Recommendation 13

THE COMMISSION RECOMMENDS:

Empower all citizens to participate actively in community self-governance, including local “community summits” to address community affairs and pursue common goals.

As powerful as the Internet is for facilitating human connection, face-to-face contact remains the foundation of community building. Indeed, recent years have seen an explosion in the use of the Internet not only to create “virtual communities” among strangers, but to enable people who know and encounter each other offline to sustain and deepen their connection. To build the “bridging capital” that American towns and cities need in order to prosper, local communities should pursue opportunities for citizens to share responsibility for addressing community needs and to organize on a community-wide basis to discuss common problems and to pursue common goals.

Community summits can be important catalysts for such self-governance activity. To be successful, local summits will have to make sense within the context of an actual decision-making agenda. Such gatherings should have the potential to lead to constructive action and to help identify and empower citizen leaders who can move the common agenda forward. Engagement should be motivated by common awareness that what the gathering decides will create an action agenda that citizens can and will pursue. Inviting citizens to engage with one another and then offering an experience that is accessible, energetic, and constructive can overcome the barriers to opportunity and motivation that too often keep people at home.

A good start for initiatives in community dialogue would be summits directed at creating community action agendas to improve the local information environment. Mayors’ offices and city councils could lay the groundwork for such summits by using the Healthy Information Community checklist in Appendix I as a framework for gathering the basic facts about the community’s information environment. A follow-up summit could then bring together the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors in a united search for specific local steps in pursuit of the “informed community” vision. They could collaborate to map additional community information assets and determine voids that need addressing. They could design initiatives to promote information availability, citizen capacity, and public engagement.

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