During Debate Season, Let’s Stay Civil

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Public Agenda Newsfeed

As we make our plans for watching the first presidential debate on Monday, we are committed to encouraging civil and inclusive conversations. Will you join us?

In an effort to reset the tone of this election, National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD) has issued a set of debate standards. The standards call on presidential debate moderators, candidates and audiences to commit to more civil, informative and fair debates.

We join more than 65 other organizations in signing on to the standards. You can join the effort: sign the petition on Change.org. Your name will be sent to the presidential debate moderators, asking them to adopt the Debate Standards for the upcoming debates.

The Debate Standards are:

We want debaters to:

Be respectful of others in speech and behavior
Answer the question being asked by the moderator
Make ideas and feelings known without disrespecting others
Take responsibility for past and present behavior, speech and actions
Stand against incivility when faced with it

We want moderators to:

Address uncivil behavior by naming it and moderating the conversation to move toward a more respectful dialogue
Enforce debate rules equally
Hold candidates accountable by challenging each candidate to speak the truth and act with integrity
Treat all candidates equally in regards to the complexity of questions and debate rules
Be respectful when interacting with candidates

We want audience members to:

Be respectful of other audience members, the candidates and moderators in speech and behavior
Refrain from creating disturbances to other audience members, candidates and moderators
Take responsibility for personal behavior, speech and actions
Speak against incivility by reminding candidates it is not acceptable
Practice active listening when someone else is speaking, seeking to understand them

We are proud to support the National Institute for Civil Discourse and their #ReviveCivility campaign. To learn more about the campaign and how to become a citizen for reviving civility, click here.

The presidential debates are scheduled for September 26, at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York; October 9 at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri; and on October 19 at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. The presidential debate moderators are NBC's Lester Holt, CNN's Anderson Cooper and ABC's Martha Raddatz, and Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. The Vice Presidential debate is scheduled for October 4 at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, moderated by Elaine Quijano of CBS News.

Family Migration

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

My mother is big genealogy enthusiast. Her enthusiasm, however, is unmatched by many in our family. I mean, we’re glad someone‘s doing the research, but we don’t seem to get that same spark of awe which for her is so inherent to the process.

So she wrote this thing, exploring what we learn from genealogy; the individual effects of the great sweeps of history.

I share it here with permission.

***

Much of what we can know of our ancestors has to be suppositioned by our knowledge of history and prevalent customs of their times. The lives of most of these people did not make a big splash. Many were illiterate and, as a result, did not leave much documentation of their experiences. Life was frequently short due to lack of medical discoveries that are so much a part of our current lives. But I would suspect that they lived more in the moment than we do now. So much was out of their control, they had little choice but to focus on the things that were occurring, leaving the rest in the hands of God. Given the difficulties of sustaining life, as an aggregate, what they accomplished was remarkable.

Each era had its own agenda, but the commonalities remained the same for several hundred years of our country’s history. People married young, reproduced prolifically, and attempted to provide for their children. Many of the accomplishments were a result of this drive. Starting with the Pilgrims and the indentured servants of the South, our ancestors were seeking an environment that would provide opportunities to build lives for themselves and their progeny. The hardships they endured were more than many of us could even consider, but the conditions that existed in their current lives spurred them forward. Whether it was religious convictions or abject poverty, they all made the leap. They got on a boat with little real knowledge of what they would meet and forged our future. The heroes are the many people who will never appear on a family tree because they died in the process of trying to reach this goal. It was the sheer numbers of people who would make this attempt that made our ancestors successful. It created a movement that would be reproduced in 1700’s and the 1800’s and would populate this country with Europeans.

Family life could have many variables, but the notion of childhood is very recent idea. Children were loved and cherished, but expected to participate in sustaining livelihood from a very early age. Frequently their mothers, and sometimes their fathers, were nothing but children themselves. Many people had multiple marriages due to the loss of a spouse. You could not remain unmarried once you had begun family building. It was impossible to continue the care of your children and the growth of your farm without two adults, and, in many cases, young adults to keep up the work. The family home would be small and bursting with people. Every space would be a bedroom at night. This caused the older children at a young age to look to new options. Friends and relatives who had moved further west would encourage these young people to join them. Single men and women would be told that there were many marriageable people waiting to find mates. Young couples would frequently be intermarried with sisters or brothers of a specific family with the thought that when they emigrated they would remain together. The reality of this westward movement was the disintegration of the original family unit.

Communication would be difficult. In this era of cell phones and e-mail, it is hard to imagine the absolute impossibility of keeping in touch. Frequently, several siblings would end up in the same location over time. The first arrivals would help their siblings establish themselves, and then they set to the task of recreating a new network of relations. The ones left at home were usually so young that they had little feeling for their older siblings. If the family was large enough, another move would be made by the younger children resulting in a separate conglomeration in a new location. Frequently an aged parent would die in the home of a child in the second migration.

There were, of course, some people who remained in the same location generation after generation. When you reconstruct the families through genealogy, they are our cousins. Our ancestors were the ones on the move.

first year college students and moral relativism

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Peter

Justin McBrayer, a philosophy professor, wrote not long ago in The New York Times, “philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” McBrayer attributes this situation to the Common Core, which recommends teaching young children a distinction between facts and opinions. Because values aren’t viewed as facts, they get put into the opinion basket. So the same basket that contains “I prefer vanilla ice cream” also contains “genocide is bad.”

I happen to be teaching a whole class of first year undergraduates in a philosophy course, and I asked them whether they shared the relativism attributed to their demographic group by McBrayer. About one third agreed that moral claims are “mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” Roughly the same number disagreed. Many were uncertain. After about an hour’s discussion, it was evident that most students held quite complicated or nuanced views. Everyone’s position sounded different, but I think many would like to hold onto: 1) moral seriousness and the assumption that it makes a big difference what we conclude about moral issues, 2) an ability to decry certain horrible acts as evil, 3) a recognition of ideological diversity, 4) a distinction between moral claims and empirical claims, 5) falliblism and an acknowledgement that context affects, or even determines, everyone’s thought, including our own, and 6) tolerance, which they recognize as a value, not as an absence of values. Those assumptions are in some tension, but it’s possible to pull them together into a complex position.

I don’t want to generalize based on an “n” of 15 people at one college, but if anyone asks me for evidence that Kids Today are amoral relativists–or that they have turned into censorious absolutists–I offer this counter-evidence.

A Surge of New Work on the City as a Commons

Posted on September 21, 2016 by David Bollier

There has been a surge of new interest in the city as a commons in recent months – new books, public events and on-the-ground projects. Each effort takes a somewhat different inflection, but they all seek to redefine the priorities and logic of urban governance towards the principles of commoning.

I am especially impressed by a new scholarly essay in theYale Law and Policy Review, “The City as a Commons, by Fordham Law School professor Sheila R. Foster and Italian legal scholar Christian Iaione. The piece is a landmark synthesis of this burgeoning field of inquiry and activism. The 68-page article lays out the major philosophical and political challenges in conceptualizing the city as a commons, providing copious documentation in 271 footnotes.

Foster and Iaione are frankly interested in “the potential for the commons [as] a framework and set of tools to open up the possibility of more inclusive and equitable forms of ‘city-making’. The commons has the potential to highlight the question of how cities govern or manage resources to which city inhabitants can lay claim to as common goods, without privatizing them or exercising monopolistic public regulatory control over them.”

They proceed to explore the history and current status of commons resources in the city and the rise of alternative modes of governance such as park conservancies, community land trusts, and limited equity cooperative housing. While Foster and Iaione write about the “tragedy of the urban commons” (more accurately, the over-exploitation of finite resources because a commons is not simply a resource), they break new ground in talking about “the production of the commons” in urban settings. They understand that the core issue is not just ownership of property, but how to foster active cooperation and relationships among people.

Empathetic Listening

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Scott Fletcher

Method: Empathetic Listening

Sep 21 '16

Author:

Scott Fletcher

Note: the following article is a stub. Please help us complete it. Definition "Empathic listening (also called active listening or reflective listening) is a way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding and trust." Source: Richard Salem, "Empathetic Listening". http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/empathic-listening Problems and Purpose History For a...

Nominal Group Technique

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Scott Fletcher

Method: Nominal Group Technique

Sep 21 '16

Author:

Scott Fletcher

Note: the follow article is a stub. Please help us complete it. Definition "Nominal group technique (NGT) is a structured method for group brainstorming that encourages contributions from everyone." Source: American Society For Quality, "Nominal Group Technique". http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/idea-creation-tools/overview/nominal-... Problems and Purpose History A case study of this method's use in...

NCDD Endorses NICD Standards of Conduct for Presidential Debates

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

NCDD is proud to announce that we are officially endorsing the set of standards of conduct for civility during the Presidential debates that our member organization the National Institute for Civil Discourse recently released. We are standing with NICD and other organizations in calling for civility during the debates because we believe that civility demonstrated in these events can be a step toward bridging our divides nationally. We encourage you to read NICD’s announcement about the standards of conduct below and to sign their petition for moderators to adopt them by clicking here.

The National Institute for Civil Discourse Calls on Presidential Debate Moderators to Enforce Civility, Releases Debate Standards for Upcoming Presidential Debates

We released a set of Debate Standards today that we are asking the presidential debate moderators to adopt in order to ensure that the debates are fair, informative, and civil. More than 60 organizations, including the AARP, have already signed on to the standards, which contain guidelines for moderators, the audience, and the candidates themselves.

In addition to AARP, a wide range of organizations endorsed the standards. Types of organizations include education institutions, such as the Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, University of California Berkeley Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement and University of Virginia Center for Politics; forums, such as the City Club of Cleveland and City Club of Portland; and faith organizations, such as that Faith and Politics Institute and Interfaith Alliance. A complete list can be found on NICD’s website at: http://nicd.arizona.edu/standards-conduct-debates.

Join us in asking moderators, debaters and audience members to raise themselves to these standards and agree to use them in your own everyday interactions.

Sign our petition asking the Presidential debate moderators to adopt these standards for the upcoming debates

Revive Civility with us, our democracy depends on it.

Sincerely,
Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer

Standards of Conduct for the Presidential Debates

I want debaters to:

Be respectful of others in speech and behavior

Answer the question being asked by the moderator

Make ideas and feelings known without disrespecting others

Take responsibility for past and present behavior, speech and actions

Stand against incivility when faced with it

I want moderators to:

Address uncivil behavior by naming it and moderating the conversation to move toward a more respectful dialogue

Enforce debate rules equally

Hold candidates accountable by challenging each candidate to speak the truth and act with integrity

Treat all candidates equally in regards tothe complexity of questions and debate rules

Be respectful when interacting with candidates

I want audience members to:

Be respectful of other audience members, the candidates and moderators in speech and behavior

Refrain from creating disturbances to other audience members, candidates and moderators

Take responsibility for personal behavior, speech and actions

Speak against incivility by reminding candidates it is not acceptable

Practice active listening when someone else is speaking, seeking to understand them

Design Aesthetic and Chart Junk

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In my visualization class today, we had a guest lecture by Michelle Borkin, another Northeastern professor who works in the field of information and scientific visualization. She gave us a great overview of the foundational design aesthetics of Edward Tufte.

Whether you know him by name or not, you may be familiar with some of his principles. He writes extensively about “graphical integrity,” highlighting the importance of clearly labeling of data and cautioning against distorted or misleading axes. But, perhaps more fundamentally, the Tufte-ian mantra seems to be summed in one word: simplify.

Tufte advocates for removing as much extraneous ink as possible. Non-data ink should be minimized as much of possible; clearing away the clutter and letting the data speak for themselves.

Generally, his arguments make sense – there’s no need to create a 3D bar-chart just because Microsoft Office says that you can. But in this day of infographics and data journalism, Tufte’s style can seem rather…dull.

This has led to a great debate over chart junk: a topic so real it has its own wikipedia page. “Chart junk” refers to any element of a visualization which doesn’t explicitly need to be there – elements which may make the visualization more interesting, but which don’t directly convey the data. The term was actually coined by Tufte, who, as you may have guessed, was adamantly anti-chart junk.

Recent research, though, has shown that “chart junk” isn’t necessarily inherently bad. Infographics and other visualizations designed for broad public consumption may not have the precision of a scientific visualizations, but they are more memorable and impactful.

Is chart junk okay? The answer, I guess, depends entirely on the audience, the task, and the context.

CIRCLE identifies top 50 congressional districts for the youth vote

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Peter

Medford/Somerville, MA – Will the youth vote help shape the next Congress? A new index ranks the top 50 districts where young people could have a significant influence on the outcome of Congressional races across the country. The Youth Electoral Significance Index Top 50 was developed exclusively by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) – the preeminent, non-partisan research center on youth engagement at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.

Taking into account the competitiveness of the Congressional races, as well demographic characteristics, the number of higher education institutions in the district, and historical youth turnout data, the index highlights the districts where young people are poised to have a disproportionately high impact this year.

“Young people can shape our elections and the make-up of Congress, but their potential is limited when campaigns don’t reach out to them,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Director of CIRCLE. “We hope this tool encourages campaigns, media outlets, and advocates in these districts – and in many others – to engage young people on issues that matter to them.”

Key findings include:

Iowa’s 1st Congressional District comes out on top due in large part to a large number of college campuses (31) and high percentage of young people enrolled in college in the district.
New York has six Congressional Districts in the YESI Top 50, the most of any state. Though New York tends to be reliably Democratic in presidential and Senate elections, many Congressional races are much more fiercely contested.
Colorado has four districts on this list, including the number 2 spot in the ranking: the Colorado 6^th, which includes the eastern part of the Denver-Aurora metro area. This district ranks highly due to its competitiveness: in 2012, the election was decided by only 7,000 votes, young people cast a high number of ballots, and the seat is expected to be highly contested again this year.
Four Michigan districts make the Top 50, including two in the top 15: Michigan’s 7^th District, which includes parts of Lansing, the western suburbs of Ann Arbor, and the southeast corner of the state; and Michigan’s 1^st District, in which there are 12 colleges and universities with close to 20,000 enrolled students.

Throughout this election season, CIRCLE’s 2016 Election Center will offer new data products and detailed youth voting analyses.

Finding a Seat for Social Justice at the Table of Dialogue and Deliberation

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The 4-page article, Finding a Seat for Social Justice at the Table of Dialogue and Deliberation (2014), was written by David Schoem and published in the Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 10: Iss. 1. In the article, Schoem discusses the relationships that many dialogue and deliberation organizations have toward social justice. Many D&D organizations have a tendency to shy away from social justice in an effort to maintain neutrality. Schoem puts forth three arguments that “the field needs to 1) work intentionally for social justice and serving the public good for a strong, diverse democracy, 2) confront the illusion of neutrality, and 3) address issues of privilege and power. ”

Read the article in full below and find the PDF available for download on the Journal of Public Deliberation site here.

From the article…

First, most people, whatever language they choose to use, regardless of their political affiliation, perspective, or point of view, share a hope for a better society and believe in a more just world. To use the foundation of a just society or a better world as a common starting point allows for purposeful dialogue and is an invitation to a wide range of people, perspectives and viewpoints. Even the Pledge of Allegiance speaks of “liberty and justice for all,” so it’s surprising that those words are too often taken off the table in dialogue and deliberation organizations because they are seen as “too political.” To ignore social justice serves only to diminish the opportunity and promise that dialogue and deliberation have to offer.

Second, ignoring inequity and inequality predictably leads to the marginalization and exclusion of less privileged groups and those expressing unpopular opinions. Rather than opening the door to open discussion and dialogue by invoking a value of neutrality, when issues of social justice are left off the table it signals to people who are concerned with such issues that the conversation will support the status quo, that substantive change will not result, and that they are unwelcome at the table.

Third, declaring an approach of neutrality, without accounting for power and privilege, almost always privileges those in power. The invocation of unexamined neutrality ignores the power relations embedded in social issues, makes invisible the privilege and power of members of different social identities actually participating in any dialogue and deliberation, and serves to silence less privileged voices. To presume a priori an approach of neutrality mistakenly creates an unequal situation from the outset.

Fourth, efforts to convene substantive dialogue and deliberation without a social justice orientation typically end up as an exercise to give already privileged people more power. When the D&D community gathers people together for good discussions and conversations without any acknowledgement of or attention to issues of social justice, power or privilege, it simply creates space for a privileged group of people to gain an even larger voice and to reify existing inequalities. Admittedly, some in the D&D community who previously felt excluded have carved a niche for themselves and found a voice in public discourse through D&D, but too often when doing so without any social, racial, economic and/or other justice orientation, they have left even further behind those with even less privilege and power.

Fifth, issues of power and privilege are present in dialogue and deliberation whether or not people are ignorant of their presence or choose not to acknowledge them. The fact that people with more privilege are unaware of their power or may consciously choose to ignore it, does not mean that such dynamics are not present and salient in dialogue and deliberation.

Download the article from the Journal of Public Deliberation here.

About the Journal of Public Deliberation
Spearheaded by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium in collaboration with the International Association of Public Participation, the principal objective of Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is to synthesize the research, opinion, projects, experiments and experiences of academics and practitioners in the emerging multi-disciplinary field and political movement called by some “deliberative democracy.” By doing this, we hope to help improve future research endeavors in this field and aid in the transformation of modern representative democracy into a more citizen friendly form.

Follow the Deliberative Democracy Consortium on Twitter: @delibdem

Follow the International Association of Public Participation [US] on Twitter: @IAP2USA

Resource Link: www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol10/iss1/art20/

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An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies