We the Goverati

For the next few months I’ll be working with Community Matters to host a series of conference calls on Open Government. These calls will specifically focus on implementation of Open Government in cities and towns across the country, and the content of the calls will be driven by the participants.

The goal is to get beyond talking about big ideas and start focusing on overcoming some of the more pervasive implementation challenges people are facing.

The conference calls will be run in a case-study method, with participants on the call responding to the challenges presented. This is a unique and effective learning method, and we hope that it will help support people in project implementation.

We are currently soliciting cases, so if you have a project or challenge you’d like to discuss on one of the three upcoming Open Gov calls, please fill out this form and tell us more about it. We’ll select one or more projects to focus on for each call. If you’d like to join the call but don’t have a specific case to share, you can register here.

We are lucky enough to have Dustin Haisler joining us on our next call on Thursday, January 27th at 4pm. Dustin is the former Assistant City Manager and CIO for the CIty of Manor, TX and is currently the Director of Government Innovation for Spigit. Needless to say, Dustin has plenty of implementation experience, and is looking forward to discussing your cases on the call. If you would like your project to be included in this upcoming conference call, please respond by Friday, January 14th with your case: http://bit.ly/gov20casestudy

All are welcome, and you can also for the calls here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/confcallreg

If you’d like more information about the conference call series, please see the community matters website: http://www.communitymatters.org/conference-calls

Thanks!

Yasmin

Two giants in the education reform movement have called it quits in the last month – Michelle Rhee, DC Schools Chancellor (and Kennedy School Alum), and Joel Klein, NYC Schools Chancellor.

Both of these people were/are tireless leaders, and I am proud to say that I worked at the NYC Department of Education from 2005-2008.

However, as they both prepare to leave their respective positions, its appropriate to think about how their replacements can carry on the great work that they’ve done in reforming their schools, and what opportunities new leadership may bring. While many in the reform community laud the work of both of these leaders, they left many feeling disenfranchised from the process.

In DC, Mayor Fenty took major heat for Rhee’s lack of collaboration, and many pundits credit her approach with Fenty’s loss.

In fact, Mayor Gray has indicated that he is interested in increasing participation in the reforms. His Education Plan includes promises to increase “Transparency, Accountability, and Sound Management” as well as support “Collaborative, Innovative, and Involved Leadership” which includes continuing the reforms while giving more power to the community.

This is a good thing for education reforms in DC, as increasing participation has the potential to lead to more sustainable change. However, any public participation process should be rooted in the theory and research around participation in order to ensure that the work is meaningful and impactful.

As Mayor Gray thinks about how to structure an increase in civic engagement, I wanted to offer some advice to help ensure that any participatory processes he selects are responding to actual concerns in the education reform movement and are also grounded in participation theory and best practice.

EDUCATION REFORM AND A LACK OF PUBLIC PARTICIPATION

Critics often talk about how dogmatic and bullish Michelle Rhee was during her tenure as chancellor of DC public schools. Although his reputation wasn’t severe, people definitely criticized him (his approval ratings were often in the 20s) about excluding families and teachers from the reform process.

So what are people upset about? Contemporary Education Reformers of the Rhee-Klein-Duncan brand are typically singularly focused closing the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap in our schools as measured by student performance on standards-based assessments in English and math. They tend to prefer market based approaches to reform that focus on teacher quality, including promoting merit based pay usually through a value-add model,, doing away with automatic tenure,  supporting charter schools as a way to give students and parents alternatives to the public school system (and also to create competition w/public schools under the assumption that this will increase their quality), supporting rigorous accountability based on standardized tests scores, and closing or restructuring schools that repeatedly fail. These favored reforms have been ushered through across the country with the support of federal initiatives and legislation such as No Child Left Behind (initiated during President GW Bush’s tenure) and Race to the Top (initiated during President Obama’s first year in office).

There is not doubt that reform needed to happen in both cases. The systems were both in disarray, and were failing kids. The Education Equality Project lists states that “The huge difference in academic performance between students from different economic circumstances and racial/ethnic backgrounds is what we call the achievement gap.”

“by 4th grade, African-American and Latino students are, on average, nearly three academic years behind their white peers

Only 10% of students at Tier 1 colleges (146 most selective) come from the bottom half of the income distribution

Barely half of African-American, Latino, and Native American students graduate from high school, with African American students graduating at 54%, Latinos at 56%, Native Americans at 51% and their white counterparts at 77%

The average student eligible for free/reduced lunch is approximately two years of learning behind the average ineligible student”

However, the way that they approached reform was alienating. Michelle Rhee said at the 2008 Aspen Institute’s Education Summit at the Mayflower Hotel that “if there is one thing I have learned over the last 15 months, it’s that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.”

I understand Michelle’s frustration here – the system was failing for years, and she needed to cut through a lot of dysfunction in order to make radical and much needed change in a short time frame. She had an economic and social justice imperative to fix the schools quickly, and collaboration isn’t always the best strategy for creating change. She had a clear vision for what needed to happen, and they pushed it through and sometimes large scale participatory action is not the most effective strategy.

However, for all the improvements she may have made, there were many community members who felt extremely marginalized by her approach. And although you cannot create change without offending some people, its important to hear their concerns from a procedural perspective. When the success of your change requires the cooperation of the very people you are cutting out of the process + your boss’s reelection you will have a serious implementation and sustainability problem if you do not have proper participation mechanisms in place.

If the new DC Public Schools Chancellor (whether Kaya Henderson – the current Interim Chancellor – or someone else) is going to continue the reforms she started, he/she is going to have to do a much better job of engaging teachers, parents, and students in the process, and support them throughout periods of massive change.

POLITICAL THEORY ON PUBLIC PARTICIPATION^[1]

Luckily, literature regarding the best practices and values that motivate a participatory approach to public decision-making now spans almost forty years worth of critique of liberal democratic tradition, and can be used to support an increase in participation. Authors ranging from Jurgen Habermas to Carole Pateman and Benjamin Barber have criticized what they see as a technocratic approach to policy-making that legitimates decisions by experts that may not have otherwise enjoyed the consent of the larger population.

These theorists suppose that without avenues for citizens to participate in policy decisions, the benefits of local knowledge may be lost in sacrifice to the interests of a central authority. Indeed, Peter Bachrach and Aryeh Botwinick are among those that argue inclusive decision-making leads to a fairer outcome for those otherwise excluded from these processes.

Others argue in favor of participation as a means to increase the social awareness that can lead individuals to learn how to act in the collective good. Robert Putnam’s work on social capital provides an argument for civic engagement as an educative process whereby the social networks and associations central to quality public life can be formed and developed.

A third main line of support for civic participation comes from those such as Frank Fischer who argue that a deliberative process of engagement can offer a means of breaking through intractable policy problems. By this argument, the involvement of citizens in a dialogue that entails learning, processing and creating new information and analyses increases the likelihood that creative and well-supported solutions to problems can be found.

The education reforms taking place across the country as well as in DCPS could definitely use some of these benefits.

Benefits of Public Participation

• Allows decisions to benefit from local knowledge
• May lead to fairer outcomes for those otherwise excluded from the process
• Increases social awareness that can lead individuals to learn how to act in the collective good
• Offers a means for breaking through intractable public policy problems

The extensive literature on civic participation and engagement also acknowledges several potential barriers to achieving effective engagement, which include:

• Prohibitive costs (both in terms of establishing and running a participatory process and regarding the opportunity costs forgone by participants who chose to engage)
• Assumptions regarding a highly motivated and capable citizenry
• The potential for participatory process to increase conflict or exacerbate divisive positions

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR INCREASING PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN DC PUBLIC SCHOOLS

In the case of Education Policy reform, there is a clear and already engaged citizenry, but they are not being involved in the decision making processes. By involving them in the process you can reap some of the benefits of participation while minimizing some of the problems with divisiveness and conflict that exists in the field. Furthermore, the emergence of sophisticated online tools and platforms that support large-scale, multi-party dialogue, collaboration, and data amalgamation and ranking offer a new technical capacity for increased civic engagement via the web, which also lowers the barrier to participation for citizens.

In order for participation to work best, however, it has to be structured in a way that will maximize success. You cannot just have an online portal that asks people to submit ideas. My research shows that meaningful participation includes the following elements:

• Executive Level Support Creates the Context for Engagement, but is not enough
• Engagement As a Practice Must be Integrated into the Agency’s Organizational Structure and Culture
• Online Strategy Should be Driven by Engagement Goals
• Engagement Efforts Should be Designed with an Eye Towards What Interests, Delights, and Excites your Audience

There are additional indicators that are important to consider within each of these realms, which I discuss in my thesis.

I also turned this research into an assessment tool to help government agencies plan engagement projects that may be helpful in the education reform context in DC: bit.ly/dbsaeA

It is important to think about change on each of these levels in order to be successful. Furthermore, DCPS officials should look outside of their system for leadership as well. Given the breadth of interest in DCPS, the engagement team should not only include high level administrators at DCPS as suggested by Gray’s plan, but also include partners from other stakeholders such as the teachers unions, charter school leaders, students, parents, and social services administrators (to represent children whose legal guardians are state appointed). Accordingly, the technology platform selected should allow a wide range of people to participate at varying levels and styles of engagement. Furthermore, the offline participation should be connected to the online participation – both should support each other, rather than being completely distinct projects. The processes and platforms should also be beautiful and innovative in terms of how they manage and organize participation and information.

There is a lot of good work to continue in education reform, but unless people are included in the process, they will likely fail. I am excited to be a resident and business owner in the DC metro area, and look forward to seeing how Gray and his new Schools Chancellor take on this extremely important challenge. I hope to see more participatory process that are grounded in the theory of engagement, and provide rigorous, beautiful, fun, and meaningful opportunities for community members and stakeholders to become more involved in education reform efforts in Washington DC.

[1] This section is from my master’s thesis which I co-wrote with @annayork

Last month Malcom Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker: “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.”

I’ve been thinking about this article ever since it came out, and people have asked me to respond on several occasions. When I read Next Generation Democracy and BYO started helping the author (and now friend) Jared Duval, I realized it was the perfect opportunity.

Its not that Malcom Gladwell is wrong in his article. Its just one sided.

He starts the article by describing a lunch counter sit in that took place in the Woolworths in Greensboro North Carolina in February of 1960, and that spurred a movement in which 70,000 students eventually took part.

These nonviolent actions were a core component of the civil rights movement, and although the protesters advocated peaceful solutions, their lives and limbs were often in danger.

Gladwell is clearly fond of what he describes as this old form of social activism, and uses the article to take issue with the assertion that “the new tools of social media have reinvented social activism.”

He spends the rest of the article deriding all the ways that social media have degraded activism, instead of looking for ways that it enhances it. His primary claims are as follows:

• The life-threatening and impactful forms of activism we saw during the civil rights movement require strong ties between people, and social media only promotes weak social ties
• Hierarchy and structure are needed for social action, and social media promotes loose decentralized networks
• We take the actions that we see online (fans, followers, etc) as social action, and we have forgotten what real activism is.

While his argument is not wrong, it is superficial and misleading. What Gladwell is commenting on is only what he sees, and what he sees is often just the surface of much larger movements and campaigns. Its like someone writing a story in the 1960s about how the civil rights movement cannot rely on the telephone alone, without talking about all about the actions that the telephone can help facilitate.

The telephone was probably used during the civil rights movement to reinforce relationships between people who already had strong ties (i.e. facebook) and connect people who may have common interests through random phone banking (i.e. twitter).

The core problem with Gladwell’s article is that he spends most of it discussing people who are chatting about activism and social justice on the phone (i.e. people in America tweeting about Iran and Moldova), rather than discussing people who are using the telephone to organize lunch counter sit-ins.

Next Generation Democracy
I recently read and am helping get the word out about Jared Duval’s new book: “Next Generation Democracy – What the Open Source Movement Means for Power Politics and Change.”

Jared’s book is all about how civic engagement and collaboration can help solve some of the world’s most wicked problems, and Jared also happens to be a former youth organizer and activist. I recently had a chance to talk to him about what Gladwell’s piece and how social media interplays with today’s activism.

Jared (and any good online or offline organizer) agrees that the main measure of social media’s impact is the action it promotes offline. Its fine to have 2000 facebook fans; the question is what their fanship means.

Jared is “sympathetic to Gladwell’s main point which is that the activism of generations past came from a depth of moral courage that people were really wiling to sacrifice their bodies and their lives for what they believe in. But today’s activism requires similar efforts. ”

Jared described stories of fasting for days at a time in his work on climate change, and has friends who have risked their lives as mountain top removal activists.

The problem, Jared asserts, is in the efficacy of those old school tactics. The media does not cover young activists risking their lives for causes they believe in.

This type of reporting is saved for documentaries that play well in niche circles, but not with traditional news outlets. If no one sees it, nothing changes. Millennials are willing to risk their lives and limbs, but only if it will work.

This makes sense given the ideological differences between Millennial and young activists in the 1960s. The Center for American Progress did a bit of polling which found that Millennial tend to be more progressive, but our ideological range is much more compressed. There are fewer on the extremes which may mean that there is less of an impulse for in your face activism and more of an impulse for things that are seen as pragmatic.

Jared’s book is all about how increased participation in governance can help solve some of the world’s most wicked public problems and this perspective goes a long way in describing Millennials preferred form of activism. If we don’t like something, we will probably first ask someone in power to change it. If they say no? We’ll start to create the change we want to see.

Next American City & SeeClickFix
I was just at the Next American Cities: Open Cities conference about the future of cities, and the participants exemplified this new form of change making. The room was not filled with people talking about how to get mayors to change our cities (although there was a bit of that). The conference was mostly filled with civic entrepreneurs who were creating social enterprises and companies that were the change they wanted to see.

While these companies and people do not solely rely on social media to promote the change they want to see, many of them rely on large-scale public participation, and use the web to create transparency around their movement and facilitate meaningful interactions, both online and off.

That’s just how we roll.

While at the conference I had a chance to catch up with Ben Berkowitz, founder of SeeClickFix – one of the most interesting companies currently shaping the online/offline world that was also profiled in Next Generation Democracy.

SeeClickFix is a civic company where anyone can report a nonemergency problem which then gets shared online for others to see and comment on. The social nature of SeeClickFix makes it more than just a complaint forum, but rather a place where people can spark actual change. Not only does it allow city officials to see what issues people care about and want solved, it allows people to connect with other that share similar concerns to advocate for greater change, and most interestingly, promotes people solving these problems themselves without relying on government to step in.

To date, there have been over 70,000 issues reported, 45% of which are marked as resolved.

I asked Ben what he thought about Malcom’s article, and what he thought of the power of social media and online media to facilitate meaningful change.

Ben – like all good social change makers – sees the power in the combination of the online tools and offline action.

He sees social media tools as a sort of onramp to more offline action. In the case of SeeClickFix, people start by reporting potholes or other non-emergency problems. But this often leads to a larger action.

Ben relayed a story about a group of runners who were in a park and found an abandoned boat and complained to the city about it. Then they realized it would be cheaper and easier to remove it themselves, and did just it. Their online activity lead to offline action. Ben has countless other stories about people banding together to make certain stretches of road safer to walk through, stories of previously unengaged residents becoming activated citizens, and stories of real change ushered through by everyday people.

To me, SeeClickFix is a great organization that really gets how online social tools can facilitate, spark, and enhance offline action, and exemplifies the power of online/offline integration.

To be fair, Gladwell did state in an authors chat a few days after the article that he believed online tools + offline grassroots organizing can be very powerful. However, I wanted to explore that intersection a bit more, and for that I called Evgeny Morozov, a brilliant theorist who is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford and was quoted in Gladwell’s original piece.

Evegeny’s main focus is on the international context, but his main question to me still applies:

In the case of limited resources, “how do you want to spend it to maximize social good? Do you want to blow it on save Darfur facebook groups, give money to groups that are effective offline and want to expand online, give it to people who do nothing on the internet.”

In the cases of serious social change and limited resources, it is important to think about how digital activism fits into the larger goals. Sometimes promoting the use of the tools distracts from the issues on the ground.

We need to make sure that we don’t focus on facebook and twitter and social media in ways that crowd out other types of activism and drain resources. There is a danger that many powerful tools will be disregarded because people have too much faith in the internet alone.

While Evegeny’s perspective is in the international context, I think the advice is important for us to think about. There are very real limitations to online organizing in the United States – we have a significant digital divide that prevents all people from participating equally, and on many issues this can be devastating. I completely agree that the first piece is to look at what you are trying to accomplish, and then work back from there. If online tools can help you enhance your strategy and better meet your goals, then by all means go for it. If you have limited resources, and are not able tp craft a campaign that adequately ties your online work to offline actions? You might want to focus your resources elsewhere.

The thing is, activism has changed since the 1960s. People are no longer engaging in direct actions in the same way that they used to. Today’s activism is no longer focused on the action, but its also not entirely focused on the tool, as Gladwell states in his piece. Rather, today’s “activism” is focused on change. We may not engage in direct action to the extent that past generations did, but we start companies, volunteer, take on government service, run for office, form community groups, write books, and otherwise create the change we want to see.

I think this new form of social change is really critical to think about. Gladwell is a much smarter theorist than I, and he missed a really important opportunity to explore how activism has shifted since the 1960s, and what role (if any) the internet has played in those major shifts.

Right now theorists like Malcom Gladwell see the internet, and they see the Saul Alinsky form of organizing, they don’t see the connection, and they think the system is broken.

The system is not broken, its just changed a bit.

Right now, Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” (1971) is number one in Civics on the Amazon bestseller list. I studied Saul Alinsky during my days as a community organizer, and I still use many of his ideas in my organizing work. But there are some new ways of organizing that are critical for people working in social change these days to think about and study.

Next Generation Democracy was released today, and contains a whole host of ideas about a new way of thinking about community engagement and organizing. It is important that the word gets out about how new ways of working together – both online and off – can help us create the change we want to see.

Next Generation Democracy begins to explore this new paradigm.

Here’s where you can buy the book: http://tiny.cc/nextgendem

Here’s what other people are saying about the book: http://vimeo.com/16646306

I hope that Gladwell and other theorists, practitioners, and citizens will contribute to a meaningful dialogue about how social change and activism has changed in the last few decades, and what that means for the future of citizen activism and participation in the Next Generation.

One of the reasons I started BYO was so that I could work with clients I believe in, and help push forward values and ways of governance and civic engagement that I think will change this country and the world for the better. So far we’ve been able to realize that goal, especially in our work with the amazingly talented writer, thought leader, and millennial activist Jared Duval.

Jared’s new book – “Next Generation Democracy: What the Open Source Movement means for Power, Politics, and Change” – is an inspiring work that challenges people to think about how large-scale participation and collaboration can help us solve some of the world’s most complex and dynamic problems.

From the blurb on the back of the book:

“Picture the chaos of Hurricane Katrina. Waters rising and families stranded. There are federal officials somewhere, but they can hardly communicate with each other, much less the people in trouble. How could anyone be expected to manage this sprawling disaster?

Katrina is an extreme example of many of the problems we face today. Carbon Dioxide emissions, financial instability, the need for health care – these are things we could easily manage if they were occurring on a much smaller scale.

But what if we could turn our vast size and complexity into an advantage? According to social-change leader Jared Duval, the Millennial generation is in a unique position to do just that. Next Generation Democracy chronicles some of the watershed events – including Katrina – when directly democratic, forward-thinking organizations become more effective than our centralized government. Telling the stories of a participatory organizations, such as SeeClickFix and AmericaSpeaks, Duval describes a new approach to solving complex problems that draws on all resources, voices, and flexibility or vast networks of citizens – with unprecedented speed. An artful blend of personal writing, journalism, and political argument, Next Generation Democracy not only gives us a vision of a brighter future, it inspires us to help create it.”

Like many of you, I have been steeped in government and gov 2.0 for some time now, have tried to practice the principles of transparency and collaboration of the Open Source Movement in my work, and have been studying the ways that organizations and politicians are trying to open up government to greater levels of participation.

Yet while the theories are familiar, reading the book was amazingly refreshing to for several reasons. First, the theories were articulated in a way that make them accessible to a broader audience in ways that I think all people can connect with. This gives me hope that the message will reach beyond the echo chamber, more leaders will start opening up their practices, and more citizens will demand to be included in deeper forms of participation. Second, in the book Jared is focused on exploring how greater levels of collaboration and participation can help us solve “wicked” public problems. It is this focus that we all have to remember when engaging in this work – its what many of us are here for, and ultimately what will help this movement prevail. Finally, and most compelling to me, was the way that Jared wrote the narrative and how he used story in the book.

Starting with a forward by Tim O’Reilly, Jared relays stories from many of the leaders in today’s movement to open up our systems of governance to more participatory, transparent, and collaborative processes. The quirky and awe-inspiring accounts he relays draw the reader into the book, and illustrate how individual actors can precipitate large-scale action:

• How a broken copy machine inspired the open source movement and a student in Finland catalyzed massive change in the field
• How volunteers and technology helped unite families and communities during and after Hurricane Katrina
• How an old farmhouse in Vermont provides a framework for changing our ever broken political and governance systems
• How an exotic animal zoo in the mountains of Vermont can inspire the creation of a foundation dedicated to improving rural communities by promoting citizen engagement in Heart and Soul planning
• How remote controls and tree-like structures can help us untangle solutions to some of our deepest social problems
• How a transformational event in Frances Moore Lappes life inspired her to change the course of her career and leap into the world of wide-scale social change
• How someone equally loved by Steel Magnates and Radical feminists went on to transform post-Katrina planning in New Orleans through AmericaSpeaks
• How an iphone app and website is changing the way that people solve problems in their communities
• What 13 – 29 year olds have in common with the Open Source Software movement, and how they are shaping the next phase of politics and power

For people like us, working in the field every day, trying to push forward the ideals of the Gov20 movement, it is really cool and inspiring to see how others are making change. Jared reminds us that behind every theory, movement, and or bit of innovation are the people making it happen. People with ordinary lives, doing extraordinary things. People like us, trying to do better with less, and opening up our democracy to greater levels of participation.

If you are reading this blog post, you are probably a leader in the field. We are lucky to have another piece of literature to support this work, and I am hoping its publication will help us get the word out about the massive potential for large-scale participation that will change our systems of governance for the better.

Let me know what you think of the book, and if you get a chance to attend one of the book’s events (I’ll be at the official launch in Washington DC on November 8th) definitely do so and meet Jared:

Bus Boys and Poets
w/ Carolyn Lukensmeyer, AmericaSpeaks
November 8th, 2010
6:30 – 8:00p

Books, Inc
November 16th, 2010
Mountain View, CA
7:00pm

Kilton Public Library
co-sponsored by Upper Valley Land Trust
December 1st, 2010
West Lebanon, NH
7:00pm

WestPort Public Library
December 6th, 2010
Westport, CT
7:30pm

Demos: Ideas & Action
December 7th, 2010
New York, NY
6:00pm – 8:00pm

What else are people reading now? Anything inspiring that has come in front of you lately? Any stories that you find particularly innovative? What other texts are currently helping to move our work forward?