The Fight for America’s Soul, With Bill Moyers preface
The Fight for America’s Soul, With Bill Moyers preface
Showcasing Boston’s Civic Tech Tools at #Tech4Democracy
The team at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, an NCDD member organization, recently posted on their Challenges to Democracy blog about their #Tech4Democracy Showcase and Challenge – an event highlighting civic tech projects from the Boston area. It featured some very cool civic tech tools that could be useful for folks in our field, so we encourage you to read more in the post below or find the original here.
HUBweek Event Shows Greater Boston is Ripe with Civic Tech
The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation is a leading research center at the Harvard Kennedy School focused on the intersection of government and technology. We are helping HKS students – our future public leaders – to learn crucial technology skills that they will take with them into their careers. The Center is also studying unanswered questions about the potential and the pitfalls of technology’s role in making government more modern, effective, and efficient as well as more responsive, transparent, and participatory.
A strong connection to real-world practice is an important element in most of our research, teaching, and outreach efforts. On October 9, 2015, the Ash Center hosted #Tech4Democracy Showcase and Challenge, welcoming over 350 people to the JFK Jr. Forum.
The #Tech4Democracy Showcase and Challenge was a festive gathering for the local civic tech community and anyone with an interest in learning more about how technology can benefit the civic health, public services, and political life in their communities. No matter your background, the event was an opportunity to share your ideas, join in conversation, or simply browse.
#Tech4Democracy featured 28 projects that have been dreamt up, designed, developed, and created by people with a connection to Greater Boston. They tackle issues from participation and engagement to voting and elections. There are ideas for recruiting more citizens to run for elected office and others for improving the communication between current elected officials and their constituents. There are also platforms that aim to help people connect to one another – both for the purpose of political organizing around shared interests and taking action together on public problems.
While #Tech4Democracy was not a hackathon, it was social. Celebratory, even, with a DJ, good food, beer and wine. Everyone in attendance was invited to vote for their favorite among 28 different teams competing to take home a $5,000 ‘People’s Choice’ award.
Meanwhile, a $5,000 ‘Judge’s Choice’ award was selected by an esteemed panel of judges comprised of Professor Eric Gordon of Emerson College, Scott McFadden of Microsoft, Jane Wiseman of the Institute for Excellence in Government, and Perry Hewitt, Chief Digital Officer for Harvard University. Their job was not an easy one!
The winner of the Judge’s Choice Award was Agora, an online civic network dedicated to purpose-driven dialogue between decision makers and busy people concerned about their communities.
Runner up in the Judge’s Choice Award was CandiDating, a platform to match potential voters with political candidates based on their views.
The winner of the People’s Choice Award was DoneGood, an app that makes it easy to find businesses that share your values by empowering users to “vote with their wallets” to create a financial incentive for more businesses to adopt socially responsible business practices.
Runner up in the People’s Choice Award was MetaCogs, a web-based collaborative space in which communities of learners don’t just share what they’re thinking, they share how they’re thinking.
There were also 12 local institutions displaying their civic tech work as non-competing exhibitors. Many thanks to them and our supporters that helped make the event a success: Boston Civic Media Consortium, City of Boston, City of Cambridge, City of Somerville, Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Engagement Lab at Emerson College, FWD.us, Microsoft, and The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
The Ash Center was delighted to be hosting #Tech4Democracy as part of HUBweek, a joint venture between The Boston Globe, MIT, MGH and Harvard University. The spirit of HUBweek was to provide unique and unexpected experiences that celebrate the world-changing work, art, and thinking being imagined and built in Greater Boston.
#Tech4Democracy was the Ash Center’s contribution toward celebrating and showcasing the growing and vibrant community of students, entrepreneurs, technologists, passionate citizens, and others in the Boston area who are using their creativity and knowledge of digital technology to make our governments run better, engage our communities, and improve our quality of life. More information, including a calendar of past HUBweek events, is available at hubweek.org.
You can find the original version of this Challenges to Democracy blog post at www.challengestodemocracy.us/home/greater-boston-is-ripe-with-civic-tech/#sthash.wE4y4RqZ.PAWn3hGQ.dpuf.
Deliberation in the Classroom
The 19-minute video, Deliberation in the Classroom, created for National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI), was published January 2013. The video shows examples of students engaging in deliberation using NIFI issues guides at two different schools, one in Alabama and one in Wisconsin. The video shows the students getting ready for their deliberative forums, during the forums, and reflections afterwards from the students and teachers. Read more about the video and watch it below, or find the original on NIFI’s site here.
From NIFI…
This 19-minute YouTube video features students in Wisconsin and Alabama as they participate in deliberative forums using materials from the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI). In Birmingham, Alabama, teacher, Zakiya Jenkins, with assistance from Peggy Sparks, of Sparks Consulting, reflects on eighth-grade student deliberations about Youth and Violence. And in Wausau, Wisconsin, teachers Sarah Schneck, Shannon Young, and Kevin Krieg, discuss student deliberations about America’s Role in the World. The student forums in Wausau were hosted by John Greenwood of the Wisconsin Institute for Policy and Service.
Watch the video below:
About NIFI
Based in Dayton, Ohio, the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI), is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that serves to promote public deliberation and coordinate the activities of the National Issues Forums network. Its activities include publishing the issue guides and other materials used by local forum groups, encouraging collaboration among forum sponsors, and sharing information about current activities in the network. Follow on Twitter: @NIForums.
Resource Link: www.nifi.org/en/groups/watch-video-deliberation-classroom
survey measures of civic learning and engagement that track change from grades 4-12
Our colleagues Amy Syvertsen, Laura Wray-Lake, and Aaron Metzger have posted on the CIRCLE website a set of survey-based measures of civic engagement that they have carefully developed to be appropriate for kids all the way from fourth grade up to twelfth grade. Such measures are invaluable for assessing growth and learning. They are hard to develop, for reasons the authors describe on the CIRCLE website. Even just finding phrases that are appropriate for both children and older teenagers is a challenge. The new toolkit is the result of an intensive and highly professional project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and it sets the standard.
See Civic and Character Development: Good Data Starts with Good Measures. The recommended citation for the toolkit itself is: Syvertsen, A. K., Wray-Lake, L., & Metzger, A. (2015). Youth civic and character measures toolkit. Minneapolis, MN: Search Institute.
The Hollow Men
In 1925, T.S. Eliot, already an established and respected poet, published The Hollow Men.
It was a transitional time the author. Two years later, Eliot – who had been born to a prominent Missouri family and raised in the Unitarian church – would convert to Anglicanism and take British citizenship. A conversion which is reflected in his 1930 poem, Ash Wednesday.
He was in an unhappy marriage. In his sixties, Eliot confessed in a private letter, “To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.”
Eliot had composed the epic poem largely while on three months enforced bedrest following a nervous breakdown.
It was in that state of mind – post-Waste, as Eliot later described it, yet without the peace he found later in life – that Eliot wrote The Hollow Men.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
The poem is full of allusions to hollow men – Guy Fawkes of the infamous Gunpowder treason and plot; Colonel Kurtz, the self-professed demigod of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Brutus, Cassius, and other men who conspire to take down Julius Caesar; and the many cursed shades who call to Dante as he travels through the afterlife in The Divine Comedy.
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Ultimately, these hollow men, full of veracity and determination in life; worshipped, perhaps, as gods among men, are nothing. They are only the hollow men, the stuffed men.
In Purgatory, Dante finds such hollow men. “These shades never made a choice regarding their spiritual state during life (neither following nor rebelling against God) instead living solely for themselves. Neither heaven nor hell will let them past its gates.”
They are remembered – if at all – not as lost,
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
There is an in-betweenness to their existence, a nothingness far worse than the tortuous circles of hell. They are shape without form; gesture without motion. They are paused, eternally, in that inhalation of oblivion.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Perhaps we are all hollow men. Perhaps we are all doomed to that empty pause. Perhaps, we, like Fawkes, will be found – seemingly on the eve of our victory – standing guard over our greatest work not yet accomplished.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Or, perhaps not. Perhaps, as Eliot did himself, we can find new beginnings out of our quiet darkness. As Eliot writes in Ash Wednesday:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
EvDem Campaign Reaches Student Democracy Project in Bolivia
As we work in our own local niches, it’s easy at times to forget that D&D is an international field. But as this recent post from NCDD member organization Everyday Democracy shows, our work continues to impacts and be impacted by a global movement for democracy. This EvDem article shows how ripples their recent social media campaign made it all the way to young people democratizing their student governments in Bolivia. Read more about it below or find the original piece here.
Putting ‘Everyday Democracy’ Into Practice: Making Visions a Reality
When people think of “democracy,” what comes to mind most often is voting. This is certainly an important part of it, but democracy is something we as citizens should be connected to every day.
As an organization, we work to make sure people have opportunities to participate in decision-making at all levels. We believe people should have a voice in what happens in their schools, in their communities, and in their government on a regular basis – not just on Election Day.
This summer to celebrate our Independence Day, we launched a campaign to get people talking about what democracy means to them. People from all over the country contributed their ideas, which ranged from “transparency” to “participation” to “sharing responsibility for the outcomes of government,” and more.
Not only did this campaign draw responses from people all over the U.S., it also caught the attention of Adam Conkright, co-founder of Democracy In Practice, a nonprofit organization based in Cochabamba, Bolivia, dedicated to democratic innovation, experimentation, and capacity building.
“What stood out to us,” Adam explains, “is that several people in the campaign expressed the idea that democracy can be done better, and that improving democracy is like a journey that continues with no real endpoint.” He says this theme really connected with them because that is what Democracy In Practice is all about. “We are trying to help strengthen this growing global movement to improve democracy, and we think the most important thing is for people to start experimenting with different approaches, not only in governments but also in schools, community associations, unions, nonprofits, worker cooperatives, and the like. We’re trying to get people to think outside the box and get creative.”
They’re hoping to inspire others in this way by setting an innovative example themselves. For the past couple years, Democracy In Practice has been working in schools in Bolivia helping students reinvent student government. Adam sees schools as a really great place for this type of experimentation because “the stakes are so low that students can completely redesign their government – each semester if they want to – in ways that would be too risky elsewhere.” He also points out that this kind of experimentation has the added benefit of encouraging students to be engaged and to think critically and creatively about improving their school community.
It’s in this innovative atmosphere that students have replaced elections with random lotteries, rotated meeting roles, and tested out both mandatory and voluntary participation. These and other changes have had an effect: the student government at one school has started the school’s first library, issued its first ID cards to halve student transportation costs, and exposed one teacher’s abuse of power. All the while, the Democracy In Practice team provides suggestions, support, and capacity building to go along with support from school staff. It’s a continual process of trying to make student government more inclusive, representative, and effective in a variety of contexts. A journey with no endpoint.
Bolivians celebrate their independence on August 6th, and inspired by our campaign Democracy In Practice asked these student governments what democracy meant to them. As Adam explained, the students added their own twist. “Just like in the US, people here in Bolivia come from a variety of different backgrounds and have very different views, but each student government decided to deliberate and agree upon a collective answer to the question.” Not surprisingly, the responses of both groups stressed unity.
The 4th-8th grade student government members at the rural school where Democracy In Practice is working decided that “Democracy is participation, working together, and the community united.”
The other school Democracy In Practice is working in is an urban night high school with much older students. The student government there agreed that “Democracy means working as a team to defend the rights of everyone – unity is strength.”
Adam feels that the next step for Democracy In Practice in this journey is to look beyond schools to find a union or community organization that is open to experimenting in this manner. “People in your campaign said that democracy means ‘participation’, ‘equality’, ‘transparency’, etc.,” he noted. “If we want government to actually embody those beautiful ideals then we’ve all got to roll up our sleeves and develop better ways to govern ourselves. We liked that your campaign encouraged people to think critically, and we appreciate that Everyday Democracy’s work takes an innovative approach to bringing communities together. Hopefully together we can get more people thinking creatively about what democracy means and what it’s going to take to make those visions a reality.”
We have a lot we can learn from each other, whether it’s from our neighbor next door or our friends in a different hemisphere. In fact, the only way we can continue to build a democracy that works for everyone is to continuously examine and improve our current systems, learn from the experiences of others as well as our own, and make sure everyone has a chance to participate.
You can find the original version of this Everyday Democracy post at www.everyday-democracy.org/news/putting-everyday-democracy-practice-making-visions-reality.
Rome didn’t end because of barbarian invasions
(New York) This is a classic map of the “barbarian invasions,” taken from Wikipedia. I certainly grew up looking at maps like these. The story they illustrate goes like this. First, there was a Roman Empire with armed borders all around the periphery of the Mediterranean. Inside its borders, the people were Romans who spoke Latin and/or Greek and were ruled from Rome. Beyond were barbarian peoples who behaved very differently. At a certain point, the borders collapsed and various barbarian peoples swept in, taking up residence in portions of the former Empire. They brought new languages, myths, and cultures with them. Their descendants still constitute the majority populations of most parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Levant to this day. The newcomers ceased to be barbarians once they stopped moving, because then missionaries were able to radiate back out from Rome and Constantinople to teach them Christianity, Latin and/or Greek, and other elements of ancient civilization.
I had already begun to realize from various scraps of evidence (even including news reports of genetic data) that this model was quite wrong. Now reading Peter Brown’s brilliant book The Rise of Western Christendom, I understand the current synthesis. It denies that there were vast movements of peoples from one place to another around the time the Roman Empire ended. Rather, the population within and around the territory of the old official Empire went through a series of cultural, political, and economic changes until the Imperial system was gone. These changes often germinated within the borders rather than coming from outside. People who were, in some important sense, Romans turned (over the course of several generations) into people who thought of themselves as Franks or Bulgarians.
To elaborate a bit: The Roman Empire was always much more culturally and linguistically diverse than I was taught in grade school, and much more loosely governed. Local elites always ran things in their own ways. Brown notes that even though Egypt was a crucial province that encompassed one of the biggest cities in the world, Rome posted only one official there per 10,000 residents. Egyptians governed Egypt. The official borders made little difference, since the culture, economy, and political order on both sides was just about the same. However, the Empire was important economically because it taxed everyone within its borders and used the proceeds for armies and official building programs (both of which also enriched an upper class). When the Empire lost its taxing capacity, that changed the flow of goods and greatly reduced levels of construction and production.
The Empire was also important culturally because it offered a set of ideas that could be used by local elites. Among these ideas: Rome was the center of the world (urbs et orbis), the Emperor was the most powerful mortal of the day, Latin was the language of law, and there was a difference between Roman subjects/citizens and barbarians. Those ideas were never exactly true or false—they were closer to orienting value judgments. Over time, they lost their force, and then the same elites who had governed as Romans started to govern as, for instance, Franks. In place of stories about Rome, they started to tell mythical stories about their ancestors’ migrations from primordial homelands beyond the old borders, and those myths continue to influence Europeans to this day.
Meanwhile, profound changes in culture and behavior developed within the Empire. For instance, in the third and fourth centuries, civil wars were almost constant. They were fought by soldiers who pledged personal loyalty to leaders (claimants to the Imperial throne) and moved around regions like northern Italy and the Balkans, often pillaging. They dressed increasingly in ways that we associate with the “Dark Ages.” Brown says these soldiers wore “Embroidered trousers, great swinging cloaks, large gold brooches, and heavy belt-buckles.” They probably spoke various languages other than Latin. We might once have viewed them as barbarians who had somehow come inside the frontiers of the Empire and threatened its security. But a better theory is that they were Roman soldiers who were gradually developing the organization, behavior, and even dress that we associate with the post-Roman era. That is a great example of the new synthesis.
come work with us
(Washington, DC) Tisch College is advertising two positions:
A Program Administrator for the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, who will manage essential responsibilities associated with NSLVE including recruiting campuses to join the study, distributing data to campuses in the form of reports, and working to develop resources for all campuses to access through the website. The Program Administrator will also be responsible for supporting communications including but not limited to managing the process for the newsletter, updating the website, and collaborating with the team on other publications.
A Coordinator for our Voting Initiative: This individual will coordinate efforts to increase voter participation among Tufts students in the 2016 presidential election through initiatives supported by faculty and staff at all Tufts campuses. Responsibilities will include: working with student groups to sponsor forums on campaign issues of interest; implementing a plan for comprehensive voter registration opportunities; administering a fund for student-driven initiatives (etc.)