does empowering young people in a community boost the community’s economy?

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(Los Angeles) We made this announcement today on the CIRCLE homepage:

CIRCLE receives W.T. Grant Foundation Support to Study Social and Economic Effects of Youth Civic Empowerment and Participation

Much research by CIRCLE and others finds that civic activities have social, physical, and economic benefits for the young people who participate. For instance, volunteer service boosts academic success. Meanwhile, a growing body of research finds that the levels of civic engagement in a community as a whole are related to that community’s economic resilience, quality of education, and security.

This body of research has not so far focused on the specific question of whether engaging young people in civic activities improves social and economic outcomes for communities as a whole over time. We hypothesize that young people’s civic engagement is especially important for the economic vitality of their communities, and we will test that hypothesis using data from Chicago neighborhoods and national data for counties.

See also does service boost employment?, the benefits of service for low-income youth,  and against methodological individualism or why neighborhoods are not like broccoli.

Portland Gathering Catalyzes D&D-Journalism Connections

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We recently shared an invitation to join the Experience Engagement gathering on journalism and public engagement last month in Portland, which was supported by NCDD Board member Marla Crockett and NCDD Sustaining Member Peggy Holman. Well apparently it was quite the transformational gathering, and the team at Axiom News did a great write up on a few definitive experiences folks had there, and we encourage you to read it below or find the original Axiom piece here.

Renewed Hope for Journalism Creates Shifts

An energy for discovering and bringing to life journalism’s deeper promise is still pulsing days after a gathering in Portland, Oregon, inspiring participants to new connections and possibilities.

“My hope has been renewed,” says Renee Mitchell, admitting she had long bought into the pessimist view that journalism was basically a dying industry, gasping for its last breath, which “deeply saddened her.”

“But I now recognize that what is bubbling up in the void between what was and what is coming is not new journalism but next journalism, where the possibilities are endless on how to use technology to tell stories that build, empower and inspire community. That’s what’s so exciting for me.”

Hosted by Journalism That Matters and UO SOJC’s Agora Journalism Center, the gathering drew more than 100 journalists, community activists and others representing a diversity of professions. Called Experience Engagement, the highly participatory gathering or “unconference,” as it was called, centered on the question: What is possible when the public and journalists engage to support communities to thrive?

What’s now possible in the lives of three participants in the gatherings begins to answer that question.

Shaping a Community’s Soul

Amalia Alarcon Morris joined the Portland gathering as a government administrator responsible for civic engagement. Her bureau provides support to people at the community level to build capacity, develop leadership, identify issues that matter to them and build bridges back to city government, so that they can influence decisions that shape the community’s quality of life.

Amalia was encouraged to attend the events after participants at a conference on public participation heard her passionate reflections on the importance of story in shaping community.

“I was on a panel around equity and civic engagement and one of the things I said, which I firmly believe in, is that when we work in government, there is a kind of data lust that happens where people are constantly asking us for statistics; they want quantitative information to support the work that we do. But they don’t give the same respect to people’s stories.”

Quantitative data is fine, but people’s stories are the data, Amalia continues, and it is in “sitting down and listening to people’s stories” that hearts and minds are changed.

As a result of the Experience Engagement gathering, Amalia is now actively working towards forming collaborations with journalists in the city of Portland who have an orientation to the journalism that she saw might be possible.

“One of the biggest things that I walked away with was just this feeling of, ‘Oh my gosh, what influence could we have in the world if we approached the practice of journalism in that way,’” Amalia says.

“To walk into a room filled with people who are journalists or students of journalism who were talking about how to engage with community and approach journalism from an assets based perspective . . . to me, that was a completely new way of looking at journalism. It was amazing.”

Amalia adds one of her resonating reflections from the gathering was that if a community is always being portrayed negatively, what does that do to the soul of that community?

“My biggest ideal, my dream, would be some collaborative work so that together with the (traditional) investigative pieces there would be this collaborative storytelling about what else is going on amidst the chaos and the wrongdoing.

“How are people putting the pieces together or holding the pieces together or building community as opposed to tearing community down. To me, that would be the most exciting thing.”

Journalism Still Matters

Renee joined the Experience Engagement gathering to see if there was still a place for her, as a spoken word poet, multimedia artist and youth voice advocate, to connect with others based on the work she now does outside of traditional journalism.

“One of my aha moments was in the confirmation that hope is still alive, that journalism still matters, and that journalists still have an important role of facilitating conversations that help people find common ground,” says Renee, a journalist of 25 years who is now working outside of the industry.

“I was thrilled to see that there were so many other current and former journalists and non-journalists in the room who still cared deeply about the intention of why I got into journalism in the first place, which was naively to help save the world,” she adds.

“It was amazing to see so many others, 30 years later, who still believe in the potential of making a difference in the lives of others through journalism.”

As a result of her experience in Portland, Renee now feels supported to try things that engage the community more directly and to collaborate with other journalists in different cities in creating projects that excite her journalistic urgings and also empower her community.

One specific possibility now coming to life is her intention to create an interactive youth voice project she learned about from Terry Parris, Jr. who now works for ProPublica in New York City. Terry led a project that involved working with young poets who wrote about their dreams for their neighborhood. “He was so open in sharing information and ideas, while also giving me permission to duplicate the project, which I intend to do next year,” Renee says.

She also found tremendous support and inspiration for a new initiative she is leading, which is to create a career-technical track in journalism for a local high school.

Eager to avoid, the standard “me-teacher, you-student boring lecture approach,” Renee was envisioning project-based learning that offered students a chance to do social justice-based journalism that was relevant to their lives and to their communities.

“I walked away from the conference with so many ideas for really cool storytelling projects, so much enthusiasm for the potential of what my students can learn and create, and so much more direction, and confidence, really, about teaching  students to embrace the heart and intention of serving community through journalism,” she says.

It’s for all of these reasons that Renee says she has “fallen in love with journalism all over again.”

“I see this industry I loved so much and for so many years through fresh eyes now. I am reconnected to it in a way I didn’t expect. I am so grateful.”

Strengthening the Practice as a Tribe

As someone already venturing down the path of active community engagement, Ashley Alvarado with the Southern California Public Radio has been most thrilled to discover a “tribe” with whom to build and strengthen and amplify the possibilities in this “next journalism.”

As a public engagement editor, Ashley was especially struck by the various engagement practices and activities modelled through the Experience Engagement gathering, from Open Space Technology to the space made for group reflections on the experience as it unfolded. She is now looking at ways to bring some of these practices and activities back into her own work of engaging listeners and the broader community.

“I think lot of people at Experience Engagement found it was this transformative experience; it was renewing, and I’m excited to see what happens now so many people have found their people and what we can pull off when we get together,” says Ashley.

Intrigued by the possibilities in the rebirthing of journalism? Click here to learn more about Journalism That Matters, the host of Experience Engagement.

You can also sign up for a co-discovery experience Axiom News is hosting on Generative Journalism and the New Narrative Arts.

You can find the original version of this Axiom News piece at www.axiomnews.com/renewed-hope-journalism-creates-shifts.

The Shift from Open Platforms to Digital Commons

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Universitat de Oberta Catalunya -- Open University of Catalonia -- just published the following essay of mine as part of its "Open Thoughts" series.  The UOC blog explores the benefits and limitations of various forms of peer production: well worth a look!

From open access platforms to managed digital commons: that is one of the chief challenges that network-based peer production must meet if we are going to unleash the enormous value that distributed, autonomous production can create.

The open platform delusion
We are accustomed to regarding open platforms as synonymous with greater freedom and innovation. But as we have seen with the rise of Google, Facebook and other tech giants, open platforms that are dominated by large corporations are only “free” within the boundaries of market norms and the given business models. Yes, open platforms provide many valuable services at no (monetary) cost to users. But when some good or service is offered for at no cost, it really means that the user is the product. In this case, our personal data, attention, social attitudes lifestyle behavior, and even our digital identities, are the commodity that platform owners are seeking to “own.”

In this sense, many open platforms are not so benign. Many of them are techno-economic fortresses, bolstered by the structural dynamics of the “power law,” which enable dominant corporate players to monopolize and monetize a given sector of online activity. Market power based on such platforms can then be used to carry out surveillance of users’ lives; erect barriers to open interoperability and sharing, sometimes in anticompetitive ways; and quietly manipulate the content and “experience” that users may have on such platforms.

Such outcomes on “open platforms” should not be entirely surprising; they represent the familiar quest of capitalist markets to engineer the acquisition of exclusive assets and monetize them. The quarry in this case is our consciousness, creativity and culture. The more forward-looking segments of capital realize that “owning a platform” (with stipulated terms of participation) can be far more lucrative than owning exclusive intellectual property rights for content.

So for those of us who care about freedom in an elemental human and civic sense — beyond the narrow mercantilist “freedoms” offered by capitalist markets — the critical question is how to preserve certain inalienable human freedoms and shared cultural spaces. Can our free speech, freedom of association and freedom to interconnect with each other and innovate flourish if the dominant network venues must first satisfy the demands of investors, corporate boards and market metrics?

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Feminist Data Visualization

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I just had the opportunity to attend a talk by Lauren Klein of Georgia Tech on Feminist Data Visualization: Rethinking the Archive, Reshaping the Field.

Her work, she argued, is feminist not because it includes the works of female data scientists – though it does – but because it seeks to examine the cultural and critical dimensions of data visualization.

Data visualization has the ability to call attention to the scholarly process, and a feminist perspective on data visualization highlights the presence or absence of certain modes of scholarly thought.

Klein began her lecture by exploring the work of Elizabeth Peabody. Quietly at the center of America’s Transcendental movement, Peabody was the business manager of The Dial, the main publication of the Transcendentalists, and is credited with starting the nation’s first kindergarten. She was friends with Emerson and Thoreau. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann were her brother in laws.

An educator herself, Peabody’s work probed the question: who is authorized to produce knowledge?

Through the creation of elaborate mural charts, Peabody captured complex tables of historical events as aesthetic visualizations intended to provide historic “outlines to the eye.”

Her charts were challenging to create and to decipher – but that was an intentional pedagogical technique. Peabody believe that through the act of interpreting her work, a viewer would create their own historical narrative – they would have a role in generating knowledge.

Her large mural charts, intended to be physically be spread out on the floor, each took 15 hours of labor to create. Klein commented that this work is reminiscent of quilting – “a system of knowledge making that was considered women’s work and so has been excised from history.”

Klein compared Peabody’s work to that of William Playfair. Widely considered “the father of data visualization,” Playfair is credited with wth creation of the bar chart and the pie chart. His works are recreated by aspiring data artists and new data tools use his work to demonstrate what they can do.

Playfair’s work is beautiful and easy to read.

But, Klein asked, are we losing something by unquestioningly accepting that approach as the standard?

Klein pointed to the work of one other data visualizer – Emma Willard – who created a beautiful graphic, Temple of Time in 1846.

Her work is explicitly framed from the viewers perspective. The viewer stands at the fore as the history of time recedes into the past.

Willard’s work makes the implicit argument that data visualization is inherently a subjective process. While we take our bar charts and graphs to be unquestionable factual – Willard argues that data is inherently subjective.

In that way, we are indeed losing something by neglecting this alternative forms of data visualization and by not questioning the perspectives we take in interpreting data.

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Senator Sasse’s Moving Senate Speech

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Senator Ben Sasse. Link goes to the video of his maiden speech in the Senate.

Public Policy Leadership alumn Elliott Warren kindly sent me a link to this maiden address from Senator Ben Sasse, Junior Senator from Nebraska (R). It was an incredibly kind compliment for Elliott to say that this Senator’s speech reminded him of my classes here at the University of Mississippi. Senator Sasse calls for a renewal of the virtues of deliberation that the Senate is supposed to embody. He explicitly points to Socrates for insight, and to the methods of Socratic dialogue. He calls on his colleagues explicitly to avoid straw man fallacies and other errors of reasoning. It was the most elegant speech I have heard from a Senator in years.

The speech is 29 minutes long. You may not have that time right now. At some point, though, you will be glad that you watched Senator Sasse’s speech. I urge you all to find the time. Here’s his speech on C-SPAN.

NIFI to Host 3 Online Health Care Deliberations in Nov.

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Our friends at the National Issues Forums Institute – an NCDD member organization – recently launched a great online deliberation tool call Common Ground for Action, and you’re invited to check it out for yourself in 3 forums this month about health care issues. The forums are part of NIFI’s larger project that will yield a report to federal policymakers, so we encourage you to join in! Read more below or find the original NIFI post on the forums here.

NIF logoHave you tried a Common Ground for Action forum yet? We’ve got 3 exciting opportunities coming up in November for you to try National Issues Forums’ (NIF) new platform for online deliberation – and to be part of a national report that the Kettering Foundation will be making to policymakers about the results!

The three November CGA forums will all be using the NIF issue guide Health Care: How Can We Reduce Costs and Still Get the Care We Need?, which will become part of the forum data that Kettering will report to federal policymakers on in 2016.

If you’d like to participate in any of these forums, all you have to do is click the link below to register (so we’ll know how many moderators we need). Then, the day before the forum you sign up for, you’ll receive an email with a unique URL for your forum – all you do to join the forum is click that link no more than 10 minutes before the forum start time. That’s it!

Of course, in the meantime, you can check out the issue guide – which is FREE to download! Go for it now, and we’ll see you online!

If you have any questions, please feel free to email cga@nifi.org.

You can find the original version of this NIFI post at www.nifi.org/en/groups/do-you-want-try-online-forum-three-chances-november-deliberate-about-health-care-costs.

why it’s especially important to deliberate in diverse schools

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(Washington, DC) In a new article, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and I argue that discussing current, controversial issues is an effective way to teach civic skills and raise students’ interest in politics. Such discussions are relatively rare in schools that are “racially pluralistic” (having no racial majority), probably in part because diversity makes teachers and students wary of broaching controversy. Yet the benefits of discussion are strongest in just those schools. That may because the students’ diversity is an asset for good conversations, and also because planned discussions fill a gap in diverse schools that pervasively lack political conversation. Our article assembles the quantitative evidence for controversial issue discussions in racially pluralistic schools and offers tips for teachers and links to helpful organizations. See Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg & Peter Levine, “Challenges and Opportunities for Discussion of Controversial Issues in Racially Pluralistic Schools,” Social Education, vol. 79, no. 5 (Oct. 2105), p. 271-7 (or via Academia.edu.)

Authenticity and Branding

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I am honored to have the opportunity to participate in a panel on remaining authentic while creating, building and growing your brand. The event will be on Monday, November 16 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM at the Charlesmark Hotel & Lounge, 655 Boylston Street. You can register at http://bit.ly/SipsTipsHowtobeAuthentic.

Marketing is often derided as a soulless art which relies on sacrificing your authenticity to increase your bottom line. But it doesn’t have to be.

In fact, I believe that audiences respond to and appreciate authenticity in a brand. But it’s not easy to find the right tone of authenticity – whether you’re speaking as yourself or as a business.

Join me at the Charlesmark to dig into this question more and enjoy and evening of networking!

I will be joined by these great panelists:

 

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Does Twitter “smoosh” the public and private?

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In The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer explains why Twitter seems not to be as fun or as socially satisfying as some other networks. He thinks it uncomfortably and unsuccessfully “smooshes” together aspects of oral communication (spontaneity, rapidity, and interactivity) with aspects of written communication (permanence, sharability, and the capacity to reach strangers). Meyer thinks that “the more visual social networks have stayed fun and vibrant even as the text-based ones have not. Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram don’t traffic in words, which can be reduced to identity-based magnum opi [that should actually be magna opera], but in images, which are a little harder to smoosh. Visual conversations have stayed chatty, in other words.”

Meyer’s theorists are Walter Ong and Bonnie Stewart, but there are also hints of Habermas in the article: Ong is quoted on the “human lifeworld,” and Meyer notes ways that the public and the private “get smooshed.”

A core Habermasian insight is that there are different norms appropriate to private and public speech.

In public, you must make arguments that can persuade strangers. You must therefore provide adequate reasons and explanations for everything you say. Since you can’t assume that strangers understand your assumptions and experiences, you must make them evident. You are accountable for your remarks and should be responsive to reasonable critiques. You should (generally) take the same positions when talking to different people. When Mitt Romney complained to donors about the 49% of Americans who were “takers,” but he didn’t want the 49% to hear him, he became one of many public figures who have been caught violating the norms of public speech.

In private, the norms are authenticity, spontaneity, and responsiveness to the concrete other people with whom you have relationships. You should (generally) say what you really feel in the moment, although you are also obligated to care about what the individual who hears you thinks and feels. That may require tact. You need not fully explain your thoughts, and your explanations certainly need not convey entire, self-sufficient arguments to strangers. You are not responsible for treating everyone alike. In fact, you are obligated to favor some people, the ones you love and who love you. You have a right to privacy, so if you are videotaped saying something that you wouldn’t want strangers to hear, that is a violation of your rights.

It is dangerous to confuse these domains, to “smoosh” the public with the private. Often, marketing and political propaganda consists of pretending to have an authentic private conversation while actually influencing strangers. Voters mistakenly choose candidates based on their impressions of politicians’ private lives, which are irrelevant at best and fictional at worst. Meanwhile, powerful people privatize the public sphere by making policy decisions on the basis of personal relationships and inventing spurious justifications or avoiding rationales entirely. Prying journalists and governments violate privacy. And sometimes ordinary people retreat from the public sphere and either take no positions at all or develop irresponsible positions on public matters because they can’t or won’t interact with strangers as if they were real decision-makers.

I am not sure, however, whether Twitter exemplifies the smooshing of public and private that worries Habermas. Twitter is a fairly flexible platform. You can use the 140 characters to address the public, although that will often require embedded links. Or you can use the 140 characters to keep your close friends informed about your social plans. You can develop a persona as a public person or as a private one. The two can be confused, and awkwardness can arise. For instance, as Meyer notes, disclaimers that “RTs do not constitute endorsements” are odd ways of distancing a Tweeter from the content. But it could be that Twitter is a useful vehicle for both public and private conversations, and the feeling of tension simply reflects the parlous condition of our public life, more broadly.

See also: Habermas illustrated by Twitter; protecting authentic human interaction; friendship and politics; Ostrom plus Habermas is nearly all we need.