The Pew Center on Open Data, Whether Half Full or Half Empty, What's the Next Half of the Journey?

This post will be a slight detour from the pathway being taken by the previous two NCP posts concerned with Collective Impact. The Facebook group Open Government and Civic Technology - (The global #opengov group) recently had a post on Americans’ Views on Open Government Data | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and provided different views on the topic.

This brought to mind the past NCP blog post, Open Data as End and Means of Civic Disruptive Innovation, as well as the wiki-page that arose later, Transparency and Open Data in Governance and related blog post, Open Data - Left or Right, Inside or Outside, Works for Creating New Community Paradigms.

The Facebook post was submitted by Alex Howard of @digiphile, who also wrote 15 key insights from the Pew Internet and Life Project on the American public, open data and open government | E Pluribus Unum. According to the Sunlight Foundation Blog's perspective, “New Pew study: Public is optimistic about open government and open data”. In his Civic Innovations blog post, “Hearts and Minds and Open Data” writer Mark Headd wrote that it, "suggests a tremendous opportunity for organizers working in cities across the country to engage people to use data for new apps, services and visualizations." Steven Clift of the E-Democracy Forum and @democracy saw, “this survey as a huge wake up call to #opengov advocates on the #opendata side that the field needs to provide far more useful stuff to the general public and care a lot more about outreach and marketing to reach people with the good stuff already available.” Alex Howard also did a follow-up post, “Half empty or half full? Mixed reactions to Pew research on open data and open government” which extended the variety of perspectives even further.

Whether half full or half empty, it still puts us at being not any more than half way done. The question is being done with what? If it is transforming our means of democracy then this should be seen as nothing more than getting our foot in the door.

It has to be kept in mind that for the most part, especially in terms of truly impactful engagement and empowerment, we are on the outside of often entrenched systems of community governance. Did anybody think that the entrenched systems of bureaucratic, political power would fade away when enough apps became available?

Open data does not mean easily accessible or willingly shared. The need remains to penetrate the walls of entrenched bureaucratic, political systems often putting such efforts, and therefore the needed design focus of app developers, closer to that of community data journalists. This doesn't mean that everyone needs to become a local community data journalist. It does mean creating platforms to move from community data to community information and on to community wisdom, but open data and apps alone will not accomplish that, far deeper systemic transformation is needed

Most of the community and civic related technological innovations have been of the sustaining variety, for the most part sustaining the status quo, making changes on the edges. Significant examples of change can be found, yet for people to reach a tipping point to bring about true transformation, not only what they do but how they do it and why they to it, we need something much closer to disruptive innovations.

That pathway is a much longer haul, still being explored and requiring more steps. It will also require greater use of design thinking, not only to improve the user interface with an app within particular systems, but also within larger scalable, community based, collaborative efforts such as Collective Impact or upcoming The Next Systems Project in deeply understanding the needs of the community.

The Knight Digital Media Center believes that design thinking can develop better solutions for community organizations, especially foundations, and community media. Design thinking as used by design firms such as IDEO and others is based on a human-centered, design-based approach to helping public and private sector organizations innovate and grow.

Design thinking can help community foundations frame the question, “How might we craft information solutions that meet the deepest needs of our community?” It is done, according to the Knight article, “Can design thinking power better solutions for community foundations?”, by diving deep with small groups of people, to really understand their day-to-day behavior, their context, how they feel, what they do and how, instead of talking with a scientifically representative sample. The Stanford University d-school approach makes going even further explicit, drilling down to the individual. Looking for extreme users to understand the experiences of people at the statistical edges is also insightful. “The idea is that people who are in extreme positions one way or the other are exhibiting needs more acutely than the average person,” said Andrew Haeg, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University. “If you can talk to them they're going to help you understand problems that a lot of other people share or help you understand dynamics that are shared by a lot of other people."

The next question is how to apply this to communities? The Incourage Community Foundation’s initial goal of working with the community of Wisconsin Rapids on developing new ways of listening, talking and interacting, to encourage a culture ripe for self-organizing and collective action, was through adaptive skills but the foundation’s work quickly began incorporating design thinking which increased the impact of their work with residents. Applying adaptive skills prepared the ground so that a human-centered design approach created deep roots helping to transform the people and the culture of the place where they worked and lived. As sharing and spreading lessons about the resident-centered process with other organizations was seen as an important objective, a defining question then became: “How do we nurture the demand for information in the community?“

This started my thinking about Alex Howard's response to a Facebook comment with better questions. “A majority of American adults use open data in apps and services but do not realize that they do so. Do people need to be ‘engaged’ to find use in it, even if they're unaware? More broadly, under what conditions would providing access to data created with public funds to the public be a useless idea?"

The last NCP post addressed the need to be 'engaged' question. Apps and services using open data can be applied to all levels of Increasing Engagement (Kumu map). This would also include adding the concept of community attachment to that list. This still leaves open the question as to how to move people up the list to true engagement and beyond to empowerment. There isn't likely to be any sort of tipping point though if those using the apps, those curating the apps, and those designing the apps are focused only on specific grass-top organizations.

For New Community Paradigms, an ideal approach would be a bottom up one endeavoring to build a viable civic network by being able to follow these Tips from Beth Kanter and find local data nerds and build a local data hub, again from | Knight Digital Media Center. While this approach still focuses on grass-top organizations like nonprofits, it does attempt to reach into the community. Kanter's original post suggested setting up something like Chicago CivicWorks' online services, mobile apps, reports, or local services accessed by interactive text messaging and provided 10 strategies for finding volunteers and others to assist with data projects.

There is also the need for better community related content creation that is not only transparent but also factual, meaningful and viable. Again, from the Knight Digital Media Center, Public Lab’s DIY science plugs community into civic decisionmaking. Using low-cost tools, Public Lab is able to inject community knowledge into civic decision-making about local environmental concerns. Public Lab lists scores of DIY citizen projects on its extensive community populated Wiki website. It also puts accessible tools into the hands of the community not only resulting in good solid data being collected the tools themselves become self-replicating and viral through the provision of hand drawn, illustrated guides on how to create them, along with video tutorials walking people through each step of the process of using them to collect data. Open source licensing has also fed into Public Lab’s sudden growth.

By enabling ground up data-based research and communication, by putting the tools, the media platforms and devices into the hands of the community, Public Lab addresses a huge information gap with local governments and the industries whose policies impact the environment that community members can fill? The outcome could be a media campaign, interfacing with journalists or calling for a larger, systematic study of a certain area.

Working towards and attaining all of this in a comprehensive fashion by which it becomes ubiquitous will undoubtedly make things more complex, the challenge is making it all coherently complex, even simple if possible, which means continuing to develop new community paradigms.

Exploring Collective Impact - Community Matters - A Lot

The last blog post, Beginning an Exploration of Collective Impact, began as the title implies, an exploration of the Living Cities' free 5-week e-course on Collective Impact initiatives, and the forum around which they are organized, for including and working with members of the community. This post continues using the Kumu map Living Cities Collective Impact for navigation, expanding on and clarifying that exploration and discovering different ways that it can be connected with what has previously been documented on these pages in discovering New Community Paradigms. 

We can venture back to Week 1: Why Involve Community Members in Collective Impact and the related Living Cities blog post, Why Involve Community in Collective Impact At All?, which leads back to what was discussed in the previous post. Before extending further though we can take another couple of excursions off the directed path, this time to look more closely into the Community Rhythms Toolkit of the Harwood Institute. The Harwood Institute has been featured on these pages before in CommunityMatters knows Harwood and Harwood knows what Matters for the Communities to Change, which is included in the Organizational, Online and Technology Based part of Community Change Agencies wiki-bridge page.

Perhaps more salient information is available in the articles provided by the course, such as found at Roundtable on Community Engagement and Collective Impact, here as related the Stanford Social Innovation Review article. Of particular interest is the quote from the article by Paul Born, president and cofounder of the Tamarack Institute:

In the early days of a collective impact approach, we often find that one of two mistakes is made. One is that we gather only the grasstops. That is, we think somehow it’s about shifting power. So we bring the powerful players into the room. The other mistake, almost as common, is that we don’t engage any of the power players because we’re afraid that it will be perceived as a grasstops initiative.

As Richard Harwood, founder and president of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, observed:

We say we want to put community in collective impact, but we don’t do it. That may be because we are afraid, we don’t want to lose control, or we don’t want to create certain risks, but there are two results. One is that we increase the likelihood that our collective impact will not succeed because there won’t be true community ownership and we won’t be able to mobilize the energies and the public will of our large communities. The other is that we will miss an opportunity.

The Harwood Institute establishes a set of prerequisite conditions through the concept of Community Rhythms: The Five Stages of Community Life, explained here  as a guest blog post, and in more detail through the Harwood Institute Report, Putting Community into Collective Impact. 

We can also take a closer look at the Problem with Community Outreach, through the related Collective Impact Forum blog post, expanded to include the other three posts making up the series Collective Impact in Neighborhood Revitalization. 

Going back then to the Kumu map that displays the tension of choice between Produces Desired Goods and Necessary Functions, as an outcome of institutional government activities, and the challenges in endeavoring to attain a democratic ideal of keeping Citizens at the Heart of the political process, it could be argued that instead of focusing on the establishment of deliberative democracy with citizens at the heart of the process being the goal, that as a third party, non-governmental entity, Living Cities is focusing on necessary production of goods and functions of the community as the goal and is asserting that the involvement of the community is not only beneficial but essential in achieving that goal. The question is how and by what means involved? Our current systems of institutional government over communities, particularly by those seen as being entrenched, often fail in this aspect.

New Community Paradigms has constantly argued for a greater reliance upon direct democratic deliberation in community governance, particularly through the post Of, For, By the People and now Through the People - Community Governance Revisited.

One specific tool of community engagement cited in the IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum is the concept of Deliberative Polling®. The concept of Deliberative Polling® was developed by the Center for Deliberative Democracy  at Stanford University and was featured in the blog post Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities as one of this blog’s first explorations of Deliberative Democracy. This was incorporated, along with similar efforts, into the  People’s Governance in California wiki-page. Entrenched government institutions invariably fail with this aspect as well.

New Community Paradigms is seeking empowerment of community members from the bottom up through deliberative democracy, scaffolded by systems thinking, and other means.  Concerns were therefore expressed regarding the concepts of Increasing Levels of Engagement, between grassroots and grass tops, defined by Living Cities as contrasted with that of Tamarack and the IAP2, as something seemed to be lost in translation. This was mitigated to some extent though through the insights of Max Hardy’s article “How Not to Use the IAP2 Spectrum in Engagement” and the Tamarack report,“Our Growing Understanding of Community Engagement.  

New Community Paradigms or NCP also does not envision ever attaining 100% empowerment, engagement or even participation by all community members. This was acknowledged in the blog post, From Community Attachment to Community Empowerment which discussed the potential relationship created by incorporating the concept of Community Attachment into Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder (as defined here by the Citizens Handbook), a recognized basis for the IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum. NCP borrowed the term Community Attachment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup ‘Soul of a Community’ project.

“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 raises, through a related blog post, another connection of the six degrees of separation type through Della Rucker, Principal of the Wise Economy Workshop. The New Community Paradigms connection in this case was through Looking for Non-Experts to Create New Community Innovations then Make sure They are Disruptive. Della Rucker, more importantly is also EngagingCities’ Managing Editor and had interviewed Ben Hecht, President and CEO of Living Cities, in July of 2013, on civic tech's potential impact on low income populations in the blog post, Transforming Community Systems Through Partners and Tech: Living Cities charts the way forward | EngagingCities.

The NCP blog post before this one also asserted that similarities existed between the Living Cities’ approach and some examples of systems thinking approaches that were featured in System Thinking - Concrete Wants vs Complex Realities as part of the Systems Thinking Certification process. It has to be admitted though that the similarities were seen only from this side and raising them so soon likely goes against the basic rules on how to break the first rule of systems thinking. There isn’t any explicit mention of systems thinking resources until the last module. That resource is the article “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” by Donella Meadows which described a hierarchical structure of interventions to alter the way systems work. As pointed out in the Donella Meadows Institute post, Coming Back to Our Systems Roots, which tells of a move or return to “System Dynamics in Policy Design and Analysis”:

We live in a world of remarkable, adaptable, complex systems. They are inside of us and all around us, from the tiny system of a single cell to the vast systems of the world’s oceans and our global communications networks.

The problem with complex systems, though, is that it turns out we human beings are not much good at recognizing, understanding, or communicating them.

A connecting question then between these two perspectives may provide a better answer on How Can We Recapture the Spirit of Community Engagement that Built America?, which can then be expanded as being at the heart of the work making up the Living Cities' efforts.

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.

Still Looking for Non-Experts to Create New Community Innovations? Look outside City Hall.

The last post was based on an article by Della Rucker of Wise Economy.com, titled Go Find Some Non-Experts. You Probably Need Them.  In the article, she develops the argument that “[P}eople who will come up with creative solutions to solve the world’s biggest problems…will NOT be experts in their fields.”  

Della believes that “we have an enormous supply of non-experts who can “approach challenges with a clean lens, bringing together diverse experiences, knowledge and opportunities. We call them the Public. They know stuff. They’ve done stuff.”

This provided an opportunity to discuss Charles Leadbeater’s concept of pro-amateurs as well as touch upon the concepts of discontinuous innovation and disruptive innovation.  

From a community engagement perspective what was cited were the challenges of implementation in the current political environment of too many city halls using  Sherry R. Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation.  This work was referenced previously in Governance by the Community or Not - Getting with or past City Hall post.  That particular post did not deal with economic development directly, rather it made the case for an ideal future of direct deliberative governance of the community and by the community.  That is not the case here.  

The interaction of the public or members of the community in this scenario may more often require the resources found under the People’s Governance (wiki page) of the New Community Paradigms wiki, which offers resources for direct democratic participation but more often in opposition to an unresponsive institutional government power. 

The ‘public’, cited by Della, is not an extension of city hall or the studio audience for city council meetings.  This public or the community is more properly classified under civil society which can be understood, as can community paradigms, as a set of community relations.  Charles Leadbeater’s pro-amateurs are also at home within this concept of civil society as opposed to professionals which are more a product of institutions.  Both though are needed and the relationship between these two perspectives needs to change from disengaged and even adversarial to open and engaged.  What should be recognized is that there is a difference between governance and government and that the role of government to take on the function of governance arises from civil society.

Even after eliminating any hurdles to democratic participation in economic development issues there are still two challenges that need to be faced.  The first may seem to go against the theory of full democratic participation.  It recognizes though that there is not a clear line occupied by the pro-amateurs sought by Della between what should be done, as decided by the public and how it should be done, as decided by the professionals.  The challenge is accessing not only the pro-amateurs but those best suited to the task.  Trying to do this through a specifically focused selection process is fraught with pitfalls. 

As was pointed out in the previous blog post (and in LinkedIn discussions - I won’t be using anybody’s name in respect of their privacy except for Della)  “large gatherings of laypeople gives more the illusion of participation as no one's given much time to talk or expand on their point beyond a sound-byte's length” the result is being able to predict most non-expert content in advance of the meeting.  In other words, we failed, as a community, to find the means of including those in the public best suited for the job. 

The second challenge is in actually achieving any of the lofty goals set by this process. Staff is made responsible for realizing the goals established in these city sponsored studies or strategic plans.  Otis White of Civic Strategies, explains in his article Why the Goals of Citizen Engagement Are Not What You Think why it is that public meetings often fail to bring about the results desired. 

“I know local government officials well enough to know some of their secrets. And here’s one: Many don’t really believe in citizen engagement. Or, if they do believe in it, they don’t think it actually works.”

In the article, he explains more fully why and he should be heeded because he, like Della, has worked to advance greater involvement and empowerment by the public in economic development.

One of his past creations was the Map of Community Change series on community transformation.  The “map of community change” provides a process of community engagement consisting of three phases - Discussion, Planning and Decision.

Which means that it not only focuses on the democratic creation of economic development policy but it also looks toward implementation to achieve a successful outcome.  Beyond allowing everyone to have their say, the process still has to really accomplish creating jobs and generating revenue for the community.  It may seem to be at cross purposes, it is though an unavoidable responsibility if we are to fully realize the potential of our communities. 

In the Map of Community Change series he explains:

“The better way: Begin talking with citizens before plans are drafted, perhaps even before problems are identified. By doing so, you’ll get a calmer dialogue and a much better sense of interests and desires. (I’ll talk about how to do this in a future posting.) And keep citizens involved at every step in the planning stage. Here is the key concept: Citizen engagement is not an event (a town-hall meeting, a public forum, or a “My City 101” class, and certainly not a public hearing or public-comment period); it is a process.”

Based on the nature of most local government public meetings, who does get tied into are frustrated citizens who end up mistaking as one economic development professional put it, “symptoms for causes, anomalies for patterns, cycles for one-time events.”

Who is not reached are the disengaged of the community, at least those disengaged from city hall and civic discourse.  These so-called “Disengaged people in the community are often especially rich with insights as to what could be done, why many things haven't worked that should have, and often what the noisy elite in the community are ignoring,..”  They are, in truth, often deeply engaged within the life of the community existing outside of city hall. “The deeply engaged people in the community also have all kinds of ideas, see a lot of potential that they're often actively developing, and notice what resources and people are missing (implementation puts that in much sharper relief.)“

Some see another challenge in that communities arguably include a middle group, within the population, who are seemingly completely self-absorbed and have little passion or interest about anything that isn't very, very obviously to their personal benefit or detriment...the folks who complain about shopping and dining, lack of health care professionals, home prices, lack of entertainment they can passively consume or costly facilities for their hobby of the moment, taxes in general, etc.“

Della, to her credit, is not ready to write off this segment of the population as having no thoughts beyond their own self-interest.  “I think folks of that type are definitely out there, but I think it's a much smaller proportion who truly cannot or will not get past that.” 

This raises the question then as to different levels of community involvement and community engagement.  Through this effort, I have discerned three levels of community involvement.  

The first, to which many of this middle group likely belong, is community attachment as defined by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup Soul of the Community project that sought to determine what attaches people to their communities. 

While this level may not get people to city hall meetings, the project did demonstrate a strong correlation with economic prosperity.  However, as a previous post, Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms, stated:

“Good economics and finance are essential to the sustainability of a city but they are not the soul of the community and do not make up all of that community's wealth.  Neither was the leadership of city hall.  This was demonstrated in the one Southern California city included in Knight Soul of the Community Study - Long Beach, California..” 

Ratings of the local economy increased in 2010; however, the economy is still not a key factor emotionally connecting residents to their communities. Perception of local leadership is rated lower in 2010, but it is not a key driver in attaching residents to Long Beach.

This means that while this group may be the hardest to reach, they cannot be ignored. If  nobody has a reason to be attached to your community, then you are already fighting a losing battle. If they are attached but uninvolved, then you better understand how and why so that you don’t do something to loose them completely. 

The second level is community participation which can be anything from attending community fairs to serving on various city council appointed commissions.  This group does attend city hall meetings but is often in the group of so-called experts that are as much or more a part of the problem as they are any possible solution or are enmeshed well enough into the system that any opposition they raise to the status quo can be easily diverted. They are also the ones most likely to be recruited in to taking a new approach to community building and economic development empowerment.

The final level is true community engagement. These are community members engaging at the level of Citizen Control, envisioned by Arnstein, at which they are truly involved and empowered.  Find the means to access the knowledge and experience of the pro-amateurs within the community and empower the community to fully realize that potential and you have a formidable economic development engine. 

Finding the soul of your community and the reason to create your own community paradigms

In the last post, Placemaking - for communities the canvas becomes the art, we began exploring the concept of  Place and Placemaking from the perspective of  Project for Public Spaces or PPS and similar organizations.

Placemaking, was defined by PPS as both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region.  The linked to site went on to say of Placemaking:

Put simply, it involves looking at, listening to, and asking questions of the people who live, work and play in a particular space, to discover their needs and aspirations. This information is then used to create a common vision for that place.

The New Community Paradigm Places wikipage  which will serve as a depository for community resources on Place was also introduced.  Community Places, was examined in the last post.  This post will deal with what has been described as the  Soul of a Community.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Gallup joined forces and following an approach similar to PPS studied cities across the country to determine what attaches people to their communities by launching the Knight Soul of the Community project in 2008.  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:

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

The same three answers apply to cities across the country as shown by the Vimeo video below An Explanation of Community Attachment - Soul of the Community Project.




What is even more interesting is that these three aspects which provide for Residential or Community Attachment also have a strong correlation with economic prosperity.  By studying the 26 individual cities that participated in the study, it is possible to determine what steps can be taken to replicate the same results.  The study showed both good and opportunities for improvement in each city. Each city had a its own story to tell. The stories were of place and, more importantly, the stories were of people and how they interacted with the place they called their community.

From the Aberdeen post:

Despite its high ratings of resident caring, social offerings remains a challenge area for Aberdeen, specifically in the areas of local night life and arts and cultural events. This must be addressed as these areas are particularly important to young people. Over the past three years of the study, Aberdeen has made significant gains in attaching young people 18-34 years old to the community. Imagine what could be possible with more attention to these aspects of social offerings.

From the Corpus Christi post:

The comments I had read in the article announcing the presentation flooded my mind as I stood facing what seemed to be a completely different crowd that night. And I worried about deflating that crowd with my honest response. But I said, “It seems to me that some of you, and I’m not sure if you’re in this room, but some of you are stuck in place.”

The Soul of the Community study helps identify new approaches to help create transformational change and new possibilities for continued progress, in other words it helps in creating new community paradigms.  A community can use the study’s findings to help optimize the strengths of their community and address the challenge of improving of areas community attachment thereby potentially increasing local economic growth.


This effort' to create new community paradigms began by looking at economic development in working to create Liveable Cities through Liveanomics.  The relationship of community attachment to economic development in the Soul of the Community Study provides particular relevance for this effort by going beyond the recent economic crisis as the study's findings can help leaders include new ideas into the existing economic rebuilding and development conversation.

Good economics and finance are essential to the sustainability of a city but they are not the soul of the community and do not make up the all of that community's wealth.  This was demonstrated in the one Southern California city included in Knight Soul of the Community Study - Long Beach, California..

Ratings of the local economy increased in 2010; however, the economy is still not a key factor emotionally connecting residents to their communities. Perception of local leadership is rated lower in 2010, but it is not a key driver in attaching residents to Long Beach.

To increase its community wealth, Long Beach added to its own natural assets of good weather and relaxed Southern California attitude by investing in high-quality bicycle infrastructure and encouraging bike-related businesses.

Long Beach according to PPS offers charisma according to their online article How Charismatic Is Your City? showing that there is more to a community than just the city budget and that investments into the livability of the community can have a long term return on that investment.  Charlie Gandy, mobility coordinator of the city of Long Beach, California talks about his city and what they have done to enhance their charisma for the members of the community and others in this TEDx. video.