Engaging Ideas – 9/23
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Application Opens to Work with 2017 Nevins Fellows
NCDD was proud to host a special Confab Call this week with our partners at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy – an NCDD member organization and the host of the Nevins Democracy Leaders Program – who shared a presentation on the incredible opportunity for D&D organizations to take advantage of their Nevins Democracy Leaders Program. Nearly two dozen organizations participated in the call, which marked the launch of the 2016-17 application for organizations who want to host a bright, D&D-trained student who will work with their organization for two months of next summer at no cost. 
We are encouraging all of our member organizations to apply today for the chance to host a Nevins Fellow next summer! Having a Nevins Fellow work with you is like bringing on a new full-time staffer, so it’s a great way for your organization to finally take on a special project you haven’t had time for, get extra help with your big summer engagements, or increase your organizational capacity overall – all while helping bring more young people into our field and growing the next generation of D&D leaders!
Opportunities like this don’t come often or last long, so we encourage you to make sure to apply for a Nevins Fellow before the October 21st deadline. You can find the application at bit.ly/nevinsapp.
If you haven’t heard of the Nevins program before or just want more information, there are tons of ways to learn more. You can start with the Frequently Asked Questions document that McCourtney created for potential applicants. We also had an informative discussion on the Confab Call with the McCourtney team, who covered lots of the important details about the program, and you can listen to the recording of that call by clicking here. You can also get a better sense of what the program experience is like from the student’s perspective by checking out this blog post from a 2016 Nevins Fellow about their summer fellowship with the Close-Up Foundation.
We can’t speak highly enough about the Nevins program’s students who applicants will have the chance to work with or about the value of this program’s contributions to the D&D field. We know that these young people will add enormously to the organizations they work with and that this program is helping secure the future of our field – a wonderful testament to vision of the program founder and NCDD member David Nevins. We encourage you to apply today!
Six Thinking Hats®
Method: Six Thinking Hats®
Sep 22 '16
Developed by Dr. Edward de Bono, the Six Thinking Hats technique allows participants to approach a discussion from multiple points of view.
Large Graph Layout Algorithms
Having previously tried to use force-directed layout algorithms on large networks, I was very intrigued by
Stefan Hachul and Michael Junger’s article Large Graph-Layout Algorithms at Work: An Experimental Study. In my experience, trying to generate a layout for a large graph results in little more than a hairball and the sense that one really ought to focus on just a small subgraph.
With the recent development of increasingly sophisticated layout algorithms, Hachul and Junger compare the performance of several classical and more recent algorithms. Using a collection graphs – some relatively easy to layout and some more challenging – the authors compare the runtime and aesthetic output.
All the algorithms strive for the same aesthetic properties: uniformity of edge length, few edge crossings, non-overlapping nodes and edges, and the display of symmetries – which makes aesthetic comparison measurable.
Most of the algorithms performed well on the easier layouts. The only one which didn’t was their benchmark Grid-Variant Algorithm (GVA), a spring-layout which divides the drawing area into a grid and only calculates the repulsive forces acting between nodes that are placed relatively near to each other.
For the harder graphs, they found that the Fast Multipole Multilevel Method (FM3) often produced the best layout, though it is slower than High-Dimensional Embedding (HDE) and the Algebraic Multigrid Method (ACE), which can both produce satisfactory results. Ultimately, Hachul and Junger recommend as practical advice: “first use HDE followed by ACE, since they are the fastest methods…if the drawings are not satisfactory or one supposes that important details of the graph’s structure are hidden, use FM3.”
What’s interesting about this finding is that HDE and ACE both rely solely on linear algebra rather than the physical analogies of force-directed layouts. FM3, on the other hand – notably developed by Hachul and Junger – is force-directed.
In ACE, the algorithm minimizes the quadratic form of the Laplacian (xTLx), finding the eigenvectors of L that are associated with the two smallest eigenvalues. Using an algebraic multigrid algorithm to calculate the eigenvectors makes the algorithm among the fastest tested for smaller graphs.
By far the fastest algorithm was HDE, which takes a really interesting, two-step approach. First approximating a high-dimensional k-clustering solution and then projecting those clusters into 2D space by calculating the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix from the clusters. The original paper describing the algorithm is here.
Finally, the slower but more aesthetically reliable FM3 algorithm improves upon classic force-direct approaches by relying on an important assumption: in large graphs, you don’t necessarily have to see everything. In this algorithm, “subgraphs with a small diameter (called solar systems) are collapsed” resulting in a final visualization which captures the structure of the large network with the visual ease of a smaller network.
A New Model for Citizen Engagement
Myung J. Lee, the executive director of Cities of Service, and I have an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that is free to read or download until November 17.
We define citizen engagement as a combination of deliberation (communicating and learning about issues), collaborative action, and the working relationships that form during such interactions. We summarize a growing body of literature that finds that citizen engagement–so defined–is crucial to addressing the most stubborn social problems.
But the harder question is always: How can America get more civic engagement? Who would be motivated to expand the number and breadth of active citizens or to make their work more consequential?
In the SSIR piece, we propose one answer. Municipal governments have much to gain by enlisting more citizens in more consequential civic work. This serves their self-interest. Furthermore, many cities already have thousands of citizens involved in organized volunteering efforts. Volunteering, by itself, does not have the positive effects that we find from citizen engagement understood more broadly. But all those volunteers are expressing a willingness to take action. Municipal governments are capable of turning ordinary volunteering into opportunities for deliberation about issues, collective action, and sustained relationships (including relationships among government officials and other citizens in their communities).
One of several ways that governments can achieve this shift is by helping citizens to set measurable targets for change at the community level and providing them with the data they need to assess progress. Unpaid citizens are not responsible for achieving these outcomes on their own; they collaborate with city employees and people from other sectors and hold each other accountable.
In the article, we offer several promising examples of what we call “impact volunteering” in US cities. We highlight cases from the Cities of Service network–which I strongly endorse–but our argument is meant to apply more broadly as well.
Citation: Myung J. Lee and Peter Levine, “A New Model for Citizen Engagement,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, fall 2016, pp. 40-45.
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