Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication
Promoting greater civic engagement and investing in the capacity of citizens to engage with civic information and one another to solve public problems are among the recommendations made by the Knight Commission. Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication, a new policy paper by Peter Levine, calls on community and elected leaders to adopt sensible strategies to strengthen civic communication and citizen engagement. (Download PDF or Read Online)
The strategies posed in the report include reforming existing federal, state and local programs and institutions that could make significant contributions to the information environment and health of local communities through a Civic Information Corps; engaging young people in building the information and communication capacity of their communities; realigning incentives in higher education to turn these institutions into local information hubs; investing in public deliberations; and mapping the civic networks that exist in communities.
Adopting these strategies will enable communities to tap into the expertise and innovative spirit of the public to create public knowledge and culture that benefits the whole community.
Levine is the director of CIRCLE: the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement and research director of the Jonathan Tisch School of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. His paper is the sixth in a series focused on implementing the Knight Commission’s 15 recommendations for creating healthy informed communities across the country released in 2009 in a landmark report, Informing Communities.
Civic Engagement and Community Information:
Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication
A White Paper on the Civic Engagement Recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy
by Peter Levine
Introduction
Strategy 1
Strategy 2
Strategy 3
Strategy 4
Strategy 5
Who Should Do What
Relationship to Knight Report
References
About the Author
The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program
I'll try to share to comments today via Twitter from the roundtable discussion: http://twitter.com/democracy
You can also check out Twitter comments: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23knightcomm
I've also started a conversation on the good old Democracies Online Exchange listserv: http://groups.dowire.org/r/topic/3ylXIftwgnZAWL3q...
Thanks, Steve! Looking forward to hearing your ideas on how to take advantage of digital tech to implement these strategies.
I too will share from the roundtable on Twitter, and blogged this morning about the connection between our work at Social Capital Inc. and this paper here http://socialcapitalinc.org/node/667. Looking forward to the conversation.
David Crowley
Glad you'll be here. Social Capital Inc. is a good model for discussion of the Civic Information Corps concept in Peter's paper.
What are the best organizations that currently disseminate information to spur civic action? HandsOn Network? DoSomething? Idealist? Where does a person go to find the resources they need to (1) get informed, (2) take action, and (3) share the impact?
I'm creating http://www.pandoprojects.org in NYC to help meet this need.
GREAT article from Peter!
I’m not sure exactly why but this website is loading extremely slow for me. Is anyone else having this issue or is it a issue on my end? I’ll check back later and see if the
problem still exists.