I was just turned on to this smart paper by Cynthia Gibson & the Case foundation. She makes the case that volunteering and voting is not substantive civic engagement- that despite rising rates of each, despite a strong service ethos, people feel increasingly isolated and powerless . We are not, in fact, deeply engaged in the civic life of our communities.
This feels intuitively right to me - and is one of the reasons I've been shying away from voter registration as a dedicated profession. I believe it's critically important - don't get me wrong - but it feels like a shallow way to fulfill the mission of mobile voter, which is to use Internet tech to facilitate and enhance civic participation.
Gibson calls for a civic renewal movement that moves beyond voting and outcomes such as #trees planted or people served - to one that empowers everyday people to come together and make decisions that affect their community. Importantly, Gibson suggests that the community define their own actions - that these actions and behaviors are not pre-defined by a service organization. She calls it a citizen-centered approach.
These sentiments tie directly into a bunch of the research that I've been doing about emergent software design where the designer lays out a framework that empowers its users to define their own behaviors. Listen to the beginning of this great interview with Ross Mayfield for a pithy and clear description of emergent design.
At the recent Aspen Inst. conference I attended in SF - we talked a lot about how to go about doing this kind of thing on the city governance level - and came up with a bunch of ideas. Such as a SMS service that allows citizens to tag something broken in the community (a swing for example) and then connects that person to everyone else who had tagged the same object and provides city funding and other services to empower them to fix the problem themselves. Building community while reducing city costs. People who worked with city governments said that there would be serious roadblocks due to city ordinances, liability, unions, and so forth. Gibson lays out a handful of successful cases in the article.
In my upcoming book I cover dozens of cases of orgs using tech to engage young people. Most are short term engagements - for a given purpose. I think these short term outcomes are critically important - perhaps more so than Gibson - but her analysis, suggestions, and approach are incredibly sharp - pointing to a hole that I've felt, but haven't been able to quite verbalize. Glad she and her team have done it in this paper. Wish I'd read it before writing the book!
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