Category Archives: research

Innovative Journalism Can Take Public Conversation to Scale

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We have barely begun to use major media and journalism – both old and new forms – to scale up the impact of powerful public conversations about public issues beyond the rooms and online forums where those conversations take place. Our societies urgently need innovations and development in the area of public conversation journalism in order to bring collective intelligence and community wisdom into our policy-making and into the everyday activities of ordinary citizens and organizations.

In this post I want to highlight the most remarkable public conversation journalism I’ve ever seen and explore some of the kinds of work public conversation journalists do and could do.

A few weeks ago 122 members of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation created, edited, and rated 95 ideas about what they’d like to see and do in their national conference in October 2014 (and you can see the results here). To my surprise and delight, an item I contributed ended up in third place:

Explore the best examples we can find where major media have partnered with dialogue and deliberation efforts to actually “scale up” public dialogue and deliberation to the regional, state, and national levels – or which contained lessons and best practices to help us do that in the future.

Thanks to these results I’ve decided it is finally time to share a major research project I’ve been working on over the last 15 years. I posted the last pieces of that work online last month. So now a major new resource is available – a thorough examination of what I believe is the most potent example of media-sponsored public conversation on public issues in North America and possibly the world. This initiative – all but unknown even to specialists in the field – was undertaken in 1991 by Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s leading newsweekly in collaboration with Canadian TV. The resources now available online include the entire 40 pages of Maclean’s coverage, the complete CTV documentary video, detailed interviews with four of the major players, and my own descriptions and analyses (see www.co-intelligence.org/Macleans1991Experiment.html).

What Maclean’s and Canadian TV did

These two major media innovators convened 12 Canadians whose extreme diversity reflected the diversity of their deeply divided country. They then charged these ordinary folks with articulating a shared vision for Canada. They were given two and a half days to do it. Maclean’s provided a team of leading-edge negotiators from the Harvard Negotiation Project – led by Roger Fisher, co-author of the classic negotiation handbook Getting to Yes – to help them.

The intense conversations that resulted were remarkable all by themselves. But the coverage provided by Maclean’s and Canadian TV was unprecedented and, I believe, has never been surpassed in the quarter of a century since. It generated widespread lively conversation around the country for months – and awards for Maclean’s.

Despite the fact that it happened more than two decades ago, I find this remarkable event teeming with potential lessons for all of us who want to “scale up” public dialogue and deliberation. We know that that can’t be achieved by centrally organizing millions of people into high quality conversations; there just aren’t the resources for doing that. We need some kind of catalyst that can trigger hundreds of self-organized, spontaneous conversations, including some with potential for real impact.

Maclean’s and Canadian TV provide important clues. They designed their coverage in ways that closed the gap between the small facilitated conversation and its mass audience. They didn’t provide the usual coverage to be witnessed by passive observers keeping up with the latest news. Their coverage was actively, intensely engaging. Like reality TV today, the Maclean’s/Canadian TV coverage drew millions of readers and viewers into intimate and often dramatic interactions among twelve radically different Canadians who included a few people much like themselves as well as others that they strongly disagreed with. Because of the brilliant design of both the interactions and the coverage, these journalists showed us how to vicariously engage an entire country in a higher form of conversation and a renewed sense of political possibility.

As I noted in my book Empowering Public Wisdom, a major unlearned lesson in this effort was that Maclean’s and Canadian TV didn’t repeat this process every year after that. If such a journalistic engagement of the entire country in high quality conversation were to be done on a regular basis, any country doing it would find itself thinking more clearly and creatively about its affairs than it had ever done before and creating a political force field which would profoundly influence politicians, news media, educators, businesses, and government decision-makers, as well as ordinary citizens.

Once it became part of the political culture, such collective thoughtfulness and due attention to diverse views and information would make all the difference in the world. That was, after all, the dream of democracy in the first place: an informed, conversant citizenry engaged together in crafting their collective lives and future.

The fact that we have today new ways to do that – conversational technologies as well as digital and telecommunications technologies – makes it even more important to understand what pioneers in the field did that we can now build on to succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Public conversation journalism

The field of journalism – its theory, practice, and business models – is in upheaval.

The primary source of this disruption – the Internet – is widely recognized: Journalists, who were once the gatekeepers of news and current information, have been bypassed by millions of bloggers, citizen journalists, and community and issue activists using the web and modern communications technology to share what’s going on and what they think about it. This explosion of participatory information-sharing has many blessings for democracy. But it also has limitations, as many valuable journalistic standards have been ignored on the way to greater freedom and participation. The field is now rife – or perhaps ripe – with angst and creative conversation and experimentation. Among the most creative efforts to engage with this issue is Journalism That Matters, catalyzed for over a decade by NCDDer Peggy Holman and a handful of colleagues.

To this rich transformational soup of modern journalism I want to add one more ingredient – an innovative manifestation of journalism’s time-honored contribution to informed citizen engagement in a vibrant democracy: I call it “public conversation journalism” – journalism that has a professional commitment to do things like these:

  • Report on public conversations on public issues – before, during, and after – as legitimate community news.
  • Sponsor major public conversations on public issues, like Maclean’s did.
  • Welcome op eds that promote or usefully comment on public conversations about public issues.
  • Profile public conversation participants from various angles including who they are (to entice audience identification with them and thus trigger a vicarious experience of their views, their passions, their transformations) as well as their personal human interest stories and their infectious enthusiasm.
  • Profile the issues being discussed (background and framing) to deepen and contextualize the public conversation.
  • Provide multi-media coverage (print, video, even journalistic drama like Multiple Viewpoint Drama and Playback Theater).
  • Feature conversations that include well chosen, inclusive diversity such as we find in the Maclean’s initiative, Citizens Juries, WIsdom Councils, and Deliberative Polling (which convene cross-sections or random selected members of a population) and/or in “whole system” stakeholder conversations such as Consensus Councils and Future Search Conferences.
  • Provide truly transpartisan coverage – that is, coverage that includes a broad range of perspectives that move the viewer or reader beyond the reductionist, obsolete, and deeply adversarial standard of “both sides”.
  • Cover the very real drama of citizens problem-solving together, that may include but goes way beyond “the debate”.
  • Help the public understand the character and dynamics of different kinds of conversation – productive and unproductive, creative and uncreative, informed and uninformed, vibrant and restrained, diverse citizens and “the usual suspects”, colaborative and adversarial, etc.
  • Cover – and even provide forums and structure for – the social media generated around quality dialogue and deliberation.
  • Cover the actual results of public conversations on public issues – the immediate and longer term impacts on participants, communities, decision-makers, etc. – and publicize when good public conversational work gets taken seriously or ignored.
  • Cover efforts to institutionalize public deliberations, to build a “culture of dialogue”, to promote citizen engagement, etc.

I hope journalists and professionals in the fields of citizen dialogue and deliberation and public engagement engage in thinking together about how to bring about this powerful new kind of collaboration among themselves and their colleagues. I hope to hear from you about earlier and current experiments in such collaboration, including any details we can all learn from and questions and challenges you now face. I have heard of some work in Australia along these lines, and a number of people have noted that South Africa’s Mt. Fleur scenario initiative – which, intriguingly, happened one year after the Maclean’s initiative – included remarkable publicity by major news media.

There is SO much to learn and try out here…

Beyond the Polls on Americans’ Feelings on Gov’t

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This post comes from Beyond the Polls, a joint blogging initiative from Public Agenda, the National Issues Forums Institute, and the Kettering Foundation – all of which are NCDD organizational partners. We hope you’ll take moment to read about the latest insights they’ve gained from recent polls on opinions about government, which you can read below or find here.

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Do Americans Really Loathe The Federal Government?

What does it mean when fewer than 1 in 5 Americans say they are satisfied with the federal government? Over the last few years, survey researchers have fielded dozens of questions that seem to show the public’s contempt for the federal government.

In a Pew poll last year, just 12 percent of Americans said they were “basically content” with the federal government, while 30 percent were angry about it, and 55 percent were frustrated. Just 19 percent of the public says it trusts the government in Washington to do what is right most of the time. It’s a stunning number. When Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were in office, that number was above 70 percent.

chart_agencyperformanceBut if so many Americans are so dismissive of government, then why were so many of us appalled by the government shutdown last fall? Is this just further proof that Americans will happily indulge in anti-government rhetoric, but that they really like government and what it does for them? Or are there more complex and consequential questions lying beneath the surface—questions that deserve much more careful analysis and discussion?

Here is a quick tour of some of what lies beneath.

  • There’s government – and then there’s politics. Then there’s the frustration factor – the sense that government has a crucial role to play, but that it’s just too bollixed up with politics to meet its responsibilities. This sentiment comes up forcefully in Public Agenda and Kettering research and the National Issues Forums. When citizens gathered in NIF forums a few years ago to discuss options for addressing the federal debt, many were honestly perplexed by the government’s inability to solve the problem. “Never in my 57 years have I seen our government so dysfunctional,” a man in Kansas said. “Everyone seems to be pointing fingers and calling each other names and not working together to compromise.” This participant wasn’t suggesting doing away with government. He was making a plea for government to function.

chart_institutionsThe fact is that public attitudes about government are mixed, multi-faceted, and to some degree unresolved. What’s more, Americans’ lack of resolution about what government can and cannot do — and what it should and should not do — lies at the very heart of debates on the economy, the budget, health care, education, and other key issues.

“Americans’ lack of resolution about what government can and cannot do — and what it should and should not do — lies at the very heart of debates on the economy, the budget, health care, education, and other key issues.”
This comes through clearly in the recent Public Agenda/Kettering Foundation work on curbing health care costs. Some people in our focus groups opposed and feared government action to contain costs, while others saw government as an institution that could help protect patients from insurers or providers who got greedy.

When surveys show Americans voicing disdain for government, it’s easy to jump to dramatic, but misleading conclusions—that large swaths of Americans want to roll back long-standing federal programs or that people always prefer local or private sector solutions for the problems we face.

In some very important respects, public dissatisfaction is real, and that’s worrisome. But there’s also ample evidence that most Americans want government to play an effective role in solving the country’s problems, even though many haven’t fully sorted out their expectations or priorities.

Our view is that opinion research should lead to more than sloganeering and hand wringing. It should point us to topics and themes that we as a people need to talk about and think through together. In this case, polls suggest that the U.S. is in dire need of a more detailed and far less categorical discussion about what we expect from the government and what costs and trade-offs we’re willing to accept to make it work.

Beyond the Polls is a joint endeavor of Public Agenda, the National Issues Forums, and the Kettering Foundation. Sign up to receive an email update when we have a new Beyond the Polls post.

 

PAGE Fellowship Opportunity for Grad Students

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We recently heard about a great opportunity for our grad student members from NCDD supporting member Steven Kull, and we wanted to make sure to share it with you. The Imagining America initiative is a great venue for scholars to integrate civic engagement into their work , and we encourage you to learn more about their PAGE network below or by clicking here. 

Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) is Imagining America’s network for publicly engaged graduate students in humanities, arts, and design. PAGE enhances the theoretical and practical tools for public engagement, fosters a national, interdisciplinary community of peers and veteran scholars, and creates opportunities for collaborative knowledge production. The PAGE consortium, made up of alumni and allies of the program, promotes opportunities for mentorship and peer support from IA’s network.

Imagining America (IA) invites graduate students with a demonstrated interest in public scholarship and/or artistic practice to apply for a 2014-2015 PAGE Fellowship. Awardees receive $500 to attend a half-day Fellows Summit on October 8th and the 2014 Imagining America national conference, October 9th-11th in Atlanta, Georgia.

Fellows also commit to participating in a yearlong working group to promote collaborative art-making, teaching, writing, and research projects. PAGE alumni and Fellows will work together to organize monthly conference calls around themes and questions relevant to the needs of publicly engaged graduate students. In doing so, PAGE looks to foster a cohort of Fellows interested in pursuing collective and innovative scholarly practices.

Fellows are asked to be active participants in the Imagining America network through posting on the IA blog, presenting at regional meetings or campus workshops, or other related professional convenings. Additionally, each Fellow will be tasked with co-facilitating a webinar or workshop during the 2014-2015 academic year. Past examples include: book group discussions, virtual dinner parties, guest lectures, skill-building demonstrations, and music performances.

Learn more about PAGE from its 10th Anniversary Retrospective Video:

Graduate students from IA member campuses at all stages of their MA/MFA/PhD programs may apply to be PAGE Fellows.

The submission deadline is May 16th.

For more information and to apply, click here.

Review of Rosa Zubizarreta’s New Book, “From Conflict to Creative Collaboration”

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We are happy to share the post below from NCDD organizational member Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute, which came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

I just finished reading NCDD member Rosa Zubizarreta’s new book From Conflict to Creative Collaboration: A User’s Guide to Dynamic Facilitation. I’m quite excited. I’ve known about “DF” for fifteen years, and I’ve never seen it described as clearly and compellingly as in this book.

It’s an oddity: DF generates a remarkably effective creative group conversation whose nonlinearity makes it seem very peculiar indeed. Many NCDD practitioners have found it hard to grasp or turn away from those who unduly evangelize it. But I want to say that it is definitely worth checking out – and that finally we have a book that makes real sense of it without overselling it and with good attention to contextualizing it within the larger field of group process.

Furthermore, like many other excellent books focused on one process – notably Juanita Brown et al’s The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures through Conversations that Matter – Rosa’s book provides deep insights into group and facilitation dynamics that we would all be wise to attend to, regardless of which methods we love and use.

This particular unusual facilitation approach is built around a few deceptively simple practices like fully hearing each person, reframing conflicts as concerns, being truly open to every perspective and to the range of human emotions, and always inviting the best solutions from each and every person. I say “deceptively simple” because – like the deceptive simplicity of “following your breath” while meditating – the power of these practices comes from their persistent and courageous application. So, as with so many processes, it’s good to have access to a facilitator skilled in the practice.

Because when these practices are applied persistently and courageously – and with empathy and faith – I have seen them produce the seeming miracles for which I think Dynamic Facilitation is becoming increasingly appreciated. These practices have a pretty good record of transforming difficult and conflicted people into creative collaborators, and thorny resistant problems and disputes into breakthrough insights and effective new directions.

This alleged “magic” of Dynamic Facilitation is, like all magic, impressive because it does things we don’t believe are possible with actions that could not possibly produce those results. The nonlinear power of DF seems to defy logical understanding – a puzzle that, thankfully, begins to dissolve as we read Rosa’s book.

She makes it clear what’s going on and why, and how to perform these miracles ourselves. She also makes it clear that, while all the magician’s secrets are here and some people – the “naturals”, we might say – can perform them right out of the book, for most of us it takes practice. Practice… and authentic respect for people – genuine curiosity about what people think and feel and a faith in their ability to find their way together in groups when they’re given the right support. These are the qualities of the master Dynamic Facilitator – of whom Rosa, I quite seriously suggest, is one of the best. She’s also a dynamite observer, theoretician, and writer.

DF is filled with nuances and extraordinary phenomena and assumptions, all of which become vividly obvious to us in the gentle flow of Rosa’s prose. The subject unfolds in foreshadowed layers: She gives us a good glimpse of a vista and then takes us down for a more detailed examination of the landscape which, in turn, has its own smaller vistas and finer-grained details. Layer upon layer she guides and invites us. At each step of the way, she grounds us both in the simple overriding mechanics of the process and the underlying spirit of the whole thing. We learn about chart pads for people’s Problem Statements, Solutions, Concerns, and Data; reflecting back to each person their meaning and caring; asking for solutions and concerns; and many other techniques. We also learn that what we’re doing at every stage is making a space safe enough for the perspectives and problem-solving impulses of diverse individuals to evolve quite naturally into collective big picture insights, innovations and transcendence.

Rosa wrote this book especially for existing and prospective facilitators and for people seeking help with group work. And so, for us NCDDers, she offers a section clarifying the important differences between DF and practices like Open Space Technology, Focusing, and brainstorming. But aside from that one specialized section – which can be readily skipped by a lay reader (or they can look up these practices online), the rest of the book is nearly jargon-free. From my view straddling many methods and lay perspectives, Rosa says it like it is in ways that will allow most readers to gain a wholesome, satisfying understanding of this remarkable topic regardless of their facilitation experience.

From the history of Dynamic Facilitation to its technical details, from its unfolding stages to its proper application, this book covers the ground and covers it well. It ranks among the best books I’ve seen on group process and human – in this case collective – potential. I like to think that that its widespread use could make a big difference in the nonlinear and often troubling trajectory of our civilization. In the simplest terms, the innovative tool it describes could help us co-create our future with much more wisdom and effectiveness.

I am so excited that the curious magic of DF is now out of the closet and at everyone’s fingertips.

Call for Papers for Journal of Dialogue Studies 2:2

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We hope you’ll take a moment to read the post below about a great opportunity, which came from NCDD member Frances Sleap of Dialogue Society via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

In November this blog (to the delight of its editorial team here at the Dialogue Society) announced the launch of the Journal of Dialogue Studies. The Journal aims to promote in-depth academic exploration and evaluation of the theory and practice of dialogue. We hope it will be directly useful not only to scholars and students but also to professionals and practitioners working in different contexts at various cultural interfaces. The first issue is available to download free here.

The peer review process for the second issue is now in full swing and we look forward to the publication of that issue in May. Our editorial board is growing; most lately we were proud to welcome Prof. Ronald Arnett of Duquesne University, a real authority on theories of dialogue.

We are now calling for papers for the third issue, volume 2, issue 2. We warmly invite you to consider submitting a paper if you are engaged in any academic exploration of dialogue. The theme for the issue is ‘dialogue ethics’. We want to explore ‘dialogic ethics’ as conceived by theorists like Gadamer and Freire, to delve into the ethics informing dialogue practitioners and to consider ethical pitfalls that arise in the practice of dialogue.

We also welcome any submissions falling within the general remit of the Journal. It is not too late to contribute to the critical exploration of influential dialogue theories which we have begun in volume 2, issue 1 (guidance provided for that call for papers is still online here).

The paper submission deadline is July 11th, 2014, and we expect the next issue to be published in November, 2014.

Please do have a browse of the full call for papers online: www.dialoguesociety.org/publications/academia/981-journal-of-dialogue-studies-vol-2-no-2.html.

Please email Frances Sleap at fsleap@dialoguesociety.org if you have any queries or if you or your organisation would like to subscribe to the journal.

ICMA’s State of the Profession Survey Results

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The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) recently released the results of its 2012 State of the Profession survey, and we think that the results make good food for thought. From feelings about the purposes of public engagement to the state of civic discourse, the survey provides insights on where we are and where we might go from here. You can read the ICMA write up on the report below or find the original at www.icma.org/en/press/pm_magazine/article/104159.

The Extent of Public Participation

by Robert Vogel, Evelina Moulder, and Mike Huggins

Local governments use a variety of strategies and techniques to encourage public involvement in local planning and decision making. The International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) describes public involvement as occurring at five levels ranging from informing all the way to empowering.

In this article, we summarize the responses to ICMA’s 2012 State of the Profession Survey, which asked respondents to rate the importance of achieving the five levels of involvement in their communities. The levels are illustrated in a case study of an online public participation project in Rancho Cordova, California. We conclude with a list of questions to help local government managers improve their public participation strategy.

Goals of Public Participation

Previous ICMA surveys examined how local governments share information with residents. The 2012 survey delved more deeply into the nature and purposes of local government public participation efforts.

IAP2 has designed a widely-accepted Spectrum of Public Participation that identifies a range of interactions that a local government can have with its community. Distinguished by increasing levels of direct public involvement and intended outcomes, the IAP2 Spectrum includes the following five types of goals that a government can strive for in its public participation efforts: inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and empower. A number of the 2012 survey questions addressed the perceived importance of these types of public interactions within the local government profession.

Inform: Eighty-five percent of the responding local governments report that it is “important” or “highly important” to provide the public with objective information to assist them in understanding problems/solutions/alternatives.

Consult: Seventy-five percent indicate that it is “important” or “highly important” to work directly with the public to ensure that their concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.

Involve: Some 70 percent report that it is “important” or “highly important” to obtain feedback from the public on analyses of problems, solutions, and alternatives.

Collaborate: The results show that 57 percent of respondents reported that it is “important” or “highly important” to partner with the public in development of alternatives, identification of the preferred solution, and decision making.

Empower: Nineteen percent of respondents indicate that it is “important” or “highly important” to place decision making in the hands of the public.

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Being clear about the underlying purpose of the engagement effort as well as the promise it intends to make to the public is essential to the success of any public participation effort. Without objective information and a clearly understood purpose, the public cannot provide meaningful feedback nor can they partner with the local government in developing alternatives, identifying solutions, and making decisions. Unless concerns and aspirations are understood, problems cannot be successfully addressed.

Rancho Cordova: A Case Study

When residents of Rancho Cordova, California (population 67,000), asked their city council to loosen restrictions on raising chickens, the council wanted to first hear from a broad spectrum of residents. Before finalizing their decision, councilmembers wanted to encourage participants to first learn about the issue, then engage in a nuanced discussion without polarizing the community for or against the proposal.

Under the leadership of City Manager Ted Gaebler, the city decided to use the Open Town Hall online public engagement service to broaden the discussion beyond the few who typically attend in-person meetings. To encourage the public to understand the issues around this proposed new ordinance, the online service presented objective background information before inviting users to participate in the online discussion.

To ensure that the public’s concerns and aspirations were well understood and considered, the city created a map of “Engaged Rancho Cordova Districts,” enabling decisionmakers and others to see what residents from each district were saying. Anyone could click on the “word cloud” in the online tool to see statements containing frequently occurring words (e.g., enforcement) and on demographic tallies to see trends in perspectives by age and gender.

Compared with Rancho Cordova’s traditional face-to-face meetings, participation in the online forum was both large and civil. More than 560 residents visited the forum, 66 posted or supported a statement, and 147 subscribed to updates enabling them to remain involved after the forum closed. Statements were monitored for compliance with the city’s guidelines for civility and all but one were found in compliance.

Much like a public hearing, each participant was allowed to make only one statement. Monitoring statements and allowing only one per resident resulted in a collaborative online forum providing clear feedback on the proposed ordinance as well as potential improvements to that ordinance.

After the period for public discussion had concluded, the council directed staff to prepare a draft ordinance that reflected the feedback and addressed the concerns expressed both on the forum and in other public venues. This outcome was also posted on the forum and e-mailed to forum subscribers to strengthen the partnership between the city administration and the public in the decision-making process.

In line with the preference of most of the respondents to the ICMA survey, Rancho Cordova chose not to place decision making directly in the hands of the public. The online forum was designed specifically to preclude the public perception of a public vote or a referendum.

The city never mentioned the “v word” (vote), and it chose to collect open-ended statements from residents rather than have them respond to a poll or survey that asked for a yes/no position on the proposed new ordinance. The forum can be found at www.peakdemocracy.com/1379.

Civic Discourse and Extent of Public Participation

Citing the complexity of issues and the breadth and depth of knowledge needed for sound policies, local government officials often express reluctance for expanding the public’s direct role in decision making. Over the past several years, the often disconcerting tenor of civic discourse has also contributed to concerns about greater public participation.

A perception of the public as increasingly “nasty, brutish, short” and polarized inevitably raises questions for local officials about the efficacy of their collaboration with that public.

Civic discourse. Close to 40 percent of ICMA survey respondents described the civic discourse in their community as “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude.” Respondents in the New England division show the highest percentage (45 percent) reporting civic discourse in their community as “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude,” as did 44 percent of respondents in those communities with the town meeting form of government. The 2013 Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate survey Civility in America, which was conducted nationally online, found 71 percent of respondents believed the lack of civility in the United States was worse than several years ago, and 82 percent believed the general lack of civility in politics is harming the country.

Slightly more than 50 percent of respondents with council/administrator/manager and council elected executive also described civic discourse as “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude.” Of particular interest is that out of the 777 survey respondents overall who reported that civic discourse is “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude,” 399 also indicated that partnering with the public in development of alternatives, identification of preferred solutions, and decision making is “important” or highly important.”

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If we look at the same group of respondents, we also see that 127 of them reported that it is “important” or “highly important” to put decision making in the hands of the public. Not surprisingly, when these 127 are examined by form of government, the town meeting and representative town meeting governments represent, respectively, 19 percent and 20 percent of the total respondents.

Level of resident participation. These are by far the highest percentages of respondents by form of government that rated putting decision making in the hands of the public as “important” or “highly important” and rated civic discourse as “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude.”

When asked about the level of resident participation, only 12 percent of respondents indicated that there is a high level of participation in their local government’s engagement efforts. A majority of local governments in communities under 10,000 population show low participation levels. Pacific Coast respondents show the highest percentage – 19 percent – reporting a high level of participation.

Outcome

Local governments are encouraging the public to participate in the identification of problems and their solutions, to share their concerns and aspirations, and to provide feedback and develop alternatives as part of the decision-making process. The outcome is optimized when local managers first ask themselves these six questions:

  • What is the readiness and capacity of my organization for public engagement?
  • Why am I involving the residents?
  • What do I want to achieve?
  • What do I want to know?
  • What is the role of the public?
  • How is that role communicated to the public in face-to-face and online interactions?

Answers to these questions enable local governments to constructively engage the public in both face-to-face meetings and online public participation methods. Through careful design and monitoring of online forums, localities can significantly improve the effectiveness of public participation by expanding the number of people participating, restoring the civility of their participation, and ensuring clarity about the role of the public in final decision making.

New Pew Study Maps Twitter Conversations

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We saw an intriguing article last month over at the PewResearch Internet Project that we thought might interest some of our social media- and tech-oriented members. Pew has compiled some very impressive amounts of data on the patterns that we can find in political conversation on Twitter that may hold insights for us as practitioners. The results are fascinating.

It’s not news to us at NCDD that social media has become an important part of our public life:

Social media is increasingly home to civil society, the place where knowledge sharing, public discussions, debates, and disputes are carried out. As the new public square, social media conversations are as important to document as any other large public gathering. Network maps of public social media discussions in services like Twitter can provide insights into the role social media plays in our society.

Especially for those of us who aren’t so tech-savvy, it is quite a challenge to make sense of what all of the conversation in the Twittersphere means. But as the Pew analysis shows, there are a few distinctive patterns that develop regularly: 

Conversations on Twitter create networks with identifiable contours as people reply to and mention one another in their tweets. These conversational structures differ, depending on the subject and the people driving the conversation. Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke structures. These are created as individuals choose whom to reply to or mention in their Twitter messages and the structures tell a story about the nature of the conversation.

If a topic is political, it is common to see two separate, polarized crowds take shape. They form two distinct discussion groups that mostly do not interact with each other. Frequently these are recognizably liberal or conservative groups. The participants within each separate group commonly mention very different collections of website URLs and use distinct hashtags and words.

The split is clearly evident in many highly controversial discussions: people in clusters that we identified as liberal used URLs for mainstream news websites, while groups we identified as conservative used links to conservative news websites and commentary sources. At the center of each group are discussion leaders, the prominent people who are widely replied to or mentioned in the discussion. In polarized discussions, each group links to a different set of influential people or organizations that can be found at the center of each conversation cluster.

Unfortunately, the initial analysis seems to confirm that the polarization dynamic that dialogue practitioners see all too often applies to online conversation, as well. Whether in person or digitally, political conversation can have the effect of splitting people into groups that communicate only sparingly with each other.

But for what it’s worth, these aren’t necessarily average people that we’re talking about:

While these polarized crowds are common in political conversations on Twitter, it is important to remember that the people who take the time to post and talk about political issues on Twitter are a special group. Unlike many other Twitter members, they pay attention to issues, politicians, and political news, so their conversations are not representative of the views of the full Twitterverse. Moreover, Twitter users are only 18% of internet users and 14% of the overall adult population. Their demographic profile is not reflective of the full population. Additionally, other work by the Pew Research Center has shown that tweeters’ reactions to events are often at odds with overall public opinion— sometimes being more liberal, but not always. Finally, forthcoming survey findings from Pew Research will explore the relatively modest size of the social networking population who exchange political content in their network.

Thankfully, there is a lot more that to be gained from social media mapping than confirmation of what we already knew. The development of these analysis tools can shed a new light on the ways that our social networks work:

…the structure of these Twitter conversations says something meaningful about political discourse these days and the tendency of politically active citizens to sort themselves into distinct partisan camps. Social networking maps of these conversations provide new insights because they combine analysis of the opinions people express on Twitter, the information sources they cite in their tweets, analysis of who is in the networks of the tweeters, and how big those networks are. And to the extent that these online conversations are followed by a broader audience, their impact may reach well beyond the participants themselves…

Social network maps of Twitter crowds and other collections of social media can be created with innovative data analysis tools that provide new insight into the landscape of social media. These maps highlight the people and topics that drive conversations and group behavior – insights that add to what can be learned from surveys or focus groups or even sentiment analysis of tweets. Maps of previously hidden landscapes of social media highlight the key people, groups, and topics being discussed.

There is much more to learn from this research project than we can cover here. But if you want to learn more, you can find both the summary and the full-length analysis of Pew’s research at www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/20/mapping-twitter-topic-networks-from-polarized-crowds-to-community-clusters. You will find fascinating data, visualizations, and much more. Happy reading!

NIFI Announces New “Linked Futures” Deliberations

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We wanted to make sure that NCDD members, especially those in higher ed, saw the most recent edition of Higher Education Engagement News, the periodic update on the American Commonwealth Partnership from Harry C. Boyte. This edition announces a new stage of the collaboration between the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums Institute – both NCDD organizational members – that builds on the Shaping Our Futures initiative. You can read the newsletter below or find it at the NIFI blog by clicking here.

Make sure to note that it’s not too late to be part of the “framework testing phase”, so if you are interested in facilitating a test deliberation around the future of higher ed as part of this new project, find the details for how to get involved below.

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March 2014 Higher Education Engagement News

Higher Education Engagement News is a periodic newsletter, edited by Harry C. Boyte, which responds to requests for updates and information about initiatives associated with the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP). ACP was a coalition to strengthen the public purposes of higher education, organized for the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges in 2012, on invitation by the White House Office of Public Engagement.

This issue is devoted to Linked Futures – Communities, Higher Education and the Changing World of Work, a new deliberation being developed in association with the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums. Linked Futures builds on the earlier Shaping Our Futures, 150 forums across the country on the public purposes of higher education. The Linked Futures deliberation will address the crucial question of how to think collectively about changes and challenges often described as an avalanche, which often seem overwhelming. The project is described below.

We are in the “framework testing phase” for the next month (until April 11th). This involves having small groups test how the framework works. The framework gives more detail on the three options described below, but is not a full National Issues Forum “issue guide,” like Shaping Our Futures.

If you are interested in getting in on the ground floor of this deliberation by testing the framework, please contact Harry Boyte (boyte@umn.edu) and copy our project administrator, Hunter Gordon (gordo430@umn.edu), who will keep track. If you want to test the framework we will send it to you, along with facilitator guidelines and an optional questionnaire.

Linked Futures – Communities, Higher Education, and the Changing World of Work

Linked Futures builds on Shaping Our Future – How Should Higher Education Help Us Create the Society We Want?, a National Issues Forum and American Commonwealth Partnership public deliberation launched at a National Press Club event on September 4, 2012, with Undersecretary Martha Kanter and higher education and civic leaders including David Mathews, president of Kettering Foundation, Muriel Howard, President of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, Scott Peters, Co-director of Imagining America, Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of Syracuse University, and others. Shaping Our Future convened more than 150 forums across the country, bringing together college students, parents, faculty, employers, retirees, policy makers and others to deliberate about the purpose of higher education and its roles in the society.

The findings, described in Divided We Fail, a report by Jean Johnson of the public opinion and engagement group Public Agenda, revealed a gap between the ways in which lay citizens outside the policy making arena talk about higher education, and the debate among elected officials and other policy makers. As Johnson puts it, “Facing a more competitive international economy and relentlessly rising college costs, leaders say now is the moment for higher education to reinvent itself.”  In contrast, “Forum participants spoke repeatedly about the benefits of a rich, varied college education…where, in their view, students have time and space to explore new ideas and diverse fields.”  Lay citizens emphasized the need to broaden, not narrow, STEM education and preparation for other careers, in the context of rapidly changing work roles and globalized workplaces.

The next stage is Linked Futures. A design team with representatives of six Twin Cities institutions– Augsburg College, Century College, Hamline University, Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Metropolitan State University, and St. Paul College – working with the Kettering Foundation gathered concerns from hundreds of citizens in different settings. They addressed the question, “How can communities and higher education work together to address the changing world of work?”  A framework is being tested with three options to consider:

• Prepare Students for the Job Market:  Our colleges and universities have to raise academic expectations, tailor their programs to the real needs of employers, and direct more of their educational resources toward vocational and pre-professional training.

• Change Jobs for the Better. Many of the positions available to new graduates are poorly paid, offer little in the way of job security or job satisfaction, and are vulnerable to downsizing and outsourcing. Colleges and universities should take the lead in shaping a new kind of workplace…and a new kind of worker, one with the skills and habits of mind needed to thrive in a complex and rapidly changing world.

• Be a Good Partner to the Community. Colleges and universities represent vital anchor institutions, places where the community gathers, engages issues, organizes activities and makes common cause. We depend on them to provide the civic and intellectual leadership that can strengthen democracy and drive long-term social and economic progress.

The Linked Futures issue guide will be ready from the National Issues Forum Institute in September.

NCDD Member is New ED at Journalism that Matters

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We are so pleased to announce that our friends at Journalism that Matters have selected a new Executive Director from NCDD’s ranks. Peggy Holman is a long-time NCDD member and friend, and we’re proud of her and all she’s accomplished. We look forward to continuing to work with her at Journalism That Matters. You can read the announcement below or read the original on JTM’s website here.

Journalism that Matters is excited to announce that Peggy Holman, a JTM co-founder and long-time board member is now serving as the organization’s Executive Director.

In 2001, Holman joined three career journalists in founding Journalism that Matters to support the pioneers who are shaping the emerging news and information ecology.

In her new role, Holman will oversee JTM’s growth as the organization matures beyond event production and expands into a hub for supporting journalism innovation and community engagement. Said Holman:

“I see an opportunity for us to fill a vital niche by connecting people who are reinventing ways in which the public’s voice enters into news and information. News organizations that are forging new ground around engagement often find themselves alone in the wilderness. We want to provide a place for them to benefit from each other’s work.”

Holman will continue to oversee the Illuminations Project, an initiative shining a light on what’s working in the changing news landscape, that JTM has produced since last year. She is also leading development of the Engagement Hub initiative, a collaborative endeavor to create a peer-based community of practice for sharing resources, connecting people, and growing understanding and skills for journalism that engages communities. Both projects were made possible by a generous grant from the Mott Foundation.

An author and consultant based out of the Seattle area, Holman brings to her new role her experience with engaging organizations and communities in discovering creative solutions to complex issues.

In the second edition of The Change Handbook, she joined with her co-authors to profile sixty-one engagement processes.  Her award-winning book, Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity, dives beneath these methods to make visible deeper patterns, principles, and practices for engagement that can guide us through turbulent times.

Journalism That Matters is a nonprofit that convenes conversations to foster collaboration, innovation, and action so that a diverse news and information ecosystem helps communities to thrive. A core belief: journalism matters most when it is of, by, and for the people. Best known for convening unconferences, JTM has a proven track record catalyzing disruptive innovation and fostering new collaborations within the news industry.

The original version of this post can be found at www.journalismthatmatters.net/jtm_announces_new_executive_director.