Who Should Do What

Who Should Do What

One way to summarize the recommendations of this white paper is to identify the actions that have been proposed for various institutions.

Congress and Federal Agencies

The Corporation for National and Community Service, with congressional authorization and appropriations, should create a Civic Information Corps that provides training, grants, and meetings for service organizations that emphasize the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Participants should include non-college-bound youth and young adults. The Corporation should also designate learning outcomes for all of its programs, and those outcomes should include civic communications skills.

Agencies that fund research and scholarship (National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others), should fund and evaluate scholarship that benefits local communities as well as efforts to aggregate and disseminate such scholarship.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other federal agencies that address community-level problems should support communitywide public deliberations about those problems. Hampton’s infrastructure for civic engagement and deliberation was seeded with a federal grant. EPA has supported community collaborations to address environmental problems with grants, toolkits, meetings, training, and technical assistance through a program called Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) (Sirianni, 2009, pp. 270-274). These are rare models in a system that still favors command-and-control regulation. To promote civic engagement, a mix of grants and other incentives, plus training and technical assistance, seems essential.

The federal civil service should provide opportunities and incentives (e.g., credit courses) for government employees to learn how to collaborate with citizens to create and disseminate public knowledge.

State and Local Governments

Cities, counties, and other jurisdictions should provide physical spaces for public deliberation. These need not be single-purposes sites; convention centers, central libraries, and other multipurpose facilities can be designed to work for public meetings.

Local governments should fund and recognize or promote online knowledge hubs, often in partnerships with local colleges and universities.

Local governments should convene deliberative forums to address public issues and should promote ongoing training for deliberative democracy.

School systems should make civic education a priority and include within civic education media and communication skills and service-learning opportunities that involve media.

Colleges and Universities

Colleges and universities should reward high-quality, rigorous research that is helpful to their immediate geographical communities. They should create websites that aggregate such research and make it publicly accessible. They should create oversight boards with community representation that review community-based research to ensure that it is genuinely valuable.

Journalism schools and departments should play leading roles in creating and maintaining public information portals, and their classes should work on those projects as a form of service-learning. Programs in library and information science have important roles in designing, maintaining, and evaluating public online archives, networks, and relationship maps. Extension agents should help maintain and disseminate public information.

Colleges and universities should make civic learning opportunities (including courses and less formal learning opportunities) available to non-students. They should also strive to improve K–12 civic education and media literacy through relevant research and teacher training.

Foundations

Foundations should generally fund the work described above, with special attention to funding community-based nonprofits that serve marginalized populations, of which an important example is non-college-bound youth and young adults. Funds should be available for knowledge creation and dissemination, e.g., community-based research projects, trainings, and access to computers. Foundations can also fund processes, such as public deliberations at the local level.

The most important role of philanthropy is to support pilot projects, such as exemplary colleges and universities that (in partnership with community organizations) build experimental online knowledge portals. Once pilot projects are successful, governments and higher education should take them to scale.

Citizens

Citizens should seek opportunities to create and share public knowledge and discuss public issues. They should learn to do so in formal and informal educational settings. They should expect governments to be open, transparent, and collaborative and demand reform when they are not. They should volunteer to the best of their ability, and their volunteering should include elements of research, media creation, and communications. In their regular paid work, they should also look for opportunities to contribute to public knowledge. Citizens should, in particular, create and share knowledge about the networks and relationships in their communities.

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