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Topics: Civic Communication

by Carmen Sirianni, Lewis Friedland, and Douglas Schuler
prepared for the American Civic Forum, 1994

Call For A New Citizenship: The American Civic Forum

Political life and civic culture in America are in a state of crisis, and this crisis is unlikely to be resolved in a constructive fashion unless we begin to reinvigorate citizenship as active and collaborative public problem solving by citizens themselves. The American Civic Forum is a diverse, pluralist and nonpartisan confederation of civic and community groups, public partnership projects, and civic-minded individuals from every walk of life, who are dedicated to this task. In the best traditions of our education for democracy, from the early days of the republic of Jefferson and Madison to the civil rights movement of Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr., it seeks to make schooling for citizenship a central principle of how all our institutions work. In the information age, this presents new challenges and possibilities.

This crisis we face has many dimensions, but no single cause and no simple solution. Big government, big business and big labor no longer possess the kind of tools, or are able to strike the kind of bargains, that can ensure our quality of life and enhance the sense of control over our destiny, as they once did. Indeed, large bureaucratic institutions often create more problems than they solve, even when honestly attempting to secure some clear public good. The myriad of interest groups claiming special benefits for their constituents, however legitimate, makes it increasingly difficult for Congress to forge coherent policies that serve a broader public interest, or to eliminate those programs proven ineffective in order to support ones that enhance the problem solving capacities of communities, schools, families, and voluntary associations that have always been the soul and sinew of American democracy.

Fiercely partisan politics, with stale political ideologies and simplistic policy prescriptions, further feeds the growing disaffection of people from government, and sets a disgraceful example for citizens, who themselves must find ways to collaborate across their many differences if they are to forge new approaches to problems that are considerably more complex than only a generation ago. Continuing gridlock in Washington makes ordinary people more vulnerable to the politics of rancor and rage fostered by demagogues, who would further debase the ideal and practice of citizenship. And a press that has become addicted to what is negative and deficient in our our communities, institutions, and leaders, does little to enhance the capacity of any of these to help citizens deliberate and problem solve together.

Responsible citizens and leaders need to recognize that there are no quick fixes to the problems we face. More rights, better advocacy, bigger social programs will not, of themselves, provide solutions. Nor will less government, fewer taxes, and balanced budgets. Nor, indeed, will campaign finance and lobbying reform, or term limits and increased voter participation, breathe into our political institutions the new life that they need. All of these things, in some combination, may be needed for some of the problems we face. But none of them alone, or even in the best of combinations, will provide adequate solutions unless we work together to bring a new vitality to our broader role as citizens. We cannot reinvent government for the challenges we face unless we simultaneously reinvent citizenship.

The American Civic Forum builds upon the rich experiences of its affiliated groups and individuals, and of many other community organizations, public partnerships, and civic projects within the new "citizenship movement," in seeking to make the arts of collaborative problem solving part of the common tool kit of citizens and institutions in every arena of public life. In order to do this, it seeks to share "best cases" and "best practices" within and across diverse sectors, and to build competencies for evaluating and refining these, as part of a larger conversation about how to revitalize civic culture and democracy for the challenges of the twenty first century. It seeks to cultivate "civic story telling" as an essential component of democratic skills and pedagogies, and one which provides not only a renewed sense of agency and hopefulness, but the narrative forms and action templates for citizens to envision concretely how they themselves can make a difference.

And the American Civic Forum seeks to nurture responsibility within every institutional setting for telling civic stories, sharing best practices, and providing mutually educative evaluations from which all can learn. In these ways, a diverse array of civic learning communities that include all stakeholders can begin to flourish and bring new approaches to problem solving into every sector of public life.

Civic Learning Communities and Electronic Capacities

The information age brings new dangers, but also new opportunities for active citizenship. The dangers are various: 1) a cacophonous information overload that confuses and overwhelms citizens, and makes them ever more dependent on experts and bureaucrats; 2) the division of society into information haves and have-nots that excludes many not only from rewarding postindustrial work, but from the valuable public work of citizenship itself; and 3) cheap fantasies of electronic plebiscites, fax-machine mobilization and e-mail advocacy that debase the deliberative and collaborative arts so essential to democracy.

There is no simple way to inoculate ourselves against these dangers. But there are ways of designing electronic and telecommunications networks so that they enhance civic capacities, and provide the tools to sustain a much richer vision and more responsible practice of democratic empowerment. We can begin to build on-line multimedia components that will help lower the barriers and increase the opportunities to make practical schooling for citizenship and public problem solving widely available and eminently useful in many different kinds of institutional settings. To this end, we propose building a Civic Practices Network that will serve to support a broad array of dynamic learning clusters for reflective civic practice, and a broader learning community engaged in the common project of renewing citizenship.

Software and hardware development have proceeded to the point where most of what we outline here is already quite feasible, and within the next few years will be even more so. The social infrastructure for civic networking has also begun to emerge rapidly with the development of Community Nets and Free Nets, city and regional electronic networks, Community-Wide Education and Information Services partnerships with local affiliates of the Public Broadcasting System, mentoring models that build technical capacities within a broad range of community-based organizations, and various other educational, library, computer professional and right-to-know networks. The Civic Practices Network will facilitate active learning and problem solving through broad and multimedia sharing of best cases, civic stories, mutual evaluations, mentoring opportunities, and many other kinds of resources, and thus add value not only to the broader citizenship movement, but to existing civic and community networking projects.

Vision: A Dynamic Learning Network for Reflective Civic Practice

In the age of the smart machine, computer and telecommunications networks should serve not only as meeting places for problem solving across professional and organizational boundaries, as in our most advanced postindustrial workplaces. They should also be able to serve as public spaces for problem solving in all institutional settings by whichever individual citizens and civic-minded organizations are willing to collaborate in a good faith search. This includes professional staff, clients and customers in mediating institutions such as schools, social service agencies, and health care centers, as well as in governmental institutions such as community policing offices, environmental agencies, and transportation departments. It should also include managers and employees in corporations, which increasingly must partner with civic and government organizations to address common problems that no longer can be solved separately or by excluding other stakeholders in the community.

Citizens should never think that the first step to solving a public problem is to go to a bureaucrat, lawyer, politician or judge. The first step, rather, should be to turn to their own civic and community groups, and to their own broader networks of trusted problem solvers, wherever they may be located. They should be able to discover here the practical civic wisdom of others who have confronted similar problems, developed useful models, and evaluated previous successes and failures. Civic stories and best cases should point them toward workable approaches, helpful mentors, valuable contacts, and hidden assets that they themselves can mobilize in partnership with others.

And when they approach government to assist them in their public work, they should always do so as independent citizens who bring with them practical insight, collaborative experience, and the responsible commitment of community stakeholders to work together across their differences. They should never address government solely as claimants seeking rights, clients seeking benefits, or victims seeking redress.

This is the ethos of civic empowerment. And in the information age, we can utilize computer networks and telecommunications systems to help make this first step second nature.

There is a treasure of practical wisdom and civic organizing experience not only within the American historical legacy of voluntary associations, but within more recent innovations in citizen participation, community organizing, collaborative problem solving, community visioning, alternative dispute resolution, deliberative democratic dialogue, and public partnership. Most of this wisdom is built on face-to-face relationships, trust building, group skills, and personal mentoring in public leadership development. A robust civic culture requires that we continually search for new ways to strengthen and diffuse these, especially in an age when our institutions and our problems have become increasingly more complex and our citizenry ever more diverse, and when many of our previous forms of social solidarity and collective action have grown steadily weaker and less effective in actually solving problems.

The Civic Practices Network would utilize computer and telecommunications networking capacities to make this wisdom readily available to support relationship building and problem solving within and across all community and institutional settings. It will support diverse clusters of civic practitioners engaged in learning from the experiences of others. It will nurture responsibility for actively mentoring others and evaluating common work so that current and future partners, as well as the broader citizenry, can learn from this. Those who become full members of the network, with the privileges of publishing home pages with their own stories and cases on-line, will assume corresponding responsibilities for story telling, case analysis, pro bono mentoring, and collaborative evaluation. All others are welcome as civic learners and partner seekers, as well as future members who would assume similar responsibilities, and help to make every community and institutional setting a citizenship school for the information age.

Design: Key Components

The Civic Practices Network (CPN) will foster the following kinds of activities:

Best Cases and Civic Stories: making available in multimedia formats "best cases" and "civic stories," so that others can learn from them, and so that they can serve as the templates for further collaborative action. This will include developing capacities to write and produce engaging stories and complex cases, as well as to self-publish home pages of these on Mosaic, by the broadest array of civic partners: community development groups and support networks, school-based community service projects, multisided public-private partnerships for state health reform, Community Quality Councils, or environmental agency programs that partner with community and industry groups to reduce toxics. Case writing, self design, and story telling in text, video and audio formats will also enhance reflective civic practice within these groups and networks.

Civic Mentoring and Collaborative Evaluation: developing norms and practices that multiply capacities for training and critical evaluation. Full membership privileges (with each group's home-page that includes civic-story chronicles and best-case analyses) require a commitment that "each one teach one." Practically, this entails responsibility every year for contributing at least: 1) one civic story (on-line, home page), 2) one pro bono mentoring or training activity, and 3) one collaborative evaluation (on-line, home page) of this activity by the training partners (others available at partners' discretion). Enforcement of this triple mentoring norm is primarily through reputation among training partners and the visible quality of reflective practice, so that partners are free to develop multiform and variegated learning networks based on trust and choice.

Civic funders could promote such norms and practices by adding report requirements that include an accessible "civic story" version of project activities and outcomes that can be made broadly available through the Civic Practices Network, some other more problem-specific medium, or both.

Similar full-membership requirements for participation on the network by government partners (Community Relations in Superfund, Community Development at H.U.D.), industry partners (environmental affairs, community relations offices), and other institutional partners (community empowerment teams in school districts, health systems and medical schools), would help make civic impact assessment increasingly normative, as well as directly useful to citizens themselves. And the richer the stories and cases generated by civic partners, the more pressure there would be on other organizations to account for their activities in similarly reflective and narrative forms, in which citizens can locate themselves as problem solving actors, rather than as bureaucratic categories, demographic groups, and statistical data. This, in turn, increases the leverage of innovators to transform bureaucratic organizational cultures through well elaborated voluntary learning networks and parallel architectures.

Active Problem Solving: making possible the on-line and multimedia engagement of civic practitioners and students from many different settings. Civic stories and best cases on home pages will typically be about ongoing problems and projects, and member groups can elicit feedback from others, and host formal, real-time problem-solving conferences. Critical feedback can range from simple e-mailing of text messages, at one end of the spectrum of possibilities, to a group or project team hosting a formally announced video conference with closed or open participation, at the other. Support networks (community development, toxics reduction and right-to-know, community policing, corporate family policy, community health, elder and youth community service) can themselves host such problem solving sessions, and can regularly scan cases on home pages to identify those to whom they might provide useful feedback, mentoring, and other resources.

Civic Organizing Courses: developing multimedia introductory and advanced courses, as well as courses designed for specific organizing networks, and institutional and policy arenas. These will be based on critical analysis of cases and stories, and informed by active, flexible, and ecumenical theorizing. They will evolve with the richness of cases and stories, and with the emergent capacities for reflective practice and mutual evaluation among those utilizing the Civic Practices Network.

Courses can be in real time and/or edited for use on a come-as-you-need basis, thus making it easy to integrate them into other scheduled training and course work in schools, universities, businesses, unions, government and social service agencies. All CPN courses (as well as home pages of members), are open to everyone, whether members or not, though full interactive participation may be limited to members and invitees, at the discretion of specific course organizers.

Courses will be organized around problem-solving activities to an extent previously unimaginable. This is made possible by various features:

1) a continually updated selection of cases and stories by course organizers; 2) the capacity of facilitators and students to access directly the stories, cases, and the (open) mentoring evaluations on the home pages of all CPN members, in order to supplement or redesign the selection; 3) participation in real-time problem-solving conferences that are open, or that are set up to include those engaged in specific courses; 4) selective or open access to archived problem-solving conferences and evaluative comments; and 5) open access to cases and stories archived in PBS, public library, Extension Services and other locations.

Course organizers, as well as facilitators of specific learning groups and problem-solving teams, be they in school and college classrooms, professional training programs, or any other institutional settings, will be able to design exercises based on case materials that present genuine challenges to collaborate in developing practical solutions to complex problems. And students will be easily able to access a rich variety of other cases to sustain their search for innovative and alternative approaches. Course work can directly serve ongoing civic projects in communities and institutions through formal learning partnerships and internships, or or by putting selective problem-solving course work on-line for practical use by others.

Courses for specific policy areas (community development, school reform, community policing, family policy, environmental protection) can be organized by any CPN member groups and support networks in those areas, including academic programs and associations that become CPN members. These member groups and networks will also collaborate with the CPN board to design general courses on citizenship renewal, democratic empowerment, and capacity building, and will receive board assistance in designing specific courses, if they choose.

The general citizenship courses, as well as the specific policy area ones, will be nonpartisan and pluralistic. Multiple approaches to public problem solving from across the academic, political and ideological spectrum will be represented within those courses designed collaboratively with the CPN board. Member groups and support networks can choose to develop courses in a similarly ecumenical fashion, but are also free to design ones that have particular theoretical assumptions and political slants, as long as they do not support specific parties or candidates. (on the latter, see Open Access, below.)

Courses oriented to problem solving will challenge academic theorizing and professional training to be more grounded in best cases, civic stories, and service learning, so that they themselves might become forms of practical public work that nurture civic learning communities wherever they might appear. They will also promote university partnerships in community problem solving, and help universities to redefine their civic mission.

Civic Mapping: developing capacities to map and mobilize the assets of communities and civic networks, so that they are more capable of community development, participatory planning, community crime control, equitable facility siting, and collaborative partnership with government and business. Civic mapping needs to remain connected to the everyday narratives and community pedagogies of citizens themselves. An on-line and periodically updated version of Kretzman and McKnight's Building Communities from the Inside Out: Towards Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets, will provide basic tools, and will point to a broad array of more in-depth cases and stories on CPN.

Other mapping tools will be utilized to provide further visualization of people, places and assets within communities, to lend analytical power and statistical data to community-based assessments, and to involve a broad range of stakeholders in local and regional planning and ecosystem management. These include Geographic Information Systems, the Toxics Release Inventory, Community Reinvestment Act data, and regional or ecosystem management plans. Support networks that currently assist community groups in utilizing such tools will enhance their capacities by accessing home pages with cases, stories and contacts, and by being better able to embed technical assistance in community skills and pedagogies. Community groups, in turn, will be able to see very specific uses of these tools in the stories and cases of other groups, as well as locate the contacts that can provide a personal bridge to technical support services.

Deliberative Democracy: deliberative forums (community meetings on health values, electronic town meetings, deliberative opinion polls, National Issues Forums) will be enriched by becoming substantially more embedded in, and informed by, problem solving experiences and models than they typically are. This will reduce the tendency of deliberative democracy among ordinary citizens to be divorced from the consequences of action and from existing networks of public problem solvers, or to be limited by the background information and action alternatives provided by forum organizers and policy elites. Access to relevant cases and stories on-line, including to previous deliberative sessions of a specific policy process, will also help ensure greater continuities within, as well as richer complementarities among, various types of deliberative bodies (community meetings, formal commissions with public and expert representation, policy dialogues among stakeholders, elected legislatures).

Open Access: any individual, voluntary association, school program, advocacy group, government department, service agency, small business, corporate department, professional group, trade association, labor union, media organization, or collaborative team within any of these, can become a full member of the Civic Practices Network. The "triple mentoring norm" represents the minimum yearly activity requirements for all members: 1) one civic story or public problem-solving case analysis (on-line, home page); 2) one pro bono civic mentoring or training activity; and 3) one collaborative evaluation (on-line, home page) of this activity by the training partners.

This minimal yearly evaluation is accessible to all users of the network, and will contain contact information about partners, so that others can further check reputation and quality, should they be interested in pursuing civic partnerships and training arrangements of their own. Members are encouraged to provide further mentoring and training evaluations available for open inspection, so that others can make better informed training and partnering choices, or simply learn more about reflective civic practice. Beyond the single pro bono training and mentoring activity each year, members are free to advertise and arrange for-fee civic training and consulting through the network.

Those members with a for-profit status will be assessed a fee to help defray the costs of operating the network, and other members will be expected to contribute appropriate resources. A government agency, for instance, might assume all or most of the costs of mapping software developed in collaboration with a community development, environmental justice, or community crime- control support network. A computer science department or team might be expected to work on Mosaic design that better serves certain kinds of civic groups and projects, and even take this on as part of service learning courses. Norms for in-kind contributions are voluntary, and enforced only by reputation among CPN members and civic partners themselves. Over time, organizations will be expected to fold these costs into their normal operating budgets.

With the exception of political parties and candidates (see below), full membership in the Civic Practices Network is not restricted simply to those groups that would typically qualify as civic or community groups. The reason for this is central to the mission of the network: to help bring reflective civic practices and partnerships into all institutional settings.

If a corporation seeks to find ways of reducing pollution or creating more family-friendly work options, while still remaining competitive, it ought to have easy access to the problem-solving models and potential community partners that would best facilitate a collaborative search for workable policies with broad stakeholder support. If an interest group that advocates for particular constituencies and entitlements wishes to rethink how this builds civic capacities and serves a larger public good, it should be able to locate easily the models of consensus-seeking policy dialogue and community capacity building that would permit it to develop some innovative approaches. If a regulatory agency finds that its command and control methods are failing to solve real problems, it should be able to scan far and wide for alternative methods, as well as to locate close to home the civic partners in business and the community that might help make these work.

The richer the resources (stories, cases, models, contacts, conferencing, training, evaluation) that become available to support dynamic civic learning networks on CPN, and the more accessible and targetable they are, then the lower the costs and risks become for those organizations wishing to transform how they typically do business, and the greater the moral and institutional leverage becomes of those civic partners within and outside these organizations who seek to collaborate in helping them do so. Other tools (regulations, referenda, rights, lawsuits) are simply too blunt and ineffective, unless they are linked to a dynamic process of civic learning and collaborative partnering.

Limits placed on involuntary mass mailings and broadcasts through the network will contain within reasonable limits the problem of more well endowed organizations crowding out less endowed ones. And users will have access to the cases, models, evaluations, and partners that will permit them to make comparative judgments and informed choices about those with whom they might wish to collaborate, and those with whom they do not.

The Civic Practices Network is nonpartisan, and home pages of members should not support specific parties or candidates for office. However, schooling for citizenship needs to occur within the sphere of partisan politics as well, if we are to develop the kind of political discourse and policies that support rather than undermine civic and community capacities. Thus, it is important that parties, elected office holders, and candidates become active participants in the network. Not only can this be a resource for their own learning, it can provide a way for them to account for the civic impact of their policies and performance.

Specific guidelines will be developed for making this tension between the nonpartisan and partisan a productive one. These will: 1) encourage home pages for parties, office holders, and candidates, where they can make the case for how their policies strengthen civic capacities; 2) limit other forms of partisan discourse and electioneering available to them through the network; and 3) encourage civic partners to limit their own partisan recommendations and evaluations to specifically designated partisan forums, whether organized by parties, office holders, and candidates, by civic partners themselves, or both.

Parties, office holders and candidates will be assessed a fee to defray the costs of operating the network, and to enable them to demonstrate serious support for the purposes it seeks to serve. They will have no role in governance of the network.

This vision proposal for the Civic Practices Network is based on an earlier proposal by Carmen Sirianni, "Citizens' Collaborative for Mentoring and Training," which was presented to the Reinventing Citizenship Project and the White House Domestic Policy Council in February 1994. It benefited from the comments and insights of many people, most notably: Anne Beaudry, Harry Boyte, Richard Civille, Michael Garland, David Mathews, Mario Morino, Kaye Gapen, Mick Presnell, Ed Schwartz, Juan Sepulveda, Renee Sieber, and Tina Taylor.

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