What Type of Digital Transformation? Reinventing Social Thought and Action with Civic Intelligence

What Type of Digital Transformation? Reinventing Social Thought and Action with Civic Intelligence Douglas Schuler International School on Digital Transformation Porto, Portugal — July 20, 2009

An informal talk...
Ideas that are not totally substantiated
Strong assertions
Opinions
Personal feelings
Confessions
What does informal mean?
Informal presentations often contain:
I will strive to include all of those!

Confession: I believe that an activist approach to research (and related work) is absolutely essential. Assertion: We’re doomed without it.

Organization of Presentation
Civic Intelligence as an appropriate paradigm
Some civic intelligence work (with a focus on Liberating Voices)
A Civic Intelligence Thought Experiment
Discussion !

Part 1. Civic Intelligence as an appropriate paradigm

In philosophy, what is important is not so much the answers that are given, but rather the questions that are asked. - Bertram Russell

Will we be smart enough,soon enough? question:

An abbreviated collection of current crises
Financial systems are imploding worldwide
Climate change, global warming
Depleted fish stocks in oceans and massive deforestation
Over consumption by some while billions of people are in desperate poverty
Food crises around the world
Ethnic cleansing / new forms of slavery
Worldwide mental illness (especially depression) epidemic; other health crises
Nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical weapons
Worldwide rise in fundamentalism
How Are We Doing?

Problems seem to be growing a lot faster than solutions.

Will implies an orientation towards the future Will we be smart enough, soon enough ? implies that there is time criticality implies that we aren’t certain about the answer implies that we aren’t certain about the answer Will we implies a collective actor and collective effort Will we be smart implies a cognitive orientation; reasoning with information and communication Will we be smart enough, soon enough ? implies that we aren’t certain about the answer Incremental Inspection of the Question Will we be smart enough implies that a certain level of knowledge exists and the potential to act effectively and responsibly on that information exists

I wanted to identify a concept that
accurately reflected what type of digital transformation we are striving for;
would describe the common threads of projects that we have been involved with;
could be used a common frame for motivating and coordinating (implicitly and explicitly) a large number of projects; and
helps address the question of being “smart enough”

The concept I came up with was civic intelligence

Some Definitions Informally, civic intelligence refers to how smart collectivities are in relation to their problems. C ivic intelligence is a form of collective intelligence that focuses on shared problems. Although we know that civic intelligence exists, this fact is not explicitly acknowledged and hence not something that we can readily examine or improve.

How Do We Recognize Civic Intelligence?
The group (or collectivity) and its products and projects have civic orientations and work in civic ways
The group and its products and projects mobilizes around shared challenges
The group learns over time
The group does things effectively and in novel ways when appropriate
The group thinks and acts
The group performs meta cognition; i.e. it thinks about its thinking
The group and its products and projects promote this orientation in itself and others
At a minimum an action or project that demonstrates civic intelligence contains several necessary features

Some Assertions Today more than ever, civic intelligence is needed to address the problems we now face. C ivic intelligence is distributed throughout society — not just among elites. Also, it is clear that elites can’t (won’t?) solve these problems by themselves. Although we know that civic intelligence exists, the capacity that exists may not be adequate for our pressing needs. Civic intelligence — its understanding and development — could serve as a paradigm for the DT community

(These are all current)
Response to reduced funding for domestic violence prevention in rural Washington State
The Evergreen State College planning for 15% reduction in funding
People in Iran working for a recount of the last election
UN conference for climate change
And there are millions more...
Civic Intelligence Examples Exist at All Levels

Friends of Nature, Beijing Creating maps of environmentally interesting locations builds citizenship skills

EcoMoms

Sustainable Seattle

First (we think) online version of Roberts Rules of Order
Collaboration with Public Sphere Project and Milano Civic Network (RCM)
e-Liberate

New Tactics for Human Rights http://www.newtactics.org

An open source repository for leaked documents supports transparency and open policy analysis

Worldwide Protests Against Invasion of Iraq “ The February 15, 2003 anti-war protest was a coordinated day of protests across the world against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Millions of people protested in approximately 800 cities around the world. According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of the 15th and 16th; other estimates range from eight million to thirty million.” (Wikipedia)

What Does a Paradigm Do for a Group?
Binds
Helps bring a group together and maintain it
Orients
Promotes a shared vision and a trajectory of thought and action
Generates
Helps spawn new ideas
Informs
Brings information in from specific domains
Constrains
Sets some limits on what thoughts and actions are relevant
Positions
Places the work in relation to others
Identifies
By members of group and by others outside the group

A paradigm is a philosophical and theoretical framework. It is generative, informative, and constraining, at the same time. It would affect our work individually and collectively.
Helps focus on what we’re doing
Helps focus on why we’re doing something
Doesn’t rely on business as usual or side-effects which hopefully will be useful. (Helps us identify the constraints that have been consciously and subconsciously placed upon us.)
BTW, I’m not arguing for a single paradigm.
Why Do We Need an Explicit* Paradigm? * We already — presumably — have implicit ones.

Neo-liberalism & competitiveness Power relations & “realism” Class struggle Post-modernism & academicism Optimism & pessimism Fundamentalism Emergentism & New Age-ism Nationalism and extreme localism Scientism & “objectivity” Technological determinism Technocracy and the cult of the “expert” Other Isms (Implicit and Explicit Paradigms)

Web 2.0 is Relevant , but not Synonymous
“ Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called " harnessing collective intelligence.")” — Tim O’Reily
“ Civic Intelligence is the social revolution in communications caused by the conscious move to the focus on collective problem-solving (rather than for profit or control), and an attempt to uncover, develop, and promote the rules for success using that new orientation. Chief among those rules is this: Develop and use ideas, policies, products, and projects that promote civic intelligence. (This is what I've elsewhere called " enhancing collective intelligence.")” — Doug Schuler, with apologies to Tim O’Reily

Acknowledges — and embraces — the challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Civic explicitly identifies benefit for the common good
Intelligence
Necessarily incorporates thought and action
Is context dependent (it associates “local” problems with “local” capacity)
Is a social (not technological) capacity
Is a holistic phenomenon — multi-modal, dynamic, long-lived; It can also similarly orient our work
Is a concept that resonates with “ordinary” people (it’s not academic jargon)
Helps surface and focus on important work and research
Puts our work in a central position. It is proactive .
Civic intelligence exists at the interface within and between communities and ICT can improve this (I.e. we can keep working where we’re working but expand our work in meaningful ways
Hopefully build on insights from other fields (cognitive science, political science, sociology, learning sciences, etc. )
The times virtually insist on this conceptualization (the problems we face are translocal; people are essential ingredients; networks provide / enable shared information and communication). How we use technology is one of the most crucial questions we face.
Why is Civic Intelligence an Appropriate Paradigm?

Civic Intelligence is not a Brand New Topic
Civic Capacity (Harry Boyte, Xavier Briggs) Social Intelligence, Community Inquiry (John Dewey) Public Work Politics (Center for Democracy & Citizenship) Civic Innovation (Carmen Sirianni & Lew Friedman) Open Source Intelligence (Robert Steele) World Brain (H.G. Wells) Civic Community (Jane Addams) Civilizational Competence (Piotr Sztompka) Social Learning (many authors) + Social Enterprise / Entrepreneurism / Innovation, etc.

Generic Civic Intelligence Examples
Transforming schools and other institutions devoted to public problem solving —or, even, starting new ones
Developing policy that improves civic intelligence
Organizing workshops or conferences where people develop skills or learn new knowledge
Developing software that improves civic engagement (e.g. collaboration, information sharing, deliberation)
Developing new incentives and making resources (such as information) available for people who are doing this work
Increasing public consciousness about public problems
Developing new ways to think about public problems or to address new challenges
Hosting public demonstrations or otherwise making public statements
Using collaborative and other participatory techniques to create actionable knowledge
Developing ways to integrate diverse efforts synergistically

Transnational advocacy networks and other NGOs
United Nations and other institutions for international collaboration
Increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship and partnerships
More countries are democratic than ever before
Global collaboration and consciousness
The Internet and other new information and communication technology
Some universities, foundations, governments (and, even, a U.S. President) who seem to “get it”
Positive Signs for the DT Community

Part 2. Some of my civic intelligence work (with a focus on Liberating Voices)

Liberating Voices pattern language project
Civic Intelligence modeling, surveys and other explorations
e-Liberate (and openDCN) online deliberation system
Examples of Civic Intelligence Work

Liberating Voices A participatory project started in 2001 to catalog issues and actions that promote positive social change. The online “pool” contains over 400 “patterns.” The book contains 136 patterns (also online) contributed by 85 authors. A Civic Intelligence Project

Project Focus Construction of alternative versions to the official version of information and communication systems at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Creation of a radical orientation in which ordinary people assert their rights, and their responsibilities, as citizens of the world. Cultivation of the collective intelligence of the world’s citizens, built on values, creativity, and courage.

Elicit and develop ideas (“patterns”) related to democratic and civic use of information and communication to promote peaceful, positive social change in an inclusive, accessible, useful way.
Strive for broad coverage (economics, social change, art, activism, citizenship, history, organizational development, media, etc.) and coherence within these ideas
Show the connectedness of thought and action
actions have inherent, often undisclosed, theory
we’re not just “studying” social change.
Show how what people and thinking and doing in seemingly disparate fields are related (thus “one big project”)
Create holistic and accessible online and print resources
Engage the community in this work
Support evolution of the ideas and their ongoing discussion.
Help build communities
Liberating Voices Project Goals

http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/ Each pattern is a seed for positive social intervention from a grassroots perspective. Each pattern contains three main parts: problem / context / solution. A pattern language is an ordered collection of patterns. (The concepts are from Christopher Alexander et al, A Pattern Language, 1977) We are developing a set of cards that we have started to use in workshops. We are currently transforming our web site to help support use and further development of the patterns. We are still seeking patterns. Please consider it!

Patterns provide ideas that...
Perturb “business as usual”
Aren’t obvious (Fincher)
Lead to other things; they are “generative”
Promote action as well as thought; They are “actionable”

Patterns aren’t recipes They don’t provide precise instructions... They are more like seeds that have different results when planted in different soil. The use of a pattern is intended to change the flow of what would have happened in its absence.

People who hope for a better world feel the need for a shared vision of the "good life" that is flexible enough for innumerable individual circumstances but comprehensive enough to unite people in optimistic, deliberate, progressive social change. This shared vision of the "good life" should promote and sustain conviviality and solidarity among people, as well as feelings of individual effectiveness, self-worth and purpose. A shared vision of the "good life" is always adapting; it encompasses suffering, loss and conflict as well as pleasures, reverence and common goals of improvement. An emergent framework for the modern "good life" is based on some form of humanism, particularly pragmatic or civic humanism, with room for a spiritual dimension that does not seek domination. Finally, the environmental crises of the planet require a broad vision of a "good life" that can harmonize human aspirations with natural limits. All this needs to be an ongoing and open-ended "conversation," best suited to small geographic groups that can craft and then live an identity that reflects their vision of a "good life."
The Good Life Written by Gary Chapman

An OCSE should provide the following macrofunctionalities:
User management
Communication and dialogue
Information and publishing
Community awareness
Calendaring
Work group support features
Monitoring and statistics
A framework for extending these functionalities is also required. This framework should also support the vital function of communicating across community boundaries thus enabling a network of cooperating communities that share technical expertise and content. In addition to the general macrofunctionalities, an OCSE should be able to be integrated with modules that offer relevant features for any specific type of community, such as teaching modules for learning communities or deliberation facilities for civic and community networks. The OCSE should be implemented on standard base technologies, such as the lightweight directory access protocol to handle authentication and authorization and Web services for providing standard interoperability among modules. Each deployment of the engine should be created as an instance of the engine, including the set of functionalities necessary for each specific online community.
Online Community Service Engine Written by Fiorella de Cindio and Leonardo Sonnante

Community Networks Communities often lack the information and communication infrastructure needed to: a) support and sustain the social networks of clubs, organisations, associations, groups, agencies, families and individual citizens that constitute the structures, organisation and activities of community life; and b) enable effective organisation, planning and enactment of local campaigns when threatened from outside. The potential scope for ICT to support, enhance and sustain community communications is immense but effective community networks can only be built through meaningful and mutual partnerships of knowledge exchange. If community networks are to emerge as significant components of modern community life, external partners must understand this in context and content. Only then can they contribute in a meaningful way. Written by Peter Day

Meaningful Maps Like many patterns, this “works” several ways — developing the maps educates the developers; using the maps educates the users. Written by Andy Dearden and Scot Fletcher

Experimental School Schools with unchanging assumptions are unlikely to meet society's changing needs. This is unfortunate at a time when the need for public problem-solving is the most acute. If schools aren't innovative and if people don't seriously think about how education can play new roles in new ways, it's unlikely that the society will be innovative in cultural, technical, scientific, or civic thought or action. An experimental school attempts to accomplish positive aims while adopting experimentation as a guiding orientation. It will work towards its goals through careful and ongoing evaluation of the approaches that the school is trying. The concepts of an Experimental School can be useful to anybody who is involved in or interested in education. The key concepts are respect for learning, reflection, and a faith in the importance of reasoning and, especially, reasoning together. School according to John Dewey should be an experiment in collective action and it should break down walls between academia and practical work. Adopting an "experimental" orientation reflects a belief in meliorism — that things can improve through directed effort — and an acknowledgment that nothing is perfect; the need for adjustment is an unavoidable and normal fact of life. Written by Douglas Schuler, Steve Schapp and Thad Curtz

Community Animators Development professionals often find it difficult to adequately assess the broad spectrum of problems a community faces, as well as grasp and utilize the various assets the community has to work with. The lack of grassroots knowledge has proven problematic in that development schemes are often mismatched in scale and relevance to the community’s needs, abilities and liabilities. Thus the conceived solutions for encouraging community capacities and livelihoods fall short of their objectives. The community animator can act as a critical link between the community and any NGO Collaborator. It should be noted that by those in the field for social change that local citizens and activists can often better activate a community’s sentiments and bring about awareness for the possibility to realize change than an outsider who may be perceived to have little understanding of the real issues at stake. Beyond the processes of concientization that a community animator can bring to the process; NGOs can also assist these community members in training for information gathering and needs assessments to help refine the basic kinds of projects and programs that might be of benefit to a community. Written by Justin Smith

Indicators Citizens are often bystanders in their own lives. Research, even that which is putatively conducted in their behalf, is often irrelevant or even damaging to the livelihoods of "ordinary" people and marginalized groups alike. Since it is intended to promote academic aims, such as publication in an academic journal, rather than community goals the idea of actual benefit based on the results of the research often takes a back seat. This lack of genuine community involvement or connection helps lead to the self-perpetuating cycle of citizen disempowerment. Citizens need to construct community and civic indicators, publish them, discuss them, measure them, publicize them and develop policy and projects that address them. Indicator projects seems to be best coordinated through organizations and groups. Written by Douglas Schuler

Civic Capabilities Peoples can often find the path to social and economic empowerment blocked to them due to any number of circumstances whether they be lack of literacy and information, limited access to health care, a low-level of durable assets, political marginalization and so forth. Ultimately, the idea of engaging capabilities is a critical component to almost any pattern language we might wish to construct. Therefore, when constructing a pattern language that is meant to address development in anyway it is necessary to consider the ways in which these projects will utilize the individual as well as collective capabilities of a community (and associated development partners) and how they will be utilized to support and encourage the further realization of these freedoms in peoples lives. Written by Justin Smith

Power Research Research power — what it is, how is it organized and applied, who has it. Although it is important to make the findings freely available. It is at least as important to disseminate the ideas and techniques that help people initiate their own power research projects. This pattern particularly applies to government and corporations but other people, institutions, and groups (such as hate groups, militias or organized crime families) need to be thoroughly investigated as well. Written by Douglas Schuler

Strategic Capacity Occasionally in the course of human history, a small group with meager resources fighting a powerful foe, actually wins. One of the most famous of those struggles is that of the biblical shepherd David vanquishing the seemingly invincible Goliath. A thousand other struggles, against poverty, against oppression, against environmental degradation, retell the David and Goliath story with equally improbable outcomes. What's the secret to these unlikely successes? Marshall Ganz explains that decisions are expressions of strategy and that strategy is a type of group creative thinking or distributed cognition that is sometimes akin to the "performance of a jazz ensemble." Strategic Capacity uses motivation, access to salient knowledge, and the heuristic processes that organizational leaders use as the key factors behind effective strategic capacity. Written by Douglas Schuler

Public Agenda At any given time, there are a few issues that are receiving "public attention." These issues change dramatically from day to day offering the public very little time to actually think about one issue, before another one takes its place. In addition to the manic novelty, the stories offer little real information, especially about alternatives or opportunities for public involvement. Even the "news" is entertainment. It shouldn’t be necessary to break glass.. Who decides what issues are important, what issues are on the public agenda? Written by Douglas Schuler

e-Liberate
First version of Roberts Rules of Order online
Designed to support civic deliberation
Design rationale: start where people are
Integrate with other civic tools (e.g. OpenDCN, De Cindio et al)
Editing rulesets on research agenda

Part 3.
A Civic Intelligence Thought Experiment
What would an ideal project look like?
What steps could be taken to begin that work?
What questions and issues would influence this work?
Strong assertions: (1) We must grow our expertise and influence more effectively and efficiently; (2) We must use civic intelligence in our own pursuit of civic intelligence.

What expertise would an ideal team have?
How would / could the network grow? How fast?
How would the network develop critical diversity?
How could work proceed with (much) explicit coordination?
How could existing work be tweaked to make it more appropriate within a civic intelligence paradigm? (see C&T paper)
Questions Raised Through Civic Intelligence Thought Experiment

What articulation points exist?
Problem areas
Geographical areas
Vocabulary
Methodology
Shared databases
Case study data
Shared representations (e.g. patterns or iconic views)
How does coordination happen without (and with) explicit communication? But how does this differ from other research? Focus & orientation / Duration / Explicit handoffs

Cultivating Civic Intelligence
• Improving access and quality of access to information and communication systems and resources;
Improving access to deliberation, and collaboration, i.e. to political spaces — physical and virtual and hybrids;
Improving translation — including technical-ese into natural languages;
Creating institutions with civic intelligence at their core — science shops and community networks, for example;
Improving and expanding collaboration among diverse people and communities including laymen and scientists;
Developing relevant models and other frameworks, paradigms, and narratives;
Exploring policy implications and developing recommendations; and
Surfacing relevant research questions in related disciplines.
Important Areas of Focus

Civic Intelligence Models Naturalistic Model #1 (1) who did what , (2) under what conditions , (3) to produce what , (4) with what degree of competence or efficacy (5) yielding benefit (6) for whom or what .

Civic Intelligence Models Naturalistic Model #2 (1) orientation, (2) organization, (3) engagement, (4) intelligence, (5) products and projects, and (6) resources

Civic Intelligence Models Functional Model

Use models (current and augmented) for analysis
Use common (although provisional) frameworks for comparison (among other things) (Version 1 of our survey will be available online soon)
Use existing examples / findings to populate functional model
Use examples and findings to develop better civic intelligence models
Use models / findings to help develop increased civic intelligence
Use models / findings to develop to check / test hypotheses
How Can Civic Intelligence Models be Used?

Some questions
What would a civic intelligence curriculum look like?
What would media policy look like that encourages civic intelligence?
How to make this sound cool?
How much does the U.S. Department of Defense spend on preparing for war?
How much does the U.S. government spend on identifying the causes of war in order to avoid it?
What would a research / action team that wasn’t confined to disciplinary rules look like?
Why do 50% of Harvard graduates go into the financial sector after graduation?
What would a People’s Google look like?

Focusing on Civic Intelligence
Research
Less lab, more street
Focus and Scope
Problems, community, collaboration, deliberation
Methodology
Participatory design, community inquiry, citizen science
Norms
Support for “ordinary” people; focus on human-centered approaches
Participant
includes community, civil society, business, arts, social sciences, government, etc. etc.
What Implications for Our Work?

Civic Intelligence
Civic intelligence as Social Science
Let's study it!
Civic intelligence as Policy
Let's support it!
Civic intelligence as Organizational Self-Reflection
Let's use it!
Civic intelligence as Social Movement
Let's do it!
Four Perspectives Each perspective related to the general concept (and to each other) but each has different Goals, Activities, Strategies, Norms, Social Actors, Resources, and Slogans.

People can be intelligent. They can also be compassionate, creative, enthusiastic, and dedicated. Perhaps societies can too. This community can play an important role. And we may decide to sign on.

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What Type of Digital Transformation? Reinventing Social Thought and Action with Civic Intelligence

by Douglas Schuler on Aug 11, 2009

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What Type of Digital Transformation? Reinventing Social Thought and Action with Civic Intelligence — Presentation Transcript