrees in public administration and theological studies, respectively, from the University of Dayton, and a PhD in education from Cornell University.

Nancy Thomas directs research on college student engagement in democracy at Tisch College and CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, at Tufts University. She also co-founded and directs the Democracy Imperative and serves as a senior associate for Everyday Democracy. Nancy has worked for more than 20 years in the national diversity, civic, and democracy reform efforts in higher education. In 2010, she published Educating for Deliberative Democracy and co-edited (with Martin Carcasson) a special issue of JPD on teaching democracy across the curriculum. She holds a BA in government from St. Lawrence University, a law degree from Case Western Reserve University, and a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In addition to IAP2 and DDC, the Journal is also supported by a range of other institutions, including:

For further information kindly contact:

Iris Almeida-Côté, Executive Director, IAP2 Federation

iris@iap2.org or visit the website: www.iap2.org

Matt Leighninger, Executive Director, Deliberative Democracy Consortium

mattleighninger@earthlink.net or visit www.deliberative-democracy.net

 

Invitation to 3rd round of dialogue on Race, Poverty & Wealth in America

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Here’s an invitation from Ben Roberts of The Conversation Collaborative to participate in the third (and final) round of the innovative online conversation he’s hosting as part of the National Dialogue Network initiative…

From now through October 31st, please join us on hackpad, on the phone and perhaps in person as well, as we continue to explore the topic of race as it relates to the National Dialogue Network’s topic of Poverty and Wealth in America.

The stories we tell ourselves concerning race, poverty and wealth will be the focus of our Round Three inquiry. You can be a “story teller” and/or a listener/respondent. Thank you to Helen Roberts and Safeer Hopton for agreeing to share their stories to get us started. You can listen to Helen’s recording and then post reflections on our here on the “Story 1” pad, and read or listen to Safeer’s interview here on the “Story 2” pad. You can also…

  • Go to one of our additional pads and share your own story there
  • Pair up with a friend (live or virtually) and interview one another
  • Email me and request that I interview you (this Sunday afternoon or in the morning Eastern during the week is good timing).
  • Join the conversation on our “spin off” pad on “Race and Culture” or “Changes to Voting Laws.”

See the main pad for Round Three to get started on all of the above.

We also have two interactive MaestroConference calls next week. These calls will feature a brief orientation for those who are new to the conversation, plenty of time for dialogue in small and large groups, and two special guest conversation starters.  Stay tuned for more info. Note that if you’re receiving this email from me, you’re already registered. Here are the times for the calls:

  • Tuesday, Oct 29 from 3-5pm Pacific/6-8pm Eastern
  • Thursday, Oct 31 at 11am-1pm Pacific/2-4pm Eastern

Finally, as part of our collaboration with the National Dialogue Network, we request that you take their survey here. This is our way of connecting our thinking together with that of other groups having similar conversations as part of this initiative.

Hope to “see” you soon on the pads and on the phone, and thank you for your interest and participation to date!

Meeting Tips Radio Podcast

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Meeting Tips RadioI just added a great interview to the NCDD resource center with past IAF chair Mirja Hanson and, while doing so, had a chance to learn about an excellent new audio podcast that features topics on all forms of meeting facilitation.

Meeting Tips Radio describes itself as a ”resource for anyone who runs meetings including: meeting facilitators, corporate executives, non-profit executives, managers, CIOs, business managers, IT managers, project managers, business analysts and strategic planners. Collaborative facilitation, face-to face facilitation, and virtual facilitation methods are discussed. Special guests include the best facilitators in the world from the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) and the International Association of Facilitators.”

Two recent podcasts caught my attention: the Mirja Hanson interview mentioned above and a recent talk with ToP Trainers Network’s Catherine Tornbom focused on conflict resolution and “virtual” facilitation.  Host Reine Kassulker engages in one-on-one interviews, gathering advice on best practices and encouraging stories from his guests’ facilitation work.

You can listen to or download the shows on the Meeting Tips Radio website.  If you have an iOS device, the shows are now available through iTunes.

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.