Revisiting Community Arts as Connector to New Community Paradigms

The last six months have been spent on Systems Practice, which was finally determined to be a potentially viable component of Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking and seen as lending credence to the Victor Havel quote:

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out,”

through additional interactions with the And? It’s All Connected and the Ecology of Systems Thinking Facebook groups.

Systems Practice was also recognized as requiring substantially involved effort yet still only being one aspect of creating new community paradigms, important even essential but not sufficient.

This post returns to the initial purpose of this effort of discovering pathways to new community paradigms by updating the New Community Paradigms Wiki which has been neglected for some time. The first revision to the wiki is the inclusion of a disclaimer concerning intention. It is a learning site that is being shared, there is no claim to authority and regarding security, there isn’t any but then it doesn’t require anyone to provide information, private or otherwise. While a disclaimer to not having any definitive answers only shared explorations may be true that is not made as explicitly.

The work on the Systems Practice series was largely interiorly focused involving introspective contemplation. The change in direction now is to a more exteriorly focused perspective, for at least a while, resulting in more ideas being gathered and added to the pathways to new community paradigms. One of the goals of this effort being to demonstrate how ideas are connected to a far greater extent and far more extensively than may be commonly realized.

A number of new resources have been made available since the last update with new connections and pathways to be explored which means potentially that new insights are possible. This means looking more outward to determine how to apply these insights.

One new area of interest that will be explored is the currently rising idea of a #GreenNewDeal. Despite being popular in circles for which I have an affinity, it is still in the exploration stages. At this point, it seems hopefully aspirational and pragmatically problematic but a good deal of time has just been spent demonstrating through Systems Practice that the pragmatically problematic can begin to be overcome. Recognizing at the same time, other pathways need to be added.

The first of these pathways to be revisited is Community Arts. A number of changes have occurred since the last update with, Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms. One of the organizations, Cultural Strategies Initiative, is gone but a number of new resources have been discovered.

One of the more recent is Smoke Signals Studio, the subject of a TED Talk, who believe that “a practice for truth-telling and rooted in assembly is powerful”. Some notable quotes from their talk seemed particularly relevant in perhaps providing some of the depth required to bring about something like the #GreenNewDeal.

"See, laws never change culture, but culture always changes laws." 

"They understood what many of us are just now realizing -- that to get people to build the ship, you've got to get them to long for the sea; that data rarely moves people, but great art always does." 

Among other resources that have been added but not previously acknowledged are What's Happening - A Blade of Grass which provides resources to artists who demonstrate artistic excellence and serve as innovative conduits for social change by fostering an inclusive, practical discourse about the aesthetics, function, ethics and meaning of socially engaged art that resonates within and outside the contemporary art dialogue. One of their projects was by Chinatown Art Brigade, who dealt with gentrification in New York.

The Laundromat Project believes art, culture, and engaged imaginations can change the way people see their world, open them up to new ideas, and connect them with their neighbors providing invaluable assets in furthering community wellbeing.

A number of the new resources have to do with storytelling seen from both sides, telling and listening. Storytelling and Social Change: A Strategy Guide | Working Narrative works with communities to tell great stories that inspire, activate and enliven our democracy. Their work is located at the intersection of arts, technology, and social change. Hidden Voices seeks to empower underrepresented populations to effectively tell their stories by engaging communities in dialogue and positive action to strengthen community cohesion and provides pathways for increased communication, cooperation, and respect. 

A guide to Listening Matters | Community Organisers, while perhaps technically not arts-based organ, is by the Company of Community Organisers, the national body established to support the training and development of community organizing in England. It provides an important aspect to effectively completing a feedback loop in the creation of a community’s story about itself. 

“Listening to people is the foundation of community organising because it builds trust and relationships, uncovers issues and is an essential starting point for bringing people together to share stories, ideas and action.”

YOUNG LISTENERS SUPPORT PEERS WITH MENTAL WELLBEING

The site A S . I F | ART + SCIENCE IN THE FIELD works at rebuilding cross-disciplinary connections while keeping a balance between the two cultures of art and science, following their own creative paths while maintaining accuracy and critical thinking when conducting, and communicating about, science.

ArtsFwd.org has also been added, which though a creation of the EmcArts and featured in the last update, was not included in the NCP wiki through an oversight.

The mission of Imagining America | Artists & Scholars in Public Life is to publicly engage artists, designers, scholars, and community activists working toward the democratic transformation of higher education and civic life by creating democratic spaces to foster and advance publicly engaged scholarship that draws on arts, humanities, and design.

Animating Democracy places a high value on learning from and building capacity and visibility for practitioners’ work on the ground by bringing to bear Americans for the Arts’ strengths in research, policy, professional development, visibility, and advocacy specifically to advance and elevate arts for change work on field, cross-sector, and national levels. The group was also featured in the post The What, Why and How of Design Thinking and Collective Impact part 2 of 3 as advancing the role of the arts in fostering citizen participation and social change, along with Art VULUPS doing the same with geography, environmental science, land use planning, sustainability, art and creativity concepts.

Other added resources deal directly with finding and establishing artists for the community. Easle is supposed to make it easy to find and commission independent creators for a project. Street I Am - highlights street culture, street fest, busker street art, and graffiti street entertainment. Art Prof provides a unique opportunity for a global community to have equal access to a free visual arts education by removing barriers to art education that exist due to the high cost of higher education & private classes while providing easy-to-follow content for people of all ages and means. The site Dance/USA — The national service organization for professional dance looks to establishing legacy by the preservation of art form for future generations. Their Artist's Legacy Toolkit helps organize and preserve materials in ways that are practical but neither time-intensive nor expensive.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of resources, merely suggestions for possible ways to incorporate artistic thinking, along with design and systems thinking into the civic dialogue.

Community Arts is seen as a means of expressing what has been termed the Soul of a Community. The most significant change to the Community Arts wiki page is seeing it as being not only a component of Community Design but also more as a means of Advocacy By and For Community.

In regard to its place in the still being developed NCP Wiki Map on Kumu, Community Arts is a component of Places and a part of Art and Health Communities, which has been recently updated (read corrected) which in turn is related to Pathways to Healthy Communities.

Perhaps additional new pathways can be found incorporating Community Arts more deeply into Advocacy By and For Community and then extending into Community Ecology based on the concept that the community basis to address the health of the populace and community basis to address the health of the environment as in the #GreenNewDeal being the same.

More thoughts on Systems Thinking, Complexity, Chaos and New Community Paradigms

The previous post was a fairly abstract article on applying the logistic equation, from the course Dynamical Systems and Chaos by ComplexityExplorer to New Community Paradigm system structures generally, regarding Causal Loop Diagrams of the currently under construction Community Advocacy patterns specifically. This is taking a satellite distant perspective but still with the possibility for an in-depth inquiry into the parameters of a system. It was more a matter of questions than answers and while jumping to conclusions was hopefully avoided, speculations were stretched. The abstraction, unavoidably, continues.

One conclusion reached that should be viable and understandable but not necessarily fully realized is that systems can, sans mitigating factors and based on deterministic function, exhibit stable and periodic behavior that is both constant and consistent. If it can’t be established and maintained over time, then it is not a system. If it is an established system then it is likely to develop some resiliency to drastic external or internal change. This would mean fundamentally changing a system, particularly an entrenched system would require far more energy than is often appreciated.

Another conclusion, far less intuitive, even cognitively dissonant but just as viable, is that a deterministic function can result in a random output sequence. The alternative to a deterministic function is stochastic, the same input does not always result in the same output. There is some element of chance producing a random result, similar to what happens with a fair coin toss sequence. The behavioral orbits are unstable and aperiodic.

What we have then is a deterministic, rule-based system, that once past a region of undetermined predictability, behaves unpredictably despite being a deterministic system. A system in which the function has the property of being deterministic but the qualities of its output are random.

The Complexity course teaches that it is important to distinguish between the properties of a process or a system that generates an outcome, the cause, and the properties of that outcome, the effect, especially in the long term.

The course demonstrates step by step that the logistic equation with r=4 [where r multiplies x(1-x)] is as random as a fair coin toss series. A statistical test would be unable to distinguish between the results produced by the logistic equation and that produced by a random coin toss.

The idea is that a deterministic dynamical system, is capable of producing random, or another way of saying it is chaotic behavior, regardless of how close the system is to the annihilation population {(1-x) where x is between 0 and 1}. Keeping in mind, we often don’t have any idea what is the annihilation population, just that by mathematical logic that there is one. This is applied in a relatively simple sense to a finite population, consisting of similar elements or units that die off or are eliminated and must be propagated to maintain or to increase that population and will be eradicated if not, over a limited number of time periods.

This is a result of the logistic equation that has been proven by mathematics exactly and rigorously. It can be proven, or deduced, from first principles. The claim has been rigorously established. It is not merely a computer or an experimental result.

The long-term behavior of an aperiodic or chaotic orbit depends very sensitively on its initial conditions. The idea is that a dynamical system featuring the phenomenon known as "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," or SDIC or more popularly as the "Butterfly Effect,” can with even extremely small differences in initial conditions result in a difference that can grow to become exceedingly large. This idea applies to numerous dynamical systems, not just iterated functions. It also has a more formal mathematical definition which is provided in the course.

To predict the behavior of a system with sensitive dependence requires knowing the initial condition with impossible accuracy. An example used in the course demonstrates that a difference of nanometers can result in very different results in a few time steps.

The course provides one example of tremendously improving the precision of a measured number to 15.00000001 when in truth the actual number is still 15.0 but the prediction still becomes worthless after a relatively few more time steps. To help visualize this degree of sensitivity, 15 meters is about as tall as a 5-story building, while 0.00000001 or about 10 nanometers is about 1,000 times smaller than a single red blood cell, 10 times larger than a single glucose molecule.

Something 15 meters versus 15 meters + 10 glucose molecules then will exhibit completely different behavior after just a few more time steps. Practically speaking, the difference between 15.0 and 15.00000001 isn’t simply a matter of not having good enough measuring instruments. A very small error in the initial condition grows extremely rapidly meaning long term prediction and even medium term prediction are impossible. More accurate measurements can lead to more accurate and longer term predictions but we have to work exceedingly harder to get only slightly better results. It is r, the growth factor, that makes the significant difference, not x.

The course has us imagine one version of a path of a hurricane hitting New York City, and another version hitting North Carolina based on the tiny difference of the flapping of a butterflies wings. Phenomena such as this though are essentially unpredictable because one can never measure something like this in a manner in which values are this accurate or are even physically meaningful. The course quotes James Gleick from his book, Chaos, who explains that:

‘Its like giving an extra shuffle to a deck of already well-shuffled cards. You know that it will change your luck, but there's no way of knowing how it will change it.’
Even computers are limited by finite precision and having to round off numbers can't calculate the true orbit with we thought we were dealing. The orbit a computer gives us is never the actual true orbit for a particular initial condition. The course explains that the computed orbit "shadows" the other true orbit, also known as the "shadowing lemma.”

Chaos, like the logistic equation, can then be defined in a mathematical sense. A dynamical system is "chaotic" if the following four criteria are met:

1. A dynamical system has to be deterministic, iterated functions and differential equations are certainly deterministic. A dynamical system is just a deterministic rule, if one knows the rule and one knows (with infinite precision) the initial condition, then the trajectory is unique, it's determined. 
2. The system's orbits are bounded, unable to reach infinity. The logistic equation’s orbits start between zero and one and stay between zero and one. 
3. The orbits also have to be aperiodic, they never repeat and they never follow the exact same path twice. They don't go into a cycle. It is a requirement that the orbits be bounded that eliminates the possibility of orbits going off to infinity. If we then have bounded orbits that are aperiodic then they are confined to stay in a unit interval and yet never repeat. 
4. Has sensitive dependence on initial conditions, as again was demonstrated with r=4 for the logistic equation. 

This, in one sense, extends the George Box principle, "All models are wrong, some models are useful" as discussed in Sailing Complex and Wicked Seas with Icebergs (Systems Thinking). Not only wrong in being incomplete copies or maps of reality but as in being limited perspectives, especially one's own. Wicked problems can be analogous to sailing through a massive storm on the sea. The system surrounding the ship can be overwhelming to the system on the ship so people end up arranging deck chairs.

It also though provides a more in-depth understanding despite an inability to reach infinitely fine precision. For myself, having a mathematical foundation as a basis for understanding provides a great deal of confidence but confidence that can check itself. Not to predict where the storm will turn but the confidence to navigate the best possible course.

As Prof. Feldman advises, we sometimes have to invert our thinking about things with starting with an equation because we don't get handed equations, we get handed life and sometimes we can turn it into data. We can't assume that the world is made up of things that are either orderly or things that are random and that these are separate. That we are wrong in thinking that maybe they get jumbled together but they are separate things and need different types of explanation and requiring different means of managing seems reasonable.

One can get disorder from an orderly system, one can get deterministic randomness. We need then need to think about determinism and randomness in a completely different way that in a sense they are two sides of the same coin. They are not complete opposites and we need to think about them completely differently. The relationship between randomness and order is more subtle than we might have thought.

Systems Thinking, Complexity, Chaos and New Community Paradigms

Currently, while still exploring what was learned through the Digital Advocacy course and experimenting with how it fits into the NCP wiki and systems map, I have been taking a course in Dynamical Systems and Chaos taught by Prof. David P. Feldman through ComplexityExplorer.

I am now questioning what my most recently created Causal Loop Diagram maps are really telling me. What I present here, as a rough summary, is in consideration of my questions and should not be thought of in any way as an even partial substitute for the course. It is simply an attempt to try to apply someone"q new learning. It gets abstract because it involves some mathematical concepts but the ideas in the course are for a general audience and are presented here as general as possible.

A dynamical system is simply a rule for how something changes in time. The NCP systems maps are also intended to provide this type of information though at a different level of precision. The ComplexityExplorer course deals with two types of dynamical systems, iterative functions and differential equations.

f(x) = rx(1-x)

The logistic equation, shown above, is a simple model of population growth. It's an iterated function which might tell us how a population changes from year to year. We do the same thing, apply the same function, this logistic equation with a fixed r value, over and over again, using the output for one year as the input for the next. In the standard form of the logistic equation r is a growth rate parameter, r then is something that could change, and we could then see how the behavior of the equation changes. As an iterated function time is discrete, we are not monitoring the population at every instant. A continuous change would involve a differential equation.

The logistic equation is a second order polynomial, a parabola; a very simple function studied in high school, not an exotic or complicated function. The course offers a couple of simple tools for single iterations and comparisons. It is also pretty simple to create a spreadsheet which can push beyond the parameters set by the web tools. The logistic equation is deterministic. Simply an iterated function, an action repeated again and again which ought to be completely predictable.

The first question is whether the simple circles making up the various loops of a Causal Loop Diagram convey smooth transition rather than the more likely true jumps both positive and negative found with iterative functions, then whether additional loops are sequential or occur more or less simultaneously?

The logistic equation deals with populations, as in a finite collection of items under consideration dealt with as a whole, more specifically for our purposes, a community of living entities in which interbreeding occurs among members and is subject to a growth rate parameter from internal and external forces. There is a natural positive increase in population through procreation that exceeds the forces that work against it by some factor greater than 1. The population is changeable to the point that it can be annihilated, from lack of resources, inability to compete for resources, inability to reproduce and maintain the population, and by destruction from environmental or external forces.

The logistic equation is not a means of measurement, in the same way, say as using a Newtonian Law to determine the rate of cooling of an object. As the course explained, the logistic equation is more of a caricature than a detailed portrait or photo. The NCP maps then are a few brush strokes but as has been said many times before, while wrong in terms of the totality of information provided can still be useful, in some cases more useful in conveying insights or at least a different level of insights.

If this year's population is larger than last year’s, based on r, the growth factor considered alone, is greater than 1 then next year's will be larger still tending if without bound towards infinity. If r is 1 then the population stays fixed. If r is less than 1 but greater than 0, the population diminishes approaching 0. If r, for example, is 0.5 then next year there will be half as many say rabbits and half again the following year.

The idea that populations grow without bound is though unrealistic. There is some limit to the growth. There is some maximum population beyond which the population can't pass. There will always be some limit to the number of rabbits, or whatever it is being studied. A term is then added to the equation, a term known in this case as the "Annihilation" population or "Apocalypse" population; meaning that if the rabbits ever reach this “A” population then the next year there will be no more rabbits. The rabbits eat all their food, so the following year there are no rabbits left. The maximum possible number of rabbits is determined by this function in which x is measured as a fraction of the annihilation parameter so the equation can be display as:

f(P) = rP(1-P/A)

Which through algebraic manipulation as demonstrated by the course becomes the equation provided at the beginning of this post.  Note that the Annihilation term is not actually a set number like 5,947 is reached and an entire rabbit population disappears. The logistic function does not explain why a population is annihilated. It simply applies an upper bound and defines population growth in terms of that.

For small populations very far away from annihilation, with P much less than A, we should have the potential for rapid growth. When, however, P gets to be large, enough that the rabbits start running out of food, is when population growth starts slowing down approaching its limit. Once the population gets large, the Annihilation term starts to matter more and population growth slows down. There is an absolute upper limit, at the annihilation or apocalypse number, which if reached the population completely crashes.

Nobody should think, however, that the logistic equation actually controls real rabbit populations or fox populations or moose and wolves populations for that matter. It is simply a thought experiment to interpret as the reality, what's actually happening, and what will happen. A rabbit population once established and under normal circumstances would be unlikely to reach either the maximum of the Annihilation Population or total collapse. If an increase in foxes decreases a rabbit population then there will likely be a subsequent decrease in the fox population from a lack of prey and the rabbit population may rebound, explaining the parabolic shape of the curve of the function.

Arguably, many of the elements of the NCP maps could be considered to be populations serving different even opposing functions within a community. There has to be a certain portion of the community population comprising or utilizing the elements making up these maps. I am not sure how to determine an Annihilation population equivalency but the annihilation of elements is possible fundamentally changing the system. The NCP CLD maps denote positive and negative forces or influences by blue and red connections, respectively. The actual nature of Community Advocacy portrayed by the Kumu map then is a result of the net influences making up the particular configuration of the system at that point in time. Causal Loop Diagrams also repeat but adding in more loops, at likely different rates of growth or influence, can create numerous complex outcomes. With the NCP maps, increased calls for greater transparency and open data in government could result in greater pushback by entrenched government institutions. How much of an equivalency is there then with the logistic equation applied to rabbits? Open Data and transparency are ideas made manifest. Can they be propagated and annihilated the same as rabbits or perhaps viral infection would be a better analogy?

The logistic equation is capable of cyclic behavior that is stable or attracting. Different r values can also give rise to cycles of different periodicities, a cycle of period 2 takes two iterations to complete a cycle. The logistic equation with an attracting cycle of period 4 takes four iterations to cycle back then it repeats. It’s attracting because nearby orbits are pulled towards it. If a population is in such a cycle and gets pushed off, it will return back to that cycle.

While the NCP CLD maps are cyclic in nature, they don’t convey periodicities even though subsequent revolutions along the paths could result in far different outcomes with each completion. InsightMaker would seem to be better at this than Kumu. There is though a great probability for interacting cycles to move towards stable orbits regardless if they are desired, particularly when involved with Entrenched Government Institutions. Entrenched Government Institutions have been dealt with before, most recently with Active Citizens in a Digital Age Embracing Organized Complexity. This might raise the question whether the ideas being considered here apply to Warren Weaver's concept of Organized Complexity in "Science and Complexity". I believe it does as the parameters set by the equation don't depend upon the actions or consequences of any individual member but the community as a whole.

However, for a logistic equation with r=4, and other values, the orbit is aperiodic. The orbit doesn't hit some regular cycle, it just keeps bouncing around all over, never repeating. An incredibly repetitious process which always produces something new. The orbit and never settles into periodic behavior. In other words, it is chaotic, a concept which needs to be explored further.

The Difference between Mapping Pathways and Traveling the Road

During week 5 of Active Citizen in a Digital Age, the course guided us in considering how to allocate responsibilities in addressing our shared social goal. Our team's stated mission was to reduce the economic inequality of low-income people by providing access to affordable healthcare, education with job training, and housing. How we were going to do this was a little less clear.

Our plan was to include advocacy activities such as who would volunteer, donate or seek donations to a particular association or charitable nonprofit. How would this make a difference in achieving our goal? Also, who would spend time or money or both specifically focused on policy change or political action? This could include attending public hearings or council meetings on certain topics, organizing people to vote, participating in peaceful protest activities, or donating or seeking donations.

The plan was intended to focus on the type of influence or change that was to be made in one year's time. The one-year time frame provided the potential for including all aspects including ending up with a vote through an election or action by a political body.

We were to explain how the different tactics are meant to fit together and our reasons for choosing those tactics and any tradeoffs we had to make.

When I looked at the assignment, there were a number of questions that came to my mind. My questions were pretty basic. Were we focusing on all three of our objectives in general or picking one and focusing on a particular aspect of an issue? How were we providing access? How were we making it affordable? What type of influence or change were we seeking? Specifically, what policy change or political action were we going to be focused on?

It also seemed that the theme of the first part of the assignment was concerned more with the civil sector while the second part of the assignment was concerned more with the political sector. Which were we going to focus on, the first, the second bull, or both?

If focused on the civic realm then how would our actions make a difference in achieving our goal? If focused on the political realm then at what level of government? If organizing people to vote then I presumed we were speaking of an election through a vote by a political board was also a possibility. If both, how are they then to be related together to explain how our different tactics are meant to fit together? Peaceful protests would seem to be in reaction to a political action. Seeking donations would seem to be as important as making donations (they have a course on that).The one-year time frame provided the potential for including all aspects including ending up with a vote through an election or action by a political body.

As is often my habit, I decided to create a Kumu map of the course’s state Mission and Actions, based on a self-selected choice of healthcare, to make more explicit the relationships between various factors or elements. Opening the map and mousing over the text in the left-hand column will highlight relevant parts of the map but I will also discuss here. The map consists of a Civil Sector and a Political Sector which is organized in such a way that they are seen as working together. Their limitations are made more discernible when viewed separately. The civil sector has difficulty making fundamental changes being often relegated to merely holding the line in terms of social damage. The political sector can’t access the deeper perspective of civil society.

My own potential personal path of involvement was based in part on my past experience working in city government and past and still, unfinished work exploring Effective Virtual Collaboration and its expanded perspective Community Based Virtual Collaboration.

This was fine as far as it went but I needed to include my path as one component of a Collective Action Plan with the others on the team. I had access to everybody else’s narrative as they had access to mine as well as to the basic map I created. With this information, I endeavored to map out a path for each of the team’s participants. My pathway connections' thicker widths make it possible to see where my pathways and the pathways of others overlap.

The team leader Participant 1’s Path emphasized the political sector more though hopefully growing out of an educated and enthusiastic base of support. The far more challenging undertaking though would be carrying this forward to final attainment of the goal.

Participant 2’s Path incorporated the new platform Educate Evangelize which I came to see as very important. One has to change people's mindset before they can change much else. I put Participant 2's path more on the civil side leaving the subsequently educated and enthusiastic to decide for themselves which political path to take. This doesn't preclude political action by Participant 2 but to educate truthfully about something means to my mind connecting with people in the field.

Participant 3’s Path towards change was seen as emphasizing the civil sector connections with various associations and nonprofits and by working with them to impact policy change by working hand in hand with political change. Again, this did not preclude political action by Participant 3 simply that there was an emphasis on working with groups like the American Medical Association (AMA), American Association of Retired People (AARP), American Hospital Association (AHA) and Federation of American Hospitals (FAH), American Cancer Society (ACS), National Physician Alliance (NPA) and Planned Parenthood through which one can leverage these organizations and participate in their efforts to influence elected officials.

Participant 4’s Path towards change emphasized the promotion of financial contributions expanding beyond personal giving.

Each of these paths is a different story which is not being revealed here. The map simply demonstrates how those stories could interact in creating a larger story. It was interesting to note that despite not having any input into the selection of the team members, the Paths of All Participants covered nearly all of the platforms and actions put forward by the course. The All Paths loop brought together all of the individual paths through collaboration. Besides connections related to Crowdfunding to be discussed below, only one connection was missing and that was spending money to organize people to vote which likely needs another level of organization and effort.

Week six of the Active Citizen in a Digital Age course got into the market sector of democratic advocacy including boycotts. Other advocacy support financial tools cited were Crowdfunding like IOBY (In Our Backyards), impact investing as with B corporations and Embedded Giving.

Crowdfunding which was also included in the Combined Paths map connecting the personal actions of spending money, what the course referred to as political spending and donating or seeking donations, what the course referred to as financial support of civil society efforts with the various platforms for action, working with associations or nonprofits, taking political action, working on policy change, or the added education and evangelizing.

The Crowdfunding element’s influence could then be further extended integrating other elements together. Crowdfunding obviously raises money but it could also work through the advocacy systems connector loop, integrating even further.

We created and I mapped out pathways to achieving the goals for which we were advocating. What became obvious to me is that no one path would be enough. The issue I had is that we had no specific modes of traveling those paths. As has been asserted before, "There is also still the further need to move from basically abstract ideas to connecting ideas together for strategic application, to the why, to begin overcoming what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton called the Knowing-Doing Gap (page 7)".

Active Citizens in a Digital Age Embracing Organized Complexity

Week 5 of the Active Citizen in a Digital Age course sought to develop an understanding of how we can engage directly with our political systems using the Internet and digital tools so as to develop an understanding of the ways in which they are changing democracy. Part of this is understanding how to make sense of news in the digital age, so one can be informed and hopefully use credible information for political action.

The course is mostly concerned with advocacy in the support or opposition of government action and how civil society does this.  Civil society, according to the course, “…Can be thought of as the place where minorities are protected, galvanized, organized, and gain access to the systems of government.” This is put in contrast to the fundamental principle that democracies are run by majority opinions. 

The question arises though, if civil society is working to protect the democratic rights of minorities, then why does civil society have to work in opposition to the government in this aspect? Because certain portions of civil society support those actions of government. Does this mean that portion of civil society has the majority opinion and vote? No, it could be a matter of structural components of the system, e.g., Gerrymandering or situationally induced views that can change when circumstances change. One shouldn't think of majority as monolithic or opinions as concrete.

Even in the digital age, with so many ways of engaging it is still a matter of real world organizing, communicating, funding, campaigning and finally voting.  Some of which is done in person, much of which can now be done digitally. In some cases being simply digital versions of these basic activities. For example, Turbovote, which provides election reminders, gets people registered to vote and applications for absentee ballots and the already NCP wiki featured MapLight which provides information on political funding. On the NCP Kumu map, MapLight is directly related to Transparency and Open Data in Government, making it an important tool in ensuring credible information for political action but one that needs to be used in conjunction with other resources. 

It has long been held by this blog that governance is different from government.  The former being a social activity taken on by a community and the latter being the establishment of institutions to implement those activities. The course differentiates between the outside-in relationships of civil society with government institutions and the inside-out relationships of government institutions with civil society.  This configuration already sets up a biased relationship conceding a greater centrality and implied ascendancy of power to the government institution diminishing democratic intent. 

Outside-in functions by civil society to influence government, besides the more formal civic functions, include easy actions such as gathering signatures for petitions or the use of hashtags on social media content. Digital makes obtaining a large number of signatures or retweets on Twitter or likes on Facebook far more possible but let us keep in mind Zeynep Tufekci warning about Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win from the last blog post. 

Digital tools can go beyond this though. They can be used to organize people, help them communicate with each other and with the broader system in which they exist. This has been true for both sides of the political spectrum from the Tea Party in 2010 to progressives marching in the streets today. 

The political agenda may be different but the digital tools remain the same. Groups like Indivisible are featured in the newly created Advocacy For and By Community wiki page which is explained more fully here. The course cites Kathryn Schulz’s New York Times article reminding us that in our digitally driven world, one of the oldest ways and powerful medium to make your voices heard is to contact your elected representatives by calling them (actually phones have gone digital as well). Using digital tools can help your organization or group grow to a larger size much more quickly but it also lets those in opposition to you know what you are doing by the digital trails that you leave.

Inside out, government institutions provide public services to those in civil society but they don't necessarily do so equitably and can become entrenched over time. The means by which governments interact with its citizens has changed because of civic tech, technology in the civic space. This again differentiates between civil society and civic space as was discussed before but now with a digital component. 

The nature of these digital programs can depend upon from which perspective they are being created.  These changes are often not initiated by governments from the inside-out. Many arise in the civil society sector to make government more transparent and accessible like Public.Resources.org.

“What Public Resources dot org is doing is literally making the public law public.”  

The OSET Foundation builds digital into the infrastructure of our democracy through open source election technology. It sets the standards for voting systems around the world to help re-establish trust in voting, our most basic democratic function. It is not a government institution but a nonprofit election technology research institute.

The course continued to warn about dangers inherent with using digital technology by examining the impact upon politics and democracy. Stating, it has the potential to empower the voiceless, actually a debatable statement. The course didn’t use potential as a modifier rather presuming the concept, empower can convey the sense that someone with power delegates to someone without power (more so in the UK) and it often isn’t a matter of the powerless being voiceless but the powerful being purposely deaf. Still, many who did not have access to making their voices heard now have multiple pathways that they can take but then so do all the other voices benign or malignant. 

The Internet makes increasingly obsolete what the course called the intermediaries, political parties, legacy media, and my addition institutions of government which created the barriers and therefore the power pockets of the pre-Internet world. Intermediaries are still necessary today but now they can make connections increasing the power of others.  This is a transition from scarcity to abundance, invoking one of NCP’s more controversial ideas. The course though may give the impression that this happens far more easily than happens in reality. One person having access to millions is one thing, one person among millions having access to millions is another thing. 

Other dangers arising from the Internet include lack of access to reliable information to make informed choices are examined in Can Democracy Survive the Internet.  This NPR Radio program features both the author of the original article, Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University and  Zeynep Tufekci discussing this more deeply. These dangers can be made worse with the excess virility of information including the creation of “fake news”. Even foreign governments have increased capacity to influence our elections by injecting “fake news” into the discourses. 

“One of the difficulties in defining “fake news” is that one person’s propaganda is another person’s persuasion.”

The other two concerns with the Internet were echo chambers and privacy. These may actually feed into each other. There is not only, no civil society space, on the Internet, there is also no individual privacy on the Internet as was also discussed previously. There is, therefore, no community on the Internet save what trust we place in other people. Allowing for the privacy of others because they allow for our privacy, we also trust in their authenticity as they trust in ours. A lack of authenticity or anonymity may disclose not only a lack of conviction but even a lack of humanity.

The course places the responsibility of this primarily on the individual, particularly the individuals taking the course. The course seemed to emphasize community joined efforts in the background readings but more individualistic endeavors in the videos and assignments. 

On an individual basis, efforts can only be aggregated as a statistical class. To allow for collaboration to create meaningful change requires some level of community. The transition from aggregated individuals to collaborative socialization moves the community from disorganized but predictable and manageable complexity to organized complexity, difficult to predict, less manageable but creative (see Science and Complexity - Warren Weaver). 

As the course states, people do need to be careful as to what actions they take on the Internet, whether directly through blog posts or the creation of apps or indirectly through retweets and Facebook likes. The problem is that the advice came across as a discouragement. The problem with that advice is that only those taking the course would be following it. Those creating or propagating fake new have no such stipulation. This cannot be effectively countered with only the cumulative efforts of individuals. This doesn’t mean not taking any actions. It requires community or as Jane Jacobs saw it a level of organized complexity. Jane Jacobs concept of eyes on the street could also be applied to the Internet. The more people see something or are made aware of it, the harder it is to purge from social consciousness and the more it can grow to create new paradigms for the community. 

Organizing to Achieve Social Change through Digital Citizenship

The last blog post finished off with Zeynep Tufekci and her TED video, Online social change: easy to organize, hard to win.  As was said, the video deserves its own post. The words that follow, however, have been summarized and edited from the original transcript. 

Tufekci speaks to the many challenges facing digital approaches to democracy across the globe. The problems that we face in the United States though are different from those faced by protesters in Turkey in both kind and degree. We have far greater capacity to establish ourselves, our weaknesses are more likely to be internal rather than external threats. 

Tufekci speaks of how a global awareness campaign can start with a network of tweets or that Facebook page can serve as a hub for massive mobilization. It can also do the same for a local effort and these opportunities should not be discounted as they can be scaled up if not inflated before doing so. As she says, everything can be organized partially with the help of new technologies. “Digital connectivity was used for everything from food to donations.”

Their achievements, their outcomes, however, are not really proportional to the size and energy they seemingly inspire. Hopes rightfully raised are not really matched by what they were able to achieve as end results.  The problem, as she points out is that while social media helps empower protest, it paradoxically can also help weaken them through the very way technology empowers social movements.

Why then haven't successful outcomes become more likely if digital technology makes things easier for movements? Being easier to mobilize does not always mean being easier to achieve results. Overcoming this requires deep diving into what makes success possible over the long term and applying the lessons in multiple domains.

Tufekci compares the Occupy movement of 2011 with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Occupy movement started in 2011, with a single email from a magazine, Adbusters, that had 90,000 subscribers. In two months there were 600 ongoing occupations and protests in the USA.  After a month from Occupation in Zuccotti Park, one of the largest global protests ever organized was held across 82 countries, 950 cities. Years after Occupy sparked a global conversation about inequality, many of the policies that fueled it though were still in place (or are now being put back in place by the Trump administration). 

The Civil Rights Movement in 1955 Alabama protested the racially segregated bus system through boycott (market sector), navigating a minefield of political dangers, facing repression and overcoming, won major policy concessions, navigating and innovating through risks. 

Tufekci uses the metaphor of the Internet being our Sherpa helping to climb Mt. Everest by taking the fast routes and not realizing the benefits of slower work that goes into organizing all those daunting, tedious logistical but still essential tasks.

The Civil Rights Movement created the kind of organization that could think collectively and make hard decisions together, create consensus and innovates, and maybe even more crucially, keep going together through differences. The Civil Rights Movement innovated tactically, on-the-ground actions from boycotts to lunch counter sit-ins to pickets to marches to freedom rides. 

The painstaking, long-term work that put on the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a dream" speech, 1963, wasn't just a march or a powerful speech, it also made those in power realize they had to take not just the march, but the capacity signaled by that March, seriously.

Occupy's global marches, in comparison, were organized in two weeks, but didn't necessarily convey long term commitment, instead one sees a great deal of discontent. 

The magic is in the capacity to work together, think together collectively, which can only be built over time. Movements that scale up very quickly without the organizational base that can see them through the challenges are like startups that get very big without knowing what to do next, and which rarely manage to shift tactically because they don't have the depth of capacity to weather such transitions.

Today's social movements want to operate informally, avoiding institutional leadership, with many wanting to stay out of politics because they fear corruption and cooptation.

Tufekci agrees that they have a point. Modern representative democracies are being strangled in many countries by powerful interests. But operating this way makes it hard for grassroots organizations to sustain over the long term and exert leverage over the system. This leads to frustrated protesters dropping out, and even more corrupt politics. Part of this arises from the complexity of both the problems and the environments in which they exist and the inability of our institutions to meet these challenges because they double down on complicated top down management approaches to addressing them. 

Politics and especially democracy without an effective challenge to power or the status quo hobbles, because the causes that have inspired the modern recent movements are becoming more and more crucial.

Tufekci believes that it is not true that the problem is today's movements are formed by people not taking as many risks as before. I agree that is not the problem. The problem is not realizing the unintended consequences within the system that arise from taking risks or not taking risks. 

She also has an argument with Malcolm Gladwell about today's protesters forming weaker virtual ties. Leaving that until later, I am not sure the two perspectives are as mutually exclusive as they might seem to be. 

All of these good intentions and bravery and sacrifice by itself are not going to be enough to bring about the change needed.  Movements have to move beyond participation at great scale very fast and move to the next level, even if it is at a small local level,  of how to think together collectively, develop strong policy proposals, create consensus, figure out the political steps and relate them to leverage the systems needing to be changed. 

Digital awareness-raising is great because changing minds is the bedrock of changing politics. In New Zealand, a group of young people is developing a platform called Loomio for participatory decision making at scale. In Argentina, an open-source platform called DemocracyOS is bringing participation to parliaments and political parties. Both can work with large and small scale efforts. They are great, and we need more, but the answer won't just be better online decision-making. To update democracy, we are going to need to innovate at every level, from the organizational to the political to the social and in every sector of our democracy. 

Establishing a Foundation for Democratic Belief pt 2

Continuing the response to Caleb Crain's article The Case Against Democracy as part of The Active Citizen in the Digital Age course from the last post. Again, the order of ideas here do not correspond to the order of ideas in the article.

Brennan takes a third person perspective of ill-informed voters (them) on behalf of a second person perspective of the modern, cultured intellectual New Yorker reader (you). So when he says, “You are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row” than making your one vote count thereby making learning about politics not worth even a few minutes of time, he doesn't mean “you” the readers but the readers putting themselves in the shoes of the potentially lazy or self-sabotaging (them) but regardless still seen, for the purposes of a straw man argument, as rational actors who indulge themselves in more emotionally appealing approaches to democracy. While you reason for the general welfare, they feel for themselves. The specious claim then by Brennan, that not voting does a neighbor a good turn because “If I do not vote, your vote counts more,” is also conversely if you do not vote then my vote counts more.

Crain recognizes that gaining franchise or the right to vote has been the primary means by which historically disadvantaged groups such as blacks and women have been able to gain political leverage. The votes of blacks and women (well some women as the 2026 electoral results demonstrated) served, as he says, as the defense against the most reckless demagogue in living memory supported by white men advantaged by the current system. While the defense, this time, was not sufficient, decreasing that defense even further does not make sense to me. 

I won't deny though general voter ignorance having a shape which can be manipulated but question the "balance" derived by political scientist Scott Althaus, a mix that although calculated doesn't seem to actually exist in nature. I could also agree with Caplan that voters ignorant of economics tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration but the answer is not greater constriction of voting and ignoring the information derived from those votes. This includes the votes of those in red states.

When Brennan reports on the advantage of knowledge about politics by more educated, higher income, Republicans, he is also indirectly referring to a rigged system of campaign contribution corruption and gerrymandering that by its own rules disenfranchise blacks and women. Disenfranchisement whether intentional or not is not incidental. Widespread failure or more likely resistance to passing even a mild voter qualification exam should instead call into question the criteria for the exam and who has real access to establishing its rules.

The originating federal system feature of not paying too much attention to voters was designed by the Founding Fathers with the presumed intention to protect the people from,”the artful misrepresentations of interested men.” In modern democracies, voters usually delegate the task of policy creation and administration causing Brennan to struggle, as Crain says, to reinvent the “representative” part of “representative democracy,” if instead voters now need to know enough about policy to be able to make intelligent decisions themselves. It is when they don’t know, as with some of  California’s ballot initiatives or the recent British Brexit vote, that disaster can be especially prone to strike. The challenge is finding an optimal solution.

I can agree with Brennan who argues that voters would need to know “who the incumbent bastards are, what they did, what they could have done, what happened when the bastards did what they did, and whether the challengers are likely to be any better than the incumbent bastards,” to impose full accountability through “retrospective voting” or the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents who have made them unhappy.  

This is not only a very limited solution but a backward solution having both no real current benefit and no real proactive future benefit unless the electorate makes a better guess about the future but then the system has four years to re-entrench itself. It is not individual politicians that propagate the system but the system that propagates individual politicians. Such a process of getting backward applied solutions under our current entrenched political systems (plural) allows canny politicians to be cavalier about campaign promises and still be long-lasting resulting in perennial voter dissatisfaction and eventual disengagement. 

Brennan and others seem rather to apply cognitive shortcuts of letting broad-brush markers like party affiliation stand in for a close study of a candidates’ qualifications and policy stances for individual voters, when it is actually networked applications among a group which can be helpful even if party stereotypes aren't well enough understood by particular individual voters to create the social bonding and community knowledge. 

If all one values about participation are the chance to influence an election’s outcome for only one’s self then Brennan is right such participation is worthless as odds are, you won’t. He is also right though as he has previously written that participation can be meaningful even when its practical effect is nil, because of the social bonding it creates. He assumes though that no comparable duty exists to take part specifically in voting, because other kinds of good actions can take the place of voting, believing that voting is only one 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 is diminished then for the sake of administrative efficiency.

Democracy, according to Brennan is said to separately be analogous to either farming, as part of a larger market in food or to clean air, a commons seen, in this example as an instance of market failure, dependent on government protection for its existence but if, as Crain asserts, judicious voting is like clean air then it can’t also be like farming. 

So when Brennan asserts that, “It would be bad if no one farmed but that does not imply that everyone should farm,”  it is a false equivalency. We have to ask what if any is the difference between one’s duty to vote and one’s duty to farm? Farming was a specific agency for specific personal good when farming was largely self-supporting. Most had to farm or were forced by others to farm but such a specific agency would not have been adopted for protecting only one’s farm from invasion or for building a church.  Now farming is a more specific agency for general good within the marketplace. Voting is a general agency for general good that makes possible a system for our own individual specific agency and personal specific goods. 

Brennan also compares uninformed voting to air pollution which Crain sees as a compelling analogy. I don't.  While your commute by bicycle probably isn’t going to make the city’s air any cleaner, the joint effort of creating bike lanes and other means of getting out of cars can make an empirical difference. Even if reading up on candidates for the civil-court judge on patch.com still gets crooks elected, there are other civil sector actions that can be taken between elections. These still don't, however, replace voting. 

The civic and civil society realms are not at all explored, the market realm is only by way of analogy though how well is both questionable and debatable. Saying that voting may be neither Commons nor market but instead combat, even if gentle discounts the civic and civil aspects.

The market's ability to seamlessly weave self-interested buy-and-sell decisions of individual actors into a prudent, collective and efficient allocation of resources is vastly overstated, so depending upon another “invisible hand” in politics comparable to Adam Smith's in economics is just as questionable. If there is an equation to explain how democracy works it isn't going to be tidy. It is going to be complex. This still doesn’t argue for top-down control by an elite, even a highly knowledgeable elite. 

The economist Joseph Schumpeter, a poor advocate for democracy who thought far more highly of efficient economies, didn’t think democracy could function all that well whether or not voters paid too much attention to what their representatives did between elections, regulating voters as passengers having no thought of  “political back-seat driving.” Gears in the engine would probably be a better analogy. Voters, as passengers, could at best simply choose to take another bus if taken to a destination not of their liking, again a backward solution.

The last presidential election could be seen as a result of the cost of shirking that duty being spread too widely to keep any malefactor in line (presuming Madison’s ”the artful misrepresentations of interested men”). Interpreting the conscientiousness of the enlightened few as being no match for the negligence of the many is more problematic. The designation of conscientiousness or enlightenment isn't a mantle that can be permanently applied to any one group.

So why do we vote, for personal reasons or for social duty? Does voting enable one to take an equal part in the building of one’s political habitat and how does this impact one’s economic market habitat and one’s civic society habitat? We don’t vote or participate to only define ourselves, we also vote to define our communities, be that at a local, state or national level. Voting should not be considered merely a form of pure self-expression limited to individualistic concerns expressed through multiple choice. Yes, as Brennan counseled, “If you’re upset, write a poem,” but one can write a poem to have others take action against human suffrage through different avenues including voting.  Multiple contributions are expressive.

Our current institutional system weakens the incentives for personal duty but it’s not clear that the civic duty itself is lightened. Crain states that “The whole point of democracy is that the number of people who participate in an election is proportional to the number of people who will have to live intimately with an election’s outcome.” 

I agree with Crain that what Brennan’s model omits is that sometimes democracy itself can be in danger because of an election. The combat analogy used by Crain sets the metaphorical contrast between soldiers worrying more about letting down the fellow-soldiers in their unit than about abstract allegiance against personal calculations of the cost of showing up at the front factoring in the chances of being caught and punished for desertion. Voters feel their duty most acutely toward friends and family who share their idea of where the country needs to go. It is for this that democracy should be designed to develop, encourage and protect, so for me the proper metaphor if we are going to use the idea of combat is Dunkirk, as a means of resilience through group effort by diverse individuals.