Digital civil society and digital governance

                                      Philadelphia, Independence Hall, photo by Miguel Angel Sanz from Unsplash

I'm an historian. I used to sit in graduate seminars about the founding of the United States and wonder what these guys (all men, those founding fathers) were really thinking? Where did their ideas come from? There's lots of important scholarship about this now, including work that centers the knowledge of indigenous communities (land stolen, ideas taken). 

We're in a moment like that one in digital spaces. Pick an area of social, economic or political life and I can guarantee you people somewhere are trying to figure out how to govern energy systems, communication sites, health policy, economic policy, political campaigns, and nations in ways that account for our digital dependencies, something the 18th century thinkers were spared. Governance questions are broad, although 3 of them are easy to ask, hard to answer and have shaped my professional career. Those three questions are:

1. What's public?
2. What's private? 
3. Who decides?
   

Here are two very different approaches to thinking about these issues. The first is a collection of essays on governance called "The Digitalist Papers," a nod to John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton's work on The Federalist Papers. Unlike Madison, Jay, and Hamilton, these authors don't bother hiding their identity, nor have they taken to publishing the papers in serialized fashion in major news outlets. The Digitalist Papers also (gasp!) include essays from women and people of color, though they rely on Ivory Tower scholars and not political decision-makers. The whole thing was cooked up at Stanford. As in all things digital or political, knowing who wrote the code is important.

The second example is a study of governance in the fediverse (you know, Mastodon etc.) by two prolific users of it. Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi undertook the study and wrote it up. They use the fediverse and write about it. They are not ivory tower academics though they're day jobs bring them into very close proximity. It's a study of "what is" and "what could be," where the digitalist papers are a collection of "should be's."

The fediverse in relation to the majority of the web is a good analog for civil society and its relationship to the marketplace in phsyical space. There are important lessons to be found in these analyses for thinking about the reality of civil society and democracy today.

The Fediverse study is here.

The Digitalist Papers are here.

The Connective Tissue of Democracy

Photo by Bioscience Image Library by Fayette Reynolds on Unsplash

The connective tissue of American civil society—the associations, clubs, congregations, and other spaces where people gather and experience collective life—has deteriorated significantly in recent decades, diminishing community resilience and jeopardizing the health of our democracy. While the roots of this civic crisis are complex, remedial action is imperative. How can we revitalize the intermediary institutions that enable civic life to flourish?

This virtual event, co-hosted by Stanford University's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) and the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, will examine how policymakers, philanthropists, and civic leaders can contribute to this effort. Sam Pressler will present on the newly released Connective Tissue report—a policy framework for government's role in building connection in American communities—and a panel of experts will discuss the possibilities and challenges of civic renewal. 

The panel, moderated by Aaron Horvath, a Sociologist and Research Scholar at Stanford PACS, will include: 

• Pete Davis —Writer and filmmaker; Co-director of Join or Die, a documentary on Robert Putnam and the decline of American community 

 • Josh Fryday — California’s Chief Service Officer; Appointed by Governor Newsom to lead service, volunteer, and civic engagement efforts throughout California 

• Hollie Russon Gilman — Political Scientist; Senior Fellow at New America's Political Reform Program where she leads the Participatory Democracy Project 

The event will be held on Tuesday, October 29, from 4:00-5:30PM (ET) / 1:00-2:30PM (PT). See the Connective Tissue policy framework here: https://theconnectivetissue.us/framework
The virtual event is on Tuesday, October 29, from 4:00-5:30PM (ET) / 1:00-2:30PM (PT).

 

You can register here for more info and a link to the zoom.

Fifteen years of Blueprints in 8:48

Thanks to Google's NotebookLM, here are two fake voices discussing 15 years of Blueprints. 

Let me know what you think. I'm playing around with this for #Blueprint25.

Civil society and AI Bots - part one of ?

                                                Photo by Andy Kelly from Unsplash

People are making bots of themselves.They're probably calling them AI assistants, and are making them DIY or by using sites such as Trint ot HappyScribe (for use on video conference meetings such as Zoom or Teams).  

Keith McNulty made a bot of himself to make sense of his own work (I'm using NotebookLM for this purpose. Here, for example, is 8 minutes of AI voices discussing 15 years of Blueprints). Other people make bots of themselves to enable 24/7 contact.

So, what do you do if you're planning a meeting or a conference or a community gathering and someone asks to send their bot instead of their physical self? If your organization already has a policy in place for this - and you've considered the impact of having a mix of bots and people at your events (on both the bots and the people) - feel free to share them so we can all learn. I can still host things on DigitalImpact.IO for civil society organizations around the world to use.

Here are some additional thoughts on this coming phenomenon from DataEthics.eu.

I have a new book coming out in July 2025 on AI And Assembly, written with an amazing group of collaborators, that looks at how AI is changing how we associate and assemble. This is just one example.

New (nonacademic) books on philanthropy

Here are two new books - one by one of my favorite novelists - that I'll be reading in the next few weeks. Thoughts and feels will be noted in #Blueprint25 (Yes, I'm working on it. My health makes it harder. Stay tuned - doing my best to get the 16th annual one done.)

Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind, has a new book out called Entitlement. The LA Review of Books says: 

"We follow Brooke Orr, a dynamic woman handling a massive responsibility—managing an octogenarian billionaire’s earthly fortune and assisting him in giving it all away. Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination." Sign me up.

And, in the "tradition" of Anand Giridharadas's Winner Takes All, a World Economic Forum insider, Thierry Malleret takes on the globalist crowd with his self-published work, Deaths At Davos. Semafor Media describes the book this way: 

"The self-published thriller centers on The Circle, a WEF-like institution consumed by self-interest whose cardinal rule is that “money always has the last word.” The Circle is “a handsomely sophisticated comfort zone for people who had already changed the world, not necessarily for the better, and wanted to cover their tracks.”

If you prefer TV,  Maya Rudolph, whom I adore, is back with more of Loot, the TV show about a billionaire's widow and the fortune she tries to put to good use. At least she'll be doing this when she's not being Kamala Harris on SNL.

 

 

The GOP threat to civil society

                                                    Photo by Richard Stovall on Unsplash

Democracy in the USA is not "naturally" withering, it is under attack. And the call(s) are coming from both inside the house and outside, domestic and foreign. One source of attack is the Republican Party. Threats can't be beaten if they aren't named. I strongly suggest both foundations, their associations, and their media stop "both-sidesing" this and call out the threats to the sector that are coming from their own.

First and foremost, Donald Trump's campaign has declared it will be "taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments" to fund its own propaganda-driven alternative university. Now, big private universities don't usually inspire a lot of sympathy, I get that. I'm an alum of them and they don't make me all warm and fuzzy. But be clear, none of this has anything to do with anti-semitism (which gets a quick shout-out in the document linked above). It's part of a sustained campaign against perceived liberal or left(ish) civil society. The presumed candidate of the Republican Party is promising/threatening to seize endowment assets from universities it doesn't like. I'll say it again, the GOP is running on a platform that involves taking funds away from nonprofits it doesn't like. If that doesn't make the philanthropy industry stand up and take notice (and, one might hope, action), I can't think of a bigger threat that the sector would be ignoring. And this from a candidate who's been repeatedly sued for the way he ran his nominal foundation. 

All nonprofits and foundations, their professional and lobbying associations, and the media dedicated to them should decry a platform such as proposed in Agenda47. And, what's that I hear? Yup, crickets.

Or worse, InsidePhilanthropy worked hard on this rundown of funding for democracy, (behind their paywall yell at them, not me). It's good reporting on a survey done by the Democracy Fund that focuses on giving to democracy efforts and causes related to it. But it counts funding on just one side of the equation. It counts funding by funders in the political center or on the left. It doesn't count the other side - there is no accounting of efforts to undermine democracy. The story mentions book bans, school board fights, and transgender bathroom hysteria as examples of undemocratic philanthropy. But it neither tallies the amount of philanthropic dollars spent on these issues nor names any of the funders. That's not helpful. Those are philanthropic dollars going to efforts that undermine democracy - and they're by no means all the way such money is being spent (Supreme Court favors, anyone? Social media trolls, disinformation, and campaigns such as that run by Christopher Rufo with help from Congresswoman Stefanik to oust female college presidents of color? The list is long)

Attacks on democracy are secretively well-funded even as they appear to be led by grassroots individuals. Counting the funding on the pro-side and not on the attack-side makes it seem as if the  attacks are just part of the process of democracy. And that may be true. But if its true its true in the sense that democracy will always have critics, and some of those will be doing their best to destroy democratic participation by those they don't like.

One of the two political parties in this country is running on a platform that includes seizing endowment assets. Yes, the campaign platform of the GOP is "vote for us and we'll put government in charge of higher education and destroy some of the nation's longest-lived independent institutions. For all the vitriol these universities attract, there's a helluva lot of rich people trying hard to get their kids admitted to them).You may not feel sorry for Harvard, but you'd be a fool for thinking this is just an attack on the Crimson. That's what the GOP wants you to think, but it's not (all) they want to do.

If foundations, philanthropy, and nonprofits don't stand up to defend civil society from Agenda47 before November, they'll deserve what happens, post-election.