Category Archives: tools

Group Decision Tip: Write on the walls

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In principle, good group decisions stem from shared understanding and shared understanding comes from reading off the same page.

Group Decision Tips IconAlso, people like to feel heard and when people feel heard it allows the group to move on. A very effective way for someone to feel heard is for their point to get written for everyone to see.

Practical Tip: For every group meeting, have on hand the ability to write words in front of the group. Markers and a flip chart work well or you might use a laptop and projector. There are many creative ways.

When people make comments, paraphrase them on the chart or the screen. The words don’t need to be perfect, but representative of the view expressed.

When it seems like the group is agreeing to something, write words to represent the agreement. Make sure everyone understands and accepts the representative words.

Writing public words that represent viewpoints and agreements is a learned skill and requires focused effort. When done well it leads to shared understanding and individual empowerment — two key building blocks of good group decisions.

Civic Data Challenge Winners Announced

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CivicDataChallenge-logo

Earlier this year, the National Conference on Citizenship announced the 2013 Civic Data Challenge, a competition for civic groups to turn raw civic data into tools that their communities could use to increase civic participation. And earlier this month, the winners were announced!  

We hope you’ll take a moment to join us in recognizing and congratulating the winning groups. The winning teams included:

The Outline Team. Their Balanced State Budget Simulator tool allows citizens to assess public policy with the same understanding of the impacts as an economist. We hope that with an increased awareness of the policymaking process, we’ll see an increase in voting rates. The team is currently working with the commonwealth of Massachusetts to test this tool.

The Manifesto Project Team asks the question: How does Arizona retain its young leaders? Through a series of events, they collect civic health data from young Arizonans and leverage their findings to place these youth in positions of leadership to influence change.

The Texas Connector Team seeks to correct the pervasive absence of accurate data regarding nonprofit service providers and social and demographic community data. Their website application increases access to community data, enabling stakeholders to more accurately assess community needs and respond.

Civic Data Denver partnered with Earth Force to create an interactive visual that empowers youth to take civic action to address social and physical health issues in their community. Civic Data Denver’s website will be used by students and educators where Earth Force programming takes place.

The DC Community Resource Directory Project helps residents find health and social services referral information. It establishes ‘community resource data’ as a commons — cooperatively produced and managed by local stakeholders, and open to an ecosystem of applications and users. They are working with a core set of community anchor institutions, including Bread for the City, Martha’s Table, and Lutheran Social Services, to continue to develop their product and recruit partners.

We encourage you to read more about the competition and the winning projects on the Civic Data Challenge blog.  You can also find more information at www.civicdatatchallenge.org.

Congratulations to all the winning teams! We can’t wait to see what your communities do with your work, and we’re looking forward to next year’s challenge!

Challenges to Democracy Public Dialogue Series and Blog

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I wanted to share some news from one of our newest supporting members. I finally got Archon Fung to take the plunge and join NCDD during the recent member drive. (Yay!) For those who don’t know, Archon is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at the Harvard Kennedy School, and he’s one of the top researchers in our field.

ArchonFung-borderArchon is a key member of the faculty for the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. The Ash Center advances excellence and innovation in governance and public policy through research, education, and public discussion. One of its three major programs is the Program on Democratic Governance, which researches those practices that resolve urgent social problems in developed and developing societies.

In honor of its 10th anniversary, the Ash Center launched a public dialogue series named Challenges to Democracy. Through a series of events with scholars, policymakers, journalists, and artists, the Center seeks to broaden and deepen public dialogue on how we might address democracy’s greatest challenges in order to adapt and preserve our form of government.

The series launched October 3 with a standing room-only event featuring a panel discussion moderated by WBUR and NPR’s On Point host Tom Ashbrook on the threat economic inequality poses to the health of American democracy—and broadcast on the On Point radio program. Additional challenges will include immigration, lack of representation, business power, political polarization, the risks and opportunities created by digital technologies, the place of cities in American democracy, the decline of popular movements, and more.

The Challenges to Democracy Blog, launched in October 2013 by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (and edited by Archon), captures the stories and lessons of the public dialogue series, exploring ways that American democracy is being tested, digging deeper into possible solutions, and pointing readers to news stories germane to the series. The blog provides unique content including in-depth accounts and audio and video recordings of past events, interviews with public figures asking their thoughts on the greatest challenges to democracy, lengthy excerpts from the books of featured speakers, and posts highlighting new research from the Ash Center faculty and Democracy Fellows.

Check it out today at www.challengestodemocracy.us/home/ and stay tuned for future blog posts in the series.

Group Decision Tip: Right to be wrong

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In principle, in relations among equals, people have a right to be wrong.

Group Decision Tips IconOften it is only by being wrong for a while – trying on an opinion that doesn’t fit — that one comes to realize what is truly right. Without the freedom to be wrong one is often in tension, discontent with the present, wishing for a different way.

When I think you are wrong and I am right, the question is not “How can I make you change?” but rather, “Given our different opinions, how shall I move forward peacefully?”

Practical Tip: If we disagree and I think you are wrong and I am right, it works well for me to say my opinion but it doesn’t work well for me to talk down to you or think bad of you. It works well for me to hear your opinion with a genuine desire to understand but it doesn’t work well for me to shut you down or write you off.

Let us acknowledge our different opinions but move forward anyway. Rather than stall and fight, let us either live with our differing opinions for a while, try on more opinions, and continue our dialogue with mutual respect; or let us go our different ways in peace.

Just like you have a right to be wrong, so do I, and it works well to be always mindful that perhaps I am.

Knight Foundation Maps Civic Businesses & Investments, Seeks Feedback

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Knight-Foundation-logoOur interest was piqued recently by a report released by the Knight Foundation presenting the first mapping of “civic tech” businesses and investments here in the United States. We know that many NCDD members work in or are interested in the high-tech end of public engagement, so we wanted to share some snippets from a great article about the report that we found on the tech blog, GigaOm (you can find the original article here), and to let you know that you have a chance to give your feedback on the report.

So what is “civic tech”, you might ask? Well, it’s not so hard to understand:

Jon Sotsky, the foundation’s director, described civic tech as “technology that’s spurring civic engagement, improving cities and making government more effective.” The field includes a range of private and public organizations, from groups the Knight Foundation and its data analytics and visualization partner Quid designate as “P2P local sharing” (Airbnb) to “community organizing” (Change.org) to “data access and transparency” (Open Data Institute).

And as many of us know, civic tech has been on the rise in recent years, taking on different shapes and being used in many different ways. It is a growing sector, which is why the Knight Foundation set out to map it in the first place:

You might not have heard of “civic tech,” but chances are it has affected your community and its influence will only increase over time. According to a Knight Foundation report released today — the first to track civic tech businesses and investments — the sector has raised $430 million in investments in the past two years and civic tech company launches are increasing 24 percent annually.

The report generated quite a bit of interesting data, and that’s why it came along with a nifty visualization tool:

Users can explore civic tech through a bubble treemap data visualization, sorting by themes, communities and companies. Investments are color-coded as either private investments or public grants and the size of the bubbles depends on the size of investments. As you explore each section, you can see the investment types and amounts as well as several other data points, all of which can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet.

Visualizations of this type can be crowded by the number of nodes they include, but the Knight Foundation does a good job showing the structure of the civic tech field as a whole. Indeed, the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit geared at benefiting media and the arts, is using the information to make its own investment decisions. The intention is that everyone can get a better view of the field, including new startups trying to find their way in the space.

We agree that it is important for all of us to gain a better understanding of this emerging field, so we highly encourage you to check out the Knight Foundation’s report and the visualization tool. But we especially wanted NCDD members to know that the Knight Foundation is looking for feedback on civic tech initiatives or funders that they may have missed in their report:

As with any sector that is measured for the first time, Sotsky admits it is incomplete, which is why they’ve included feedback links for people to add missing civic tech businesses and investments. The intention of the list is to “get a conversation started” so that next year’s civic tech data directory will be more robust.

So if you are connected with a civic tech initiative, funder, or group that you don’t see in the report, you’re invited to email Knight Foundation director Jon Sotsky at sotsky@knightfoundation.org with suggestions of what may have been missing from this year’s report. We hope that next year’s report will be bigger, better, and more informed by the NCDD community of practitioners!

Original GigaOm post: www.gigaom.com/2013/12/04/knight-foundations-civic-tech-data-visualization-project-reveals-surge-of-startup-activity.

Peter Levine on Making Public Participation Legal

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This post is shared from the blog of supporting NCDD member and professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Boston, Dr. Peter Levine. Peter shares a humorous take on the not-so-funny state of public meetings, and highlights the NCDD-supported Making Participation Legal report. For more info about this important intitiative and how it was created, check out our write up on its release.

Making Public Participation Legal

This is pretty much how “public participation” looks when it takes the form of a meeting with officials at the head of the table defending their policies, and their fellow citizens lining up to speak:

The “Parks and Recreaton” satire hits so close to home because public forums usually use awful formats and methods. As Matt Leighninger writes:

The vast majority of public meetings are run according to a formula that hasn’t changed in decades: officials and other experts present, and citizens are given three-minute increments to either ask questions or make comments. There is very little interaction or deliberation. Turnout at most public meetings is very low – local officials often refer to the handful of people who typically show up as the “usual suspects.” But if the community has been gripped by a controversy, turnout is often high, and the three-minute commentaries  can last long into the night. On most issues, the public is either angry or absent; either way, very little is accomplished (Making Public Participation Legal, p. 3).

One reason is the laws that allow or require public participation: they are poorly structured. The Working Group on Legal Frameworks for Public Participation has developed frameworks for better state and local laws. Their model legislation and other materials are presented in a new report, Making Public Participation Legal, available from the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC).

You can find Peter’s original post here: http://peterlevine.ws/?p=12660.

Group Decision Tip: Enforcement

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In principle, decisions without enforcement grow weak and eventually wither. When rules or policies are not enforced it causes confusion, resentment, and conflict. The word enforcement comes from a Latin word meaning strength. To enforce decisions is to strengthen them.

Group Decision Tips IconPractical Tip: Take preventative measures to ensure that members of your group understand the rules of your group. Honor the rules of your group. If you disagree with the rules: Follow them anyway, leave the group, or work in peaceful ways to change the rules.

When you see someone breaking group rules, try these steps:

1. Discuss with them what you saw. Don’t ignore it when you see practice out of sync with policy. Such a conversation may bring to light that they “simply didn’t know better,” or that they interpret the rule differently, or that a larger issue needs to be addressed. If that doesn’t work,

2. Point out the consequences of the violation. “When you do ___________, it affects others in the following ways: ___________.” If that doesn’t work,

3. Impose a penalty. Ideal penalties inflict just the right amount of hurt in order to tilt the scales toward compliance.

When rules are legitimately crafted through good group processes, it is okay to enforce them for the good of the group. Actually, it’s essential for the good of the group.

Group Decision Tip: Discipline

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In principle, discipline is remembering what I want.

Step one of course is to figure out what I want. That’s hard all by itself. Yet without a clear definition of the goal, discipline is impossible. Chasing fleeting aspirations willy-nilly often results in a random undisciplined path that amounts to little progress.

Group Decision Tips IconStep two is to stay on the path, remember what I want, where I want to be. It is so easy to be distracted. Disciplined people have learned how to resist distraction.

Step three is do the work. And the work is surprisingly easy, even fun, when you truly believe in a well-defined goal and when you are free from distraction.

And it’s the same for groups. This is why it is so important for groups to define their goals and honor their processes that are designed to get them there.

Practical tip: Define what you want. Remember what you want. Do the work, joyfully, that will get you what you want.

Group Decision Tip: Best We Could With What We Had

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In principle, it’s really good to be able to say, “We did the best we could with the time, tools and information that we had.” Notice the past tense. We DID something, even with limited resources. Many groups get stuck and fail to achieve anything because they don’t have enough time, tools, or information to make as good or as big a decision as they would like.

Group Decision Tips IconActually, groups never have enough time, tools or information to make perfect decisions. The trick is to do the best you can with what you have rather than be stuck while waiting or wishing for more resources.

By the way, to do “the best we could” does not mean “the most we could.” Often, less is best. Doing our best is usually about quality, not quantity.

Practical Tip: If you start to fall short of a deadline, honor the deadline anyway, perhaps even with a lesser product or service. Pushing off a deadline once or twice for good reason is fine, but repeatedly missing deadlines to achieve perfection often just results in missed deadlines and stalled projects. Honoring deadlines with lesser achievements is at least progress in the right direction and helps us learn along the way.

When others fall short of deadlines or other expectations, give them a break. One’s ability to achieve is always related to one’s blessings and burdens. I once heard someone say, “My mom did the best she could with the tools and information that she had.”

Group Decision Tip: Best Solutions Begin With Self

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In principle, when things are not right, a natural instinct is to want someone else to do something different or to want a policy to be different, but rarely are these the best solutions. It is easy to think my problem would be solved if only you would change. It is easy to think that the law or policy is wrong, rather than me. Sometimes laws or other people’s attitudes or behaviors need to change, but it is often most effective to change my own attitudes or behaviors.

Group Decision Tips IconPractical Tip: Before going to the leaders of my group and suggesting a policy change, or before going to another group member and suggesting they should change, I ask, “What is my part in this? What can I change about my own attitude or behavior to fix things?” If I have answered those questions, acted on the answers, and still things aren’t right, then I ask my group or fellow group member to consider a change.

When we work to change a governing policy to fix an isolated problem, it can be hugely inefficient for many people. When we work to change the behaviors of others without willingness to change ourselves, it can take huge amounts of energy and result in damaged relations.

To help the efficiency of collaborative decisions the first question is not, “What should he or she or they do to make things better?” but rather, “What am I going to do to make things better?”