As we near the Democracy Fund’s two-year Independence anniversary, we are delighted to welcome new staff members to our team. With each new team member, we celebrate the opportunity to enfold new experience, diversity, and perspective to our efforts to ensure the American people come first in our political system. We are pleased to introduce the following new members of our team:
Josh Stearnswill be joining the Democracy Fund as Associate Director for the Informed Participation later this month. He currently serves as the Director of Journalism and Sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, where he currently leads the Local News Lab. Josh previously led national advocacy campaigns in support of freedom of expression and media diversity; most recently he served as the Press Freedom Director at Free Press, a national nonprofit fighting for all people’s rights to connect and communicate. As an award-winning journalist, Josh has published numerous reports on local news, public media, and media policy. He is a founding board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and served on the board of the Student Conservation Association. Josh has a B.A. in Writing from St. Lawrence University and a M.A. in American Studies from UMass Amherst.
Freddie Salas recently joined us as a Program Assistant with the Responsive Politics team. He most recently served as an AmeriCorps VISTA at the Fredericksburg Regional Continuum of Care where he worked to improve the organization’s services for the homeless and homeless veteran populations. Before joining AmeriCorps, Freddie volunteered with the Greater Fredericksburg Habitat for Humanity. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Urban Affairs and Planning.
Emma Thomson joined our team as the Digital Communications Assistant in May. Before coming on board, she served as a Press Assistant for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. Emma’s internship experience spans her range of interests, with previous positions in politics, public relations, and digital media. She graduated magna cum laude from The George Washington University with a B.A. in Political Communication.
Please join us in welcoming these new faces. The Democracy Fund is in the process of recruiting and hiring for several positions, and we will keep you updated as we continue to grow.
Democracy Fund’s President, Joe Goldman, recently wrote on our blog about some of the benefits and difficulties our organization has found while integrating a systems lens into our work. He noted how systems thinking, designed to help us grapple with complexity, can at times be awfully complex itself. As a member of the Impact and Learning team, I’ve been helping Democracy Fund make sense of what it means to be systems thinkers, and Joe’s words rang particularly true for me.
Working with the incredible systems and complexity coaches at The Omidyar Group, the Impact and Learning team has been supporting program staff in developing their systems maps, and shepherding their systems-based strategic planning processes. We’ve been alongside the teams grappling with what’s been hard—but we’ve also had a front-row seat to see the wins. Like our evaluator, I’ve seen our teams’ pride in their work, and try everyday to help the teams further recognize how much we’ve learned and how our systems skills have developed.
I had a strong moment of recognition of this progress recently when Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) released their Guide to Systems Grantmaking. This resource is designed to provide grantmakers and nonprofits a toolkit of essential systems assessment tools, frameworks, and best practices—and it is yet another piece of evidence of the growing community of philanthropies taking an interest in systems thinking. As it does on other topics, GEO can continue to be a convener for this group, collect our stories, and help us share our lessons learned.
GEO’s Systems Grantmaking Resource Guide suggests, just as we’ve found, that it takes time to understand and internalize a systems mindset. At first glance, I was overwhelmed by the wide variety of tools and practices it recommended. I learned of several new approaches I’m eager to play with in our work, augmenting the causal loop systems mapping we’ve started with. But, after I dug a little deeper, what struck me more was the complementarity and interconnection of these tools. I realized that we’ve already been engaging in many more systems practices than I’d been aware. SAT analysis, leverage points, and systemic action research are already part of our approach, flowing naturally from one another as we mapped systems. Even aspects of our grantmaking approach I had considered distinct from our systems work—our interest in scenario planning, for example—are logically tied to the systems thinking frame.
When introducing new staff to Democracy Fund’s systems practice, I describe it as fundamentally a sense-making process. While systems mapping is a great tool for new learning—particularly when designed, as our process has been, to be deeply participatory—it has also been powerful in helping to bring into sharper focus what we already knew and to align assumptions across our organization and with key partners. GEO’s Guide to Systems Grantmaking, it turns out, served the same purpose for me. It brought to life what has been hard to see in the sometimes tedious day-to-day of map-building: just how strong our systems muscles are becoming.
We’ve got a lot yet to learn to get to “expert” level on GEO’s self assessment, and I know the challenges our evaluator observed will continue into the future. But, armed with new tools and deeper connections to others in the field, I’m all the more confident we’ll get there.
In my years of service on Capitol Hill, I saw first hand that Congress is full of good people driven to make our world a better place. Yet for far too many Americans, Congress is not fulfilling its responsibilities as a representative body. Why? And can it be helped?
The Democracy Fund’s Governance Initiative spent much of the past year seeking to understand how Congress could better respond to the needs and demands of citizens. To explore how we might better understand the systems that drive Congress, we began with the framing question, “How is Congress fulfilling or failing to fulfill its obligations to the American people?”
It didn’t take long to conclude that the institution is failing to do so.
Using the work of our funding partner, the Madison Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, as a base, we pursued the broad and substantive question of what dynamics are the most significant in contributing to this dysfunction. Through that understanding, we can start to piece together what can be done to address them.
To that end, we’ve published the first public iteration of our systems map, Congress and Public Trust. We have been gathering feedback from a wide-range of stakeholders, and welcome additional thinking and ideas.
Mapping Congress and Public Trust
Last Spring, we convened a group of experts on Congress—scholars, former members of Congress and staff, and active supporters of the institution—who helped us explore the key narratives that drive the system. A ‘core story’ quickly emerged.
With expanded access to and use of the Internet by the public, communications to Congress have dramatically accelerated. The money infusing politics intensifies the pressures on an institution ill-prepared to process, let alone interpret and meet them, further weakening congressional capacity and reducing satisfaction of both among members and the public at large. This has contributed to trust in the institution falling to an all-time low.
With growth in dissatisfaction, some citizens “double down” to increase pressure on leaders, but the public is increasingly “opting out” and disengaging from the system—leaving only the loudest, shrillest, and most polarizing voices to feed the hyper-partisanship characterizing our current politics. Congress, conceived in Article One of our Constitution as the leading branch of our federal government, is becoming irrelevant to an increasing number of Americans.
Our Congress and Public Trust map describes the factors that are intensifying this process, inside and outside the institution. A long stretch of voter dissatisfaction and important demographic shifts within the two-party system have led to increasing intensity of competition for majorities in Congress. This historic level of competition has led the parties to stake out more stark ideological differences, driving their partisan constituencies further apart philosophically. As the parties and their constituents have fewer ideas in common, hyper-partisan behavior within the electorate and among those elected to Congress increases, winnowing the possibility for compromise and dragging down congressional function.
At the same time, the institution’s ability to formulate thoughtful, cooperative policy solutions has diminished. Some members (and many challengers) have responded to decreased public satisfaction by running against Washington, demonizing the institution, and reducing the institution’s resources to the breaking point. Loss of institutional expertise exacerbated by increased staff turnover has weakened policy-making capacity and increased the influence of outside experts, some of whom also proffer campaign donations. In fact, money flows throughout our systems map, depicted by factors with green halos. Further research through creation of another systems map focused on money and politics is forthcoming and will be aimed at deepening our understanding of this phenomenon.
Where do we go from here?
OK, you say. We know Congress isn’t working well; public dissatisfaction is at an all-time high and politics is as nasty as it has ever been. This map basically depicts a death spiral. What do we do about it?
A systems map helps identify leverage opportunities—places where smaller levels of effort lead to disproportionate impact. And leverage opportunities inform strategy. As we work to identify leverage opportunities and develop strategy, several themes are emerging.
First, despite this story of profound dysfunction, there are bright spots within the system. Many members of Congress and their staffs still possess what we call “servant’s hearts,” meaning they are driven by a call to public service. We know staff and members want to be effective, despite being stuck in a cycle of diminished resources. We also see a bright spot in the ability of outside partners to help Congress become more efficient and effective—to “work smarter.” As a result, we are thinking about how we can best support and empower servants’ hearts across the institution by more effectively enabling substantive work and deliberation.
Second, we believe that the institution’s failure to respond to increasing communication is driving public dissatisfaction and disengagement. We cannot simply invite greater public engagement without making sure Congress has strengthened its ability to respond. Without these investments first, we risk further alienating those we are trying to re-engage.
We have to ask, therefore, how we can help Congress develop more efficient tools to listen to the public, process the overwhelming amount of information, and invite more interaction from constituent groups, all while better managing the volume of communications from advocacy groups.
Third, once Congress’s capacity to listen and respond to the public is increased, can we help members and staff build a more functional culture that responds less reflexively to fear, elevating the leadership strength of members and staff? Members currently have too little incentive to act beyond partisan teamsmanship. Are there interventions we can make to help alleviate some of the political pressure members feel and encourage them to better withstand hyper-partisan heat? Can we help them find courage to cooperate across the aisle and strengthen bipartisan relationships that offer a foundation for institutional progress?
Finally, the cost of running for office has risen exponentially, driven by pressures from the political system we call the “Political-Industrial Complex.” Our map clearly illustrates how the need to raise campaign funds ripples across the congressional system. Reducing the amount of time spent by members fundraising would free them to focus more on legislation and remove some partisan invective from their messaging. We also see a potential bright spot using emerging campaign techniques that rely on cheaper media, and are considering exploring whether, if accelerated, they could disrupt the dominance of the political-industrial complex by reducing money on the demand side of its predominant business model.
We are knee deep in strategy development work and have some distance to go. We expect that as we continue to learn our analysis will evolve. In fact, learning and evolution is the essence of understanding the system, because by definition, it is always changing. It is our hope that by collaborating with partners across the field, existing grantees, and most importantly, with Congress itself, the Democracy Fund can play a constructive role in helping strengthen the institution and our democracy as a whole.
You can explore the map and its elements here. As you do, we hope you will tell us how to better describe and illuminate the dynamics of the Congress and Public Trustsystem. Please email us at congressmap@democracyfund.org to share your feedback or related resources.
2016 has proved to be an exciting year so far for the whole team here at the Democracy Fund. Since our launch, we have been hard at work building our new organization – setting up internal systems, approving new grants, refining our strategies, and so much more. We are proud of how much progress we’ve made so far, and are thrilled to see much of our planning work begin to reach the implementation stage.
As an organization, we believe that strengthening our democracy requires the involvement of diverse voices from across the political spectrum and from all walks of life. The Democracy Fund team is a group of remarkably passionate, dedicated people who strive every day to make our democracy work better. We are delighted to welcome several new members to our team:
Pat Christen is the newest member of the Democracy Fund’s board of directors. Pat is a managing director of The Omidyar Group, and serves as a senior advisor to Pierre and Pam Omidyar. She brings curiosity, a sense of humor, and a commitment to high accountability to her role, which focuses on cultivating environments of learning, innovation and impact across all Omidyar Group organizations and initiatives. Prior to joining The Omidyar Group, Pat served as President and CEO of HopeLab. She was President and Executive Director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation for 15 years and also served as President of the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation She has written, studied, and lectured on social and health issues both in the U.S. and abroad. Pat is a graduate of Stanford University, where she studied biology and political science. She is also a mother of four, a role that deeply inspires her work.
Terry Ao Minnis joined us as a Senor Fellow & Consultant for our Responsive Politics Program, bringing valuable insight into the current voting rights community and important dynamics shaping our elections. Terry serves as the director of the census and voting programs for Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), co-chairs the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights’ Census Task Force, and sat on the U.S Department of Commerce’s 2010 Census Advisory Committee from 2002 through 2011. Terry has been counsel on numerous amicus briefs filed before the Supreme Court on voting rights cases, including Shelby County v. Holder and was one of the key leaders in campaigns on reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act in 2006 and on Census 2010. She received her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from American University Washington College of Law and her Bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago.
Hugo Castro joined us as our Operations Manager from the Hispanic Business Initiative Fund, where he provided financial, accounting, tax, and human resources services to over 400 entrepreneurs and business owners. He graduated from the University of South Florida Business School with a Bachelors in International Business and a minor in Marketing.
Chris Crawford joined us as a Program Assistant for our Governance Program from the Susan B. Anthony List, where he worked as a government affairs associate. During the 2014 midterm elections, Chris was Assistant National Field Director for the organization’s Super PAC, leading a GOTV operation that made over 1 million live voter contacts across four states He has worked on multiple campaigns at the local and federal level in his home state of New Hampshire and graduated from The George Washington University with a B.A. in Political Science.
Jessica Harris joined us as a Communications Associate from Third Way, where as marketing manager, she ran the distribution network that pumped organizational ideas into the policy world, amplified the debate using digital media, and oversaw the planning and execution of hundreds of highly regarded events on Capitol Hill and across Washington, D.C. aimed at advancing the case for a pragmatic, solutions-oriented U.S. politics. Jessica has worked on multiple campaigns at the local and federal level in her home state of Colorado and graduated from the University of Colorado with a B.A. in Political Science.
Roland Kennedy joined us as a Grants Management Associate from the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program where as a contract and grants associate he gained domestic and international grant making experience and worked with diverse grantee organizations and donors. Roland obtained his BA in Global Studies from Villanova University, an MS in Global Studies from Northeastern University, and is a candidate for an MPhil from the University of Pennsylvania.
Karla McLean joined us as a Network Associate on our communications team, having previously served as as an Intern and then Special Projects Coordinator here at the Democracy Fund. She also gained experience through internships with the Media, Culture, and Special Initiatives division of The MacArthur Foundation and the Illinois State Senate Policy and Budget Committee, where she helped draft legislative bills, communicated with stakeholders and senators, and analyzed the state budget. Karla graduated from the University of Chicago with a Masters in Public Policy.
Looking ahead, we expect to continue to add talent and capacity across the organization. The Democracy Fund is in the process of recruiting and hiring for several positions and we will keep you updated as we continue to grow.
During the Democratic presidential caucus in Nevada last month, the issue of language assistance in elections came up front and center — and it was not pretty. Fingers pointed in all directions about what actually happened and who was to blame, but what is clear is that there were caucus participants who needed assistance in Spanish to fully understand the process and their options and that they did not receive this essential help. This incident highlights how important language assistance in the political process is and why more must be done to ensure that language needs are being accommodated.
Today in the United States, one in five people speak a language other than English at home, and of that population who are 15 or older 42 percent report having some difficulty with the English language. Despite the increases in the eligible voting populations of Latinos and Asian-Americans in recent decades, according to the Pew Research Center there continues to be a 15-20 percent gap in voting participation rates between those voters and whites. While a variety of factors can contribute to a voter’s inability to participate in the election process, in many communities language barriers are a huge obstacle.The language-minority voting community often faces the same socio-economic disparities and logistical barriers that negatively impact other marginalized voters. They can face hurdles, and at times discrimination, at the polls from poll workers or challengers who are not able to communicate clearly. In the worst cases, there may be false assumptions that language difficulties mean a voter is ineligible to cast a ballot. And the political process can be overly complicated for those who have emigrated from countries with no democratic system, while our voter materials are often written in complex English.
As the 2016 election cycle unfolds, election administrators, civic organizations, and advocates can take steps to help mitigate problems faced by language-minority voters, helping to ensure equal access to the ballot.
First, at a minimum, election officials should make sure they comply with federal protections for language minority voters under the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The federal law requires jurisdictions that meet a certain threshold of eligible language-minority voters to provide language assistance via translated written materials, bilingual poll workers, and publicizing available language assistance. Another provision of the VRA allows voters the opportunity to bring someone of their choosing to assist them in the voting process. Administrators should ensure that their poll workers are aware of this right and are trained in how to assist voters with language needs.
Additionally—and regardless of any federal or state requirement—elections administrators should attempt to recruit bilingual poll workers, identify which polling locations could have a language need, reach out to local and ethnic-community media to help with recruitment, and partner with local and ethnic organizations to review and share nonpartisan election information. A minimal investment in recruitment and targeting can yield big returns for the same cost as hiring monolingual poll workers exclusively. Civic organizations and advocates can help in this effort by working to educate language-minority voters about what rights they have to assistance at the polls and by sharing resources, such as in-language hotlines to call with questions.
It remains to be seen how well language-minority voters will be accommodated during the rest of this year’s election cycle, but the Nevada incident is a reminder that this is an increasingly important issue in elections. We should address language issues head-on to prevent miscommunication and disenfranchisement, and we should work together to make voting for this growing segment the American population as comfortable and easy as it is for everyone else.
“Systems thinking” and the practice of mapping complex systems increasingly looks like the next big trend in philanthropy. Popping up at conferences and in reports from respected experts and leaders, a systems view has the advantage of recognizing the inherent complexity of the topics that philanthropy often attempts to address.
The Democracy Fund adopted systems thinking when it launched last year and has spent the past year experimenting with a methodology to map the dynamic patterns and causal relationships that shape how systems involved with local journalism, elections, and Congress are influencing the health of our democracy. Our efforts have born significant fruit, but it has certainly not been easy.
In the spirit of collaboration and transparent learning, we thought that it would be useful to share some of the things that we’ve experienced during the process of developing system maps.
In an earlier blog post, I shared a bit about why we chose to adopt a systems approach. Our hope was that this orientation would help the Democracy Fund to avoid the trap of oversimplifying the challenges facing our democracy and provide us with tools to have greater leverage in strengthening it.
We recently published our first systems map focused on the health of local news and participation. As we continue to refine this and other maps, we are beginning to think about what they can tell us about finding leverage to change important incentives that are driving behavior. You can learn more about our approach to systems thinking here.
When we began the process of developing our systems maps, we hired an external evaluator (the wonderful Robin Kane) to travel with us on this journey and help to identify major learning along the way. Robin has so far produced two interim reports to help us check in on how our experience with systems mapping is lining up with what our initial expectations had been when we went into the process.
Several major themes jump out from Robin’s reports:
Shifts in Perceived Outcomes: As we wait to see other benefits of the process, our team has increasingly seen the value of our mapping exercise in its ability to provide us with a sophisticated means to communicate with our board and external partners about the environment in which we are working. The complexity of the map helps us to explain that there are no easy answers and that responses require multi-pronged approaches. It exposes the underlying logic of our strategies and helps to reveal where there are gaps in our analysis. The maps have also helped us to communicate with potential partners who can see their own work in the maps. We continue to hope that the mapping will help us to more effectively identify potential leverage to create change in the system, but the jury is still out on that front.
Interrogating a Map: We have been surprised how difficult it is for board members and other advisors to dig into and learn from a map outside of the context of a proposed strategy. Without the outline of a potential strategy, it is hard to know where greater detail or a narrower “zoom” is required because so many subjective choices are made during a mapping process about what to include and what to exclude for communication purposes. As a consequence, we’ve had to rethink the sequencing of our process and how we engage with our board around both the maps and our emerging strategies.
Confusion and Doubt: Ongoing questions and doubts about whether mapping will yield significant new insights have dogged our systems mapping from the beginning. More art than science, the process requires a faith that the time put in will yield more new insights than other approaches to strategy development. As we have been “building the plane, while we fly it,” we have had to cope with not having a clear road map about how to get to the next phase of our work.
Progress and Growth: While the process of developing maps has been time consuming and difficult, it has forced each of our program teams to think hard about the problems on which they are working and the solutions that they have pursued. Each team has consulted with dozens of experts and leaders, sharpening our overall understanding of the issues on which we are working. A strong sense of pride on what has been accomplished came across strongly from staff interviews by our evaluator.
In the coming months, we will complete additional maps on Congress, our election system, and other key topics. From each map, we will develop and approve strategies for the Democracy Fund’s work in the coming years. As we do so, our intention is to continue to learn from the process and share our learnings with you as we do.
UPDATE (October 2016): Mindy Finn has stepped down from the Democracy Fund’s National Advisory Committee. We are grateful for her thoughtful contributions and partnership.
Washington, D.C. – Today, the Democracy Fund announced the formation of its bipartisan National Advisory Committee, which will provide advice on organizational initiatives and assess strategic opportunities to advance the Fund’s work to ensure the American people come first in our political system. Advisors include former White House and elected officials, as well as esteemed leaders from government, academia, and advocacy – reflecting significant political and demographic diversity.
The Democracy Fund’s inaugural National Advisory Committee includes:
Hon. Robin Carnahan, Senior Advisor and Head of the State and Local Practice at 18F and former Secretary of State of Missouri.
Hon. Tom Davis, former U.S. Representative from the state of Virginia, former Chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and former Chair of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee.
Mindy Finn, a veteran digital and technology strategist, Senior Advisor to IMGE, and founder and president of Empowered Women, has operated at the intersection of media, politics and tech for some of the world’s most well-known public figures and brands including President George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican Governor’s Association, Twitter, and Google.
Juleanna Glover, Senior Advisor at Teneo Intelligence who has served on the senior staffs of then President-elect George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, presidential candidates Steve Forbes and John McCain, and then Senator John Ashcroft.
Hon. Charles Gonzalez, former U.S. Representative from the state of Texas who served as Chairman of Latinos for Obama and as the National Co-Chair of President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Professor of Communication and the Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and award-winning author of over 100 works, many of which primarily focus on campaign criticism and the discourse of the presidency.
Brett Loper, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs for American Express and former Deputy Chief of Staff to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH).
Spencer Overton, President of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, tenured professor of law at George Washington University, and the author of the book Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression.
Hon. Deborah Pryce, former U.S. Representative from the state of Ohio and the highest-ranking Republican woman in the history of the House. She currently serves as a Senior Political Advisor at Ice Miller Whiteboard LLC.
Ben Rattray, founder and CEO of Change.org, the world’s largest platform for social change with over 125 million users, one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and a thought leader on the intersection of technology, business, and social change.
Arturo Vargas, Executive Director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), a national membership organization of Latino policymakers and their supporters, and former Vice President for Community Education and Public Policy of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF).
Ernie Wilson, an American scholar and Walter Annenberg Chair in Communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He has served in several senior policy positions in the public and private sector including as Director of International Programs and Resources on the White House National Security Council and Director of the Policy and Planning Unit, Office of the Director, U.S. Information Agency.
Members of the National Advisory Committee serve a two-year term. The Committee meets twice a year, and its next meeting is in August 2016 in Washington, D.C.
Joe Goldman, President of the Democracy Fund, said:
“Our advisors have the independence to tell us what we need to hear—not just what we want to hear. We expect them to hold different points of view and understand that they are unlikely to agree with all positions taken by the organization. But we don’t have all the answers to these issues, and we believe that considering a variety of opinions and perspectives will only help make our efforts more impactful in the long-term.”
About the Democracy Fund
The Democracy Fund is a bipartisan foundation established by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar to help ensure that the American people come first in our democracy. Today, modern challenges—such as hyper partisanship, money in politics, and struggling media—threaten the health of American Democracy. Since its creation, the Democracy Fund has committed more than $30 million in grants to ensure our political system is able to withstand these new challenges and deliver on its promise to the American people.
The Democracy Fund invests in change makers who advocate for solutions that can bring lasting improvements to our political system and build bridges that help people come together to serve our nation. Grants include projects to find workable solutions to the challenges facing our elections system, local media ecosystems, and Congress’ ability to solve problems in the face of hyper-partisanship. Learn more by visiting democracyfund.org.
This week we released a visualization and accompanying narrative that seeks to represent the dynamics facing local news institutions and levels of participation of the public in civic affairs.
Original reporting, informed dialogue, and rigorously argued differences of opinion all support engagement in our democratic processes in communities across the United States. Over the past decade, however, local news outlets have struggled. Audiences and advertisers have gravitated to digital and mobile platforms — and the economics of local news has declined. We are being left with media deserts in locations where coverage once flourished.
At the same time, promising local journalism experiments have cropped up across the country. Foundations and venture capitalists are investing not only in individual outlets, but in tools and models that can cut reporting costs and support civic engagement around breaking topics. How can such promising innovations be seeded widely and cultivated fully? These are the issues that the Democracy Fund’s Engagement Program has been grappling with.
Our Journey
Over the past year, we have consulted dozens of journalists and scholars of media and communications in an ambitious effort to create a map that reveals the many dimensions of local journalism’s disruption.
This process flows from the foundation’s larger commitment to understanding democracy as a complex system. At the core of our process is an extensive process of analysis and graphical mapping of the dynamics facing this space. As Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman explains “a systems map describes the dynamic patterns (or feedback loops) that occur in a system, whether they are vicious or virtuous cycles of behavior and reaction.” It is not, as Joe writes “a network map that describes how different individuals or organizations are connected to one another.”
The process of identifying and vetting such loops has been both long and profoundly iterative. Participants in the initial workshop held in March 2014 sketched some 43 loops representing different dynamics surrounding the failure and success of local news outlets to adequately inform and connect with their communities. Over a series of internal and one-on-one meetings, the Engagement team — Program Associate Paul Waters, Graduate Research Fellow Jessica Mahone, myself, and a dedicated set of fellows and consultants — winnowed the map down to tell a “core story” about key factors and connections.
Like panning for gold, these multiple conversations allowed the team to sift through many different layers of the problem to identify valuable elements. The result is not a picture of the optimal local news environment that we might want, or the debatably better environment we might have once had. Instead, it’s a multi-dimensional model of the intersecting forces that shape the markets, missions, and practices of outlets seeking to provide coverage that can help to drive democratic decisionmaking by both audiences and policymakers around the country.
Where We Are
The current map, which comprises 17 loops, hones in on the powerfully disruptive economic shifts that have unsettled legacy journalism outlets, and the hopeful but still nascent creative efforts to build sustainable digital tools and platforms for reporting and civic dialogue. The map identifies Internet adoption and evolution as the key “input factor” disrupting this system, and pinpoints three key factors central to a healthy local information ecosystem:
The shift in audience attention;
The relevance, quality, and quantity of state and local journalism; and
The engagement of the public in civic affairs.
Several related loops hone in on economic dynamics. Perhaps the most important is the decay in income from advertising as a result of news outlets no longer able to obtain the same rates or deliver the same audience reach they once did. In addition, large digital platforms are more able to capture significant portions of the remaining advertising revenue with increasingly sophisticated targeting technologies. The result these dynamics is that membership and philanthropic support for small to mid-sized news projects is increasingly important as is the role government dollars play in maintaining public broadcasting.
Other factors are at work, however, including the rise of user-generated content, the strength of connections between newsrooms and community members, and the fate of journalism skills in an era of mass newspaper layoffs. The map raises questions such as, can audiences trust reporters to recognize and represent their interests, and uncover corruption without sliding into sensationalism? Will outlets with small slices of the public increase hyper partisanship with narrowly targeted content aimed at reinforcing viewpoints rather than informing?
The map also recognizes the importance of policy decisions around online access and how they have fostered the growth of the Internet over recent decades. All of these dynamics and others are captured in this system map, and each loop is bolstered with research, case studies and both supporting and countervailing evidence.
Overall, we have to recognize that the local public square, which has for decades been sustained by a small number of newspapers, television and radio stations, is in turmoil and though it isn’t clear what will replace what was for decades a stable equilibrium it is very clear that change will be a constant over the upcoming decade.
Looking to the future
Like the dynamics it captures, the map is not static. It is a work in progress, designed to serve as tool for discussion and strategy not just within the foundation, but across the field. With this in mind, the Engagement Program worked with the American Press Institute to convene another room full of news experts, editors and reporters this past October. Many had seen the map more than once in its various iterations; others were “map newbies.” We led the room through each loop—probing for points of confusion or competing interpretations of various factors and connections. For us this was just the first step towards more engagement with communities of experts seeking to better inform and engage the public at the local level in our democracy. Ultimately, we hope this contributes to a stronger shared understanding of the field.
How can you assist?
We recognize that as a relatively small organization we will gain a better understanding of the field by soliciting input from others. We also realize that this is a quickly shifting field and we intend to stay in learning mode as the map evolves. This prompts us to continue to engage with the widest range of people working in the realm of local news and participation: What else does the Democracy Fund need to know or understand to better illuminate the dynamics of local news ecosystems?
If your work relates to local news and participation, we welcome and encourage you to take some time to explore the map and dig into the definitions of the loops, factors, and connections. Help us improve its breadth and accuracy.
With Super Tuesday upon us, we’re reminded that the intensity of a presidential-election year brings increased scrutiny for the nation’s election administrators. Presidential primaries, state primaries and the general election in November will beget a sharp focus on those whose job it is to make our democracy work. Their efforts will be watched closely by political campaigns, advocates, voters, the media and even conspiracy theorists.
In most cases, election administrators work hard to be fair and transparent and to promote integrity. But a large percentage of election officials are elected to their offices on a partisan ticket or appointed on partisan basis. This can lead some to believe that these officials will favor one political party over another in their decisions.
Even the best-written laws, regulations, policies or standards will pale in comparison to the personal ethics of an election administrator and the cultures of the offices they run. It’s imperative that election administrators ask themselves if they and their offices can withstand enormous scrutiny. This mandates trustworthy personnel and clear ethics policies.
Overall, ethics in elections includes five elements: independence, transparency, integrity, competence and fairness…
This was originally published via Governing Magazine. To read the full piece, click here.
Just over 18 months ago, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) published recommendations by its Commission on Political Reform (CPR) to address the hyper-partisanship characterizing American politics.
BPC initiated its Healthy Congress Index last year to measure progress on several key issues, including the number of days Congress spends in session; the openness of the Senate debate and amendment process; and the strength of “regular order” in the congressional committee process, floor debate, and conference committees.
This week—on the heels of the Republican congressional retreat designed to outline priorities and issues for the remainder of the 114th Congress—BPC released its latest quarterly assessment of Congress’s ability to effectively govern.
The diagnosis? There are signs of hope, but still too little function in the system.
Based on the metrics of the Index, even with the upheaval of a new Speaker, the 114th Congress has made some progress. The ability of committees to make policy and resolve differences has improved.
Bills Ordered Reported By Committee
The number of days the House and Senate were in session fell short of the CPR’s recommendations and House Rules still allowed for fewer amendments to be offered, but the Senate spent more days working in Washington.
Working Days
The Senate also considered many more amendments compared with recent years—bearing out Majority Leader McConnell’s stated desire to return to “regular order.”
Senate Amendments Considered
At the recent GOP retreat, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Leader McConnell outlined their respective plans for the year. These included a more ambitious policy agenda on Ryan’s part, and a shared commitment by the two leaders to return to a more functional Congress—one that exercises its power of the purse on time in the annual appropriations process, conducts more effective oversight, and produces agreements on key legislation. These are also positive signs.
Time will tell whether they will be able to deliver—and whether we will continue to see progress in BPC’s “Healthy Congress” assessment—in the coming election year.
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