Active Digital Citizens Seeking New Community Paradigms pt. 3

Having  now covered weeks one, two and three, the fourth week of the course, The Active Citizen in a Digital Age took a look at volunteering and donating but the focus will be on another concept raised in the material, social capital. There’s a need to differentiate, nuanced though it may be, between the NCP perspective on Civil Society and the Active Digital Citizen Perspective. 

NCP does not see Civil Society as an “institutional manifestation of our basic human rights to peaceable assembly, free expression and, privacy,” but rather as the Australian Centre for Civil Society does as “the relationships and associations that make up our life at grassroots levels of society, in families, neighbourhoods and voluntary associations, independent of both government and the commercial world”. The difference is the level of dependence on institutions not the exclusion of them. Civil Society is the basis for Community Governance in that it recognizes that the right of the community to govern arises from the community itself through civic interactions and is not bestowed by any governmental institution.  As proposed by Laurence Demarco,  The difference between Civil and Civic, Civic refers to the 'local state' — “where citizens participate in local health boards, schools, community councils, planning partnerships and all the other mechanisms ultimately under the direction of the state.”  Civil society means voluntary actions undertaken by citizens, not under the direction of any authority wielding the power of the state which has a tendency to encroach. A similar perspective is presented by Larry Diamond, What Civil Society Can Do to Develop Democracy.

This arguably places civic society between civil society and the political sector of democracy with the institutions spoken of by the Active Digital Citizen being institutional touch points between the community and government power.  The human touch points are volunteers.

Although the course warned of dangers with digital interactions and democracy, one organization seen as utilizing technology very effectively is VolunteerMatch. Greg Baldwin, the President of VolunteerMatch talked about utilizing technology to make the world a better place and how technology has changed volunteering for the better.

The NCP wiki page Voluntary Participation and the related NCP Kumu map, which provides a non-hierarchal graphic representation of the wiki, places Voluntary Participation  as a bridge between Civil Society and Governance.  Another bridge from Civil Society to Governance is Data Journalism and Community Information to help the community keep an eye on the government institutions. Both would arguably be needed to ensure the independence of Civil Society sought by Active Digital Citizen and others. 

The course cites Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, The Collapse and Revival of American Community in which he argues the breakdown of “social capital” because of pressure on time and money, the disintegration of the family unit, media, television, and generational change resulting in the  diminishment of networks of trust and reciprocity that these connections advanced. A sharp decline in neighborhood bowling leagues leading to many more people bowling alone being the illuminating example. 

Putnam’s book was previously included but not cited as part of the Collective Impact Living Cities Kumu project as an extension of How Can We Recapture the Spirit of Community Engagement that Built America?, Kumu map of a Living Cities blog post of the same title. 

The concept of social capital, according to Putnam, depends on people believing that if: “I’ll do this for you, without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.”

From very early on with a Second look at Making Cities Work, social capital has meant creating an environment from which there was more from which draw to bring about new community paradigms. This would require a good deal of volunteering from members of the community, as participants actively pursuing their role as the producers of democracy.  Volunteering is not limited though to formal volunteering in a community but all forms of altruistic social interaction. Volunteering at its best is a face to face proposition which means creating social connections within a community, helping to increase the democratic participation being sought. 

Building 'Social Capital' within a  community through community engagement can be seen as the planning process of building both 'Bonding' and 'Bridging'.  One metric whether community engagement has been successful or not is the extent to which the process has helped the community to build social capital, making the community stronger and more connected.  

"Social Capital" can, however, be seen by some as being part of a technical discourse with which the majority of people are not engaged, making it a more useful term when examining community engagement from an exclusively systems perspective. 

The organic based direction a community takes can be diverted by institutions attempting to fulfill what they see as their institutional mission.  Even when well intentioned, professionals whether directly involved in community engagement or more likely indirectly as part of some other function, say economic development, often lack a true understanding or appreciation of what community engagement as a means of building real community capacity is about. Instead of talking about community engagement what should be talked about is an engaged community.

Even if one starts with the right motivations and frame of reference, it is still difficult to work with a community that is disengaged or disenfranchised or with a group that lacks sufficient social capital in the larger community.  This can arguably be widely applicable as many if not most people in any large community feel disengaged, as social capital is only generated where people are actively engaged.  The individual then rather than the organization becomes the most basic component of community engagement.

Stuart Graeme promoted Colin Williams’ ideas of individual community engagement, "Fostering community engagement and tackling undeclared work"  consisting of "spending time, engaged in unpaid activity, doing something that aims to benefit someone (individuals or groups) other than or in addition to close relatives, or to benefit the environment."  

This doesn’t have to happen through organizations but could arise more like a "good neighbor" concept.  Graeme also seemed  to suggest that these 'good neighbors' could be the ones to start in engaging with the community to build the connectedness comprising the Bonding' and 'Bridging' of 'Social Capital.'  It would be based, in my view upon the existence of what has been labeled ‘Civil Society, particularly when thinking of community paradigms as a set of community relations. The connection with Civil Society is made stronger yet in Community paradigms as a set of community relations.

Only later was a connection realized with Asset Based Community Development through ABCD, Social Networks and the Commons connecting Associational Life which looked at evaluating communities on an Asset Based Community Development basis, as a whole, in terms of social capital bonding (connecting neighborhood residents together) and bridging (connecting volunteers from outside the community with residents, or presumably, the community with other communities within a common jurisdiction). 

In a more recent post connected with this course Establishing a Foundation for Democratic Belief, I argued that Brennan was right as he said to have previously written that participation can be meaningful even when its practical effect is nil, because of the social bonding it creates. He assumed though that no comparable duty existed to take part specifically in voting, because other kinds of good actions can take the place of voting, believing that voting is part of what is termed a larger market in civic virtue. Those other components cannot though make up by themselves for the loss of voting from the total civic virtue or social capital created with the inclusion of voting. The overall capacity of civic virtue or social capital is diminished for the sake of administrative efficiency.

The assignment for week four included one question which was:

• Give two to three reasons why you think volunteering is important/effective

Volunteering through civil society is important to a community because the political institutions and market institutions cannot be expected to be able or to be trusted to fulfill all the needs of the community, especially in addressing Wicked Problems. Our challenges are increasingly complex. Our responses to these challenges cannot be merely simplistic but need to be coherently complex. From a systems perspective, we need to focus not only on what Chris Argyris called Single Loop Learning but Double Loop Learning as well. 

I will finish up with Zeynep Tufekci: Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win but in the next post as it deserves its own podium. 

ABCD, Social Networks and the Commons connecting Associational Life

Cormac Russell had an interesting discussion with Wendy McCaig on Twitter a while ago during which I made a suggestion that the topic would be suitable for a blog post. Wendy took the suggestion to heart and wrote, Measuring Success in ABCD – Continued, the "Continued" being from a previous post,  3 Indicators of a Strong Community. Which as the first part looked at evaluating communities on an Asset Based Community Development basis, as a whole, in terms of social capital bonding (connecting neighborhood residents together) and bridging (connecting volunteers from outside the community with residents, or I would presume, the community with other communities within a common jurisdiction), while the second part, Measuring Success in ABCD – Continued, looked at evaluating programs, activities, and projects within a community, by the community and for the community but still needing to interact at some level with institutional entities be they government or nonprofit. These are different forms of social networking that need to be made to work together.

In a post from 2015, 3 Approaches to Poverty: Relief, Betterment, Development, Wendy differentiated between a Poverty Alleviation System which addresses surface issues, such as institutions providing individual relief or means of individual betterment and a Wealth Generation System which looks to underlying causes that impact overall community development. Institutions, however, can use control of the first system and surface issue level to restrict access to the second system and underlying cause level. The question is how the community can integrate the two systems together putting a causal understanding of the Wealth Creation system on top of a Poverty Alleviation System that works through community development to address individual betterment or relief as needed. In the meantime, there is still the need to face the numerous challenges found in all communities and sometimes that requires the assistance of institutions.

Institutions insist, for arguably good reasons, upon evaluations as criteria for receiving funding but this can put the community into a dependent role. A dilemma then facing Wendy is that most institutional funders of public services, whether government or non-profit philanthropy, including United Way, want agency defined outcomes, linear measurements of attendance or level of engagement found in the traditional Logic Model, not community led impact. Cormac suggested a number of alternative forms of evaluation and assessment including Developmental Evaluation, Most Significant Change, Narrative Therapy and Marshall Ganz's work (pdf) on Public Narrative moving to a Theory of Change and onto a Theory of Practice.  There is evidence based research for these approaches, the challenge is educating funders to the importance of this to community development.

This also raises the importance of a community answering five questions raised in the Nurture Development post, What We’ve Tried (in isolation) Hasn’t Worked: The Politics of Community so that the locus of the question and control is the community, not the institution.

1 What are the things that only residents/citizens can do in response to this issue?

2 What are the things that residents/citizens can lead on and achieve with the support of institutions (governmental, nongovernmental, for-profit) in response to this issue?

3 What are the things that only institutions can do for us?

4 What are the things that institutions can stop doing which would create space for resident action?

5 What can institutions start offering beyond the services that they currently offer to support resident/citizen action?

The last four questions raise related follow-up questions. What influence does the community have over the institution to induce it to do for the community what it can’t do for itself, or to support the community in doing what it can do for itself, or to create space for the community to grow in that capacity, or what the institution can do to go beyond its current level of community support? This is not only a question of capacity for both the community and the institution but of motivation as well, particularly if other communities are competing for institutional influence on a political basis. 

This raises the concerns put forward by what was deemed the Scottish Conflict Model in the last post whether it is feasible to bridge to an institution when the relationship between a particular community and the ruling institutions may be a confrontational one. In such cases, there is an even greater need for social networking through bonding and bridging. It needs, however, to be tied together in a manner that is collective and inclusive.

As reported in Asset Based Community Development Lessons for Systems Thinking, “A viable way to be collective and inclusive from the bottom up, according to Cormac and those with a similar mindset, is to work through the concept of the communal Commons to enable some type of Coalition of the Doing in determining the relationship between Capitalism and the Commons".  

It becomes a matter according to Cormac then of not reforming (institutional) systems but reclaiming the Commons. The Commons, according to Wikipedia, “…is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.”

As cited in ABCD Conflict Consensus Debate and Systems Thinking 1 of 2, “In outlining ‘12 Domains of People Powered Change’ Russell provides paths for solving some of the most pressing social problems by restoring bonds among people.

"The challenge is not the reformation of institutions, it’s the reseeding of associational life. When our associations strengthen, they will not only put manners on our institutions but will also stop outsourcing citizen and community work onto those systems. Then we will begin to discover that the Good Life is ours for the creating.”

Cormac Russell

Cormac cites Ivan Illich in discussing the limits of institutions in advocating for a return to the commons. 

"In areas of childcare, healthcare, mental health, environmental and ecological sustainability, local prosperity and public safety, we desperately need to start a new conversation that takes a view from the bank of the river, a view that does not dismiss the river, but takes it in, alongside the rest of the ecosystems (our non-institutional capacities).”

Cormac Russell

According to Cormac, the average person has 51 other persons in their associational lives. He cites Dunbar to argue that we need 150 persons. So one measure is the other 99 relationships. The Dunbar, to whom he is referring is Robin Dunbar, the originator of Dunbar's Number, a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Here is a ForaTV video RSA video of Dunbar explaining his theory. 

The number of 150, according to Dunbar "refers to those people with whom you have a personalized relationship, one that is reciprocal and based around general obligations of trust and reciprocity." According to Cormac, these are friends and neighbors not other service users, family or professionals, “It comes down to how many unforced and unpaid for relationships of acceptance we have in door knocking distance.”

There is not, however, a single Dunbar Number but rather a scale of numbers, of ever-widening circles of connection.  According to Dunbar, there is a cognitive limit to the number of relations that any one primate (including humans) can maintain because "this limit is a direct function of neocortex size, and ... this in turn limits group size where stable interpersonal relationships can be maintained." It consists then of four layers, or "Circles of Acquaintanceship," which scale relative to each other by a factor of 3— 5 intimates, and then successive layers of 15, 50 and 150. The first group, of three to five, is our very closest friends. Then comes 12 (the size of a jury) to 15, those whose death would be devastating to us. The next circle is made up of 50 persons, or “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southern Africa.”  The number of people increases while the emotional connection decreases with each successive circle, so it is not just walking distance but emotional distance as well.  Beyond the 150 number, there are further rings, for example, fifteen hundred being the average tribe size in hunter-gatherer societies, the number of people who speak the same language or dialect. Even larger circles involve even greater levels of complexity.  

It is upon this basis, a system of associational relationships to develop community wealth that Asset Based Community Development seeks to help communities find solutions to community challenges. This requires not only connections but diversity as well according to Professor Scott E. Page. 

Within this framework, the Commons are both place-based with associational networks as a people based commons,  and the Social Network is also both people based with the commons as a place-based defined social system so that the smallest associational successes of ABCD can reverberate through the entire community (system).

Community Engagement versus Engaged Community

The issue considered In the last post was that, “We need to stop sucking at community engagement.”  A fairly easy accusation to make but more should be done in diagnosing the reasons and coming up with alternatives.  First, who is the ‘we’ we are talking about?  Taking this from a new community paradigms perspective it can’t only be those working in government and especially not City Hall.  These can be used as avenues of engagement but not as the foundations for engagement. Instead we have to look more closely at the nature of communities and how they engage, as referred to in the last post, with other external or separate organizations, institutions, and other communities as well as how they engage internally between members to members or members to the larger community.  

To better understand the workings of community engagement will mean listening and learning again from the many voices participating in the LinkedIn Community Engagement Group. Stuart Graeme, who hails from Australia, was introduced on these pages in the last post. He raised the question, “Can anyone help with a definition of community engagement relating to people being involved in their local community not in terms of organisations engaging the community?” to which a number of Community Engagement professionals contributed a response.  So it seems that one can learn lessons in community engagement from across both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. 

Once one starts looking closely at community engagement, it becomes easy to understand why its hard to come up with a definitive understanding because of the number of different terms used to define it with the definition of those terms often being amorphous.  

A more workable definition of the first half of the term under consideration, ‘community’ will wait for a later post. The definition of community will be more of a matter of understanding as a system so will likely be more abstract and involve systems thinking in some aspect. This means taking a few steps back to understand ‘community’ and its ‘engagement’ within an environment as a system.  Less passion and more analysis but for the purpose of better understanding where the passion needs to be directed.  The focus for this post is on the second half ‘engagement’ considered as more of a verb expressing action, state, or a relation between two things as in the act of being engaged.

What is commonly labeled community engagement usually involves some external organization or institution that is seen as being the subject responsible for the engagement.  How engagement, as a verb, is implemented depends upon the planned objective of the subject institution. The institution has its own motivation to engage the community. “City Hall will host a legally mandated meeting, on Thursday at 7 pm, on a new project to get comments from the public.” The community then becomes the passive object.  The last post referred to local governments needing buy in from residents for certain projects.  It is therefore reasonable to suspect that what is called community engagement is, as one CE professional put it, often more about governing and controlling and not really about the community.  

Community engagement can be realized in two basic ways or a combination of the two, either by the assistance of some external development services, including local government, religious or other nongovernmental organizations or instead by communities themselves through the use of self-administrative and social structures.  Currently, most energy and resources are allocated by and toward the first category with either meager support to active opposition for the second.  Under new community paradigms, resources and energy are allocated by both approaches to supporting the second path to be taken by the community itself. 

The idea of restricting “community engagement by formal organizations" conveys something one-directional.  As one CE professional pointed out, engagement should be a mutual two way process and not only a one way process. 

Another CE professional participating in the discussion proposed that instead of talking about community engagement what should be talked about is an engaged community.  One active citizen made it known, according to one story, that as far as he was concerned the community was already very engaged with each other, and that the project should really be about the government institution in question learning to engage with an already engaged community.  

Others cited lessons learned from Results Based Community Planning by the Australian Local Community Services Association through which they discovered that when the local councils (similar I suspect to city councils or planning commissions here) presented an idea as a plan, what it conveyed to the community was an excessively top down management approach.  The community preferred instead to talk about community action.  

How successful such efforts are depends upon the make up of the community as illustrated by another story involving Steve Johnson of Organ’s Portland University, who when participating in a number of community discussions of a planning matter observed that in some cases, “People just turned up and before anyone announced the process they just started working together. They grabbed markers, flip chart paper, and started talking, writing, drawing and came up with some ideas, documents concerns and aspirations, etc.”  At others, even though he made the same workshop resources available when people arrived they instead just sat down, looking awkward, waiting for someone to lead them. The lesson to be learned is that the extend to which communities can be engaged needs to take into account the extent to which the members of those communities are engaged with each other. 

Communities are in reality organic and complex rather than mechanical and complicated entities. Seeing communities as complex allows one to understand community engagement from an organic perspective by which the engagement is initiated and led by the community through a grassroots, bottom up approach.   Community engagement from an organic bottoms up perspective involves grassroots social structures participating in the improvement of their community from the identification of communal challenges to the realization, and management of projects identified to address those challenges.  Involving the community as a whole in a participatory manner becomes what defines community engagement. 

Engagement, when not coupled with community from a top down perspective, then is more likely to refer to activism, advocacy, networking, representing, connecting or other appropriately descriptive verbs.

Grassroots community engagement, however, rarely occurs spontaneously without some organizing focus or energy and that often comes from a formally constituted organization, whether internal or external. 

Community engagement then, according to one CE professional, becomes about planning the process to build both the 'Bonding' and 'Bridging' of 'Social Capital' within a  community.  One metric whether community engagement has been successful or not is the extent to which the process has helped the community to build social capital, making the community stronger and more connected.  "Social Capital" was seen though by some as being part of a technical discourse with which the majority of people are not engaged, making it a more useful term when examining community engagement from a more systems perspective.

Governmental institutions, however, often do not take kindly to the organic development of communities. The trouble is that government institutions treat community problems and community engagement as complicated issues, which they can at least in part control, as compared to a complex problem with which they have a great deal of difficulty.  

The organic based direction a community takes can be diverted by institutions attempting to fulfill what they see as their institutional mission.  Even when well intentioned, professionals whether directly involved in community engagement or more likely indirectly as part of some other function, say economic development, often lack a true understanding or appreciation of what community engagement as a means of building real community capacity is about. 

Even if one starts with the right motivations and frame of reference, it is still difficult to work with a community that is disengaged or disenfranchised or with a group that lacks sufficient social capital in the larger community.  This can arguably be widely applicable as many if not most people in any large community feel disengaged, as social capital is only generated where people are actively engaged.  The individual then rather than the organization becomes the most basic component of community engagement.

Those individuals engaged in their communities at an organizational level are often known as ‘community volunteers’, while those working in the community without the backing of any organization are likely to be known simply as ‘good neighbors’.  This goes back to some of the ideas discussed in the last post. 

Stuart Graeme examines ideas of individual community engagement by citing an article by Colin Williams, "Fostering community engagement and tackling undeclared work" which asserted that community engagement involves "spending time, engaged in unpaid activity, doing something that aims to benefit someone (individuals or groups) other than or in addition to close relatives, or to benefit the environment."  

In Stuart’s view this does not necessarily have to happen through an organization but could arise more like the "good neighbor" concept.  It would be based, in my view upon the existence of what has been labeled ‘Civil Society, particularly when thinking of community paradigms as a set of community relations.  Stuart also seems to suggest that these 'good neighbors' could be the ones to start in engaging with the community to build the connectedness comprising the 'Bonding' and 'Bridging' of of 'Social Capital.'  

They are also the ones who initiate the creation of new community paradigms by ‘Building Better Blocks’ or encouraging direct deliberative democracy in their communities.  The idea of volunteering becomes not only a matter of community engagement, it is also a matter of community building especially in a period of often unavoidable austerity as we find ourselves.  It can have an economic impact as well as a social or political impact on a community as was first raised by this endeavor under  A Beginning: Working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics and "Liveanomics" EIU Livable Cities Studies wiki page.