Bringing the Constitution to Life: The Joe Foss Institute

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Today’s post is a guest post from Audrey Mazzota, the Southeast Regional Coordinator for the Joe Foss Institute. She joins us this morning to discuss how the Joe Foss Institute can help you and your students grow in your understanding of American history and civics through the programs they offer. As a veteran, I especially admire their integration of active duty and former military members into classrooms. Please remember that this is a national organization, so it serves more than just Florida!

As teachers know, stories transport children to a new level of understanding. The Joe Foss Institute (JFI), a national nonprofit organization, and their Veterans Inspiring Patriotism (VIP) program, uses the power of a “living history” story to inspire students and bring the concepts of citizenship and freedom to life.
 
Military veterans visit classrooms and speak of their service, in addition to delivering free education material on the Flag, Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. These corresponding videos and lesson plans are fun, engaging, aligned to clear learning objectives and are age appropriate. Florida history teacher Evy Fernandez says, “Having a veteran talk about their experience helps students put my lectures and lessons into perspective.”
 
Teachers solely seeking materials to supplement their civics and history lessons will find a resource in JFI’s You Are America civics series. In addition, classroom-size Flags and poster-size copies of the Founding Documents are offered free to schools.
 
Since its founding, JFI has enriched the education of more than 1.6 million, K – 12 students nationwide and more than 53,000 students in Florida.
 
JFI was founded in 2001 by Medal of Honor recipient General Joe Foss, and his wife Didi, to help educate young Americans on responsible citizenship and prepare them for civic engagement. In addition to classroom presentations and educational resources, the Institute offers college scholarships.
 
For more information on the JFI and their programs, or to volunteer, please visit joefossinstitute.org or contact Audrey Mazzotta, JFI Regional Coordinator – Southeast Region, at amazzotta@joefossinstitute.org
Thank you, Audrey, for the post and for the work that you do!

Kierkegaard on Assistant Professors

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“Yes, you assistant professor, of all the loathsome inhumans the most loathsome….”

“A ludicrous sullenness and paragraph-pomposity that give an assistant professor a remarkable likeness to a Holberg bookkeeper are called earnestness by assistant professors….”

“When an assistant professor, every time his coattails reminds him to say something, says de omnibus dubitandum est [everything must be doubted] and briskly writes away on a system in which there is sufficient internal evidence in every other sentence that the man has never doubted anything-he is not considered lunatic.”

But the presence of irony does not necessarily mean that earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.

“There is nothing at all for assistant professors to do. The assistance of these gentlemen is needed here no more than than a maiden needs a barber to shave her beard and no more than a bald man needs a barber to ‘style’ his hair.”

“It can be assumed that in the present generation every tenth person is an assistant professor….”

DeKalb, IL Plans for Future with Conversation Cafe Model

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We recently heard the story of an exciting project that the City of DeKalb undertook to engage citizens in its strategic planning process that we wanted to share here. With a few of our NCDD members’ help, DeKalb held a series of Conversation Cafe-style public meetings and will turn the input they gathered into a 10-year vision for the city. We encourage you to read more about the process in NCDD member Tracy Rogers-Tryba‘s write up of the project below.

The City of DeKalb enlisted the assistance of the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University to embark upon a multi-year, collaborative, grassroots strategic planning effort. Utilizing a modified Conversation Cafe model, the City has turned to city residents, students, workers and employers to share their ideas about DeKalb’s future. Responses to these questions will help shape a vision for the City of DeKalb.

The goal is to provide an understanding of the City’s assets and improvement opportunities, suggestions for change strategies, and ways for the City to maintain ongoing dialogue and communication with people who live, work or attend school in DeKalb.

“These meetings have been excellent opportunities for us to hear first-hand the hopes and aspirations that DeKalb residents, students, and workers have for our city,” said Mayor John Rey. “We want a vision of DeKalb that is meaningful to everyone, and we also want to hear the ideas people have for realizing that vision.”

Eight open Conversation Cafes, entitled Community Conversations, were held throughout July. All community conversations were open to anyone from the public. Conversations were held at facilities located on public transit routes and transportation was made available for those individuals needing assistance. Interpreters were also made available for non-English speaking participants. Prior to the Conversation Cafes that were open to anyone from the public, the Center held smaller targeted meetings for homeless populations, international and high school student populations, as well as for various sectors of leadership throughout the community.

Results of the outreach efforts, and information collected by the Center for Governmental Studies will be transmitted to the City. Resident populations have expressed appreciation and encouragement for the City to continue this form of collaborative engagement as it reflects efforts of a more open collaborative community dialogue.

dekalb process photo

City Administrator Anne Marie Gaura opens an citizen input session in DeKalb

Following up on the dialogue efforts, Janice Thomson and Hubert Morgan – both of whom are experts in D&D and NCDD members – provided an introductory workshop entitled Conversation for Vibrant Communities on the four streams of engagement in D&D practice on August 5, 2015.

All the data has since been collected, and the Center continues to work with the City’s administration and senior elected leaders on drafting new mission, vision, values, and strategic initiatives for the 10 year visioning plan. This work product has been handed over to the City’s administration and employees so that they can also provide their input. The Center will then take this information and look to connect it to work done by residents, leadership, and employees to build out a plan that has community input.

The final 10-year plan and results of the process will be presented back to the Council and residents in October.

Thanks so much to Tracy Rogers-Tryba for writing this piece and for sharing it with us!

Philosophy Lies at the Heart of Mississippi Education Debate

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Originally published in The Clarion Ledger, September 6, 2015, 2C

Click here for a full-sized Adobe PDF scan of the artile.

Click for a printable PDF scan.

Mississippians have been entangled in a deep philosophical debate about education funding for months, though attention has focused largely on technical details. Ballot initiative 42 that will be decided this November asks: “Should the state be required to provide for the support of an adequate and efficient system of free public schools?” If voters pass the initiative, they would be demanding an amendment to the state Constitution making that requirement explicit.

This is a photo of the top of the scan of my Clarion Ledger article, 'Philosophy at Heart of Mississippi Education Debate.' If you click on this image, it will open a full-size, printable Adobe PDF scan of the original piece in the paper.

People who want voters to choose “yes” explain that such a requirement should be enforceable in the courts. Without that, a parent would have no recourse when his or her child must attend a chronically underfunded and failing school.

In their involvement of the courts, the proponents of 42 have made a crucial move for taking Mississippians’ educational obligation seriously. As the Legislature has continually failed to fund education even to the level of basic adequacy, the proponents of 42 are right to demand a check on that negligence.

The Legislature proposed an alternate initiative, 42A, which asks: “Shall the Legislature be required to provide for the establishment and support of an effective system of free public schools?” On the surface, that sounds sensible, as it is the Legislature’s responsibility to allocate proper funding. If we obligate the state instead, however, then it makes sense that the courts would be able to protect citizens’ rights, forcing the state to fulfill its obligations. 42A omits reference to the courts and calls for an “effective system of free public schools upon such conditions and limitations as the Legislature may prescribe.”

The problem people have is with the Legislature. We have had budget surpluses and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to a rainy day fund. Officials have additionally been proposing tax cuts. At the same time, the Legislature continues to severely underfund public education.

The critics of 42A are on to something when they point out that the Legislature already has the control that the alternate initiative has in mind.* 42A amounts to a rejection of the idea that the Legislature should be checked and held accountable in the courts when it fails to fully fund education. In that sense, it denies that the people of Mississippi have a real obligation to provide access to an adequate education for all our citizens.

Given the confusing technical details of the two proposals, it is vital that we consider seriously whether and why we have the obligation that 42 suggests. That philosophical question is crucial, since if we have such an obligation, it cannot be optional and contingent on the Legislature’s fluctuating will.

When the state has an obligation, citizens have corresponding rights. If we believe we have an obligation to provide access to an adequate education, we must give people a meaningful mechanism for recourse when the state fails to fulfill its obligation.

No one has seriously denied the idea implicit in initiative 42 — that the citizens of Mississippi should support and provide access to a free and adequate public education for all of our young people. We should consider the question for the sake of argument, however, because it illustrates why 42A falls short of meaningful reform. What reasons can we give to an imagined skeptic of our obligation to provide adequate, if not good or excellent, public education?

There are many reasons, but four stand out:

• Self-governance requires education. According to Thomas Jefferson, education is essential for democracy. It is necessary for wise governance, for peace, and for political legitimacy.

• Education for all is a requirement of equal citizenship. Mississippi has a troubled history. Today, reasonable and responsible officials rightly explain that those parts of our history are not what Mississippi values anymore. After James Craig Anderson was killed in a racially motivated murder in Jackson, U.S. Attorney John Downy argued that “the actions of these defendants who have pled guilty… do not represent the values of Mississippi in 2012.” I agree. At the same time, in the 44 Mississippi school districts that were labeled “dropout factories” in 2007, only a small portion of the students we were failing were white. Overwhelmingly those schools are made up student bodies 75-100 percent of which are minority kids.

• Inadequate education is one of the most powerful forms of oppression. Eighty percent of people incarcerated in the U.S. have not graduated from high school. As so many of our schools have been failing or at-risk of failing, we have been perpetuating the history that we say we want to leave behind. Republicans and Democrats from all over Mississippi are sick and tired of these impediments to the state’s progress. Educational failure is one of our most obstructive problems. To redress our history of injustice and our present challenges, we must stop accepting gross inadequacy that systematically holds our citizens back and reaps division, rather than unity.

• Expectations of responsibility depend upon personal development. In America and especially in Mississippi, we value personal responsibility. At the same time, we don’t demand rent from babies. We know that personal responsibility and self-respect are developed over time and through education. If we expect people to prize freedom and independence, we cannot assume that citizens are born as responsible adults. In youth, we are all dependent and in need of an education.

Education is both a necessity for democracy and a value in itself. If our government is intended to protect the pursuit of happiness, that protection must be extended to everyone. If we are obligated to ensure that all Mississippians are afforded at least an adequate education, furthermore, then we must provide the people with a mechanism for recourse when the state fails to fulfill its obligations. Rights and obligations are not optional, which is why we need the courts for their enforcement. That is also why 42 could lead to real progress in education and why we must choose it instead of more of the same failure.

Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of “Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South” (Sept. 2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow him on Twitter @EricTWeber.

For a week or two, The Clarion Ledger will have the text version of the article on their Web site here.

* The original article included a next sentence here that was edited in such a way that did not capture what was intended. I have omitted the new version from the text here. You can still see it in the scan, however.

The Strategic Value of Developing Law for the Commons, Final Parts

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Below are the final sections of the memo, "Reinventing Law for the Commons," whose three earlier parts were excerpted over the past several days.  The wiki of examples in Part II can be found on the Commons Transition website, and the final document can be downloaded here.

III. The Strategic Value of Developing Law for the Commons

Some Legal and Philosophical Reflections

Having surveyed a rather remarkable array of commons-based law initiatives, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on their significance for law, governance and politics.  These innovations in commons-based law challenge the tacit premise that the best, most natural system of governance and social order is the market/state, as dominated by transnational corporations and capital.  Law for the Commons attempts to open up new spaces through which commoners can have greater freedom and autonomy to devise governance forms of their own making, conBsistent with overarching principles of democracy and human rights.  It is perhaps risky to stipulate a specific set of principles that a Law for the Commons seeks to uphold, but there are clearly affinities among the diverse examples described above.  In different ways, commons projects are attempting to use law to achieve these purposes:

  • Provide structure for internal, participatory, bottom-up deliberation and governance (e.g., omni-commons, subsistence commons, Loomio, DemocracyOS);
  • Protect shared assets that are threatened by market enclosure (e.g., stakeholder trusts, blockchain ledger, community charters);
  • Provide a legal structure and identity to commons so that they can be legally cognizable to the state or international law (e.g., omni-commons, biocultural protocols for indigenous peoples, Terms of Service for peer production);
  • Provide commoners with access to state law to enforce their practices and norms (e.g., General Public License, Creative Commons licenses, community land trusts);
  • Secure state authority for commoning by modifying or extending state law through legal “work-arounds” (e.g., copyright-based licenses, stakeholder trusts, multistakeholder co-operatives, Bologna Regulation for urban commons);
  • Openly challenge recognized boundaries of law as a way to provoke a political debate or validate a particular commons (e.g., community ordinances; biocultural protocols; the commons-based foundation for Teatro Valle in Rome); and
  • Use digital technologies to create superior functional alternatives to state law (e.g., open value networks, smart contracts, the blockchain ledger).

The very idea of Law for the Commons constitutes a profound philosophical challenge to the liberal capitalist polity.  After all, many commons seek to enact different ideals of human flourishing and governance than the formal, universal and rational/utilitarian ones of the modern liberal state and neoliberal economics.  In this sense, Law for the Commons as it expands could help propel a paradigm shift because it asserts a different theory of value than that of conventional economics and the (formally) neutral apparatus of the liberal state.  Law for the Commons generally rejects capital accumulation and market exchange as the default engine of social and economic progress, and in this sense proposes a very different vision of human development.

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The Newspaper Test for Twitter and Gyges’s Ring

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Cover page of an old version of Plato's Republic.This week, while my Philosophy of Leadership class has been covering Plato’s Republic & the story of Gyges’s ring, I was presented with a Twitter-style version of the story. In the Republic, Plato’s Socrates is talking with people about justice. People only act justly if they can’t get away with injustice, say Socrates’s friends. Well, in today’s world, it turns out that if you can get away with breaking the rules, you can get a lot of Twitter followers quickly. Some high profile people break those rules and get away with it. And, some don’t get away with it.

This is the full size of the image of the cover of Gyges' Ring, featuring a gold band with a red jewel.

I am convinced of the need for more public philosophy and feel compelled to contribute as best I can. I’d like to reach more people with the messages that I think need to be said and heard. Apparently you can reach more folks and more will follow you if you first pay a service to generate 10,000 fake followers for you over a few weeks’ time. Why? People with lots of followers are more likely to get followed in return. They’re also more likely to be proposed to other people as good candidates for following, speeding the cycle. What’s the catch? It goes against Twitter policy to pay for fake activity, including following or posting.

I’ve been told that Twitter does not police that, however. They don’t want spammers who sell stuff by automatic “fake” activity of messaging, and they clamp down on that. If that’s true — if they don’t police fake follower-buying — then it’s ok to do, right?

Highway sign reading "Speed Limit 55," with next to it a "Your Speed" sign reading "118." Yes, I faked this on purpose.

Yes, I photoshopped this.

Imagine that a stretch of highway is to be policed by an office that is underfunded. It can only police that stretch of highway from January to September. Does that mean that for three months it’s ok to drive 60 miles over the speed limit? There’s no policing, so what’s wrong with driving over 100 mph? My point is that the fact that something isn’t policed doesn’t mean that it’s thereby ok to do. Also, Plato’s Socrates would say that the policing factor only gets at the extrinsic value of just action, not the intrinsic.

Extrinsic consequences can tell you something, though, or so it seems, according to the modern-day idea of a newspaper test. The question is whether it would still be ok to do what you’re planning if it were to be featured on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow. That is an extrinsic test. It asks what would happen as a consequence if someone were to find you out. Your reputation could be damaged. You could go to jail. Other bad consequences could ensue from doing the wrong thing. BUT, what if you knew it couldn’t end up in the newspaper tomorrow?

A photo of the relevant passage in my book, which says that the corpse had nothing on but a ring.Plato tells us the story of Gyges’s ring. The story says that a man goes into a chasm in the ground and finds a hollow bronze horse in the chasm. In it, there is a dead man wearing nothing but a jeweled ring. That’s right, nothing but that. Philosophers I know have forgotten that there’s a naked guy in the story. A dead naked guy.

Anyway, the explorer, now a ring richer from taking from a corpse, finds out accidentally that when he turns the ring around, he becomes invisible and can do whatever he wants. He can get away with anything. In that case, the Devil’s advocates in Plato’s story tell Socrates that the invisible man would do whatever he wanted, whether just or not, if he could certainly get away with it.

Bust of Socrates.Socrates argues that justice is not only good for the extrinsic rewards that it brings when it does, but also for its intrinsic value. So, even if you had that ring, you should act justly if you want to be happy and live a good life. Your soul is healthy when you would act justly even if you could have gotten away with injustice.

The newspaper test today is partly about the threat that you will get caught, but it can also help to convince us about what is right and wrong even if you got away with it. If what you are planning to do would look terrible when detailed for the public in the newspaper tomorrow, that’s an indication that it’s the wrong thing to do. There are some unique exceptions to that, which I think deserve their own post, but for the most part, I think that the test is helpful. If you are looking to benefit personally and in a way that is unjust, don’t do it! If to do what is just comes with a cost to reputation, that’s a different story.

Sometimes people’s right to privacy means you can’t disclose information that would explain your actions or decisions. Or, revealing information might put one’s troops in danger. In those cases, you take the insults to your character because it’s the right thing to do, when necessary for justice.

What’s wrong with the Twitter story? At least three things, if not more: 1) If you are buying Twitter followers, you are violating Twitter’s policy, going against the stated norms of a social medium. 2) You are creating a deception, making yourself look like you have a reputation that you lack. 3) As there are legitimate and non-deceptive ways of growing your following quickly, through honest and open paid promotions, you are depriving Twitter of one of the few things that earn the company money.

Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista Gingrich.

Photo by Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons), 2012.

Buying Twitter followers is cheap, it turns out. $70 can buy you 10,000 “followers.” Why not do it? One answer is the newspaper test. What would it look like if people found out that’s what you did? What if it were on the front page?

Newt Gingrich knows the answer to that question. It’s not good.

In this case, I think we can safely say that if it would look terrible to do something that is a deception, it’s probably intrinsically a bad thing to do also — whether or not you can get away with it.

Oh, and by the way, follow me on Twitter and “like” my Facebook author page! 😉

 

Guide to Choosing Tools for Digital Engagement

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Choosing the right methods for digital engagement can be disorienting, and that’s why we were happy to find this helpful guide to picking appropriate e-democracy tools that Geoff Mulgan of Nesta recently published at www.nesta.org.uk. The guide is aimed at supporting public officials, but can be helpful for anyone looking to engage stakeholders in decision making. We encourage you to check out Geoff’s piece below or find the original Nesta post here.

Designing Digital Democracy: A Short Guide

I’ve written quite a few blogs and pieces on digital technology and democracy – most recently on the relevance of new-style political parties.

Here I look at the practical question of how parliaments, assemblies and governments should choose the right methods for greater public engagement in decisions.

One prompt is the Nesta-led D-CENT project which is testing out new tools in several countries, and there’s an extraordinary range of engagement experiments underway around the world, from Brazil’s parliament to the Mayor of Paris. Tools like Loomio for smallish groups, and Your Priorities and DemocracyOS for larger ones, are well ahead of their equivalents a few years ago.

A crucial question is whether the same tools work well for different types of issue or context. The short answer is ‘no’. Here I suggest some simple formulae to ensure that the right tools are used for the right issues; I show why hybrid forms of online and offline are the future for parliaments and parties; and why the new tools emphasise conversation rather than only votes.

Clarity on purpose

First, it’s important to be clear what wider engagement is for. Engagement is rarely a good in itself. More passionate engagement in issues can be a powerful force for progress. But it can be the opposite, entrenching conflicts and generating heat rather than light. The goals of engagement can include some or all of the following: legitimation, or public trust; better quality decisions and outcomes; or a public which better understands the key issues and choices. These goals can often coincide. But there will be many times when they directly clash with each other.

A related question is how direct democratic engagement relates to representative democracy. Sometimes these align – when a political leader or party creates new forums to complement the paraphernalia of elections and manifestos. But sometimes they conflict – with Iceland’s attempt to involve the public in writing a new constitution an important recent test case (the new constitution was drafted by a broad based commission with online inputs from the public, and endorsed by public referendum, but then rejected by a newly elected parliament). One lesson is that it’s wise to involve elected politicians as directly as possible – since they continue to hold ultimate authority.

Clarity on who you want to reach

Second, who do you want to reach? Even in the most developed nations and cities there are still very practical barriers of reach – despite the huge spread of broadband, mobiles and smart phones. Recent experience suggests that engagements which only use digital tools rather than print, radio, TV and face to face, can get very skewed inputs.  That’s fine for some kinds of engagement – 1% involvement can greatly improve the quality of decisions. But it’s vital to keep checking that the participant groups aren’t unrepresentative. Even very tech savvy cities like New York and Los Angeles have repeatedly found that participants in purely digital consultations are much more male, young, well-educated, affluent and metropolitan than the population as a whole.

Clarity on what tools for what issues – navigating ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’

Third, even if there were strong habits of digital engagement for the whole population it would not follow that all issues should be opened up for the maximum direct participation. A useful approach is to distinguish issues according to two dimensions.

The first dimension differentiates issues where the public has expertise and experience from ones where the knowledge needed to make decisions is very specialised. There are many issues on which crowds simply don’t have much information let alone wisdom, and any political leader who opened up decision making too far would quickly lose the confidence of the public.

The second dimension differentiates issues which are practical and pragmatic from ones where there are strongly held and polarised opinions, mainly determined by underlying moral beliefs rather than argument and evidence. Putting these together gives us a two dimensional space on which to map any public policy issue, which could be described as the ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’.

Diagram: Belief and Knowledge spaces

Public engagement, and the use of digital tools to widen engagement, is possible on all points. But different types of issue need very different tools, depending on how open or closed public views are likely to be, and how inclusive or exclusive the knowledge needed for participation is.

For example, an issue on which there is widely shared knowledge but strongly contested values (like gay marriage) requires different methods to one which is both more technical in nature and dependent on highly specialised knowledge (like monetary policy). A contested issue – in the top left quadrant – will bring in highly motivated groups who are very unlikely to change their views as a result of participation. New fora for debate give added oxygen to pre-existing views rather than encouraging deliberation.

With very specialised issues, by contrast, wide participation in debate may risk encouraging unwise decisions – which will subsequently be rejected by voters (how much would you want the details of monetary policy, or responses to a threatened epidemic, to be determined by your fellow citizens?). So in this, bottom right, quadrant some of the most useful tools are ones which mobilise broader bodies of expertise than the ones immediately accessible to government, but try to filter out inputs based on opinion rather than knowledge or experience.

Another interesting category, however, falls roughly in the middle to top right of the table above. These are issues involving scientific choices that include ethics, some highly specialised knowledge, but also significant public interest. For issues of this kind, open public deliberation may be important both to educate the public and to legitimise decisions. Stem cell research, genomics, privacy and personal data are all issues of this kind. The issues surrounding mitochondrial research are a good recent example.

But the formats need to involve smaller groups in more intensive deliberation and engagement with the facts, before the process is opened up. The challenge then is how to use these exercises to influence a wider public, which in most cases must involve mass media as well as the internet.

I’m sure there are other issues and dimensions to consider and would welcome suggestions on improvements to the model I’ve set out here.

Clarity on requisite scale

Fourth, engagement looks and feels very different at different scales. A small city like Reykjavik can run a fantastic online tool for citizens to propose ideas and comment. There’s a directness and authenticity about the points made. At the other end of the spectrum a nation of 300 million like the US, or 1300 million like India, is bound to struggle with online engagement, since well-funded lobby groups are likely to be much more adept at playing the system. More systematic rules; more governance of governance; and a bigger role for intermediaries and representatives is unavoidable on these larger scales. Democracy isn’t fractal – instead it’s a phenomenon, like much biology, where larger scale requires different forms, not just a scaled up version of what works in a town or neighbourhood.

Clarity on identity and anonymity

Modern democracy allows people a secret ballot (though we sometimes forget that this is a relatively recent idea, sometimes attributed to the Australians, though I think France got there first). But we usually make votes in parliaments visible. The modern internet allows for anonymity which has fuelled some its worst features – abuse, extreme views etc. So any designer of democratic engagement tools has to decide what levels of anonymity should apply at each stage. We might choose to allow anonymity at early stages of consultations, but require people to show and validate identities at later stages (eg. to confirm they actually live in the neighbourhood or city involved), certainly as any issue comes closer to decisions. The diagram below summarises these different steps, and the block chain tools being used in the D-CENT pilots bring these issues to the fore.

The 2010s are turning out to be a golden age of democratic innovation. That’s bringing creativity and excitement but also challenges, in particular around how to relate the new forms to the old ones, online communities to offline ones, the democracy of voice and numbers and the democracy of formal representation.

Crowds can help with many tasks. But they are particularly badly suited to the job of designing new institutions, or crafting radical strategies, or combining discrete policies into coherent programmes. This still tends to be the preserve of quite small groups, in intense face to face conversation.

As a result my guess is that the most successful models in the next few years will fuse representative and direct elements. They will be honest that the buck still stops with elected representatives – and that the online tools are inputs and supplements rather than replacements. They will present conversation and deliberation as preferable to relying on occasional elections, and the odd binary petition. But they will also be clear that the 21st century parliament or city council has to be a hybrid too – physical and digital.

You can find the original version of this Nesta blog piece at www.nesta.org.uk/blog/designing-digital-democracy-short-guide#sthash.qXW93aMa.dpuf.

why an applied research program is valuable

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As an Associate Dean, I am responsible for a cluster of research programs that includes CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement); the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement; and the Tisch College Community Research Center. These outfits are diverse, but they all supply applied empirical research (rather than theoretical or philosophical research or direct programming or advocacy) on questions related to civic life in America. If asked why this kind of work makes a valuable contribution, this is what I would say:

People who are in a position to affect civic life face questions for which answers are unavailable but would be useful. These questions range from concrete and practical (e.g., What is a good assignment for 7th graders during a presidential primary?) to very broad (e.g., What causes good civic practices to become widespread?)

Our first job is to select questions that are truly relevant to good practice, currently unanswered, and empirically tractable. It is very rare to “answer” a question with a single study, so a question should be chosen to contribute knowledge and move toward a more complete resolution.

It is preferable if practitioners pose or at least influence the choice of questions. They have good ideas because of their experience, and the likelihood that they will use research results is higher if they were involved at the beginning. However, I also believe there is a role for independent researchers to notice and pose questions that practitioners haven’t seen.

Once the question is posed, our role is to address it rigorously, to get the results into the hands of people who can use them, and to receive their feedback as well as ideas for new questions. Completing that whole cycle should contribute to the improvement of civic life, although whether, when, and to what degree it contributes are also empirical questions.

This kind of work also has some ancillary benefits. Conducting cumulative, applied, empirical research on one important topic, such as civic engagement in the United States, can illuminate issues about the sociology of knowledge (How is knowledge defined, supported, used, and constrained?) and about larger social systems. To the extent that I have any insights about such questions, they come from my nearly two decades of work in organized applied research on a cluster of specific issues. Such work also occasionally yields new empirical methods that would be useful in other domains. It provides advanced educational experiences for the researchers and sometimes for their partners in practical organizations. And it can create new working relationships among organizations and agencies that remain useful after a research project concludes. But the primary purpose of the whole enterprise remains to pose and address tractable questions that are genuinely unanswered and relevant to practitioners, and then to share the results.

A DoD Resource for Teaching About the Constitution!

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Jennifer Auriemma of Liza Jackson Prep School in Fort Walton Beach Florida sends us this resource that you may find useful! I have taken a look myself and there is some good stuff here! Take a look!

Constitution Day and Citizenship Day

September 17, 2015
 
The U.S. Constitution has withstood the test of time for more than two centuries as our nation’s charter of government and the guarantor of our liberties.  Signed in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, this founding document reflects our core values and enshrines the truths set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all endowed with certain unalienable rights.
 
To commemorate the signing of the Constitution, the 17th of September each year has been designated Constitution Day and Citizenship Day.  Since 2005, all Federal agencies have been required by Public Law 108-447 to provide education and training to both newly hired employees and the agencies’ currently employed personnel to commemorate Constitution Day and Citizenship Day.  In the Department of Defense (DoD), a specially designed website containing a wide spectrum of information about the U.S. Constitution and American history is available at http://constitutionday.cpms.osd.mil/
 
The website includes an interactive, short course about the Constitution.  The course is designed to provide interesting and educational information about the events leading up to the creation of the Constitution by the Founding Fathers and the evolution of the document through the 19th and 20th century.  Visitors to the website can watch a speech by Sandra Day O’Connor, Associate Justice (Ret) of the U.S. Supreme Court.  The website also includes a link to an interactive Constitution, read text of the Constitution and variety of other valuable historical information related to the Constitution.