1. Planning for Stronger Local
Democracy
PACE webinar
March 22, 2012

2. The Deliberative Democracy Consortium

3. Slides available at:
www.slideshare.net/mattleighninger
Guides:
http://bit.ly/rWeHaU
http://bit.ly/iwjgqn

4. The context:
How have citizens* changed?
 More educated
 More skeptical – different attitudes
toward authority
 Have less time to spare
 Use the Internet to learn and connect
* “citizens” = residents, people

5. The context:
Families with young children
 Have the most at stake in community
success
 Parents have even more motivation to
engage, but even less time, than
average resident
 Want opportunities to engage in
community, not just politics

6. Successful recent public
engagement tactics
 Proactive about recruitment
 Bringing diverse perspectives together
 Sharing experiences
 Giving people chance to make up their own
minds (deliberative)
 Different levels of action: volunteers, teams,
organizations, policy decisions
 Increasing use of online tools

8. Successful tactic: Online tools
 Complement face-to-face communication,
don’t replace it
 Particularly good for:
o Providing background information
o Data gathering by citizens
o Generating and ranking ideas
o Helping people visualize options
o Maintaining connections over time

9. Digital divides (plural)
 Overall, Internet access growing
 “Access” – to Internet, to government –
has never been enough
 Different people use different hardware
 Different people go to different places on
the Internet
 Communities just as complex online as off
– recruitment must be proactive

10. In other (fewer) words, the key
success factors are:
 Diverse critical mass
 Structured
 Deliberative
 Action-oriented
 Online and F2F

11. Successes, limitations of
engagement so far
Why do it: Make a decision or plan in a reasonable way
Get more people working on the issue
Build trust
Successes: When done well, meets all three goals above
Gives new leaders a chance to step forward
Challenges: Takes lots of time (especially recruitment)
Hard to sustain (not designed to be sustained)
May meet goals of ‘engagers,’ but not ‘engaged’
Doesn’t often change the institutions
Trust, relationships fade over time

12. Why plan for more sustainable
kinds of engagement?
• Sustain the benefits
• Allow the ‘engaged’ to set the agenda
• Better address inequities
• Increase community attachment and
economic growth
• Increase residents’ sense of legitimacy and
“public happiness”

13. Need more sustained, holistic forms of
engagement - regular, structured, enjoyable
opportunities that enable people to:
 Connect with other people (particularly
people who are different from themselves)
 Feel like they belong to a community that
values their voices and contributions
 Bring their concerns and priorities to the table
(they help shape the agenda)
 Participate in governance (they have a
say/hand in decision-making and problem-
solving)

15. Social media is a critical tool for
new forms of engagement
 More sustained
 Larger, more diverse numbers of
people
 Easier for ‘engagers’ – recruitment
doesn’t have to start from scratch
 More open to ideas from the
‘engaged’

17. Community engagement planners should
consider some key building blocks::

20. Resources
• www.participedia.net
• www.deliberative-democracy.net
• www.soulofthecommunity.org
• www.everydaydemocracy.org
• www.publicagenda.org
• www.kettering.org
• On Facebook: “Deliberative
Democracy Consortium” group page
• The Next Form of Democracy

21. Resources (continued)
• On YouTube: the DDC channel
• Using Online Tools to Engage – and
Be Engaged by – the Public at
http://bit.ly/iwjgqn
• Planning for Stronger Local
Democracy at bit.ly/rWeHaU – and
other resources at www.nlc.org