During the Spring 2007 semester, several research teams will be working with Texas Forums. This is a summary of those projects and my links to them. Some of these links are private, but some are public if you are interested in learning more about the research that we are doing:

Outcomes-Based Evaluation (Spring 2007)

Three UMICH students (Li Yeong Yang, Erin Gong and Zachary Monahan) in Joan Durrance's graduate library and information sciences class on Evaluation will be conducting a survey to identify librarians who have participated in Public Policy Institutes within the National Issues Forums network. They will then develop an evaluation of the outcomes of the librarians' participation. They will look at the impact on the individual and on their organization and community. The question we are seeking to answer:

What are the outcomes of the various ways that Librarians have experienced Deliberative Democracy Training - in workshops, at NIF Public Policy Institutes, ALA pre-conferences - on them as individuals, their organizations and their communities?

We have a password protected site for collaborating.

Using Digitally Mediated Information Services to Consolidate Forum Reports (Spring 2007)

UIUC - DEL: Four students in Bryan Heidorn's Desigining Digitally Mediated Information Services will be exploring ways to integrate 2.0 technologies into our work. They have set up a blog to track our work. The students working on this project are: Molly Dolan, Colin Koteles, Sean Stevens, David Vess. I referred them to my blog postings about technology. One excellent project for these students to pursue is to evaluate options for using technology to localize a framing (e.g., a wiki of the Achievement Gap with hotlinks to the data sources that can be adapted by librarians or other information specialists) and for citizen journalists (see below) to collaborate and collate their reports and research findings.

Mission Statement for the UIUC - DEL Research Project
(to comment, go toWeb 2.0 Meets an Old-Fashioned Town Meeting)
The Texas Forums Project, an initiative of the LBJ Library and Museum, allows participants to explore public issues in an moderated discussion setting. Through deliberation, people broaden their understanding of the issue, find common ground with others, and begin to imagine new and creative ways to work on solving these difficult issues. Our group will look for ways in which Web 2.0 technologies can help expand the reach of the Forums, allowing them to bring together people from different areas of the state, country, and world.

Designing Digital Media for Civic Engagement and Consensus-Building

This is an emerging partnership between SRI Center for Technology and Learning (Dan Zalles and Louise Yarnell) and the League of Technical Voters (Silona Bonewald). We're still formulating the research, but here is the elevator pitch for now:

Elevator Pitch: To support sustained civic participation in the future, more understanding is needed about how grassroots groups use online digital media to track and analyze legislative activity and how they use such tools to make decisions, develop positions, and map out strategy. We propose to conduct survey and case study research about how various types of grassroots groups use these tools in their work and identify opportunities for improving the tools. Then we propose to ask the groups to test drive a suite of online tools we are developing that incorporate specific features requested by the interest groups into an online community environment based on key principles of: (1) flat hierarchy; (2) transparency; (3) civility; (4) open data sources; and (5) access to information about members that reveals their expertise and social network. We will leverage prior related research in this area as we pursue our goals.

We realize this could become huge, so we've set up a separate wetpaint site: http://civicdiscourse.wetpaint.com/.

Using Technology to Localize and Strengthen National Dialogue

Kettering Foundation, Achievement Gap Issue: I am working with KF on their issue guide, Too Many Chldren Left to:

1. Develop a list of suggestions on community outreach, working with media, and coordinating forums.
2. Drawing from experience as a moderator trainer, design a moderator guide that responds to questions raised by people who have little or no experience with facilitating forums.

This research is designed to better understand what people do as a result of participating in forums that address the gap in achievement between minority and non-minority public schools studentst? How do forum participants rename the problem? How do they think the problem should be solved? What do participants say they are willing to do? Their hypothesis is that the renaming of this problem will be dependent on the socio-economic circumstances of the schools and the communities where forums take place. And since communities will rename the problem differently, there will be divergent views and strategies for how to address the problem.

BUT...There doesn't seem to be a research protocol for answering this question, nor are there adequate support systems for gathering the data and ensuring the consistency and quality of the data.

I will use the findings from the digitally mediated Information Services, the library relationships forming in the Civic Engagement Membership Initiative Group of ALA, the citizen journalists I'm cultivating with Marla Crockett, and other research on social networking sites.

This project may include standardized tagging on del.icio.us, flickr, etc. as a way for forums across the country to share their projects. It may also include a wiki of the issue book that can be localilzed, a consensus wiki for consolidating the reports. KF wants me to run this online for one year, but the details are still being sorted out.

Transparency in the Federal Budget and Legislative Process

Working with Silona and League of Technical Voters on Legislative wikia and budget transparency project. Have a funder willing to bring together major geeks to agree on open standards to make this project work. Still seeking support for Entity-Based Social Networking in Open Source / Open Standards which is critical to knit nonprofits together! We've changed our language from "entity-based" to "actor-based" and have a website for "We are all actors." We are tentatively scheduling a face-to-face meeting at the LBJ Library for August 2007.

Citizen Journalism

This is a multi-faceted project including podcasting, use of the LBJ media technologies, citizen blogging and more. The first step, though is to train members of the NIF network to report on forums and to use technology being researched in other projects.

Reporting on Your Forums: Marla Crockett a veteran journalist and early adopter of civic journalism is working with me on several ideas we are capturing under the broad heading, "Citizen Journalism." Our first project will be to develop a workshop along with John Doble on how to report on the deliberation that takes place during public policy forums. Initially, we are targeting members of the National Issues Forums Network around the country.

OPAL Production Crew: I am recruiting volunteers to create and offer content in the Texas Foruums virtual (OPAL) room. The volunteer opportunities include:

• Production assistant: technology support prior and during the online event.
• Producer: develop ideas and recruit talent and resources for the event.
• Director: organize the ideas into an appropriate online format.
• Host: open the event, introduce the speakers and the content.

Framing an Issue with Volunteers Online

Privacy: What's at Stake? What are the Issues? What does it Mean to Me?
This is an ALA project established by resolution adopted by the Council of the American Library Association on Wednesday, June 28, 2006. The resolution states:

That the Intellectual Freedom Committee, Intellectual Freedom Round Table, and ALA Fostering Civic Engagement Member Interest Group collaborate with other ALA units toward a national conversation about privacy as an American value.

Nancy Kranich and Taylor Willingham, co-founders of the ALA Civic Engagement MIG and Carolyn Caywood, member of the ALA Intellectual Freedom Roundtable are exploring the application of NIF-style framing for a national deliberation on privacy.

Public Voice Unedited Watch Party

This is a research project of the Kettering Foundation. Their goal is to develop relationships with Presidential Libraries and to use the May 2 videotaping of Public Voice to do so. Nixon, Ford and Carter have also been invited to join. Nixon has not returned phone calls and will not participate. The director of the Ford library participated in part of the planning. It is unclear if Carter will have the technology or the support for this project.

This is their description of the project:

A Public Voice brings together policymakers and policy elites on a panel to react to and discuss the implications for their own work of scenes from publics grappling with a significant national issue, this year, energy. As the publics deliberate, they identify why the issue is important to them, what things highly valued by them they see at stake in the issue, why they cannot get everything they want regarding the issue, and so, in the end, struggle with what trade-offs among things highly valued they may be willing to make, and thus, what kind of permissions for action they would open up for policymakers.

In addition to demonstrating these qualities of public deliberation through A Public Voice, Kettering’s research interest lies largely in seeking to understand the conditions under which policymakers and policy elites come to recognize the contributions that a deliberative public can make to their own work. In conducting this research with policymakers, we bear in mind five underlying questions, greater understanding of which may help us understand better how a deliberative public can more effectively relate to its elected representatives, and how our representative institutions may become more responsive to a thoughtful, deliberative public.