Talk to us! We’d love to hear your stories and perspectives on engaging community planning. Or send us your post ideas and questions -- there are many ways to get involved.
Using Online Tools - and Building Civic Infrastructure
In some ways, I was an unlikely choice to write a report on Using Online Tools to Engage –and be Engaged by – the Public. My work has centered mainly on face-to-face forms of public engagement. I had only just begun to use a Facebook page to distribute updates and resources to practitioners and researchers. I had to do most of the research on online tools from scratch. I was vaguely suspicious of Facebook status updates, RSS feeds, and (above all) Twitter.
This may have been a blessing in disguise. The research took longer than I’d hoped, but my layperson’s perspective may have helped me describe online tools to other laypeople. Since I didn’t know most of the technical jargon, there was little chance that I would drop it, unexplained, into the report.
But the most important benefit of approaching online tools from the perspective of a face-to-face practitioner was that I had a sense of the limitations of face-to-face methods, and an overall picture of what communities need. In truth, none of these engagement techniques – whether they use computers and smartphones or newsprint and sticky dots – is sufficient by itself to solve the problems of 21st democracy. Communities (and countries) need a comprehensive civic infrastructure that is built for the long haul. They need to plan this out carefully, mapping their current assets, setting goals, and selecting the tools and structures they need – and they need to do this planning collaboratively, with public officials sitting at the same table with school administrators, nonprofit directors, policy advocates, funders, community organizers, neighborhood leaders, businesspeople, faith leaders, and others.
I think the most exciting use of online tools within this larger civic infrastructure may be the potential of social media – particularly in the form of neighborhood- and school-level online networks – to sustain networks of people. (The work of http://www.e-democracy.org is one example; other organizations and neighborhoods are using simple email listservs, or more fluid networks that rely on Twitter.) The difficulty of sustaining interactive communication and collaboration has been one of the key limitations of face-to-face engagement. These micro-local networks could be considered the nanotechnology of democracy: they are springing up everywhere, and if they are incorporated carefully into comprehensive civic planning, they could have the same catalytic effect on democratic innovation as they have had on scientific advancement.
Much of this thinking can be found in the Using Online Tools report; more of it is in a Summer 2011 National Civic Review article, “Citizenship and Governance in a Wild, Wired World.” It also informs a new set of resources from the National League of Cities on Planning for Stronger Local Democracy. Yet another guide to consult is Public Agenda’s Promising Practices in Online Engagement. Whether you are skeptical or enthusiastic about online tools, I hope these resources help you find a more informed middle ground from which to begin your own planning.
Comments
Hi Matt and others.
As far as I know, the term "civic infrastructure" was invented by John Parr of the National Civic League in their update of their pathbreaking Civic Index in 1985(?). At their annual meeting (which used to be THE meeting for all us civic types), they put together a highly participatory process to build the ten elements of the Civic Index.
Scott Fosler wrote a tribute to John at his passing and set the development of the term "civic infrastructure" in the context of the day:
Community democracy and governance also required a new, more constructive kind of deliberative politics, in place of the hostile and antagonistic politics that had crippled so many communities. The league’s intent here was to help communities create a political environment in which participants could be active, informed, and vigorous in advocating their positions but do so in a constructive manner that would bring out what was best among the competing political perspectives, in the interest of healthy public debate and community problem solving. This eventually led to the NCL’s New Politics program, which worked with citizens and elected officials at the state and local levels to foster innovation in political reform by critically evaluating a community’s entire political system, and linking political reforms with models for effective governance.
Central to the new civic model was the development of “civic infrastructure,” the formal and informal processes and networks through which communities make decisions and attempt to solve problems. To help communities define their own civic infrastructure, and assess and improve their performance, the League developed the Civic Index, a framework that provided a method and a process for identifying strengths and weaknesses, and for structuring collaborative solutions to problems. The elements of the Civic Index were also integrated into the All America City Award program to reinforce the performance orientation in linking civic action to tangible results for communities.
More of the tribute to John can be found here: http://www.ncl.org/publications/ncr/97-2/JohnParr.pdf
I omitted a key attribution in this post: the term "civic infrastructure" was coined by Harold MacDougall, who first used it (I think) in his classic "Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community."