Tag Archives: technology

Software code as regulatory advocacy

Posted on March 15, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Even with as much reading and thinking as I do about social work, social problems, and social change, there’s still something, every couple months or so, that completely blows my mind.

I love it when I come across something that makes me think, “of course!”

And, when it intersects with regulatory policy and advocacy…well, that’s just about perfect.

An essay by Gene Koo in Rebooting America brought together just such a trifecta. He writes about the increasing ubiquity of software code as a controlling influence in the implementation of social policy, and of the associated technical and political challenges in ensuring that computers don’t literally take over human judgment in critical areas of social welfare.

When you start to think about it, there are so many ways in which software is replacing the decision making even of powerful legislative and regulatory actors. Computer programs determine eligibility for public benefits, process appeals, and calculate compliance with program guidelines. Those functions are important for the overall functioning of a policy and, in the lives of an individual or family, they can be monumental.

Koo’s points about the ways in which software code shapes policy implementation mirror discussions elsewhere about the significance of regulations as the place where a policy’s intentions are translated into actual operations.

As with those rules, software code can reflect routine errors (the easiest thing to fix!) or, more perniciously, the development of what is called “codelaw” can, while not directly contradicting the law, reflect a particular implementation that isn’t the only way to construe the law. It’s in this case that software code essentially makes law, and it’s here that the same kinds of advocacy strategies we apply to the regulatory context–pointing out contradiction to legislative intent, illustrating pragmatic implementation hurdles, demonstrating the potential for inconsistent impact, and mobilizing key political and technical stakeholders–can make a real difference.

Koo’s discussion parallels that on this blog and elsewhere about the proper place for discretion in social policy. While software code can eliminate dangerously capricious decisions, which can be good governance, it also takes away the ability for trained personnel to include compassion in their way of carrying out legal mandates. This is the same tradeoff we contemplate with debates about how precisely to draw regulatory guidelines, too. Here, though, even more than with bureaucratic regulators, we’re trusting the critical task of “filling in the gaps” not to trained government employees, mostly committed to the programs they oversee, but to software developers, who, while technically expert, often have no substantive knowledge of the law nor accountability to the general public.

Kind of scary, really, especially since, while I can recognize a problematic regulation when I see it, I have no such dexterity when looking behind the curtain of a software program.

The strategies that Koo suggests for working within this new reality of “codelaw” also parallel those that work within the regulatory context. We should have a sort of “notice and comment period” when people can submit potentially tricky cases and see how the software code handles them, and our campaigns should identify software experts who can lend their expertise at this phase (a perfect opportunity for crowdsourcing!). He also recommends resisting the “baby and bathwater” reaction; we must recognize the potential to use software to ameliorate failings such as racism and sexism, which have certainly been endemic results of human judgment and discretion within our welfare systems.

Like so many of the new technological applications in the field of social work, then, the rise of codelaw is here to stay, so our challenge is to figure out how to make it work for us, and how to work within this framework to protect our legislative gains (and lessen the sting of our losses!), build relationships with those in power, and enhance the power of our constituencies.

Even when that means a string of characters is our advocacy target.

Where have you encountered “codelaw” in social policy? How have you worked, successfully or not, to advocate for kinder, gentler, software systems in these areas? What lessons have you learned in that advocacy?

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Crowdsourcing our government?

Posted on March 10, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Of all of the essays from Rebooting America that captured my attention, it was probably the one from Beth Simone Noveck, about completely envisioning a new style of citizen participation in governance and decision-making, that most captured my imagination.

She starts with an acknowledgement of a lament close to my own heart, that deliberative conversations seldom connect to action, which can mean that they’re even worse than non-participation, because they give people the feeling of having a stake, when they really do not. She calls them “one-off affairs, not tied to governmental practices of agenda-setting, policy-drafting and decision-making.”

And she’s right.

But we know that officials don’t need to be sole decision makers, that, in fact, we’d come up with better policy solutions, and better paths to implementation, if more voices were included, in meaningful ways, in that process.

And that’s when Noveck’s essay gets really interesting. She lays out a practical framework for micro-participation, of sorts, that would allow the public, writ large, real involvement in government decisions, in such a commonsense, pragmatic way that it’s really hard to find much objection.

Don’t think about other experiences in “participation” that you may have had–she’s not thinking roundtables with colored dots, or advisory councils galore. She points out that we don’t need large numbers of people to work on issues and that, in reality, relatively few government officials make many very important policy decisions today. And she’s not talking about some high-tech public comment or voting system on every piece of legislation, either. At least to begin, she focuses on regulatory action as policymaking, and envisions a mechanism of crowdsourcing in which a few dozen experts and enthusiasts would handle these regulatory issues by providing their consultation in the ‘action stage’ of governing.

There’s certainly no reason to think that these lay experts couldn’t craft regulatory policy as well as the current bureaucrats do, and involving the 5 or 10 or 100 people who know best, a percentage of whom will want to contribute to solving community problems, would not be an insurmountable technical or logistical challenge, either, especially in light of today’s technology.

She makes a compelling case, too, that such a system would be no more prone to corruption than current practice, and that the openness and transparency that would come more naturally to such a participatory model would, most likely, serve as a deterrent to corruption.

I love this idea.

I’ve met dozens of social work students and practitioners whose passion is something relatively obscure–rules about when foster care providers can also serve as foster families, for example, or restrictions on voting rights for those with mental illness, or reimbursable services for Medicaid recipients struggling with post-partum mood disorders.

I WANT these individuals engaged in policymaking, directly, on these topics. They know them, and they care about them, and they would do a better job than I would, or than an elected official balancing hundreds of different policy issues, none of which dovetail very well with the above.

But even more importantly than the substantive policies that could emanate from such a system are the skills and competencies that participants in such a crowd would develop, skills that would enable them to not only advocate more effectively in disparate topics, but also to leverage their voices and relationships in the legislative policy realm, too.

I agree with Noveck that it’s time to move participation beyond talking. Our government would be better off, and so would our citizenry. If you’re intrigued, check out the Democracy Design Workshop, a “do tank” oriented around projects that seek to build such tools. There’s an awesome e-rulemaking interface to improve public participation in federal regulatory policymaking, a policy wiki for collaborative legislative drafting, and ‘clickable statutes’, which creates interactive diagrams to help lay people better understand legislation.

Government by the people…maybe it really is possible?

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With you, not “of” you: Free agents and your nonprofit

Posted on February 28, 2011 by | Leave a comment

While we may not often refer to them this way, most of us who have worked in community organizing have had encounters with the people that The Networked Nonprofit refers to as “free agents”. They’re the folks out talking about your work, lifting up your causes, and even bringing in dollars, just because they have a passion for what you do.

The authors of The Networked Nonprofit make a convincing case that new social media tools make it easier for free agents to operate (they have access to more information about nonprofits and their work, and they have improved ways to communicate and share that information with an ever-wider set of potential converts, through expanding social networks), and also provide traditional nonprofits and the folks who staff them with new ways to find, reach out to, and even “organize” free agents, too.

Kanter and Fine understand how to approach free agents, without scaring them off, but social workers, administrators, and even community organizers used to working within set structures, and with established roles of engagement, are often less comfortable with the ambiguous and fluid ways in which free agents can add value to our work (starting with, of course, the fact that they’re seldom preoccupied with adding value to our work, but rather passionate about an issue that happens to overlap with our efforts).

If you’re asking yourself why you can’t get people to “take more initiative”, or if you yourself feel stunted by the confines of organizing committees or certain protocols, thinking about free agents and how you might pull them into your orbit, without expecting to put them under your wing, may open up new, untapped fonts of energy and, in the process, help you rethink how you approach the “agency” of each and every individual alongside whom you labor for social change.

I’ve done some additional reading and talking and contemplating about these ideas, and here are my takes on the list of dos and don’ts, so to speak, from the book (pp. 19-21). I want to hear from free agents hard at work on causes of all kinds: how do you find organizations worthy of your efforts, and do you attempt to reach out or coordinate your work in any way? If so, what kinds of responses have you found? And, organizers, how does viewing your leaders through a lens of “free agency” change how you approach your leadership development? What have you found that works, and doesn’t, in collaborating with these independent operators?

  • Get to know free agents: in many ways, this comes back to the whole question of listening; if we’re only putting our advocacy message out, without listening to what others are saying in the same issue space, we’ll never find people who could be potent allies. Going beyond the online world, though, we need to look for free agents in our physical organizing, too–the person who has shown up at your last three protests without saying much (because, also, it could be someone doing opposition research, so we need to get to know him/her!), the volunteer who’s faithful behind the scenes, the soccer league coach who has access to thousands (from my own work–he turned into a turnout machine!). If we’re so focused on what we’re producing, or on who didn’t come to an event, we’ll miss those who are obviously motivated by some internal fire to contribute (relates to “Don’t ignore the newcomer”, another piece of advice from the authors.)
  • Break out of silos: Again, this has offline applications as well; we need to do our listening, and our outreach, not just among the usual allies, but in unlikely places, too. I made a point of skimming the letters to the editor in a very conservative religious publication in Kansas, to have a sense of how issues of immigration were resonating in this particular faith circle. That’s how I found an evangelical pastor fervently committed to justice for immigrants, who, while he never became a core part of our organizing work (and never developed really strong relationships with the other, mostly Catholic, mostly liberal clergy), delivered the votes of several conservative members of the legislature, out of his own (supported and shaped by our work) advocacy.
  • Give free agents a place to learn about issues and sort out their feelings about them: We too often expect advocates to arrive “converted” and ready to recite our talking points, instead of remembering that people feel most strongly those values and positions to which they come on their own terms. We need public events on our issues that are really for the public, and blogs and discussion boards where people can ask questions and forge their own beliefs, even when that makes us uncomfortable, or even when they don’t “come around” as quickly as we’d like.
  • Keep the welcome sign lit and Let them go: These related mantras remind us that free agents really are free, and must be, to come and go as their passions wax and wane, and as life intervenes. But, really, this is how we should regard all of our leaders; if people are only engaged out of some sense of obligation to us, not a commitment to community or cause, it’s hollow leadership at best. We need to structure organizations, and campaigns, so that there are roles that people can play in various capacities, and not take it personally when others have different parameters for their involvement.
  • Don’t be afraid to follow: I like this final piece of wisdom the very best. Unfortunately, I’ve seen more than a few organizers feel really threatened by the outstanding leaders in their midst, and, when good ideas get ignored because they came from outside instead of in, or when leadership gets squashed because other leaders are intimidated, it’s our causes and the people most affected by them who lose the most. We’ve all got too much to do, right? So why, again, are we worried about being the ones to direct every action or develop every strategy?

    Finding free agents, and working with them, even if they won’t work for us, should, after all, make us all more…free.

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    Crowdsourcing your Board?

    Posted on February 16, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    What if you didn't need a chair to have a 'seat at the table'?

    While I wrote about some reflections on The Networked Nonprofit in December, it has taken me quite awhile longer to think through Chapter 11: Governing through Networks, where the authors make some recommendations about how integrating social media thinking, not just the tools, can improve the performance of Boards of Directors and, in the process, revitalize nonprofit organizations in some critical ways.

    I’m not a governance expert, although I’ve certainly had a lot of experience with nonprofit Boards, as an employee, consultant, volunteer, and Board member. I’ve seen a few really effective Boards create powerhouse organizations that excel at achieving their mission, and many more lackluster Boards that fail to do much except eat the free lunch they’re given every month.

    It’s the latter kind of Board that Kanter and Fine argue social media principles, such as transparency and equality and collaboration, can help to avoid. Importantly, this doesn’t mean just friending your current Board members on Facebook, but, instead, an emphasis on how to truly transform governance to make it more congruent with today’s social media climate of openness and fluidity.

    This means, of course, that we stop looking only to the ‘usual suspects’ for potential Board members, and that we think, instead, about how members of our crowd can participate in shaping our organization’s future.

    And I believe that this orientation to Board recruitment, development, and process could, in turn, create new kinds of nonprofit organizations that would, among other things, be more open to risk-taking and stand-making, which the nonprofit sector desperately needs.

    The book is worth reading for Chapter 11 alone, really, especially if your current Board is anything less than spectacular. Here are a few of the authors’ key suggestions about how to begin to open up a Board within the social media space, with my commentary about the implications for creating advocacy-friendly nonprofits, too.

    I want to hear from Board members, employees, volunteers, and students within nonprofit organizations. How does your Board currently operate, and what might applying some of these principles mean? What are your Board’s guiding imperatives today, and how might those change under a social media perspective? How would you crowdsource governance at your organization, if you could?

  • Include your Board members in a public social network: While it’s not the end of the process, making sure that your Board members play an active role in your organization’s online presence can help to communicate your mission and objectives (and, for example, policy priorities) while also providing a vehicle for others to weigh in.
  • Create an open invitation to Board meetings: It always baffles and alarms me when students say that they’re not invited to even participate in their own agency’s meetings. What’s the big secret? I can’t help but hope that organizations would take stronger stances on advocacy issues, in particular, if they had to do so with clients and the public listening.
  • Post draft agendas online: Your crowd, including donors, volunteers, and clients, will be much more engaged in conversations about how you can enhance your work if they see a meaningful mechanism through which their participation will matter. Allowing the public to comment on Board agendas won’t generate a groundswell of retweets, certainly, but those who do care will know that you do, too.
  • Make sharing the default: Instead of expending energy trying to keep things private, Boards should be oriented towards opening up real conversations with their stakeholders, not in controlled bursts but as part of a larger dialogue about the change they want to be in the world. This may mean, as the authors suggest, meeting outside of the Board room (like your state capitol, during the session!), or including online participatory tools in your strategic planning process, or having ad-hoc or standing committees that include not just Board members but also interested members of the public, or inviting leaders and clients to interface with your Board, or asking for Board nominations through social media channels, or…all of the above.

    Aren’t the functions of a real nonprofit Board–setting the course, monitoring the progress, providing the tools–too important to be left to just the Board?

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    Social media: democratizing the Internet, or talking to silos?

    Posted on February 15, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    There’s a debate going on right now, among those who talk about such things, about whether social media are revolutionizing the way people connect across divergent networks or just adding to the echo chambers, and, further, about whether that question really matters so much after all.

    I don’t know that I have anything terribly insightful to add to those debates, but I do think that the whole discussion has import for community organizers and policy advocates thinking about how social media can play a role in our social change work.

    Because, the reality is, no technology makes human beings stop behaving like human beings, and we wouldn’t like one that did, anyway.

    And so we have to understand human nature in order to accept the limits of social media for community organizing or transformational engagement with the most compelling challenges of our day. And we have to organize and plan with and around those limits, so that we have a chance at the transcendental human community that motivates our organizing (or should).

    First, some context. In an essay for Rebooting America, David Weinberger acknowledges that only low double digit percentages of links in social media forums point to opposing viewpoints. He reminds us, though, that such behavior mirrors how we live and think. He asks, “how often do people read the columnists they disagree with? How much time in the day do you spend talking rationally and calmly about matters of state with people with whom you disagree?”

    Again, we can’t expect Twitter to overcome human nature.

    He almost sounds like a social worker talking about how our conversation about the issues that matter most to us is seldom “an isolated exercise of pure, unfettered rationality in which we suspend core beliefs in order to think again about what those beliefs ought to be.”

    We come to these endeavors shaped by who we are, and who we know, and, while new technologies can tweak around the edges of both of those constraints, they certainly do not erase them.

    He argues that this is not only ‘normal’, but, indeed, quite helpful. He points out that “conversation among people who are in basic agreement builds relationships and foments political movement.”

    We certainly see this in the offline world, too; activists get most inspired in rallies with other ‘converted’ allies, new leaders are cultivated through relationships with like-minded peers, and momentum is built through focus on core values with those who share them.

    And, it’s not like talking to those likely to agree with us is a waste of time.

    Just a few weeks ago, when I was giving a presentation about immigrant rights to a group of immigrant youth, I acknowledged that their life stories made them a particularly sympathetic audience. But I make no apologies for spending some of my organizing time in such venues. I say often, “I’ll stop preaching to the choir when they start singing.”

    Our causes are littered with silent allies.

    In the same volume, though, danah boyd raises some concerns about this “echo chamber” effect, both profound and almost technical.

    She reminds us that alienated and uninterested people mainly know people like themselves, and so we are closing ourselves off to vast swaths of the population if we rely on established networks (online and offline) to cultivate new leadership.

    She speaks for every worthless activist email ever sent when she illustrates the difference between organizing virtually and physically; “at least, offline, you know when a door has been slammed in your face, whereas online, it just goes into the abyss.” How many of us have consoled ourselves with all of our organizing “work”, when our reliance on tight, insular networks gives us the false impression that our message has taken hold to a much greater extent than it really has?

    So, then, some thoughts on what this means for organizers and activists, in the offline and online realms. And, those of you organizing in either “world” today, how do you work around this silo tendency? Or do you? Where do you draw the boundaries of your “community”, and how does that definition influence how you reach out and engage? What practical strategies have you developed for reaching beyond your usual suspects?

  • First, I don’t share danah boyd’s lament that most social media publics today are organized around personal connection, not issue or topic. That’s the way we live, and that’s the way we should organize, too. Relationships are what draw people in to issues, and keep them there, and, while we can’t assume that the relationship is, in and of itself, sufficient, it’s certainly the best place we have to start.
  • Language matters, especially when trying to straddle communities. Even if we’re spending a lot of time talking within our own silo, we have to know that those in the next one over will at least know what we’re talking about when we reach out, and that means having enough connection that we develop messages that make sense beyond our narrow frame of reference.
  • Most obviously, if social media are segmented, we need to have an online engagement strategy with a presence in multiple ‘silos’. I think there’s a lot of truth in Weinberger’s assessment that the insular nature of a given channel isn’t that problematic, but that reassurance falls apart if we’re only listening in that one channel. Just as we’d never think to skip all of the renter-occupied houses in a neighborhood organizing campaign, we can’t focus on only one online ‘cluster’, either.
  • Finally, my ubiquitous note on power. Because, after all, what makes a certain community, or cause, prevail, quite honestly isn’t always its superior rationality, or even better communication strategy. That’s not the way that our political system works. It’s not the case that change happens once a majority of people have had a vigorous discussion about the pros and cons of a certain approach and decided, “let’s do it this way.”

    We win with power.

    And, truthfully, we can build power by strengthening the relationships within our silo, if it’s large enough and strategically connected to those with influence over the decisions at hand.

    Even if we never have coffee with the folks in the next silo over.

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    Blogs I love. Happy Valentine’s Day!

    Posted on February 14, 2011 by | 2 Comments

    My husband and I have never been big Valentine’s Day celebrants. In fact, he often jokes about the time that I tried to convince him to tackle this huge house project that I wanted to start, saying that since it was “Valentine’s Day weekend”, he should really do it for me. He laughs at my willingness to extend a holiday for which I previously had never even bought him a card to an entire weekend, when it suited my purposes.

    But, I love you, fellow pursuers of social justice, social workers, students, and kindred spirits.

    And, so, a gift for this day of love: some other blogs (and people) I have come to love, along with a cool place to find many of them.

    After all, what better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than by spending hours reading about social change, being inspired to take action yourself, and connecting to awesome people committed to the same purpose, whom I’m sure you, too, are going to love?

    Exactly.

    This list is in addition to the blog rolls that I’ve published here before. I still read many of those blogs, along with these newer finds (some of which I’ve been reading for a year now, anyway), although, I’ll admit, my RSS feed has been a little lonely as my consulting practice has accelerated, and the kids’ naptime has gotten shorter.

    As always, I’d love to hear about the blogs that you most enjoy. What voices particularly resonate with your issues? Who do you find most informative about advocacy, nonprofit organizations, or social change strategies? To whom do you turn for inspiration?

  • One of the coolest resources I found recently is the List of Change. It aggregates nonprofit and social justice-oriented blogs, with power rankings based on transparent criteria; anyone can submit his/her blog for consideration. Many of those I’ve read for a long time (A. Fine Blog, Beth’s Blog, Have Fun Do Good) are there, but I’ve also discovered some new ones that I’m going to check out.
  • Community Organizer 2.0: I appreciate Deb Askanse’s willingness to narrate her own learning about organizing offline and online, her integration of her community practice with her thinking and blogging, and her generous spirit of learning and sharing. It’s a good introduction to social media for organizing to those exploring, has a wealth of case studies and some great expert guest posts, and provides even seasoned 2.0 organizers with new ways of thinking about their work. Plus, she’s fun and friendly.
  • America’s Voice: This is my first stop for immigration reform-related news and commentary. I especially appreciate the synthesis of Spanish-language news coverage of immigration, the analysis of poll data and traditional media coverage, and the integration of action into the blog (you’ll get a “take action” pop-up pretty soon after you start reading). The video clips of Jon Stewart taking on the “anchor baby” idea are pretty awesome, too.
  • Philanthropy 2173: I’ll admit that it takes me awhile to get through some of the posts here–my percentage of unfamiliar words and concepts is much higher than on some of the other blogs; I just don’t live in a philanthropy world, let alone philanthropy of the future, that often. But I make more notes about posts here than just about any other, and I appreciate how it makes me think, and how many new ideas it introduces.
  • Kim Klein on the Commons: I love people who reflect on whether having a fenced backyard makes them a hypocrite, and who think about surviving the recession together, rather than “every family for itself.” If you think about the potential of tax policy to build a new understanding of “us”, then check this out.
  • Fighting Monsters: This is one of my favorite social work blogs. Even though I don’t do older adult community work in England, as does the author, I feel a lot in common, at least in terms of her approach to the value and ethical dilemmas of our profession. Her writing is honest and engaging…and how can one not love a social work blog named after a quote from Nietzsche?
  • MomsRising: The MomsRising blog features news, commentary, personal reflection, and, sometimes, heated debate about policy issues that touch the lives of every family in the country. Even if you’re not a mother, the stories of those who are, and how they’re working for a better nation for all of our kids, will inform and inspire you.

    Happy day to you, those you love, and what we all love…allies on our shared journey to justice.

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    Get Organizing Training in your Pajamas!

    Posted on January 18, 2011 by | Leave a comment

    I think that this site was actually launched in mid-December, but, you know, I’ve been on vacation.

    Still, it’s a good way to kick off the new year, hitting all of the major resolutions: work smarter, connect with cool people, save money, and, of course, enhance your grassroots organizing skills (or are those just my resolutions?)

    The New Organizing Institute’s Toolbox isn’t a complete substitute for dynamic in-person training, where you get a chance to build relationships with organizers working on social justice issues that connect to yours. It’s not designed to be, I don’t think. What it does offer, that’s pretty awesome, is a completely free, very accessible, and quite high-quality training program that you can do totally online, as an introduction to grassroots organizing principles (tell your story, build a strong structure, plan and execute powerful actions), as a refresher, or (and this is the part I like the best) as a train-the-trainer model that you can then use to build the capacity of those with whom you’re working on the ground.

    It uses the best of current technology, with videos of trainers conducting presentations and interactive materials, and it’s in the fullest spirit of the exciting transparency movement: everything is downloadable and free and open for sharing.

    THAT’s empowering, and it’s welcome.

    I spent some time looking through the site and found several pieces valuable to me, even after years of organizing experience. They’re all time-tested and refined from work in the field, which is especially important to me (I cannot sit through another talk about power from people who’ve obviously never been close to it). And they’re still adding content (and accepting submissions, if there are examples from your work that you want to share).

    Check it out, and let me know what you think, please, or share your own resources for community organizing. And consider yourself on the way to your 2011 resolutions!

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    How should we spend our cognitive surplus?

    Posted on January 10, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    I read all the time.

    And, every once in a while, I read something that blows my mind, like the chart in Outliers that details how much of the achievement gap between rich and poorer kids accrues during summer vacation (and how well schools do at closing it, really, during the year).

    And this, from Cognitive Surplus:

    Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year (p. 10).

    This is not a TV-bashing post. I’m sure that there are some wonderful things on television. The point of the book, and my reflection on it, is simply to point out that watching television has been a default use of one of the greatest expanding resources of our age: free time. And that our use of time, when aggregated as technology now gives us the capability to do, may be key to changing how we approach the challenges that face us.

    One of the key pieces in the book comes early, on page 17, as Clay Shirky describes the lessons learned from projects such as Ushahidi (my paraphrases):

  • People want to make the world a better place.
  • They will help when they are invited.
  • Cheap, flexible tools remove many of the barriers to collective action.
  • We can harness this cognitive surplus–the time and brainpower freed up because most of us don’t have to labor all day just to eat–to dramatically improve our lives, and the lives of others.

    Shirky is careful to emphasize that such positive impacts will not automatically flow from the existence of tools that facilitate sharing, connect people to those of like mind, and allow people’s passions an outlet. After all, the same technology that gave us Ushahidi birthed ICanHasCheezburger (disclaimer: my husband’s all-time favorite site). What we need are civic applications of these tools, in order to create real value. Civic sharing, as Shirky defines it, is about really trying to transform society, not just generating a sense of community for participants or even adding some knowledge to the public sphere. We’re going to “get what we celebrate” (p. 176), and so those of us with civic ideas for how to direct this cognitive surplus need to register our desires now, no offense to my husband’s great affinity for ironic traffic signs and email pranks.

    So, picking up on this idea, that we should treat those 200 billion hours a year as a shared resource that can and should be put to work, I plan to use some of my own free time to create a sort of “to-do list” for my fellow Americans, a “honey-do” that might prompt us to turn away from the television and, in the process, realize some of the good life that was supposed to come in this age of leisure. I want to hear from you–what are the best ideas you’ve found for capitalizing on this surplus, and what would you like to see our society collectively tackle in our free time? And, really, 200 billion hours is a lot of time, so if we can carve out just a little bit of it, I agree with Shirky, we could make some really good things happen.

    I want to hear your ideas for how to harness the potential power of this tremendous resource–what are the tools, and the motives, and the opportunities that we need to be developing? How does our culture currently support such collective civic action, and how does it discourage it? On the issues on which you work most closely, how would you use some of your neighbors’ free time to make a real difference (be those your physical neighbors, or those around the world)?

    And, of course, the critical question: how do we make such actions compelling enough to lure people away from Shark Week?

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    In the rearview mirror: thoughts on virtually teaching social policy, virtually

    Posted on December 14, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    At the end of this first semester of “blended” (half online, half traditional classroom instruction) social policy teaching, I’m fairly conflicted. There were some aspects of the experience that I found very rewarding, especially the blurring of the lines between “learning time” and “regular life”–I tend to think about social policy a lot of the time, weaving my ruminations into my daily interactions, and I think that the more fluid nature of the blended course prompted that among my students, too. But it was a semester with considerably more angst than usual, which, for someone who teaches people who want to be social workers about the part of social work (social policy) that we tend not to think too much about, is really saying something. I would love to share this discussion with my own students, current and former, as well as other students and instructors who have engaged in online or blended learning. Here’s where I sit, with one semester down:

  • Part of the psychological challenge for my students was that they did not have a choice to select blended instruction or a traditional model, and, while it hadn’t truly seemed like a make-it-or-break-it thing to me initially, it pretty quickly became obvious that it was: we know that people everywhere are resistant to change and, quite expectedly, more resistant when they didn’t choose the change. We’re now trying to figure out ways to build an element of choice into the curriculum design, because it seems that its lack is a hurdle that students struggled to get past.
  • Online instruction doesn’t seem to work as well in a course, like this one, where students are diverging into pretty new material, and, indeed, a new understanding of their profession, as compared to those courses which are an extension of what they already know. A lot of my job as a policy instructor is to make policy relevant, and accessible, and, indeed, conquerable for social work students, and that’s harder to do without the sustained face-to-face contact.
  • Students need real-time access to the instructor. We started off the semester with this blog, and closed-circuit discussion boards, and other online communication structures built in, but without a real-time chat set up, and I’m going to include that for sure next time. Students want to process their readings, in particular, and need a sort of free-form discussion in which to do that. Live and learn.
  • My sense that this blended model would work particularly well for certain students with certain learning styles was confirmed; I had several students who really flourished, for example, with the discussion boards, because they could look up material in advance, make connections between different parts of the course, and engage in “conversation” with students in other sections. I was right about that, but I underestimated the extent to which online instruction would fail students with other learning styles, and it was really a nightmare for students whose primary learning style is through oral communication with peers. There’s just no way to really replicate that outside of a classroom.
  • Online instruction is different, in so many ways, from a traditional classroom, that instructors are well-served to not try to pretend that it’s similar. I made the decision to allow students to engage in the online content for any week’s unit at any point in the semester, rather than assigning artificial due dates to “contain” that content, and that was the right decision.

    I believe that online instruction, in some form, will continue to play an increasingly prominent role in higher education, so it’s critical that we get this right. I worked harder this semester than in any since the first time I taught the course, and I hope that those efforts helped to mitigate the losses that this cohort of students experienced by being the experimental first class.

    What do you think about online instruction in higher education, specifically social work? How can we make sure that this technology will work for students, and for our profession?

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    I call it organizing: “network weaving” and your nonprofit

    Posted on December 7, 2010 by | 2 Comments

    Remember, all comments on this week’s posts about The Networked Nonprofit will enter you in the running to win a free copy of the book!

    Yesterday, I wrote about some of the attributes that drive organizations towards social media parallel those that create the conditions for effective advocacy. Today, I’m thinking more about those overlaps, here in the context of “old-fashioned organizing” as compared to what Kanter and Fine refer to as “network weaving”.

    Both concepts have the same fundamental goals:

  • Identifying key individuals who you can connect to your cause
  • Connecting those individuals, also, to each other, in the recognition that collections of people are always more powerful than people in isolation
  • Building strong relationships that, while not “personal” in the classic sense, have a degree of intimacy, forged through both conflict and collaboration, that energizes a movement and transforms people’s lives
  • Finding ways to move people towards increasing levels of involvement, always with a dual focus on how the organizing effort can meet their own needs as well as those of the cause (Beth Kanter refers to this as “The Ladder of Engagement”)
  • Creating structures that give people, who would be relatively powerless alone, voice and power, and a mechanism through which to change their own lives, and the lives of others

    I share with the authors, as do almost all of the (many) grassroots organizers I know or have known in my career, a belief that organizations are stronger when they have a solid connection to those they serve, and that individuals’ lives are enriched by participation in something larger than themselves.

    And I don’t really care whether they call that network weaving, in language that perhaps feels more familiar to those figuring out social media will add to their nonprofit organization’s quest for justice, however they define it, or organizing, which, albeit in online form, it really is.

    But it does, for me, raise some real questions about where the points of divergence are. In other words, if networking weaving, as described here, is so much like community organizing, how is it different, not in technical ways (like the media used) but fundamental ones? Are online social networks, for example, more likely to be composed on homogenous groups, thus denying people one of the most enriching parts of organizing: joining forces with those different than ourselves? Are the relationships forged online significantly different (more shallow? more lasting?) than those built face-to-face? Is the role played by a network weaver substantially different than that of an organizer? Do the boundaries of expertise fade away more fluidly online?

    I don’t know the answers to these questions, and they are most likely only answerable by work with a relatively small number of individuals–those engaged in authentic online AND in-person networking weaving/grassroots organizing efforts. Because so many of the former organizations have little to no experience in grassroots organizing campaigns (having adopted the strategies specifically to advance their online efforts) and so many of the latter are working with populations that (correctly or not) they assume to prefer face-to-face work, definitive answers may elude us, at least for awhile.

    But, maybe, that’s okay. Maybe, for now, our challenge is to really contemplate the questions: to think about how (and when) network weaving complements how we engage people “offline”, and vice versa, and to prompt conversations with our constituents about the multiple ways in which they want to connect to each other, and to our shared work.

    Those of you who organize online and/or in-person, where do you see overlap and where do you see significant differences? How can practitioners committed to empowering participation use both strategies? What cross-learning do we need to advance these fields? And does language, how we talk about what we do, matter?

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