Jumping into Civic Life

For the PDF of this document, download it here. 

Talking it out, deliberative dialogue in higher education: Compact Nation Podcast

I had the opportunity to be interviewed about my teaching and research with colleagues at Campus Compact as part of #CompactNationPod. Listen below.

Talking it out, deliberative dialogue in higher education

 In our eighth episode of the second season, Co-Hosts Emily Shields and Andrew Seligsohn sat down with author and scholar Timothy Shaffer about his work and research in deliberative dialogue, including his new book “Deliberative Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning for Democratic Engagement.” We discussed what it really takes to embed dialogue in campus and community work and some ideas for making it more effective. We also took a detour from the usual pop culture conversation to review Thanksgiving traditions, including Andrew’s recipe for turkey that doesn’t suck. Listen now and weigh in online using #CompactNationPod.
 

When 20,000 American Nazis Descended Upon New York City

For the full story, check out this story at The Atlantic. 

Beyond disgust and shame in a post-truth world

I watched a video posted on Facebook this morning from CNN about an interview with a few ardent Trump supporters. As the text accompanying the video stated, "Donald Trump supporters made several debunked claims about election fraud in a post-election interview with CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota."

One comment made during this interview was regarding 3 million illegal voters in California. When pressed, the women making the comment didn't speak specifics about the issue. She walked back the earlier comment she made about the number. She also referred to President Obama saying illegal immigrants could vote by referring to an interview which has been proven to be edited to be deceptive by Fox Business Network (here is the video in question).

The import question here is raised by the reporter: where do you get your information? The response: "from the media...all across the media." Later multiple people stated you could simply "Google it."

While my immediate response is what idiots these people are, my slightly more reflective response is that this is exactly why we need civic education, discussion, and deliberation about important issues with one another, especially those with whom we disagree. We can quite easily dismiss this woman as someone who is uninformed and lacking basic knowledge. But what steps, practically, might we take to engage someone like this who is relying on outlets of information for confirmation of her presumed positions? This is one of the great challenges we face now in a "post-truth" environment.

While "post-truth" was the 2016 word of the year for Oxford Dictionary, we have long wrestled with the uncomfortable truths as a society. Here is quite an episode of The Diane Rehm Show on this issue in our society. I would encourage you to listen to this in its entirety.

It is important to have settings where ideas--including absurd ideas--are able to be expressed. Allow them then to be stand up to some scrutiny. Have a claim about 3 million illegal voters in California face the light of day. But we can't simply express our disgust from afar. This is where civic work has come to in. We don't win people over by simply supplying facts to back our claims. In fact, they can further divide us into our ideological campus. If you want a more academic take on this, take a look at this paper recently posted on the SSRN. The authors of this paper also wrote a piece in the New York Times about this research. While now dated (Sept. 2), their point is instructive to us, particularly the last line:

Voters are now receiving a steady stream of both positive and negative information about Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Which kind of news will have a large impact will depend partly on people’s motivations and initial convictions. 

But there’s an important qualification. In our experiment, a strong majority showed movement; few people were impervious to new information. Most people were willing to change their views, at least to some extent. 

For those who believe in learning, and the possibility of democratic self-government, that’s very good news.

UPDATED - December 3, 2016

Dan Rather, in a post on Facebook, has offered another way to think about the challenge (and impossibility) of living in a "post-truth world." That commentary can be found here.

UPDATED December 11, 2016

Steve Inskeep, of NPR fame, offers a rephrasing that might be more helpful. Rather than "post-truth," he offers "post-trust" as a more useful, accurate, and appropriate term. Read his approach to making sure you're reading and being appropriately critical and skeptical here. 

Bubbles

It has been nearly four years since I've done anything with this blog. In many regards, it feels like a vestige tail from a digital animal long gone. Yet, here it is. And it is particularly because it is something that feels out of place that I would like to start using this more.

Since I last did anything here, I've become more active via Facebook and Twitter. I've written academic articles and am working on a number of projects that get at the heart of the types of questions I want to explore professionally. I hope to outline some of that work here in the future. So this is a reintroduction of sorts. While I will continue to write, post, and engage through various media, it seems like a step back from the always immediate and ever-present cycle of news.

I realize that, in my own little way, I contribute to the constant process of refreshing of News Feeds and the like. It makes me think of one of my favorite lines from a writer that I should turn to more often than I have in recent years. This is the first of two points I want to make.

In an essay published in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice, Thomas Merton has an amazingly timely and insightful remark that I often think of when I'm finding myself consumed by "news," particularly the immediate and round-the-clock process we now see through uncritical eyes. Here is Merton's quote:

What was on TV? I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as “news.” When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too. 

This leads to my second point: not only might we be well-served to step back a bit, but we would also seemingly benefit from speaking and engaging with others unlike ourselves. As we know from the "blue" and "red" feeds that shape our lives, and this great SNL skit below, we largely live in our own bubbles and (mostly) like it that way.

John Oliver has also done a great job pointing out, in more detail, our bubbles.

I argue that we can and should engage with those around us, particularly those who don't share our political views. A recent story in the Manhattan Mercury about my work spells this out a bit more. I made a similar point in a USA Today interview: we can't scapegoat or honestly clump everyone who doesn't agree with me into some category, as easy or as comforting as that might be.

“This racial stuff to me is BS and I’m tired of hearing it. I have it made because I’m a white male? I’m prejudiced? That shit is long ago." pic.twitter.com/s6X6imuKfQ

— Brandon Stanton (@humansofny) November 20, 2016

So what is to be done? Here are some interesting/thoughtful/provocative links to help us see beyond our bubbles.

• http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html 
• https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/two-bubbles-unrealism-learning-tragedy-trump/#!
• http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/18/liberals-should-stop-ranting-and-seek-out-silent-trump-voters-like-me/

I hope to, with some regularity, write here rather than always posting and sharing via Twitter and Facebook. You're welcome and encouraged to follow here. You can sign up for RSS, but I will also make these posts available through other media. But as Merton helpfully reminds me, there is a benefit to stepping back. I am easily consumed by information, but I'm not always sure it's helpful. I'm going to try to do my part make sense of our work, not only through the algorithm Facebook thinks I want but through a more critical perspective and one that is open to others.

Technocracy, democracy, and what it means

Today, print media has published articles exploring an emerging trend in governance--the role of the technocracy. The first article comes from the The New York Times.  It focuses primarily on the recent changes that have taken place in the post-Berlusconi Italy. Elisabetta Povoledo, writing for The Times noted that

Mr. Monti said he hoped the new government could restore market confidence and soothe a tense political climate. “We worked seriously and paid close attention to the quality of the choices,” he said at a news conference. He added that he had been encouraged by Italy’s European partners and the international community and that the rapid formation of the government would relieve the pressure of markets on Italy.

The ministers are drawn mostly from Italy’s academic world, some with strong ties to the Catholic Church, but also banking and the upper echelons of civil service.

Because of the seriousness of the challenges facing Italy, there is little hope outside of turning to experts. The long-term prospects for this apolitical group of academics and business leaders are questionable, primarily because such an approach to governance stands in contrast to the electoral realities for a democracy and its political parties. But for the time being, these leaders are viewed as saviors from a system fraught with political jockeying that, in many ways, has led to this precipice. The Telegraph's Christopher Booker writes that the EU's plan all along was not democracy but rather technocracy. He writes

One of the few pleasures of watching this self-inflicted shambles unfolding day by day has been to see the panjandrums of the Today programme, James Naughtie and John Humphrys, at last beginning to ask whether the EU is a democratic institution. Had they studied the history of the object of their admiration, they might long ago have realised that the “European project” was never intended to be a democratic institution.

The idea first conceived back in the 1920s by two senior officials of the League of Nations – Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, a British civil servant – was a United States of Europe, ruled by a government of unelected technocrats like themselves. Two things were anathema to them: nation states with the power of veto (which they had seen destroy the League of Nations) and any need to consult the wishes of the people in elections.

As Richard North and I showed in our book The Great Deception, this was the idea that Monnet put at the heart of the “project” from 1950 onwards, modelling his “government of Europe” on precisely the same four institutions that made up the League of Nations – a commission, a council of ministers, a parliament and a court. Thus, step by step over decades, Monnet’s technocratic dream has come to pass. 

Phillip Oltermann of The Guardian collects a good number of articles that point towards a technocracy model of governance in the EU.  


Another article comes from The Economist with the appropriate title, "Have PhD, will govern," touching on the appointment of academic economists in Italy and Greece and the shift in contemporary politics to think about new approaches to paralytic stalemates in national political systems. The articles goes on to talk about the unique nature of the "super committee" currently facing a looming deadline here in the United States. The author put it this way:

Perhaps the best example of this is the so-called “super committee” in the United States. Normally, all fiscal decisions are made by Congress, with the approval of the president. But by November 23rd, a special committee made up of three Democrats and three Republicans from each house of Congress, has to slice a mammoth $1.5 trillion off the budget deficit over ten years. Congress must then vote on whatever the super committee proposes—but may only accept or reject the plan as a whole. It may not amend the plan or vote on individual items, as is usual. And if Congress rejects the package, or the super-committee fails to come up with one, then the $1.5 trillion of cuts will be imposed automatically. American politicians, despairing of their inability to reduce the deficit in normal ways, have put a gun to their own heads. There have been partial precedents in American history but nothing quite like this.

In Europe, meanwhile, technocratic prime ministers are only the highest-ranking experts being recruited to help balance budgets and reform economies. Italy not only has an economics professor as prime minister (Mario Monti), it has also agreed that the IMF should scrutinise its reform programme. Greece has accepted that a troika of the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission (the European Union’s glorified civil service) should supervise its austerity measures. So have Ireland and Portugal. Spain is an especially revealing case. On the face of it, its democracy is working as usual. The country is due to hold an election on November 20th and, if the polls are correct, the conservative Popular Party will unseat the ruling Socialists. Yet at the same time, the current government has agreed upon a series of economic targets with the European Commission, and in practice the PP’s leader, Mariano Rajoy, will have to take these targets as a guide to policy, even if he dislikes them (which, admittedly, he doesn’t).

The political environment here in the United States, has seen a long-growing problem with the use of the filibuster (you can check out one article on this increase here). 

To quote from The Economist:

The special factor in America is the dysfunctionality of the political system. The past decade or so has seen a growing use of delaying tactics in Congress—such as the filibuster and so-called “hold” on appointments, so that decisions that were once largely formal or administrative have become mired in politicised controversy. This is the opposite of the problem in Europe, where the emergence of technocrats is supposed to make decision-making less partisan. But it is still a problem, as was seen in the disastrous wrangle over raising the national debt ceiling—an argument which ended in the downgrade of American sovereign debt. House Republicans have said they will not compromise with the president. But since the American political system requires a measure of compromise to work (and since the Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives), parts of the legislative processes have almost seized up. This is likely to get worse during election year.

America and Europe share a common problem: the economic and financial crisis has discredited mainstream politicians. The right is popularly seen as the party of the rich, too close to unpopular bankers, and responsible for the financial deregulation of the 1980s which, on some accounts, was the source of all the trouble. But the left, which might have expected to have benefited from a capitalist meltdown, is no better off. Centre-left governments, at least in Britain and America, are also compromised by their earlier friendliness to finance and the left is seen as having been profligate, running up the debts that austerity is now needed to rein in. The result is that whereas in the early years of the crisis, the left was doing better in America and the right better in Europe (an echo of the 1930s), now there seems no pattern, except growing opposition to incumbents. 

This brief reference back to the 1930s is an important nod because technocracy and technocratic approaches to governance helped to shape much of the thinking during that period. John Jordan's Machine-Age Ideology provides a glimpse into that period. The positive view of technocracy faded in the United States, but, as Oltermann of The Guardian noted 

In many European countries, the word technocrat still has positive connotations. In the 1950s, Jean Monnet envisioned growth as something that required expertise rather than party politics. Smaller democracies, such as Holland, often rely on technocrats as negotiators between unruly coalition governments, or between employers and employees. Belgium, without a government for 17 months and counting,is a technocrat's paradise and has weathered the crisis fairly well so far. In the former communist states of central and eastern Europe, technocrats played a key role in negotiating the transition from authoritarian regime to democracy.

Today, we can see nations wrestling with daunting challenges. We are included in this list. But what are we to think of an embrace of "apolitical" political actors. I realize technocrats aren't popularly elected like our democratic leaders, but we would be wrong to think they exist outside of the political world in which they live and work. It seems to me that maybe we need to look at this issue in this way.

1. We need to explain what we mean when we say "political" or "politicians." We are political animals, and I think we do a injustice to the term when we only use it as a derogatory term about elected officials. Being political can (and I would argue, should) be a positive characteristic of citizens.
2. The role of the expert needs to be understood in a way that positions them as political actors in relationship with elected officials as well as ordinary citizens. There is a benefit to sidestepping the debacle that is the Congress, but democracy doesn't have to mean impasse or partisanship. 

These two points are not simple. Changing such large issues isn't even feasible. But if we just ignore them, then I would submit that we're only going to find ourselves facing issues much like we are today. And while we may think we're living through a very extreme time, I would venture a guess that having elected officials so closely aligned with bug business and big money will continue to block an honest discussion and debate about how we might, collectively, work through some of these very serious and pressing issues. There is a role for the citizen in all of this, as well as the elected official and the technocrat. Finding that balance, however, requires considerably more work. 

Sliding away from what? The contested past and present for higher education

This morning The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article entitled "Syracuse's Slide" based on issues related to questions about the purpose and role of higher education. There are a number of reasons why this is very important, especially as I sit at the National Outreach Scholarship Conference. Harry Boyte has written a short piece in response to this article. I'm including the full text below because I think Harry captures the heartier this issue very well.

By Harry C. Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College


Robin Wilson’s October 3, 2011, article, “Syracuse’s Slide,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education surfaces controversies about the purposes of higher education and the nature of excellence which go well beyond one university. Indeed, there was a statewide debate on precisely these issues in 2001, the 150th anniversary of the University of Minnesota. The debate is likely to quicken in 2012, the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act signed by President Lincoln in 1862, establishing land grant colleges and universities.

One side of the argument is unabashedly meritocratic and elitist. Thus Syracuse history professor David H. Bennett fears that “the university is moving away from selective to inclusive,” a view echoed by the editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Orange, who worries that “rise in the acceptance rate could devalue the diploma.”

The supposed tradeoff is between “excellence” and “access.” A Minnesota Public Radio statewide discussion framed the forced choice about the future of the University of Minnesota precisely this way in Minnesota in 2001. More broadly, this supposed choice is today’s conventional wisdom, at the heart of college rankings such as US News and World Report’s, or, on a global level, the “Shanghai Ranking” of the purportedly top 100 universities in the world.

But there is another side to the argument. Land grant institutions like the University of Minnesota -- founded a decade before the Morrill Act -- were once called “democracy colleges.” The designation came from the conviction at the heart of America’s educational faith that diverse, inclusive student bodies, faculty members who educate them, and colleges and universities deeply engaged in the affairs of their communities and the larger world are wellsprings of democratic excellences far more dynamic and inspiriting than attributes of any exclusive club.

Lotus Coffman, president of the University of Minnesota from 1921 to 1938, eloquently voiced a democratic view of higher education in his inaugural address, May 13, 1921, entitled “The University and the Commonwealth.” Vowing to resist those who would locate the university on “some Mount Olympus” far above the world, he declared that “The truly educated American… believes that his institutions are social in origin and in nature, not the product of any individual nor of any special group of individuals, that they represent the soul hunger and the spiritual expressions of the common people…that a generous education for himself and a better one for his children is the only safeguard of democracy.” One can’t romanticize earlier years in higher education, freighted with exclusions of their own. But Coffman’s vision – and dimensions of earlier land grant practice – represent understandings of public purpose and democratic mission crucial to update for the new century.

Today, state colleges and universities revive this vision of democratic excellences in the American Democracy Project, community colleges continue it in the new Democracy Commitment, and small and medium private colleges like Augsburg are taking leadership in this vein as well in the liberal arts world. In a time when it is far more important to re-dedicate ourselves to developing the democratic excellences of the broad citizenry than to cultivate a breed apart, Syracuse University's President Nancy Cantor is a great democratic pioneer in the tradition of Lotus Coffman on the private research university side, helping to bring the democratic spirit of the old land grants to all of higher education. />

How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?

How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?

Joe Klein, writing for Time, has an interesting article about how democracy can/should solve difficult problems. While he suggests using a model as championed by James Fishkin (among others), the central question about how should a democracy deal with difficult questions get to the heart of rethinking both democracy and governance.

I think one of the important take-aways from this article is that communities actually turn to citizens rather than limit themselves to expert panel and consultants about what should be done.

Parker Palmer and Politics of the Brokenhearted

Two great figures of contemporary thought: Bill Moyers and Parker Palmer. Palmer speaks to much of the recent work he's been doing, but it carries the thread from his earlier works. His notion of a politics of the brokenhearted is very important, especially in a world where we turn to violence and division when things are in discord rather than taking that moment to consider an alternative to division. 

Populist movement, popular puppets, or a spiritual rebirth?

Frank Rich has echoed and articulated very clearly what others have been saying as of late: people are being duped. While the populist rhetoric is soaring, the reality on the ground is something quite different. Rich clearly captures this: 

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Enlarge This Image

Barry Blitt

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Thanks Frank. 


Yesterday's gathering in Washington, D.C. of the loose band of tea partiers and the like led by the pseudo-prophetic Beck have expressed strong anger at the current administration and have cloaked their frustration in the "federal government is meddling in my life and is on my back" kind of phrases. I have many issues with folks who want to rid their lives of the evil government while simultaneously enjoying the aspects of a federal government (I, at least, enjoy using roads.) However, there's another issue that emerged yesterday unlike much of the rhetoric and language being used by those on the extreme right. 


Yesterday, for Beck at least (and seemingly many others numbering somewhere shy of 100,000), his take on all of this was quite religious. And not in a subtle way, either. Nearly everyone who spoke invoked religious language and expressed a sentiment that the United States needs a renewal, a rebirth of sorts, from the wayward ways. This is maybe where it gets confusing because it seems like it would be difficult to say a country need a spiritual rebirth only since the last presidential election. Other prominent figures have noted this is the end times. So what's going on here?


Interestingly absent from the show on the steps yesterday was mention of Beck's own religion: Mormonism. I guess it would have just been a little too difficult to work that in when the narrative being told is that of the faith of the founders of this country (although they were more of a ragtag group of deists and such). Beck said, "Something that is beyond man is happening" and "America today begins to turn back to God." While trying to become a figure for the civil rights movements in a radically altered and confused way, there are serious issues raised by what Beck and others say. Speaking as someone who spent six years formally studying theology, I not only get frustrated by what Glenn Beck says, but also what it means when one begins to unpack and problematize the theological issues at hand. For Beck, God incarnate is someone quite different from the Jesus in the New Testament writings of old as well as the writings of liberation theologians. 


James Martin, S.J., has a very good essay on this issue of liberation theology and the great discomfort the words of Jesus as expressed in the writings of the New Testament mean for those whole profess a Christian faith. Social justice hasn't sat well with Beck for quite a while (do a quick YouTube search and you'll see). There's something really difficult for those who want to espouse Christian faith while also saying that government doesn't have role to play and you sure as hell better not think about any type of redistribution. Making Jesus a free-market capitalist is quite a stretch when you read the New Testament. Critically reading such texts, for many Christians, would force an internal conflict that is often unwanted.  Folks like Francis of Assisi and others took seriously the life of Jesus and what that meant for them. I'm not saying everyone needs to become a mendicant, but there is an orientation in one's life that must challenge many of the destructive institutions in our lives. When I write "institutions," I'm not thinking about the evil government, but rather the ways in which our society is driven by capitalism. I just doesn't jive with much of what Jesus lived and died for. There is much that could be written about the distortion of Christianity from shortly after the earliest Christians to its acceptance and adoption by the Roman Empire and in every subsequent generation, but hat is not the point. The point is that making an anti-government and lower taxes rally fit with Christianity doesn't work. It really doesn't work when you're also claiming to be leading a new civil rights movement. Courtland Milloy of the  Washington Post raises the ever important but absent question in all of this: when do we want to return to in history? At what point was it "right"?


No matter; people weren't gathered to hear too many facts. Rather, they were there to be rallied, to reclaim America from some (straw man?) socialist federal government taking over peoples lives. If that's the case, why would Paul Krugman's piece a few weeks ago be so spot on? As he reminds us, the U.S. is failing desperately, not because of a lack of religion but because of a lack of understanding how a society actually functions as a society and not a collection of individual islands functioning autonomously. E. J. Dionne Jr. asks us to think about all of this, to move beyond a politics of stupidity. I'll close with a few paragraphs from Krugman:

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.

Learning from the work of others, both good and bad

Just a couple days ago I came across what looked strikingly similar to Wikipedia. However, it's got something different going on. Participedia, the idea of Archon Fung at the Kennedy School at Harvard is one of the individuals behind this initiative. Participedia's website says, 


"Participedia is a tool for strengthening democracy. Based on a wiki platform, its main content consists of user-generated articles which describe and assess participatory governance throughout the world. For instance, there will be articles on the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly of 2004, consensus conferences in Denmark, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and other cities, local school council governance in Chicago, municipal evaluation meetings in China, and the People’s Campaign for Democratic Decentralization (under the Panchayati Raj reforms) in Kerala, India. In addition, there will be articles on participatory methods, such as deliberative polling, citizens' assemblies, and participatory budgeting, as well as articles about the organizations that sponsor, implement, and study participatory governance. Over time, we hope Participedia will garner hundreds and perhaps thousands of such articles.

There are three main kinds of articles in Participedia:

• Articles about cases, or experiences, of participatory or deliberative governance (e.g. British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly of 2004).
• Articles about specific methods of public deliberation, participation, or collaborative governance (e.g. Participatory Budgeting).
• Articles about organizations that design, execute, or support public participation, deliberation, or collaborative public action (e.g. Everyday Democracy).

So, log on, take a look around, and maybe even offer your own story as to how participatory and deliberative engagement is being used. The hope is to have both stories that demonstrated what worked while also including those accounts which show what doesn't work sometimes, given a particular contextual setting, etc. 

Regardless, it is another tool for those interested in these topics to learn from others. It remains to be seen to what degree something like this will be used to lager numbers of practitioners. Hopefully, it will be more than we're thinking.