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. 

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 with the Dialogue, Deliberation and Systemic Transformation Community to Discover New Possibilities Part 3 of 3

In addition to the World Cafe platforms participated within, as described in the last two blog posts, part 1 and part 2, I also participated in three of the fifteen Open Space conversations that were initiated by others, OS Topic 5: Super-ordinate Goals, How do we understand the system that is changing?, and A Supersaturated Theory of Change. Due to the complex nature of the questions being pursued, metaphors played an important role in getting ideas across. Complexity was itself a key issue and often necessitated metaphors to assist in making the concepts coherent.

The first interaction' on January 13, 2015, was OS Topic 5: Super-ordinate Goals.  The description for the goal was, "What  super-ordinate goal could replicate across the collective set of value systems, and act as a "guiding star" for systemic transformation?” It was presented by Ben L. as, "What everyone wants, but no one entity can do themselves." Ben was one of those who introduced me to Spiral Dynamics.

Heather T., back this time as we had both independently selected for this particular topic, spoke of "Healthy Human/Healthy Planet" as a possibility.  Heather sought out nature metaphors or analogies, as in acorns ‘become' oak trees. I suggested birds moving in a ‘flock' introducing the idea of complexity, which others saw as extending to living human/living earth allowing for seeing ‘both/and’ while moving away from ‘either/or’.

I again introduced an alternative concept, as a means rather than a goal, that I have been shaping for some time.

“Clayton Christiansen's idea of Disruptive Innovation might be applicable to social change. "From scarcity to abundance" (again, as asserted here and here) as another frame that might bring people into the fold. People are so scared of financial and environmental disasters, that they don't want to act.”

Another challenging perspective which with I could agree was developed by Stephanie Jo K based on Hans Rosling’s TED Talk, The Best Stats You've Ever Seen. 

As she said, he says, “The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized, and it's not relevant to have it on regional level. We must be much more detailed. We find that students get very excited when they can use this."  She then goes on,

“The point being twofold, (a) our misconceptions are probably thick, and (b) what will motivate people not only metaphorically but literally depends on their lived social reality. If one starts from above (the example Hans Rosling gives is wealth), no significant or automatic improvement in the baseline (in this case, health). You must invest in the ground, in the local, and-most importantly from within the local context in order to participate in processes leading to tangible change.”

For the January  25th, the Open Space conversation, I participated in “How do we understand the system that is changing?”, led by Chris S.  

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Once again helped with scribing and editing while at the same time participating but this time there was a greater intermix between the iterations of what I wrote on behalf of what others had said, and what others wrote on what I had said, creating something new that I would not have come up with solely on my own. 

The conversation appealed to Complexity Theory as a means of expressing a complex view of what is changing, what fails. Metaphors were still an essential component of communicating complex ideas. 

One was a metaphor of being together in the boat, trusting people to be mutually dependent. Having others seeing what we cannot. A River metaphor, used in the session's introductory remarks by Mark Dubois, co-founder of Friends of the River and the International Rivers Network, was used for expressing the inclusion of, ‘various agents, obstacles, currents taking us in a direction, navigating by strength or dancing with the river. See different parts of the river depending upon where you are.’

Taking a more empirical, data driven perspective, I pointed out that both the Economist Intelligence Unit and Harvard Business Review had also warned of the impact of complexity upon our societies.

This did not, however, result in any divergence. It was still apparent that our values are, “…being shaken and bruised our values are speaking to us.  Old, old of unstructured times transformed into, old, more recent of structured - Newton - reductionism - industrial - complicated to a new way trying to impose order on the emerging more complex world.  Today, what we Need is a new new way that embraces complexity and seeks coherence within complexity.”

As has been previously asserted, complexity, as it relates to us, can come in two different forms, incoherent (where we feel powerless) and coherent (where we can see a dance path).

As Chris S pointed out, it is the synthesis of the different ways of understanding systems that can lead us to the elements of storytelling which can help to define complexity in a manner similar to what makes a great story. Stories can help make our complex world coherent.

In what ways is this problem complex?

1 Many interacting “agents”

2 Individuals and processes influence each other in feedback loops

3 Reactions may be affected by current and past circumstances

4 Influenced by the external environment

5 Events have multiple causes and multiple effects

6 Large events can have small effects and small events can have large effects

7 Events emerge in surprising ways, spontaneously in the absence of a “controller”

8 Events display a complicated mix of ordered and disordered behaviour

9 It is an emotional Issue

Returning to the metaphor of a river, it was recognized that there was a need for, "balance between structure and flow - creating just enough structure so that flow can happen." "Leadership/Direction and personal empowerment/self-discovery - Having just enough leadership so that others are not disempowered."

I pointed out though that flow can potentially change structure. Citing a recent and relevant point made by Gene Bellinger in a different forum, "The riverbanks govern the flow of the river until the next flood when the river redefines where it wants to flow."

"World also feels and appears more incoherent when pressures build up. On the river, instincts say lean away from the wave but truth is to lean into it to get through."

Being an apparently diverse group, another perspective raised was that of an Operational Risk Management insight: problems reveal connections usually hidden. The lesson, we miss connections that are needed. One can never dig into too deep into the systems.

The last set of interactions I had with the DDST Community was A Supersaturated Theory of Change lead by Ben Roberts, followed by a Live conversation with Ben, Brian and Jock as a follow-up to 1/25 Open Space Session.  The conversations were again based on a metaphor, this time one based on chemistry. This particular conversation demonstrated that the good thing about metaphors is that they are open and susceptible to interpretation, the bad thing about metaphors is that they are open and susceptible to interpretation.  I fluctuated in my affinity with this specific metaphor but regardless, Ben was able to generate a good deal of relevant resources suggested by it. 

Opportunities for supersaturating solutions now

• Lessig's May Day campaign?
• Bringing top Down and Bottom-up leadership together
• Business Alliance for the Future
• Appreciative Inquiry opportunity
• Participatory Budgeting
• A trans-local opportunity
• Climate Justice Alliance & Divest/Reinvest (out of fossil fuels and into the "new      economy")

The journey created traveling along these pathways doesn’t end here. This was only one pathway that happened to be transversed by me. There were dozens of different ones taken by others and even more possible. This search for possibility travelogue only touched upon the surface.  My own journey though, for now, will end with Harvesting Pad 11: Brian G. Dowling (which no longer links to the correct map)

Exploring with the Dialogue, Deliberation and Systemic Transformation Community to Discover New Possibilities Part 2 of 3

Continuing the tour of the engagement with the Dialogue, Deliberation, and Systemic Transformation Community from the last blog post, December 15, 2014, DDST Community World Cafe had 6 spaces for the second round of conversations. I was assigned to Round 2 to Room 27 to continue by addressing the question, "What would keep you coming back?” 

The initial and guiding thought came from Ben K, “I would have to see action and progress - one of the Achilles heels of this kind of thing is a lot of talk - when talk is detached from action, it's detached from reality”, to which I wrote and came to believe that we needed, "More insights - we need action, but sometimes we need spaces that give us a sense of connectedness and foundation - the change we're going for is so large, that we'll need that connectedness to help us reach the tipping point." 

Also agreed with others who called for the need to, "Transcend the duality - Iteration and integration between talk and action. What of our actions have worked, and what have not worked? Blue sky thinking valuable, risk of getting stuck in it, thus the need for integration.”  Also, the need to, "Be in ‘dialogue' with the world/reality."

For myself, the primary inspiration was the possibility of collective thinking bringing people together to face wicked challenges through both our technology and our deeper understanding of community and change. Crucial to that success though was learning how to govern our communities without being entrenched in our current systems of government institutions and political power.

The next World Cafe session on January 6, 2015, increased to a total 20 separate spaces for conversations and went for three rounds. Round One Room 14 for World Cafe discussed the assigned topic, "What is alive in you that could pay a role in what we need to discover and do?" which was a bit touchy-feely for my taste. In the conversation, I admitted to being, “More comfortable with ‘hard’ system practices such as visual diagrams...using Causal Loop Diagram and other relational  maps and finding ways to bring hard and soft practices together in community governance venues/practices.”

The touchy-feely aspect came forward more so with, "The energetic vibration of love. Curiosity...engaged in a research project on ‘love'--finding the language of love--seems like ‘love' is following me." , put forward by fellow DDST community member Heather T., who called herself and seemed a definite INFP, and who was interested in creating a thriving, resilient local food system. 

Heather, although coming from a  noticeably different psychological perspective zeroed in on what I also saw as one of the primary challenges facing us. She raised the issue, “How do we speak to the differences we are (e.g., Meyer-Briggs, etc.) or other ‘groups’ (e.g., Tea Partiers)?” and later “Am sensing something biased by personal choices--seeing opportunities that are showing up and the ‘larger’ crises; seeing my connections and where I have traction. How to invite/relate to those who are ‘different’; see who shows up in front of me as ‘different'...don't go looking for them—“

From my own vantage point, I contributed that, “Empirical evidence shows that attempting to convince people that they are wrong in their views only makes them hold on to them all the more firmly. Our current systems, especially in political governance is competitive, winner take all.  As Linda says, (in prior introductory comments) many feel unable to contribute because they don't see themselves as experts, a perspective often encouraged by institutions. “  

For Round Two Room 20 for World Cafe on Jan 6, 2015, the topic was: 

Imagine collaborating on some thrilling initiative that is making the difference we most need...  

As each round of a World Cafe brings new people together, I mentioned again being a retired redevelopment project manager, this time though to assert some credibility in stating that many practices by governments were detrimental to community governance and that I was instead looking for more participative community paradigms. 

The conversation turned to the concept of WE space. Heinz  P., a German living in Canada asserted, “The WE space will tell us what to do”. To which Rachel E. asked, “Can you unpack WE space?” 

It involved, we were told, inviting higher consciousness to see from where the calling was based on an (EVOLUTIONARY COLLECTIVE) that we are going into as a whole system, space which wants to evolve. New ways of doing things have to come from that space, not individual space.

This raised some others of my ongoing perspectives.

“We try to create new systems but entrenched systems must be addressed at the same time. Find systems of disruptive innovation to move from scarcity to abundance (as asserted here and here). Clayton Christensen at Harvard has a theory with commonalities. Systems of control and power that have a pretense of democracy need to come up with new ways to break the stranglehold. Not just disruptive but also innovative to give people power they need to make changes.”

Heinz raised the possibility of, “Working nonlinearly? Unexpected possibility not normally available to us?”

My response, “Yes, entrenched manipulative power keeping things from changing can be overcome by means which creativity is opened up ... creation and destruction seem to go together…"

Heinz, “Creating, which I'm excited about. Shiva is creative and destructive at same time. by dancing!”  Which the group seemed to agree was a "Great metaphor for complexity."

Jeff A. introduced us to the, "Two Loops model by Meg Wheatley and Deborah Freize and friends has great value for people understanding the systems change that they are in, and how to be allies with others who are working in different aspects of the old system dying and a new system emerging." It is explained more fully here by this Two Loops: How Systems Change video and is based on the Berkana Institute Our Theory of Change arising from the article Lifecycle of Emergence - Using Emergence to Take Social Innovations to Scale, by Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze, 2006.

Round Three Room 31 for World Cafe on Jan 6th, 2015 asked, ”Sensing into everything you've said and heard, what's taking shape here?"  

Neither I nor Heather T., who ended up again with me in this round, were as of yet not seeing what's taking shape as it was so big and complex and would we felt take a few days of reflection. I am still reflecting.  

Unfortunately, I  had to miss the January 29, World Cafe for DandDTrans. There were two conceptual bridges used to begin to tie together the diverse variety of ideas presented so far. The graph below taken from The World Cafe by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, and Fungi as a metaphor for DandDTrans, created by Ben Roberts, who was the primary force behind the DDST Community.  Metaphor played an essential part throughout the engagement.

Art as a Path of Social Disruptive Innovation Towards New Community Paradigms

One source of the material for this blog’s posts is LinkedIn group discussions in which I participate or follow. A common theme across two different types of LinkedIn groups, the Community Engagement group and the Economic Development Professionals group, regarding the role of the arts in communities was recently noted. The perspectives and approaches are different but can be tied together under new community paradigms.

A Community Engagement question was, What's the impact of community art projects? A common response to this question leans towards finding the right metrics in terms of economic impact. However, as a result of new resources added to the New Community Paradigms Community Arts wiki-page, I now believe that focus is limited, that we make a mistake if we only think of integrating art and especially artistic thinking into our systems of community as window dressing for our economic development activities. We should instead be looking to art as a means of transforming and invigorating not only our economic development activities but also our community design and community governance as well.

Perceiving these connections was not mere chance, though. The unrealized contribution that art could make to creating new paradigms for our communities has become more credible over time and is not a solitary perspective. Paul Nagle, Executive Director of Cultural Strategies Initiative left a comment regarding this blog's post The Problem with the Future is Getting There and It will need Disruptive Innovation, "We totally agree with your thesis and we are working to put it into practice.” Cultural Strategies Initiative or CSI sees art being key to not only human expression and human thought but also to education, economies, community development, and innovation in technology. All factors of importance to the creation of new community paradigms.

"At CSI, we create project partnerships to demonstrate and measure how arts operate in promoting sustainability and resiliency. Our projects always target the same outcome: empower the arts and humanity.”

This suggests that art has the potential of establishing a path for sustainable disruption while at the same time going beyond sustaining innovation. Art could help communities face wicked challenges by moving towards being entities of complex collaboration and away from being ensnared by entrenched city halls through bureaucratic-like institutions of complicatedness.

It was interactions with other LinkedIn colleagues that led to EmcArts, a social enterprise for learning and innovation in the arts. Although they primarily serve as a nonprofit intermediary for many arts funders, and as a service organization for the arts field around innovation, from my perspective, they could also offer insights that would strengthen the capacities and effectiveness of all types of community nonprofits and other change agents, not just arts and cultural organizations. They could provide lessons in the design and management of innovative change, and assist communities in building their adaptive capacity.

One potentially useful resource for communities is ArtsFwd.org, a creation of the EmcArts Activating Innovation Initiative. Their latest accomplishments include a National Innovation Summit for Arts & Culture from October of last year that featured powerful thematically linked 12-minute Talks by bold leaders from across the country that highlighted the remarkable and mostly untold stories of innovative projects unfolding in arts and culture organizations. These included - Taking Collective Action, Co-Creating with the Public, Artists as Agents of Change, Animating Neighborhoods, Citizenship and the Arts and Transforming Organizational Structure. The creation of Fueling Adaptive Capacity: A Mosaic of Learning from the 2013 National Innovation Summit was an outcome of the summit, which you can download and read. As well as this report that describes their accomplishments over the last two years.

The contribution of meaningful real-world solutions that art can make towards community challenges, such as gentrification by exploring complex challenges around themes of scope, capacity, and constituency, was demonstrated by Fourth Arts Block, an organization supporting a rich arts community on the Lower East Side of New York and beyond.

Since its founding in 2001, FABnyc has made huge strides in the East 4th Street Cultural District by securing property ownership rights for arts groups in eight buildings on the block between the Bowery and Second Avenue, by providing free and low-cost rehearsal space and training programs for artists, and by serving as a centralized resource for its several arts, cultural, community member organizations.

This cannot be a one-way contribution or one-sided conversation, though. Communities seeking to create new community paradigms need to make a place at the table for this type of thinking. Artistic thinking should be added to design thinking and systems thinking as means of generating public and community innovation. Design thinking can help ensure that artistically inspired endeavors properly focus on important community needs and systems thinking can help in understanding the impact on the larger environment. Artistic thinking though can help reach deeper insights, generate more ideas and seep into the community's fabric so that its influence becomes one more of dispersion within a complex community system rather than a transfer of information from one institution to another. Richard Evans, President, EMCARTS INC contributes insights with the Debunking 10 Myths of Innovation that could be of great benefit to communities.

An artistic perspective should not be left to the end but made foundational in community design through design thinking, systems thinking, and other approaches. A number of other organizations are able to tie an artistic mindset to community-related concerns, Art VULUPS does so with geography, environmental science, land use planning, sustainability, art and creativity concepts. Animating Democracy, a project of Americans for the Arts helps to identify, develop, and advocate for public and private sector policies, practices, funding, and initiatives that advance the role of the arts in fostering citizen participation and social change. They work to better integrate the talents of artists and cultural organizations toward helping people engage in civic and community life.

By establishing a trend away from massively subsidized development projects to broader-based efforts such as economic gardening, communities open up opportunities for a more community based and artistic approach to building, landscaping and public space related to Community Placemaking. These efforts could be enhanced through what the National Endowment for the Arts terms Community Placemaking. Our Town NEA works to improve America’s communities by engaging design and leveraging the arts to create livable, sustainable neighborhoods with enhanced quality of life, increased creative activity, distinct identities, a sense of place, and vibrant local economies that capitalize on existing local assets.

Another Community Engagement group LinkedIn discussion provides more empirical evidence that the Arts make a real difference to communities through the report, The value of arts and culture to people and society – an evidence review from the Arts Council (England).

Another discussion under the Economic Professionals group provides a more definitive assertion of the economic impact of art based on an article Arts and culture contribute more to the US economy than tourism, and with added insight from the Preliminary Report on Impact of Arts and Culture on U.S. Economy | NEA released by the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts. These are only preliminary assessments of the impact of an economy produced by a creative community but now that we are measuring it instead of ignoring it more of the same can be expected in the future.

A revolution has already started but it won't only be an economic one, it will be creative in multiple ways. People are already working to make a difference. They may not always realize that they are fighting the same battle as people from other sectors of the community and are therefore not alone. We need to start learning from each other, community planners, entrepreneurs whether business or social, community activists and artists all need to learn from each other. Our communities need to engage in more than one type of thinking to meet the wicked challenges ahead and no one person or group of persons alone will be able to create the new community paradigms that are needed without extensive within-the-community collaboration.

Code for America moving Beyond Transparency to Civic Disruptive Innovation?

Last month the post Open Data as End and Means of Civic Disruptive Innovation continued to reassess the potential of Code for America as a viable agent for change in light of the previously made statement that it basically creates sustaining innovations rather than truly disruptive innovations.

Since then there has been an increasing appreciation for the role that Code for America could have in the future in implementing disruptive innovation of the public sector by elements of the civic arena.  The question is how to incorporate such a possibility within a new community paradigms endeavor.

It is the publishing of Code for America's recent print and e-book Beyond Transparency; Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation that holds the most promise but to what degree that promise will be met is still an open question both inside and outside of the organization, reaching a level of disruptive innovation is yet another matter.

Before getting to Beyond Transparency, it is necessary to first get to basic transparency or the establishment of open data by government. This was covered by a Code of America panel Open Data - Getting Started wiki-page on the New Community Paradigms wiki.  The Open Data - Getting Started panel discussed how to get communities to adopt and establish open data policies and practices.  As was noted in the Open Data as End and Means of Civic Disruptive Innovation, "The discussion, at one level, reenforced the perspective that Code for America was for the most part a source of sustaining innovation.  On another level, it helped to plant the seeds for innovation applied through what can be termed disruptive design."

First, let's establish that Code for America is primarily geared towards hackers, using that term in the best and widest sense. What Code for America does is for the benefit of communities or the people living in those communities, usually through local government institutions, but the main body of people engaged in Code for America are hackers. 

Code for America has its own community online, which is to be expected, or more accurately communities, all of which seem loosely organized. Code for America Brigade has a Google Group with at last count 1910 members which discusses among themselves such topics as how city size affects city open-data-ness? More relevant for later in this post, Mark Head discusses Open Data and "Exoproduction" based on his blog post on the same topic. Code for America Brigade features specific geographic locations like Code for Los Angeles with 54 registered civic hackers at last count. Overall organization seems amorphous in structure though not in purpose.  

Code for America does connect with other online democratic efforts such as the E-Democracy forum extending into the public square online or with the even more on the ground efforts of CNU Public Square. They are teaming up with Code for America, through MindMixer, to talk about how to use technology to improve the way governments and citizens work together through a nationwide call for ideas — Ideation Nation. Non-hackers can to interact with Code for America through the online newsletter #Meta Sights and Sounds from Code for America. The November issue provided a chance to Advocate for open data through an article by Tim O’Reilly, What’s Really At Stake in Better Interfaces to Government and a Book Review: Beyond Transparency by Susannah Vila. 

Vila recognizes that Beyond Transparency could be an important, but still early step in broad based community based civic innovation.

Beyond Transparency is a milestone for the civic innovation community both because it codifies what’s been learned and delineates what has not yet been learned. As Goldstein, the former CTO of Chicago and co-editor of the book, said recently, the civic innovation community now needs “to launch past to the next step, we have made good work, but there’s a lot more to do...how do we do government as smart as we do other sectors? That should be our challenge.”

The participants in the Beyond Transparency - Meet the Authors video Featured in Beyond Transparency - Code for America wiki-page of the New Community wiki also addressed the issue, both from the idealism of advocacy and the pragmatism of creating viable public programs.

Steve Spiker, @spjika author of CHAPTER 9 Oakland and the Search for the Open City talked about the human aspect of open data and extending it into other social areas that are not currently using open data. "Design can take open data to a different level by  providing information to the public in a different ways then when the government controlled all the data from a single point.", according to Cyd Harrell, Code for America author of CHAPTER 12 The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship: Data and Design in Innovative Citizen Experiences.  Greg Bloom, @greggish, author of CHAPTER 19 Towards a Community Data Commons, spoke of discovering and making available civic resources outside of government.

John Bracken of the Knight Foundation and author of CHAPTER 20 The Bigger Picture: Ten Lessons for Taking Open Government Further put forward two focuses, first news and information and second community. "Think past the progress we've made and think a little bit about the gaps where we really haven't made progress." Bracken also expressed the desire to move beyond the hopeful Idealistic stage to a more practical heavy lifting door-to-door level of work. John Fry of Revelstone, co-author of CHAPTER 18 Benchmarking Performance Data believes, "You can progress by sharing your information with others." And that "Sharing information with the public in a meaningful way can actually get you to the goals that you want." Jonathan Feldman Chief Information Officer City of Asheville, North Carolina and author of CHAPTER 5 Asheville’s Open Data Journey: Pragmatics, Policy, and Participation expressed the perspective that you need vendors and the market place because you can't do it by your self. 

Finally, Mark Head, Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia, blogger at CIVIC INNOVATIONS  and author of CHAPTER 21 New Thinking in How Governments Deliver Services, discussed dealing with information technology procurement being situated in between raw data and community hacked apps as explained in Open Data and "Exoproduction" blog post cited above.

Nancy Scola, in her Next City article, Beyond Code in the Tomorrow City asked Jennifer Pahlka, the organization’s founder and executive director, to pinpoint what might be the most relevant criticism of Code for America.  “

You can’t,” Pahlka says, “solve the world’s problems through apps.”  “No, of course you can’t,” she continues, on the potential for apps to save the universe. “But you can start a dialogue. You can figure out ways that give people new tools and get them re-excited about government. You can give people opportunities to be the agents of culture change.” 

Scola goes on to write, “In fact, asking what happens to the apps post-fellows leads us to a critical, if behind-the-scenes, debate about the future of Code for America. It boils down to whether the non-profit will be most successful if it focuses on refining its often rough-hewn apps or, instead, what seems to be its raison d‘être circa 2013: Rallying others around the government innovation flag.”

Rallying around the government innovation flag would be a good start but that would only be at best government blessed rebellions and what is needed is something closer to a revolution, not a violent one through the disruption of force but one made possible through the disruption of innovation.  As was observed in the Open Data as End and Means of Civic Disruptive Innovation post,

Moving to open data can be more though than a means of providing an online community-based infrastructure allowing for future innovation. The establishment of an open data platform could help move an institution from a system of centralized, complicated-oriented, mechanistic control system to a more open complex adaptive system.  

That would greatly increase the likelihood for civic disruptive innovation and enhance our ability to meet the wicked challenges facing our communities.