Civic by Design: Can the Library Building Bolster the Civic Image of the Community?

This article, Civic Engagement Trumps ‘Shhh!’ in the NY Times is a must read!

It is a striking expression of the continuing effort to shake the dust off of the city’s aging libraries and recast them as lively communal hubs, and should go far in bolstering the civic image of Queens.

How interesting that the very design of the building has the potential to bolster the image of the borough. Note also:

• “But Mr. Holl’s design is also a statement about the individual’s place in a larger communal framework…
• “The strength of this layout is that it allows Mr. Holl to balance the reader’s need for solitude with a strong sense of community.”
• “The views aren’t just pretty; they remind us that the intellectual exchange of a library is part of a bigger collective enterprise.”

Thank you, Mr. Steven Holl for recognizing what a handful of libraries and library students, like those in LIS418LE already know. Now let’s go out and wake up the rest of the profession!

This is the future for libraries – creating a communal framework both in physical and programming design, reinforcing a strong sense of community, and reminding that we are part of a collective enterprise. The sooner we embrace this critical role, the sooner we can move beyond the idea that “we can cut library budgets because everything you need is on Google.”

No other institution is better poised to fill this role than the library. And this is a time when the public is dying to feel a part of a collective, to feel grounded within their community.

I’m a QR Code

I just visited http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ and created a QR Code for my name. Here it is:

Taylor L. Willingham

Understanding Public Deliberation

Diane Miller and I will be the keynote speakers for the Austin Coffee Party on October 9 at 1:00 p.m. at the Austin History Center. Below is the description of what we will cover.

Understanding Public Deliberation
Most people think of deliberation as something juries do after hearing all of the evidence. Juries are tasked to weigh the evidence because their decisions may have profound consequences on people’s lives.

In our personal lives, we often weigh the costs and consequence of our decisions – whether to accept a job in another town even if it means uprooting our family. We weigh the costs of one university and the value of the education we might receive against other factors, like location, proximity to activities we value, etc.
What if we applied that same thoughtful consideration to the decisions we confront in our public lives?
The goal of public deliberation is to frame the tough choices we face in our public life to reveal the costs and consequences of various options. We may prefer one choice over another, but how much do we really know about how our preference will affect others? Plus, our choices could have unintended consequences that we never considered. Shouldn’t we sort that out before we implement policies and actions, and are forced to live with an unforeseen and unpleasant outcome?
This brief workshop will introduce participants to the idea of public deliberation, the role that values play in how we form opinions and make decisions, and strategies for helping people find common ground with others who hold very different perspectives.
Diane Miller and Taylor Willingham collectively bring thirty years of experience in public engagement with a special emphasis on creating meaningful public dialogues.

Having a voice/demanding YOUR voice be the one that’s heard

I appreciate the need to make certain that every voice is heard. Criminy, that’s my business…my passion! But there is a difference between having your voice heard and demanding that your voice be the one that’s heard EVEN IF it means that someone else doesn’t get to hear their voice on the microphone.

One woman in the room is pouting because I didn’t give her the microphone in a room of over 600 people with at least 1/3 of them dying to get on mike. Maybe it just shows that people don’t trust that the thoughts and ideas they write on the pages on their table will be incorporated into the thoughts and ideas that will propel the city forward.

Or maybe it shows how desperate people are to be heard. And it tells me that we have to be diligent in making sure that people ARE heard, that they KNOW they are heard, AND that they are willing to yield to make sure others get heard.

At the recent AmericaSpeaks project Our Budget, Our Economy National Town Meeting, a recorder at every table typed the ideas from the group into a wired laptop computer. The conversation at each table at six different locations across the country was captured immediately and sent to a central collection place – in this case, Philadelphia, the origination point. There was no attempt to capture a smattering of individual comments because of the impracticality. At best, we were able to isolate one person on mike and camera at each of the six sites who made a 2-3 sentence comment that was broadcast to the other sites, but the purpose was more about reminding ourselves that we were part of a NATIONAL conversation than to process what was being said or even to pretend that it reflected the consensus of the group. It was the presence of the computers at every table that gave assurance to the participants.

But that model is not practical for every circumstance. Would this event have been possible if the organizer had told the council that it couldn’t happen without 100 laptops? Doubtful.

So what’s something we can do to assure people that they are being heard in these large-scale forums?

And for me, the additional question is, “how can I adjust my attitude?”

hmm, I think that writing this blog just did that! Thanks for the therapy session.

Being in the room does not equal being at the table.

I’m sitting here listening to someone try to convince a single mother who just returned to college and is here with her young daughter that she, does indeed have something to contribute to the conversation. She came with her teacher, but her teacher has not reached out to her to draw her in (or direct her to a table where she can participate. I commend her teacher for inviting her here and exposing her to this experience, but being in the room does not equal being at the table.

Fortunately, she is in capable hands. He is a facilitator/ non-profit consultant from El Paso working on the teen pregnancy issue.

With so many moving parts, how can the organizers have support mechanisms to prevent anyone from being left out?

BTW, in the time it took me to write this, a spontaneous group of three formed when an outsider pulled up his chair and suggested, “let’s form our own group!” and another gentleman joined them.

Thoughts from Ed Whitacre Jr. (former GM CEO) at SA2020

Strategic planning is knowing where you want to go and getting there. Smart cities know where “there” is. All successful organizations have one thing in common, an idea of where they want to go.

The best way to predict the future is to create it is an idea that Ed Whitacre embraces.

When he joined GM, the company was shell-shocked. It had just gone through the largest bankruptcy for any American company. It was overcomplicated with a matrix management system that created confusion. No one knew what to do. The org chart looked like the complicated interchanges I navigated to get here from I-35. (And frankly passed under just north of Austin-I think TXDOT uses cooked spaghetti to plan interchanges, but that’s another post!)

Back to Whitacre’s wisdom from his time at GM…

The industry had been turned on its head, but GM was a company with a global reach and scale, with a toe-hold in emerging markets. Mostly, it was a company with a lot of sort passionate people. If the people don’t want to do it, forget it. It’s not going to happen. People are the most important asset to any company or any city.

Coming out of a bankruptcy is like a near-death experience. But (like San Antonio, GM had strengths to build upon.)

More than anything, GM needed a vision that was simple, understandable, believable, concise, and challenging.

The new GM vision is to design, build and sell the world’s best vehicle.

Whitacer’s vision is even simpler. Our vision is sell cars.

Visions are for organizations that are working to improve the lives and circumstances of others. What is the vision for San Antonio that we can rally arounund.

• A vibrant downtown,
• Transportation infrastructure
• Primary and secondary education

Businesses go where they are welcome, it’s easy to get around town and there is quality education. The way to create the San Antonio we want is to develop a vision of what we want to become.

Strategic planning is worthless unless there is first a strategic vision. The plan is what you do to reach your vision. It shows the different routes you can take to get to the vision.

Keep the vision simple and concise and easily understood. Now on to do that!

Observing the Strategic Planning Process in San Antonio

A community that can boast it has been named one of the most recession-proof cities in the country could easily rest on its laurels. And indeed there is much to celebrate in San Antonio. The “eds and meds” effect described in the National Journal Magazine article (September 11, 2010) explains how the economy’s emphasis on jobs in education and health care have buffered this city from some of the drastic boom and bust economies or the “hares” in this article’s “tortoise and hare” metaphor. But according to the popular Mayor Julien Castro, this is only half of the story. He cited distinguishing traits of SA that are not the City’s source of pride:

• the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation with high repeat pregnancies,
• 40% drop out rate
• low rates of literacy
• low average income

Judge Nelson Wolff, County Judge further charged the group to find ways to build a children’s hospital, figure out how to stop the flow of inmates and to rehabilitate the 4,000 that are incarcerated, to pull up those who (despite their best efforts) have still not been lifted up. Reflecting on the many positives in San Antonio, he challenged the group to not forget the many shortcomings that need to be addressed, but to build on the community’s assets. For example, as the City Manager pointed out, SA is one of the few communities to have a AAA Bond rating.

Nice to see that they are starting from a position of strength, but also that they are realistic about the challenges.

A good start to the day!

If you are interested, follow the webcast at:

Librarians will survive

This video pretty much shows the spirit of librarians and their commitment to libraries – they will survive. But we need libraries that do more than survive. Libraries are vital to our democracy (blah, blah, blah, if you’ve read anything I’ve written on this blog, you’ve already heard all of my arguments so I’ll not bore you further.)

The point is…BECAUSE libraries are vital to our democracy, shouldn’t they do more than survive? You are still surviving as you take your last few breaths. How close to the thin line between surviving and dying do we want to push our libraries/democracy?

Sigh!

Please fact-check me

For the past three months, I have been working on an AmericaSpeaks project, Our Budget, Our Economy. OBOE will link 19 sites across the county in a National Town Meeting about the Federal budget, specifically the unsustainable growing debt. We recently got some great press from a blog from Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist.org) on the SFGate.com City Brights Blog. But there were three words (four if you count a hyphenated word as two) that struck me.

Please fact-check me

I started to think back on how many times I’ve suffered writer’s block or felt incapable of joining a conversation because I was afraid I didn’t have enough information or that someone would expose my ignorance. How often have you sat quietly in a lively conversation unsure about whether or not you had enough information to fully participate? Have you ever chosen silence because it was more comfortable than taking the risk that you might be wrong?

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt?

I worry about those silent masses who are too overwhelmed by the details of public policies and too insecure to speak up even though they may be adversely affected by decisions made on their behalf.

But I also worry about those who have no problem belting out unsubstantiated “facts” carefully selected to confirm their previously held conclusions. With mind made up, they readily find data that proves their point while blindly missing anything that should cause pause and reflection. Their positions seem questionable, but their declarations are so assured that no one mounts a serious challenge. Or they are confronted by someone from another side equally armed with a set of “facts” that they vehemently use to prove exactly the opposite “truth”.

So what could perhaps help change the conversation in the midst of a “fact war” that silences some and incites others to hysteria?

What if we quit fighting about who’s facts are correct and started talking about what we value and share? What if we had an “out” that would allow the inhibited to speak from the heart without fear of being called a fool? And what if we were less focused on fighting for our preferred version of the facts and more open to different interpretations? What if we could find a way to move forward and not get mired in the details?

On June 26, thousands of people across the country will gather to talk about our federal debt. AmericaSpeaks has worked with an impressive team of National Advisors and a smaller content team to construct printed materials that will provide a Federal Budget 101 education for participants and a discussion guide (forthcoming) that will frame the conversation. These materials have been vetted for fairness and balance by institutions and individuals of diverse perspectives. And the materials explicitly address the assumptions and rationale for the projections that have been used in the framing.

These materials will be valuable for people willing to study and able to grasp the complex intricacies of our federal budget process. And I commend the crew for tackling this behemoth task. Job well done. But it won’t be enough – could never be enough – for many of us to feel like we are expert enough to propose solutions. Others may read the materials finely picking through the data to make sure that their “obvious answer” is supported. Not finding a strong argument to support their preferred solutions, they will be ready to pounce.

So here’s what I propose…

On June 26, let’s add another element to this already grand and challenging experiment. Let’s allow ourselves to just say, “Please fact-check me.” This could provide an opening for those who feel less informed to share their concerns and ideas without fear of ridicule. It would remind the falsely self-assured that NO ONE really has all of the answers, especially when we don’t agree on the issues or the circumstances that led us here.

Please fact-check me.

But please do it later. In the meantime, let us get on with the important deliberation about what we value, how we will make tough decisions, what message we want to send to our elected leaders, what kind of economy we want to leave to our kids, and what kind of sacrifices we are willing to make to get the results we want.

Yeah, the facts, the data, the projections are all important. But let’s not let our obsession with being right and being an expert keep some silent. And hopefully, those who hold strong opinions based on their slice of expertise will be willing to suspend the need to be right long enough to entertain new possibilities.

As I understand it, the consequences of inaction on the federal budget are too dire to let the problem continue while we engage in a fact war.

But please, fact-check me.

Ahem, Your Congnitive Bias is Showing

Lately I’ve been caught up in books and articles about bias and how our biases affect our thinking in subtle and irrational ways.

“Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely explores the hidden forces that shape our decisions – why we spend more on certain products, why we refuse to cut loose and keep doors open long after it makes sense, how our preconceived expectations influence what we see (or what we choose to see) and how we choose to interpret events. Warning #1: You may not have as much control over your decisions as you think! Warning #2: If you take a class from Professor Ariely, it sounds like you’ll have a ball, but don’t trust him. You might be the unwitting participant in one of his wild experiments! Then again, it might be kind of fun and definitely enlightening, if you can drop your justifications and biases long enough to learn about your own foibles.

“Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson documents why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. Why would I ever own up to a bad decision if I can rationalize why it was the right decision at the time. ooooh, “at the time” is a convenient rationalization!

I’ve not read “Nudge” a popular book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, but it looks like an appropriate third act to the two prior books. According to the NY Times Magazine article about Sunstein (May 16, 2010) this book explains why conservative economics (people are rational, therefore the role of government should be as guarantor of a fair market and nothing more) do not always work in the real world – people are not rational. We are subject to biases and quirks. (What? We’re quirky?) But our quirks are predictable. We are, predictably irrational.

I’m not going to argue behavioral economics vs. conservative economics. The PBS Nova production of Mind Over Money is your best source for the exploration “Can markets be rational when humans aren’t” and it’s available for you to view online.

But I am going to argue that we can all be better consumers, team players, parents, volunteers, students…heck, better human beings by being aware of our own biases. Again, I’m going to rely on an expert who produced a video to help his Advanced Placement High School students learn about cognitive biases for a psychology class. Take it away Mr. Wray…

So the next time you make a purchase or some other important decision or pass judgment on another person or on an event, ask yourself, “Is my Cognitive Bias Showing?”