The Civic Health Diagnostic Workbook for Cities, Counties and Other Communities

Written to be be used to monitor and evaluate the effects of various interventions, it’s goal is to help local governments better understand the underlying causes of conflict in the community and their interactions so they can better evaluate where, when and how to respond. It will also help them plan better for public engagement.

Resource Link:  www.buildingdialogue.wordpress.com/about-our-civic-health-diagnostic-workbook

This resource was submitted by Sarah Read of The Communications Center, Inc. via our Add-A-Resource form.

• Does dialogue really extend beyond the tea-fuelled self-congratulation of a few liberal religious believers?
• Does it have any real social effects, and could any such effects be augmented?
• How can it reach beyond the sympathetic to those whose attitudes and behaviour are an actual threat to peace and social cohesion?

The resource comprises short articles on each of the discussions and an extensive list of practical recommendations, some taken from the discussions and some based on Dialogue Society experience. It is intended to be a contribution to an ongoing dialogue on dialogue and to the sharing of best practice.

Resource Link: www.dialoguesociety.org/publications.html (free download)

This resource was submitted by Frances Sleap of The Dialogue Society via our Add-A-Resource form.

ConsiderIt helps individuals make sense of complex issues through familiar deliberative activities. People can sort out their own thoughts by taking stances, weighing pros and cons and browsing key points made both others. ConsiderIt makes it easy for contributors to make their voices heard and find others who share their views.

ConsiderIt’s structured approach to deliberation also helps decrease polarization and establish common ground. It nudges people towards considering tradeoffs by presenting them with ideas that resonate with a broad spectrum of their peers. And it surfaces points of agreement and potential compromise, letting contributors and organizations focus their energy on meaningful engagement and productive collaboration.

The Living Voters Guide

Why bother to reach across the divide?

Many people have at least one important relationship that has been frayed by painful conversations about political differences or constrained due to fear of divisiveness. What alternatives are there? You can let media pundits and campaign strategists tell you that polarization is inevitable and hopeless. Or you can consider taking a collaborative journey with someone who is important to you, neither paralyzed with fear of the rough waters, nor unprepared for predictable strong currents.

You and your conversational partner will be best prepared if you bring 1) shared hopes for the experience, 2) the intention to work as a team, and 3) a good map that has guided others on similar journeys.

We hope this guide will help prepare you to speak about your passions and concerns in ways that can be heard, and to hear others’ concerns and passions with new empathy and understanding—even if you continue to disagree.

Resource Link: www.publicconversations.org/pcp/docs/resources/red_blue.pdf

Universities, among the most enduring institutions of the last millenium, transform as well during these periods of rapid change. OpenGrounds is accelerating the University of Virginia’s leadership in taking on the challenges of this new era, to develop the knowledge, tools and behaviors that will shape the future.

what do we create?
OpenGrounds nurtures and accelerates interactions that emphasize creative innovation across disciplines, and catalyzes projects that will redefine the public research university for the new millennium.

why do we collaborate?
OpenGrounds is developing new responses to societal challenges and encouraging engagement and action for impact in the world.

how do i connect?
OpenGrounds links scholars, artists, scientists and other partners in a network of shared ideas, setting the table for conversations that transcend traditional academic structures.

Resource Link: www.opengrounds.virginia.edu

The term “innovation” is often applied to products emerging from the private sector. When innovation is discussed in the context of government, commentators generally concentrate on achievements at the federal level. The popular press rarely devotes attention to innovation in local government, or examines innovation as a process, rather than an output. Yet cities and counties have the capacity to engage and impact wide sectors of the public through innovative policies, practices and programs; many are already doing just that. In order to encourage the spread of new approaches to address existing community need, local government staffers, elected officials, third parties that serve them, and researchers must have a deeper understanding of how innovation is perceived and pursued in cities and counties.

Drawing on original survey and interview data, this report examines why and how city and county administrators in California adopt new approaches, and the processes through which they learn about potential solutions for problems in their communities. The report highlights the important role of knowledge sharing in the diffusion of innovations from one locale to another, and identifies personal connections as a significant source of information when it comes to innovation. In addition, it shows the obstacles faced by local government leaders who hope to pursue new approaches. Among the report’s key findings are the following:

• City and county administrators perceive the exchange of information related to innovation in local government as vitally important to the effective diffusion of innovation from one locale to another.
• Local government staffers often cite internal organizational and managerial processes — especially those concerning service delivery — as innovative, rather than concentrating on truly new or public-facing programs.
• A desire to reduce costs and/or increase organizational efficiency is the most significant motivation for innovation in local government, while lack of resources — financial, human and time — is a significant obstacle to innovation.
• Local government administrators are deeply concerned with addressing community need, but the influence of community members and civic opposition in developing proposed solutions is relatively muted.
• The vision and leadership of elected officials and legislative mandates can be powerful reasons for investigating and adopting new approaches in local government, though both factors can also result in less-than optimal solutions to problems.
• When it comes to receiving and sharing knowledge around innovation, local government administrators rely primarily on personal contacts, particularly those working in similar positions within the same geographic area.
• Those working in local government view professional associations as a moderately valuable source as they research and implement new approaches, but they regard the specific technological tools and knowledge sharing programs offered by such associations as less valuable.
• There are significant divides between urban and rural communities when it comes to perceptions of civic innovation and the ways in which knowledge about innovation is acquired and shared.

Together these data serve as a starting point for a conversation about which specific practices and programs can advance effective knowledge sharing for the purpose of encouraging innovative programs that ultimately produce more adaptive and responsive local governments.

Resource Link: http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_case_for_strengthening_personal_networks_in_california_local_government

Download a copy of The Case for Strengthening Personal Networks in California Local Government here.

Dr. Konieczka’s work focuses on socio-cultural talk and discourses of democratic governance, participatory politics, and community development. In this essay, Dr. Konieczka addressess the historically consistent causes and consequences of everyday gun violence.

Articulation of the Question
Can the U.S. sustain a reasoned and responsible conversation about the cause and consequences of violence with guns? Below, I examine how early weapons prohibitions in the U.S. responded to concerns that mirror antecedents of contemporary violence with guns; how those constants reflect cultural dispositions towards aggression in American culture and communication practices; and what those facts portended for civil discourse(s) about violence with guns in the U.S. In light of those discussions, the essay concludes by considering opportunities and challenges to fostering, focusing, and facilitating civil discourse(s) about everyday violence with guns.

Closing Recommendations
The first necessary step in any attempt at changing cultural norms leading to violence with guns is to define aggression as a communicative practice, and to offer alternatives ways of interacting with others in difficult/conflict situations. As a form of communication, aggressiveness is a verbal attack on the self-worth of an individual, and is contrasted with argumentativeness, which engages the other’s ideas. A robust body of verbal aggressiveness investigations have reached “the rather unequivocal conclusion that the effects of argumentativeness are constructive and those of verbal aggression are destructive.”

As concepts and practices, argumentativeness and aggressiveness have many articulations with immediate and long term implications for debates and discussions about violence with guns. Normatively, aggressive communication can be demonstrated, observed, and corrected. As an ethic, argumentativeness can be idealized, modeled, and taught as alternative to aggression. Interpretively, argument and aggression can be located among local and global discourses, allowing for understanding of immediate situations/contexts and broader cultural influences.

Having defined communicative aggression and at least one alternative, the second task is to identify contexts where aggressive communication is the norm in everyday interaction. The list of situations where aggressive communication is valued in U.S. culture is perhaps endless; from “trash talk” on the field to slanders outside the women’s health clinic, words that devalue other people are all too common within institutions and systems in which individuals are organized and related. Perhaps the most important contexts in which aggressive communication is today celebrated is the political and/or governmental sphere (including reporting thereof). U.S. politics has never been a civil sport, but over the last 20 years or so, it appears to have increasingly little room for reasoned, responsible, and respectful argument. The media personality Tucker Carlson has best evidenced the perceived value of aggression in U.S. politics, declaring in 2007 that then Senator Obama “sound[ed] like a pothead” when the presidential candidate opined that “we have lost the capacity to recognize ourselves in each other . . . [producing] an empathy deficit.”

Finally, the question arises as to how people might seek to reduce aggressive communication and promote argumentativeness (and other non-violent communication) in U.S. politics, and everyday interactions. Advocates for practices of deliberation, dialogue, and collaboration have long made the case for transforming how people understand themselves and others through reasoned and responsible communication about public issues and policy. Those ideals remain the best available means for cultural change. Research, for example, suggests that with instruction and practice, “policy debating increases argumentativeness and value debating reduces verbal aggression” (Colbert, 1993, p. 213).

Cultural change must start with youth in school, and be a constant theme throughout the curriculum and institutional relations (e.g., student and teacher interactions), but cultivating a less aggressive culture will be impossible if adults do not support such efforts, and model non-aggression in their communication practices with children and each other. With respect to transforming aggressive communication practices among U.S. adults, violence with guns is perhaps the best issue with which to begin the conversation. The danger, however, is that we will continue to talk about marginal gun related issues (e.g., mass shootings and assault weapons) in aggressive ways, and in doing so reproduce cultural norms leading to everyday violence with guns.

Resource Link: http://ncdd.org/rc/wp-content/uploads/Konieczka-ArmoryAsArgument.pdf (download)

Articulation of the Question
What can we do to mitigate fear, anger, and misinformation in order to build the trust necessary to navigate dialogue on the difficult issue of gun violence?

Closing Recommendations

Resource Link: http://ncdd.org/rc/wp-content/uploads/Read_Overfelt-AimHigherDigDeeper.pdf (download)

This 5-page essay by Regina Kelly, a PhD student at the University of Arizona, was written for the University of AZ’s National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD).  After the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, NICD called for essays to address the challenges of conducting constructive conversations about gun violence in the U.S. As part of their mission, NICD seeks to promote civil discourse on issues of public interest and does not take a policy position on gun violence or gun control but is committed to encouraging a civil discussion.

Ms. Kelly’s essay focuses on how media coverage of events like the January 8th, 2011 Tucson shooting make it difficult to talk about gun violence among people with different views.

Articulation of the Question
How do America’s mainstream media outlets influence how we think through complex issues related to gun violence? Specifically, how does the media’s common use of the binary frame influence the process? Mainstream media exerts tremendous influence on how we think and talk to each other not only in local public spheres but also in broader efforts to craft policies to prevent future gun violence. Attention should therefore be paid to how the media frames issues.

Closing Recommendations
Two recommendations emerge from this analysis with respect to conducting public, local discussions. First, journalists from mainstream media newspapers and TV stations should not serve as facilitators of public discussions in relation to gun violence, given that the position of facilitator is one of neutrality. Instead, journalists should be invited to explain and defend their coverage, framing, and analysis in relation to gun violence, in exactly the same way that we invite political representatives to explain and defend their positions on gun violence.

Second, public discussion should be informed by the work of researchers, experts and commentators who have investigated how different causal forces in relation to gun violence might interact and interrelate. Such citizens can model for us all how differences can be “dialogized”—as Fairclough puts it—and not just polemicized. In this dialogue, in this openness to different perspectives, in this identification of where ideas overlap and interrelate, we might begin to craft collective responses that are more likely to protect us all, and substantially prevent innocent suffering and death.

Resource Link: http://ncdd.org/rc/wp-content/uploads/Kelly-BinaryProblem.pdf (download)

Core Services

The Centre for Public Involvement is more than academics, technocrats and bureaucrats – it is community based research, a “living lab”, with the synergistic benefits that result. The Centre is designed to contribute to public involvement through theory, policy and practice, influencing the sate of the filed through the probision of the following core services:

• Research and Applied Learning
• Knowledge Mobilization
• Process Design and Impact Assessment
• Education and Training
• Project Management
• Partnership Development

Get Involved

The Centre will exemplify discovery learning by offering experiential and innovative learning opportunities to enhance the experience of students at all levels within the University. The Centre will provide extensive opportunities for graduate researchers and has employed two to date through Centre projects. The Centre will also develop internships or practicum opportunities in the area of public involvement. The Centre has already implemented one internship with an undergraduate student with the City of Edmonton Mayor’s Task Force on Community Sustainability. Undergraduate and graduate students will have unique opportunities to directly learn about the theory and practice of public involvement through research assistantships and other learning opportunities.

“The Centre was a great learning opportunity and will be for a wide variety of students. The underlying theory and practice of public involvement is central to such a diversity of work environments that the opportunities to engage students from numerous disciplines and with different interests are excellent. The major benefit of the Centre could be developing projects on which students, who normally may not become involved in community placement options, are given the chance to become more involved and learn many skills that will be useful and transferable in their future.”

- Jon Weller, Undergraduate Intern, 2011

Resource Link: www.centreforpublicinvolvement.com