The Good Life, Gary Chapman

Gary Chapman, died on December 14, 2010 while visiting Guatemala. He had been planning to view the lunar eclipse that occurred on the winter solstice from the Mayan temple of Tikal.

I met Gary in 1986 while he was the executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (its first). Gary was the founder of the 21st Century Project and was involved in a variety of fascinating projects including the International School for Digital Transformation where I was a faculty member in 2009 in Porto, Portugal. He contributed chapters to several books that I co-edited. From a web page about Gary at the University of Texas, Gary was "senior lecturer at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, associate director of the Telecommunications and Information Policy Institute at The University of Texas at Austin and internationally recognized expert on Internet policy, telecommunications and technology policy."

Gary also was an author of the one of the Liberating Voices patterns, The Good Life. I've included the verbiage from the pattern card, abridged from the full text. It reminds of Gary's humane values, and serves as an important challenge for all of us:

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

Gary Chapman was patient but persistent in his pursuit of progressive goals and a better life for all. He'll be missed.

Journalism That Matters Launches Innovative Civic Intelligence Venture

It's exciting to report on a new local civic intelligence initiative. A group of civic innovators has been meeting regularly since the "Reimagining News and Community in the Pacific Northwest" unconference organized by Journalism That Matters was held in Seattle in January 2010. Ten related initiatives, called "collaboratories" are the product of these meetings and a public meeting devoted to one of the initiatives will be held monthly. The first meeting, to discuss the Civic Communications Commons initiative, will be held on September 24. That initative "plans to launch an online commons that will serve as an information hub and conversation place for news topics." Other collaboratories include Creating Abundant Journalism, Media Mapping, Digital Literacy Initiative, Building on Transparency, Seattle Happiness Index, and Global Health Reporting.

I'm planning to use the civic intelligence lens to examine (and possibly inform) the project and the initiatives as they move forward.


Here is more information from their recent press release:

A calendar with specific dates and locations will be posted as soon as details are available on the JTM website, http://www.journalismthatmatters.org.

For more details on the initiatives please see Matt Rosenberg’s current update on the JTM website at http://journalismthatmatters.org/content/jtm-pacific-northwest-update or Heidi Dietrich’s at http://wanewscouncil.org/2010/08/10/new-journalism-ventures-in-the-works/.

For updates on the initiatives please go to the JTM website or contact JTM Outreach and Information Coordinator, Cate Montana: cate@fairpoint.net; 360-894-1868.

Towards a Leeds Declaration on Online Deliberation

The following sketch for a "Leeds Declaration" was the basis of my presentation at the "Strategies for Extending Deliberation" panel discussion at the recent Online Deliberation Conference at the University of Leeds in the UK. The organizers (myself included) had hoped to actually finish (and ratify by some means) a declaration by the end of the conference but that didn't happen. While it may still happen I thought it would be reasonable to publish my thoughts in some form on the web.

How do we take advantage of this historical opportunity to play meaningful roles in the work (now in progress) of designing tomorrow? Perhaps a jointly developed document could help inform this effort?


The Leeds Declaration:
Building an Enlightened and Empowered Citizenry [A DRAFT] July 2, 2010 / Version 0.1
This DRAFT template is based to some degree on the original idea to promote a “Citizen’s Assembly.”


All over the world attempts are being made to trivialize citizenship and reconstitute citizens as (everyday) consumers and (sporadic) voters. At the same time, real power is in many ways being transferred to large corporations and other unelected organizations such as the World Trade Organization. We, the organizers and attendees of the Online Deliberation Conference at the University of Leeds, July 2, 2010, hope to help counter that trend with this declaration.

Realizing the growing and critical importance of citizens and civic society in addressing humankind's common problems, we the undersigned propose the initiation of a prolonged and multi-pronged focus on deliberation — online, "offline", and, most importantly, the relationships between the two. We realize that this is an extremely complex project that will require years of complex, nuanced, creative and thoughtful negotiation and collaboration. We are aware that this project will have to address an extremely broad range of social and cross-cultural factors. We, however, believe that beginning this discussion in an explicit and open way is preferable to many other varieties of globalization that lack this transparency.

Moreover, we realize that precisely defining an ideal system in advance is impossible. For that reason, we propose to begin a principled, long-term, incremental, participatory design process that integrates experimental, educational, community mobilization, research and policy work all within a common intellectual orientation: specifically to provide an inclusive and pluralistic intellectual umbrella for a diverse, distributed civil society effort.

Civil society historically is the birthplace of socially ameliorative visions. This effort is intended to help build a more effective platform for these efforts, to help address humankind's shared problems — such as environmental degradation, human rights abuses, economic injustice and war — that other sectors — notably government and business — are seemingly powerless to stem.

[The proposal contains the follow main tenets or themes that the proposal declaration is founded upon.]

• Need for Deliberation and Citizen Engagement


• Obstacles to Deliberation and Citizen Engagement


• Collaborative Emergencies


• The Internet as a Critical Platform


• The Importance of Civil Society


• An Emphasis on Social Innovation and Civic Intelligence


• Building Across Boundaries As Well As Within Boundaries


• New Venues, Transformed Venues


• Many Audiences, Many Stakeholders


• Diversity of Deliberative Spaces and Approaches


• Support for the Deliberative Community


• Building on Current (and Building Additional) Knowledge


• Suggestions and Recommendations to All Sectors...

All sectors of society would be affected by a more enlightened and empowered citizenship. Although no one group will be responsible for the design, development, maintenance, and use of a more engaged and effective deliberative culture, we are directing our recommendations to specific sectors. This declaration should contain suggestions to (at least) these groups: the academic and research community, parents, teachers, and other educators, the government at various levels (the responsibility to respond to citizen input social innovation -- in addition to technological innovation -- should be funded), the media, the funders, the NGOS and to the civil sector in general.

Finally, the last line in the declaration should make it clear that the declaration must be addressed to people everywhere — all citizens of the world.

Holy Grail, NewsMan!

While the news definitely has a place, the main question that needs answering in my opinion is what information and communication do people actually need to play a meaningful role in society — and, arguably, this goes way beyond news. The subsequent question (not answered here) is what can be done to ensure that this actually occurs.

News attaches prominence on immediacy: What's happening right now is the all-important factor. And for that reason, news itself is often literally useless. It can be very entertaining and enticing, but it falls flat in the usefulness department when the voting, invasion, or bus crash, has already occurred.

When the news is the only thing that matters, the factors leading up to a news story as well as the consequences and implications that follow the story do not receive the attention they deserve.

Focusing on news is a way to entice a society with attention deficit disorder. And months after the news story, the audience can't remember who was bombed (or the reasons that were provided) or where the famine took place (or what factors helped cause it).

This also helps can help instill a feeling of helplessness (and/or cynicism and/or ignorance) because we rarely learn about roles we might play since we didn't see the news coming and we don't see where it's going or what might come next.

News preempts the important — and often unrealized — products of journalism that we could call the pre- and post- news. News shouldn't be the "holy grail" but it could serve as a foundation for developing and disseminating that matters.

Postscript: I developed the above in relation to the recent Journalism that Matters (Un)Conference held in Seattle. This definitely overlaps with the great concept of "Slow News" that was introduced at the conference. I have to admit it took awhile (a few minutes at least) for this concept to grow on me. (I'm now hoping that somebody will also post a draft Slow News pattern to the Liberating Voices pattern language site.)