transparency, trust
In Uncategorized on February 17, 2010 at 8:42 am
Nextgov.com recently posted a short article on a ForeSee Results new study indicating that online government transparency efforts may be increasing trust in government. ForeSee reports that their survey included some 30,000 folks, a clearly respectable number.
While increased transparency positively influencing citizen trust in government is not only intuitive but also accords well with traditional political philosophies, I wonder if the phenomenon would hold true in different situations.
A friend working on the ground in Afghanistan recently told me that while the younger generation in that country are tech savvy and Facebooking and using other contemporary tools, the power structures there are rigid and personality driven with little accountability and much corruption. So I wonder what innovative government transparency would look like in countries that are still trying to establish governance and rule of law. Ushahidi-type apps?
More importantly, would citizen trust in governing structures follow the same curve with respect to transparency as it does here in the US? Would it be a steeper curve? A shallower one?
books, citizenship
In Uncategorized on January 12, 2010 at 8:50 am
I’ve been carrying around with me a gift I got for Christmas: The American Patriot’s Handbook: The Writings, History, and Spirit of a Free Nation. Small and hardbound, like a small bible, the book contains, in chronological order, key writings and orations that have shaped American culture since the founding of European colonies in North America.
The author, George Grant, writes that he was interested in restoring something that used to be common in American upbringing: such handbooks of civic education. In an era of growing interest in government transparency and citizen participation, it is increasingly important to stimulate thinking and understanding of how the systems that we have (and are wrestling with) came to be, and under what very explicit philosophies some of them were created.
I’m finding the book to be quite interesting and something I wish we had been giving many years ago as students.
citizenship, democracy, gov2.0
In Uncategorized on September 17, 2009 at 8:07 am
International IDEA, respected for its work supporting democracy, recently posted a piece by their Secretary-General Vidar Helgesen about the affect of the global financial crisis on democracy. It’s a short piece that I like for introducing a couple of useful concepts and discussions. First, Mr. Helgesen frames the issue of the financial crisis’ impact in terms of people’s faith in democracy vs. people’s trust in democracy. Faith here is people’s belief in democracy as an aspiration, whereas trust relates to their confidence in democracy’s actual performance based on their experiences. As he points out, faith can be rising even as working trust diminishes. I think this is simple but very useful way of framing discussions about our political order and the options we want to entertain for its design.
The second part that I liked about this piece was Mr. Helgesen’s look at our modern representative governments, talking about the “chain of representation, oversight and accountability.” He briefly discusses this “chain,” providing another useful frame for talking about the nature of our modern political order and the pressures upon it, positioning citizenship in its proper relationship with governance (i.e. it’s true philosophical relationship).
“We are indeed facing a paradox: on the one hand, getting together to start a dialogue, raise collective concerns, aggregate opinions, protest or demand change, has become easier. The internet and emerging national and trans-national cyber-networks functioning in real-time seem to hold incredible potentials for making political representation smoother, more transparent and more effective – or even, for broadening the space for direct democracy. They may well end up altering some of the paradigms of political life as we know them today.
On the other hand, the “classical” and still dominant system of representation is seriously challenged and there is an urgent need to re-establish the linkages between citizens and those who govern on their behalf. Governments, parliaments and political parties still have a key role to play and need to be accountable for what they deliver.”
In all I found the piece to be insightful and providing a couple of simple yet valuable frames for others to use in discussing, for instance, the implications of any long-lasting success that gov 2.0 may have in altering the role and nature of citizenship in contemporary representative governments.
citizenship, Civic Media, Governance
In Uncategorized on July 25, 2009 at 9:47 pm
I recently checked out the MIT site for the Center for Future Civic Media and was drawn to their question, ” What is civic media?” In the past several months I’ve noticed more posts mentioning civic “software”, a term that immediately caught my attention, but which just as quickly seems inadequate for the possibilities we’re sensing in using information and communication technologies (most notably Web-based “social media”) for engaging citizens in government. Civic Media was in fact the term that held more appeal for me, if only because it seemed to imply the same connectedness and activity for people as citizens as “social media” has for people as social creatures.
Check out the quick commentary by Henry Jenkins on what civic media means to him. I like where he goes with it, talking about the use of media tools to connect citizens closer with government. I would, however, take the definition further, seeing civic media as the use of ICT to increase citizen participation in governing, and actually decreasing the distinction between citizen and government, i.e. ruler and ruled. Civic media really should be seen as an expanding set of possibilities for us to move from the Roman-like citizenship that we have today, with a separation between civil rights and participation in governance, towards a more Greek-like conception of citizenship, where the citizens are the governors.
This potential for our civic nature, this possibility enabled by new ICT parallels and gives impetus to the reexamination of the difference between government and governance. In my definition of the term, “governance” is “the ongoing process of identifying issues of collective interest that require action and mobilizing societal actors and resources to implement action to achieve broadly acceptable outcomes.” Civic media should really be seen as the information infrastructure, the civic infrastructure that enables the political community, whatever it is, to connect and act on collective issues, to govern, rather than simply apply greater pressure on the governors.
In Uncategorized on July 25, 2009 at 9:32 pm
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