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 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. 

Active Digital Citizens Seeking New Community Paradigms pt. 2

Continuing from the last post, the third week of  The Active Citizen in a Digital Age course dealt first with why digital matters to democracy in two parts, the first on the nature of digital data itself and the nature of networks arising from the interaction of that data. We create a tremendous amount of digital data in our every day, the vast majority having nothing to do with our ideas of democracy. Fundamentally different and in addition to other types of physical based resources we need to be concerned with in engaging as active citizens, digital is still concerned with how are we going to use our time and money? Digital data is the instructor informs us, a non-rival and non-excludable good unlike the other two. “Basically that means that lots of people can use it at once and it's hard to keep others from using it.” 

The nature of the network, exchanging digital data over networks, mobile, wireless spectrum, cable or broadband, is made up of physical structures. One important feature being the vast quantity of information that can now be stored. Every digital action gets recorded and stored and that storage keeps growing, not necessarily accessible, intentionally or not but it does keep growing. There are entities, usually market-based companies involved with maintaining this digital infrastructure making such exchanges happen from app and software developers to equipment builders, to network providers creating access to the creators of digital products we are interacting with, be it social media companies or search engines. 

All of our mutual digital transactions also involve a third party, intermediary infrastructure providers. This matters because all of the data representing the information we are exchanging (information turned into 1s and 0s) is stored on their servers. The nature of digital means that there is a difference between what gets remembered, what gets shared, and what will last when action is taken in either the digital space or the analog space.  

More information and insight on this topic is available through the Digital Impact Toolkit from the Digital Civil Society Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society which supports the ethical, safe, and effective use of digital data by civil society organizations.

The course recognizes in the second part of the lesson that the two components of the first part lead to the dangers of going digital. In part because digital democracy plays by a different set of rules than does analog democracy. How we participate in civil society is influenced, impacted, and defined based on the nature of both digital data and its network infrastructure.

The problem is that digital infrastructure is built by companies, usually for-profit and is monitored by governments. Therefore there is no individual, private space in the digital world so there is no real civil society in digital space. According to the course though, civil society needs to function as an independent space separate from markets and governments.

“Civil society is an institutional manifestation of our basic human rights to peaceable assembly, free expression and, privacy.”

Lucy Bernholz, Senior Research Scholar, Stanford University, PACS

Director, Digital Civil Society Lab (and course instructor) wrote her own perspective on this issue. She produces the Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint (2016), an annual industry forecast about the ways we use private resources for public benefit. Particular interest should be paid to pages 20 to 23. 

“Yes, we can use digital tools to expand free expression and assembly; yes, these tools can be used to expand the voices we hear and participation by many. But civil society actors - in the US specifically - are fooling themselves if they think that digital tools are innately and always democratizing.”

She points out that civil society actors - in the US this means nonprofits and foundations as well as social movements, protestors, and activists - must protect the right and capacity to organize online, to express oneself and assemble peaceably outside of government or corporate control in digital spaces, if we are to maintain that right and capacity offline.

The digital rights agenda is civil society's agenda.

The challenge then is how to reclaim and protect this loss of civil society? There are apps that are designed to protect privacy by encrypting communications for example. There still remains though the essential real world on-the-ground (analog world) steps of finding allies, working together, crafting a strategy and message which requires having a private space to come together. 

Open Society Foundations United States, an organization which works to build vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people, video  Shrinking Civic Spaces discusses how and why governments across the world are shutting down spaces for civic engagement and how civil society can unite to prevent it.

"Solidarity between the online blogger and the gay rights activist, between the NGO that's getting shut down and the social movement that's turning out on the streets. Because although those actors might look and think that they're different from each other, what they have in common is they're all manifestations of our right to organize and mobilize..."

            

Danny Sriskandarajah, Secretary General and CEO Civicus
           (4:45-5:08 of  Shrinking Civic Spaces)

The course also provides a link to an Oxfam video on some examples of civic tech projects. The video is a rather long webinar so here is the Google Doc of the presentation (23 slides) which has the advantage of making the associated links available. 

Our assignment for the third week was to create a team list of citizen actions that were digitally dependent, discuss the list as a team and list the team's responses to each of the following three prompts:

1. How do digital tools allow us to participate more/better/at greater impact than before?
2. The downsides of using digital tools for participation are significant. In what ways do you think digital tools should not be used for engagement in civil society (certain things, in certain ways)? Why?
3.  What role do digital tools play in your team's action plan from Assignment #2?   

The team members each submitted their own lists and our team leader did a rather good job in organizing them into common themes.

• Digital tools can take over for other forms of civil participation.
• Digital tools make communication and organization faster and more possible.
• Digital tools can make us more informed and expand our thinking.
• Digital tools can spread false and misleading information very quickly and without check, as well as encourage superficial understanding of issues.
• Digital tools can take over for other forms of civil participation.
• Digital tools can lead to entrenched, narrow modes of thinking.

As far as how do digital tools allowing us to participate more/better/at greater impact than before for myself, I cited access to the digitally available resources from different organizations in the NCP wiki, for example, Healthy Cities, Project for Public Spaces and Regional Governance and Policy. I also turned to new ways of thinking featured in the wiki, such as Systems Thinking Applications or Design Thinking or Community Arts or Asset Based Community Development. Then applying these to democratic processes involved concepts such as Governance through Community.

The question of what are the significant downsides of using digital tools for participation and in what ways, (see Usman Haque) and when do you think digital tools should not be used for engagement in civil society have been dealt with before for some time?

Digital democracy requires a level of individual digital literacy or fake news storytelling which can take over the community conversation. Tools like Big Data can be a two edged sword and used against the community interest. We often use digital technology in a superficial sense not drilling down into understanding the workings of the systems we wish to transform or the unintended consequences that could arise from our actions. I am also of the view that we can put ourselves into opposition or a role of permanent underdog rather than actually transforming governance. Instead of transforming a persistent deleterious entrenched system we merely enter into a subsidiary oscillating relationship with it.

Part 3

Active Digital Citizens Seeking New Community Paradigms pt. 1

As I had mentioned before starting the Case Against the Case Against Democracy, I have now spent the last several weeks engaged in another online course, The Active Citizen in a Digital Age. As has been stated before, this is not a substitute for the course, merely a way to solidify and expand upon what was learned. The course is on how to be an active citizen in a democracy in the digital age. The form of democracy considered being a conglomeration of our own imperfect form in the US, strivings to develop from around the world, and as an ideal aspiration.  The focus starts off looking at democracy and the various means of interaction as an active citizen. 

According to the first week of the course, there are three sectors of a democracy, the political process of voting and its related components, elections, campaigns, petitions, etc., then the marketplace, the economic and financial processes involving businesses, their suppliers, employees and customers and finally and most importantly civil society, the space for private actions within the public space, Boy Scouts, Salvation Army, and religious affiliations as well as actions such as protests.

In the market space, one purchases products as a private person through a private exchange. With a government to which I am paying taxes for running that government, it is a public action for a public purpose within a public space for a public benefit. 

Each sector presents different opportunities for involvement based on their differences in how they connect and how they use those connections to bring about change. So one could choose to boycott a product, write congress to have it banned or protest in front of a company. 

In civil society, one maintains one’s own private choices even if and when in disagreement with others. The course sees civil society being able to hold in abeyance all the disagreement inherent within a community by providing safe space, making it private action but with the intention of bringing others together to create something that benefits other people generating private resources for public benefit. 

“It is the place where our private actions to do things with other people with a public face comes into play.”

An essential difference is whether the action is more individualistic or solitary as opposed to being more group or collective and therefore assumedly having a greater impact. The course sees the market sector being more individualistic and the political and civil society being collective.  The latter two likely requires mobilizing other people. 

The second week switched to how we engage or what actions we can take within these three spheres cited above, political life, marketplace and civil society with more emphasis on the types of organizations and funding mechanisms making up each. 

The political sphere involves direct engagement with our governing systems, “The political bodies that surround them,” particularly those responsible for lawmaking functions and the apparatus to support elections of officials, such as political parties, funding organizations, and campaigns. We can support and vote for candidates for office, donate or help raise campaign funds, register people to vote, gather signatures on petitions,  and voice one’s opinion about laws directly at the local, regional or federal level of government. With the exception of voting, all of these actions have a public face based on the principle that, “(If) the government is intended to represent the views of the people then the people have the right to know who is influencing the government.” 

In some societies, political participation can be mandated, often as window dressing to legitimize a dictatorship but in most, it is seen more as a civil society duty, a civic duty, as “the basic obligation of democratic systems”.  Another aspect of participation in public life can include service in the military, mandatory in some democracies, voluntary in others. Finally, there is what the course claims as the never voluntary obligation of paying taxes. 

The marketplace in which we buy the necessities and the desires of life, sometimes even choosing to invest in these enterprises provides an opportunity to interact either as consumers or investors. We can choose how we align our actions in the marketplace with our social and political principles of the other two spheres. This occurs without the same degree of public scrutiny unless we choose to do so differently. 

Civil society includes nonprofit organizations, religious organizations, neighborhood associations, sports clubs, protest and advocacy organizations, and other forms of community, trade or professional associations, commonly thought of as the voluntary sector a participation is based solely on your own choice. These means one could donate money or time to organizations doing direct environment work or research to those advocating for environmental causes calling for action on climate policies through political action or protests. Participation is encouraged in many societies, and especially by most religious traditions with many privileging anonymous actions removing any obligations between giver and recipients. Again, creating a safe space. Therefore civil society actions such as charitable donations or associational choices are not considered public information.

All of the choices or actions above can involve a digital component in their realization, using online platforms to find information, give to charities or shop with cell phones, using social media to tell everyone else what we are doing so as to influence or persuade others to join us. Digital tools can give us numerous means of participation thereby changing the ways in which our participation is recorded for posterity. 

We then, having already submitted our own participation histories, looked at what others throughout the course for the many different ways other had taken in these arenas. The culminating task for the week was to come up with a mission statement to which everyone on the team could agree.

Our team's mission statement was:

“Our team wants to reduce the economic inequality of low-income people by providing access to affordable healthcare, education with job training, and housing.” 

Accompanied by a protest photo advocating for these principles held by a marcher apparently with National Nurses United. 

With this course, I again took a more subordinated role joining a team of six and following the lead of others though still putting forward my ideas. Though I pointed out that our mission statement was more general than those submitted by others in the course, I was comfortable enough to proceed if everybody else was.

Part 2

Code for America is NOT the Wimpy Geek for Disruptive Innovation of Communities

Two posts ago, this blog was still trying to communicate the concept of applying disruptive innovation, as developed by Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard University, to the public sector and civic arena.  This is not only difficult but also raises the risk of conveying the wrong impression.  

One wrong impression that may have been made is that Code for America is seen as being ineffectual based on the assertion that it is not a disruptive innovation, at least not as defined by Professor Christensen’s operational use of the term.  I now think that I was being unfair, not wrong, just somewhat unfair.  Code for America is definitely not ineffectual, they obviously do a great deal of good, and what is more important, the technology offered by Code for America may very likely be an essential component in bringing about disruptive innovation within the civic arena. 

It could be argued that what Code for America brought to the community advocacy table was a, 'there's an app for that' set of solutions. Before this time, Code for America provided some of the tools but not the necessary craftsmanship for meaningful change. Innovation is not merely a matter of having new tools, it is also having new ways of using those tools and creating something entirely new with those tools.

Code for America is networked across the USA but it is grounded in local communities, often though through city councils and city management. This is part of what makes it usually a sustaining innovation because its implementation is so often through a system that works to maintain its own existence. If disruptive innovation is then desired, it will need to be implemented, at least in part and sometimes initially, from outside of city hall.

It is similar to the relationship between disruptive technology and disruptive innovation, there can't be meaningful change without having some underlying philosophy, some set of governing principles or programatic guidelines whether created by, from within or imposed from outside the system. Disruptive innovation, within the private market, does not require or is it even possible to forcibly implement so it cannot be imposed only facilitated.  There is, what I will call system momentum (creating a perfect storm), when the necessary inherent factors arise as a result of a relevant innovation to make a market, subject to proper management, potentially disruptable. So-called disruptive technology is not enough.  A question being asked here is whether this process of disruptive innovation can be replicated with the public sector and in the civic arena.

My evolving perspective on Code for America is that they are developing a set of principles upon which to organize and manage change beyond the technical gadgets. This perspective came about because of two books, the first, from some time past, Gardens of Democracy, was created outside of Code for America and the second, more recent, Beyond Transparency, from within. This post will consider the first.

Part of the problem is that although Code for America has been followed for a while, it has been given little direct exposure on the pages of this blog.  The New Community Paradigms wiki though has included both a Code for America wiki page, as well as one dedicated to the book, Gardens of Democracy by Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu for some time. The reason was that although many of the ideas in the book were appealing, it was decided to let the blog work through the relevant issues independently.

The Gardens of Democracy wiki page features a link to a video of authors Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu proposing that we need to fundamentally change our conception of citizenship and democracy because society has so fundamentally changed. 

Gardens of Democracy challenges the current approach to governance by creating a new metaphor that sees the world as a garden needing constant attention, discretion, and periodic weeding rather than as machinery needing to be constantly tweaked to be perfected but that never can be.  Evoking metaphor, as a means of initiating paradigm level change are of foundational importance in the continuing creation of our communities.  We use symbols and stories to define ourselves and how we relate to each other as community.  By changing the metaphor we begin to change the nature of the conversation. 

We should stop using mechanistic metaphors, such as "efficient markets" especially in defining our local economy, and instead use an alternative metaphor by which the economy is viewed as an organic ecosystem so that it can be understood to prosper best from the middle out not from the top down. We should also redefine the conversation of big government versus small government, which according to Eric Liu misses the point, and instead make it a conversation about the what and the how of government. Government should be big on the what and small on the how. Government should strive to set great goals and invest resources making them available at scale but the innovation to achieve those goals should come from the bottom up in networked ways.  

The world, according to Gardens of Democracy, has now become more complex and networked and the management of these challenges is no longer a matter of simple or of layered, add-on solutions.  The economic, environmental, and social systems which we are dealing are often nonlinear and frequently in states of non-equilibrium. Another change in the use of metaphors and language is that systems should stop being described as either efficient or inefficient but rather effective or ineffective. We are, according to the Garden authors, interdependent, cooperation is a major driver of prosperity and we are emotional approximators. Our systems are impacted positively or negatively by contagion. Therefore we not only need avenues for change, we also need to understand the momentum for that change.

For New Community Paradigms this means that, the "machine" metaphor still being used by entrenched political institutions must be transformed into a community governance model built on the metaphor of a garden of democracy.  Democratic governance would be done better through a garden of direct deliberative democratic governance by community rather than by ‘the machine’ of institutional government.  The Gardens metaphor offers a more meta approach to this question that could serve as an umbrella to a host of separate strategies focused on a variety of different challenges. 

Viewing the world in this new way can help redefine our approach to politics. The mechanistic model of citizenship "atomizes" individuals according to Eric Liu. Through the use of metaphor to convey the need to redefine the notion of community and self-interest, Gardens of Democracy helps redefine our means of community governance. Human nature stays the same, but what can be changed is human understanding, our relationship between ourselves, ideas and the world moving from a fatalistic to a mechanistic to a hopefully organic perspective.

Under a Gardens of Democracy model, individuals are networked and citizenship can be redefined accordingly, making possible a true enhancement of self-interest through community based mutual interest as understood by Tocqueville. In understanding this new reality, you realize that you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. We need to be far more than simple spectators to the political process, more than simple participants in the existing system but co-creators in redefining that system. We need to be more than customers and consumers of a system of community management and become co-creators of a system of community governance.

This can be seen as a disruption of the system but it is also a disruption of our own thinking.  The question is how to bring this about within others and one answer is to demonstrate to each individual how a change of innovation could be made to address a particular community related job-to-be-done. Innovation, particularly disruptive innovation, is focused on the specific needs. or in D.I. terms, jobs-to-be-done of particular individuals and all the more so when addressed through design thinking.

Code for America and particularly Gardens of Democracy provides a potential avenue, in my view, for changing three different relationships, dealt with previously, defining our communities. 

First, changing the relationship of individual community members to the community-as-a-whole and civil society. (see Civil society as a platform for new community paradigms and Community paradigms as a set of community relations). Communal networked connections can address separation in time and space to a far greater degree today.

Second, changing the relationship of the individual community members, making up the community-as-a-whole, to the institutional city government.  Everyone has the potential of working in the garden and the more that contribute the better the crop produced. This again raises the idea of direct deliberative democracy.  This blog has long argued that the community needs to take over a greater role in governance from institutional government. We can carry our understanding and metaphors of civil society to new neighborhoods and communities but at any specific time we choose to what degree we will participate as part of the on-the-ground community of our geographical location.(See Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities and Governance by the Community or Not - Getting with or past City Hall.) Based on the technological reality expressed above, a more radical approach to community engagement can be adopted through practices such as participatory budgeting.

Third, changing the relationship of the community as a whole to institutional government. Institutional government would appear to be put into a relatively more subordinate role, in reality, staff would take on a more facilitative role in working with the community. (See Looking for Non-Experts to Create New Community Innovations then Make sure They are Disruptive and Still Looking for Non-Experts to Create New Community Innovations? Look outside City Hall.)  The existing systems arose because of the types of environments we created. Changing the system does not necessarily sufficiently change the environment and we need to change not only what we do but how we do it as well. 

From Community Attachment to Community Empowerment

Over the past few months the posts of this blog have dealt with various aspects of community engagement including, community governance as an arena for community engagement and Systems Thinking as a possible avenue for community engagement. What has not had enough attention is what is it that engages members of the community, not what can be done to get them engaged but how engaged do they get and why?

It could be easily argued that what we have now under our current system of incumbent, often politically entrenched, governmental institutions is not working and actually actively discourages, albeit covertly, community engagement. This means ignoring apologetic protestations about having elections every four years and noticed public hearings being the necessary limits of democratic integration by the community. Further, history would also argue that working in direct opposition to such politically entrenched government institutions at its own game seldom works.

New Community Paradigms would therefore have to set up a new system of community engagement to work within its new perspectives regarding community governance. This means recognizing that people have different motivations for being engaged and will be engaged at different levels of interaction.

New Community Paradigms has been arguing for a greater reliance upon direct democratic deliberation in community governance in the post Of, For, By the People and now Through the People. Community Governance Revisited for example. This does not require that 100% of a community population be 100% involved with 100% of the community decisions that must be made as a function of a community working as a corporate body or city. The current system of politically geared representative democracy, even during the few weeks of an election, does not reach anything near this level of interaction. 

It would require a means of assimilating desired community changes on a continual basis while at the same time creating enough community cohesion that there wasn’t a constant state of disruption or upheaval. Such a system of community governance would have to create enough general agreement to be able to implement programs and projects sought by the community and see them to completion over an extended period, often a period that exceeds that of most political terms of office. 

We already have a scale for the greater degrees or levels of community engagement that being the Ladder of Citizen Participation (Sherry R. Arnstein) to attain greater Citizen Control as discussed in the past post, Looking for Non-Experts to Create New Community Innovations then Make sure They are Disruptive. Arnstein’s Citizen Control would equate to the New Community Paradigm’s idea of community empowerment. The Arnstein levels of Partnership and Delegated Power on the Citizen Participation Ladder would be encompassed by the community engagement level of New Community Paradigms.

The New Community Paradigm idea of community participation diverges from Arnstein because it portrays engagement that is no longer based on direct interaction with civic institutions but involvement with the overall community through those civic institutions. These type of activities would include participating in the community’s 4th of July activities, annual community clean up programs and other activities that are outside the power structure of city hall and more based on neighbor to neighbor avenues of assistance. They may be included on Arnstein’s Ladder at the levels of Therapy to Placation and are more prone to the abuse of Manipulation but they are also more firmly established in the concept of civil society.

We also have a step outside of the lower end of a community engagement scale. One that moves below the level of active community involvement, if only at a minimal level, to simple attachment to the community.

This idea of community attachment was introduced early on in this endeavor back in October of 2011. This sense of attachment, however, can go as deep as other forms of engagement and has been portrayed as being the ‘Soul of a Community’. It arose as a means of finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms accompanying early explorations of Places or Placemaking.

Through the efforts of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup after:

Three years and close to 43,000 interviews later with people in 26 communities, the study found three main qualities responsible for attaching people to place:

• Social offerings, such as entertainment venues and places to meet, 
• Openness (how welcoming a place is) and 
• Area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces)

The fact that people are not showing up to community meetings does not mean that they are not attached to their community. This also means that the actions of any form of community governance, whether through the status quo of city council government or the establishment of direct democratic deliberation through New Community Paradigms, is usually not the primary reason why people are attached to their community.

This coupled with an appreciation of the role of civil society in establishing the legitimacy of governance should provide a basis of humility in efforts to establish New Community Paradigms.

The idea of community attachment without community engagement means that any governing body might find itself unknowingly (or knowingly) misinterpreting the will of the community as a whole resulting in a loss of attachment and thereby a loss of community members who move out over time leaving those behind in a downward circle of community decay.

Community attachment, even if it is outside the desired levels of community engagement, can be understood as a force or factor for community cohesion. This is true even when significant portions of a community does not acknowledge even the best intentioned efforts at community governance.

Under New Community Paradigms recognizing the role of community attachment provides the ability to see the community in a more holistic manner, particularly with economic factors and economic development. It is those who are attached to the community that will make up the majority of those providing the workforce to businesses and customers to merchants.

The idea of community attachment coupled with Placemaking encourages the community’s form of governance to go beyond focusing on revenue creation for the civic governmental entity’s utilization to the overall economic enhancement of the community as a whole.

Including community attachment as part of the spectrum of community engagement moving along from community attachment to community participation to community engagement and finally to community empowerment also provides an explicit avenue for greater engagement by the members of the community thereby strengthening the establishment of New Community Paradigms.

What is needed is the means to implement a community based system of community governance and expand it to making it function in a viable manner through new technology and concepts in change management and community leadership but that is likely to require first disrupting the current forms of civic institutions of governance.