How can journalists, citizen journalists, and bloggers enhance democracy’s collective intelligence and community wisdom?
Convenor: Tom Atlee
Attendees:
- Priscilla Pope
- Linda Fantin
- Elyse Kaner
- Bernadine Joselyn
- Chris Naff
- (in post-session butterfly session: Becky LaPlant)
Most of the time we focused on Linda Fantin’s work in Public Insight Journalism.
PUBLIC INSIGHT JOURNALISM
Linda said that this involves realizing that on any given story there is someone smarter than you are on the issue — and respecting the expertise of the audience and of the public at large.
She said: “We ask our audience [and many other people, see below] ‘Tell us your experience, we’ll help show you your expertise.'” Journalists usually work with (and become dependent upon) the know-it-all experts. Linda works with a team who has built a network of people who are willing to share their experience with MPR audiences on all sorts of issues. The pool/network now has 53,000 people in it, in every state and 13 countries (a year ago it was 20,000). People in the network agree to receive occasional emails about an issue or inquiry, and to consider responding to it. The MPR program staff agree to keep their information confidential unless a network member agrees to share it in a particular way, knowing that an MPR reporter might follow up.
They fill out a profile: zip code and email address, plus various demographic and occupational information. Every time they respond to MPR queries — every time they contact MPR or MPR contacts them — the software catches the interaction and adds information about them to the database. “I can search the database for ‘baseball’ and find any time it has been mentioned.”
“Every day I get unfiltered citizen news and inquiries from many people in this network,” says Linda. “Sometimes we do prospecting queries to find out what’s happening in their communities. Sometimes we send out a focused query to a particular subset of the network that are particularly relevant to a particular story. When they respond to us, we send a thank you and tell them what we did with their info, like giving them a link to the resulting story, or themes we’ve been hearing. We also often say ‘Here are a couple of other issues you may want to weigh in on,’ to gather more data and keep the flow going. We have people assigned to do this. There’s a role called public insight analyst – experienced journalists who spot trends and ask good questions, calling individuals up to ask more. Let’s say there’s a medicine that apparently doesn’t work. If you have 23,000 people in that network, some of them will respond to your questions about their experience with it — or they might even be the people who alerted you to the problem in the first place. You can ask a question and you find out what the problems and trends are.”
We need to realize that our journalistic sources can be “the field of collective intelligence of the average public”, not only — or even mostly — the experts. But, says Linda, it is hard to sell this to professional journalists.
She says, “We are exploring what technologies can help us recruit and engage these people; it is largely email-based right now. We sometimes hold focus groups for people who want to tell us something, but we’re using mostly the computer-using public. We’d like to use more tech messaging. Low-income people often have cell phones, even if they can’t afford a roof over their heads. How do we set up knowledge management tools that use cell phones and twitter?
“Our response rate averages around 7% — which, if we’ve sent out 1000 queries, adds up to 70 people — and that supports great radio and journalism. Although we are working in Minnesota Public Radio, we serve the whole National Public Radio network. We do this for Marketplace, American Radio, Speaking of Faith, and other MPR programs.”
Speaking of Faith wanted to use this for the Pope’s visit. The Public Insight Journalism office sent out a query and the show put out a call to their audience: MPR asked all these folks, “What does it mean to be Catholic? What about this faith speaks to you and what concerns you have about it?” There were 350 responses. The producers scrapped the original experts-based program idea, and built the entire show from these responses. MPR created a Google map where you can click on a location and hear people’s responses to these questions, from that place.
“Reporters don’t have a lot of time,” says Linda. “We go to experts for expedience. But the technologies give us a whole other source of overall information about the whole field of people’s experience, which we can mine for trends and themes. But we don’t always handle it well. Before Bear Stearns folded, we sent out a query asking ‘What is the next economic pillar to fall?’ — targeted to people in the network who were in the lending and finance industries. We got a ranting email from someone in the industry who said ‘You are going to see two or three banks failing.’ We didn’t know how to follow up because he was talking about things we aren’t expert in. Then when Bear Stearns blew up, he sent us an email saying, ‘You didn’t listen to me.’ We needed someone to analyze what he said.
“In our Public Insight network we’re mining knowledge and experience, not opinion, data, and numbers. People hear what we describe and say ‘That’s totally what’s happening in our community!” Key to our successes are things like
- Can we ask the right questions?
- Do we have people to make sense of the responses? and
- Do we have reporters who can follow up?”
BERNADINE: Blandin Foundation funds your work. I get why I play ball with you. Working with you is consequential. We get people together to solve public problems. But people wonder why they should pay attention. We all get too many emails, invitations to involvement. But because of who you are at MPR and because you have the amplification potential as a major radio outlet, that’s why people participate with you.
LINDA: There is something on the other end of a radio broadcast, so that anyone participating knows that other people will hear them. We do not ask our participants for money; we don’t give MPR fundraisers access to our Public Insight Journalism network list. We don’t call out on the air for recruits. We try to reach out beyond MPR’s usual educated, affluent, liberal audience. We tap into other sorts of people by going to where such people are. If we don’t have enough farmers, we have a meeting in rural areas and try to get people to come and we say “What issues are we not covering?” or “What about food prices?” and then at the end, we ask them if they want to join our network. Of if we are doing a story, we’ll ask the people we’re interviewing, “Will you help us cover the story? Give us your name and you’ll become part of the Public Insight Network.” We also recruit participants from our online Federal Budget Balancer game.
Staff? In LA we have three Public Insight Journalism analysts related to Marketplace. In St Paul, we have a FT analyst on election coverage. We have a senior producer to do something with the content that comes in, and we have another that organizes forums. And a half-time analyst. And an assoc producer who manages the database and sends out thank yous etc. And an associate director. We do twitter queries.
We want people to talk with each other. We have an Idea Generator online regarding a public issue: We start with an essential question: How would you fix the economy. People said “How the hell should I know?” With health care we asked: “Tell us about a problem you faced, how you dealt with it, how do you think we should deal with it?” And then when they respond, we say, “This was a great start. Could you flesh it out a bit?” People can comment on it on the site. And there are tags. Go to MPR.org [1], right hand side, idea generators there.
BERNADINE: I’m director of the public policy and engagement program at Blandin. We help rural communities be their own voice. Access through broadband helping envision tech needs. Resource through e-democracy the community content piece for under-served people in rural places. Legacy media have resources but not connection to the community.
PRISCILLA: I’m studying forms of advocacy. How can media promote communication and the development of more knowledge?
TOM: Even the public insight journalism has the public responding to MPR as a central agency. The focus of my work has been on the power of face-to-face dialogue between citizens to generate community wisdom. So I’m curious how we could have public insight journalism that was more dialogic. Like conference calls might provide some of the benefits of dialogue even though they’re not actually face to face. [Someone notes that conference calls work best when the participants are already a group, familiar with each other, and can get messy when it is a raw new group of folks who don’t know each other.]
Is it possible to have the benefits of face-to-face dialogue online? There is a very provocative written process that could be done online that doesn’t claim to do dialogue or deliberation or consensus process, but in fact has the potential to create a very deep-level consensus purely through an iterative group writing exercise. I’ve always wanted someone to experiment with it as a form of deliberation, because if it worked well, it would revolutionize the field.
It is an iterative process whose proprietary form is called SYNANIM[2]; I’d love to see an open source version developed. It involves groups of ten participants in which each participant writes up their idea of an answer to the assigned question or task and then, online, shares it anonymously with the other 9 group members. Then each person picks one of the posted responses (their own or another’s) and revises it, and then posts their new proposal as if they had completed the task or answered the question. After a number of iterations of this post-choose-revise-post cycle, the founders of the process say that usually the answers converge on a consensus — or, occasionally, 2 or 3 consensuses among subgroups.
You can have thousands of people participating. In this case, upon completion of the first task/question, one person is picked from each group to join people from other groups to forge broader consensus on that task, or to move on to another task on the same project. The computer chooses this “leader” by noting (a) how many times people in his/her group chose his/her write-up in the preceding task cycle and (b) how many times he or she chose write-ups that many other members of the group chose. The computer ranks the participants overall and chooses the one with the highest score on these two parameters as the group’s “leader” (who can then participate in the higher level sessions), presumably because they have some resonance with what their group thinks about it all.
I find this fascinating. It totally challenges my normal sense that real interaction — whether written or oral — is required for dialogue or deliberation to take place. This Synanim process has a very different feel, but given the theoretical power of iteration (from chaos, complexity, and fractal mathematics), and its observed power in some dialogue and deliberation processes, I can see how it would work quite powerfully.
_______: There are also “webinars” and Skype video can be used to do virtual face-to-face.
_______: Minnesota doing great stuff with community technology. And Denmark has the idea of the community library — using libraries as centers for people to gather. Google “Aarhus public library”, and look for the video — how they are exploring what’s possible for libraries becoming a center for community. This has possibilities for bringing people face-to-face in ways that also link to the internet.
_______: We’re seeking “economic sentinels”, reaching out for people to watch what’s happening in their community, so from their feedback we can gather emerging economic developments. We’re not looking for economists.
_______: We want to distribute hundreds of cheap digital cameras which we give to people who are working with us in communities.
_______: How can we use the idea generator in small towns to seed discussions? Tim Ericson is trying to build community-based issue forums. It requires a lot of hand-holding, champion(s) to care for the online initiative, nurturing the place-based, community-building effort. If we want to build capacity, it is very fragile because it is so dependent on the individual leader/champion. It goes away if they are taken out.
CANADA’S EXPERIMENT IN MEDIA-PROMOTED CITIZEN DIALOGUE
TOM: There’s a remarkable form of interactive public engagement that can be done by journalism which I see as a quantum leap. In 1991 MACLEAN’S magazine — Canada’s glossy newsweekly like TIME or NEWSWEEK — hired their polling firm to pick twelve people who together represented the diversity of Canada. This was a time when Canada seemed to be coming apart, with Quebec pushing for independence and the Native peoples demanding more rights and autonomy. MACLEAN’S hired Roger Fisher, co-author of the popular breakthrough negotiation manual GETTING TO YES, to bring a team from Harvard to work with these 12 people for three days and come up with a shared vision for Canada. The initiative, itself, was unprecedented. (I wrote it up in Chapter 12 [3] of my book THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY. But what they did as journalists was even more remarkable:
They had 39 pages of coverage — it’s all on my website in pdfs [4] — plus it was all filmed for an hour long TV documentary by Canada’s national TV network. MACLEAN’S did profiles of each of the participants, so that readers could vicariously identify with those who matched their race, class, views, etc. Then they had 12 pages covering the event, a blow-by-blow account of what people said, of the tension between them, and the resolution of that tension, with photos of them being stiff and polite, then arguing, and then hugging each other at the end of the article. Then there are four parchment-yellow pages of their fine-print agreement, ending with all their John Hancock signatures, like on the US Declaration of Independence. They also had background articles on the selection process, the facilitators, the historical tensions, and more. It was an altogether remarkable journalistic production that generated widespread dialogue around Canada for months afterwards, which was only ultimately quelled by politicians dissing the process when they saw it going out of their control and putting pressure on them.
The only shortcoming I saw in this ws that MACLEAN’S saw it almost like a fancy focus group, rather than a democratic innovation. What if they had done the same process over again every year? Would the politicians be able to continue to hold down an annual iteration and evolution of what MACLEAN’S called “The People’s Verdict”? There are other versions of this — this picking a microcosm of the community to come to public judgment about public issues — being developed in which journalists are sideline participants. Some are described in my article about citizen deliberative councils [5]. But I think the MACLEAN’S initiative points out the powerful potential role of “journalism as a conversation” and of journalists as convenors of and reporters on powerful public conversations, with a model that could be emulated or varied by other community- and democracy-oriented media.
BERNADINE: I’m reading Margaret Wheatley’s book LEADERSHIP AND THE NEW SCIENCE, about how human patterns are reflected in world, how quantum mechanics and nature have dynamics and relationships that apply to social sciences and human relationships. Too much “balance” is a form of entropy. We need to go for disruption, through disruption — keeping feedback loops in place — in order to get to a different place.
PS:
Tom’s pre-session notes brainstorming journalistic factors that can influence collective intelligence and community wisdom:
Information – its accuracy, relevance, usefulness, coehensiveness, accessibility….
Meaning-making – priorities (leads), choice of relevance, connecting the dots…
Dialogue/Conversation – voices heard, resolving conflict, access to diverse views and resources, collective reflection leading to the integration diverse perspectives into a coherent voice of the community
Emerging Crises (especially those like peak oil that undermine normal infrastructure dependability) leading to the need for more local/decentralized economics etc., need info about larger context as it relates to THIS community, need hot connections to info and people relevant to emerging developments, need it in good form as there may be little time, need ways to shift the behaviors of the people and systems that make up the community
PIECES OF MY NOTES I CAN’T REMEMBER ENOUGH ABOUT TO FILL OUT. IF ANYONE ELSE REMEMBERS, PLEASE REVISE THESE SO THEY ARE USEFUL FOR READERS, AND FIT THEM INTO THE TEXT ABOVE — Tom
Chris Hall – building community wisdom.
Alise Kaner arts and entertainment for LA weekly.
__________: Family owned newspaper in Lawrence KS, 5 week training for (Cody Howard) citizens. Doing what MPR is doing.