At a time when news and journalism are experiencing significant disruption, Democracy Fund is seeking to better understand and equip news outlets and reporters for public engagement. Individual newsrooms are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale transformations in platforms, news economics, and audience habits. Culture shifts are difficult to achieve and often happen from the bottom up or the outside in. We recognize that new solutions are needed across organizations that can be compared, replicated, scaled, and evaluated.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) provide a structure in which this activity can happen adjacent to or outside of legacy settings. This paper examines the theory and evolution of CoPs and explores in greater detail the nascent CoPs developing around engaged journalism. The appendix provides a checklist for building and grouping CoPs.
Democracy Fund is committed to supporting a vibrant media and the public square. By examining how CoPs have developed in the field of engaged journalism to date, we can better understand how a community of practice provides useful structures for learning, growth, and innovation. We can also learn how the ideas can be applied to other communities in journalism, including leaders at local news hubs, media business innovators, and other cohorts where new practices are emerging.
We welcome your feedback on these ideas and look forward to hearing more from you about how communities of practice are being adopted in your newsrooms and communities.
A healthy democracy cannot exist without a vibrant public square, including an independent, trusted, and robust free press.At a time when news organizations increasingly find themselves under attack, the Democracy Fund along with our partners at First Look Media are announcing major commitments of more than $12 million to support a robust free press – the largest grants either organization has made to date in support of journalism.
For years, the media industry has struggled against major economic threats that have severely undermined our fourth estate. In response, the Democracy Fund’s Public Square program has worked with journalists across the country to experiment with new models that can reinvigorate local media and ensure that newsrooms are able to fulfill their core responsibilities to a healthy democracy. But 2016 media trends were deeply alarming. Viral deceptions and bogus information sometimes seemed to overwhelm the facts and fact-checkers. Newsmedia coverage only partially reflected vast swathes of the country. And media institutions continued to struggle financially and with earning the public’s trust. In short, America’s lively and contentious public square stands to become choked, chilled, and full of claptrap.
However, sometimes the moments where challenges are revealed prove to be turning points. It’s not clear that this is the case, but we can say without doubt that this moment has provided a renewed focus on the critical role of our nation’s press. Many individuals and organizations who have been raising alarm bells about the future of media are newly energized.
It is in this moment that we all have an opportunity to act.
Standing With Those Who Seek the Truth
With that in mind, the Democracy Fund is announcing a number of new grants this week, and I wanted to take this opportunity to describe them within the longer arc of our work.
The bedrock of our press rests on a robust interpretation of the First Amendment. Free press advocates are battening down the hatches. Trends in digital and platform rhetoric may, if nothing else, spark violent speech and even violence towards journalists, chilling freedom of expression. Without robust defenders of the First Amendment, all American journalists will struggle. We hope that our support will enable the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to continue and expand on its work to provide legal resources and guidance for independent journalists, nonprofit news outlets, and partners in broadcast, print, and online news media. With public support for the news media dangerously low, we need a community of press freedom advocates that is able to engage with the public around these issues.
Supporting Bold Ideas for Big Investigations
The craft of journalism and, critically, the accountability journalism that larger non-profit outlets are well positioned to deliver without fear or favor, are an important asset to the field. Each of the following institutions is unique. In partnership with our colleagues at First Look Media we made five significant grants.
A grant to the Center for Investigative Reporting provides general operating support as they pioneer new models of investigative reporting rooted in collaboration, community engagement, and creativity. A grant to the Center for Public Integrity provides general operating support to expand their watchdog reporting and strengthen their ability to hold institutions accountable to the American people. And, with our additional support, ProPublica is positioned to expand its groundbreaking work that combines hard-hitting investigations and cutting edge data journalism in service to communities.
Finding New Partners and New Funding
Two other grants take a different approach, but are to us complementary pieces of the puzzle. We have to find the best way to flexibly deploy resources towards reporting. The Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) at American University achieves this through partnering with newsrooms and exploring new paths to engage others who previously might not have seen themselves as accountability experts. In contrast, a New York Universitygrant will establish a laboratory for community-supported investigative journalism and focus on developing sustainable business models for U.S. newsrooms rooted in new membership structures and drawing on the lessons from a world leader in community-driven accountability journalism.
(As part of this announcement of our support, we want to underscore that Democracy Fund will never try to influence the journalism of our grantees, and explicitly ask grantees not to discuss their editorial strategy with us, or any stories they may or may not write.)
A New Fund for State and Local News
Sustainability is key at the local level, too, and through the announcement of a commitment of $1 million towards a new fund for state and local investigative journalism, we hope to serve as a beacon for those who want to support local and state news, investigative beats, and nonprofit news. Many of the dozens of nonprofit outlets that have sprung up over the last few years are maturing and looking to the future.
Let’s be clear: the degradation of trust in news media is real, and public support needs to be renewed if we are going to have a flourishing public square—an essential component of a healthy democracy.
At the Democracy Fund, we believe the practices that will build the truthful, trusted journalism that we need focus on the public. The public should know that the journalism being produced has fidelity to the facts. The public should be engaged and connected to journalists in a very real and not superficial way. The news media and journalists the public relies on must be diverse in sources, stories, and staff. For any of this to come to pass, journalists must be able to continue to practice hard-hitting accountability journalism without fear, represent diverse points of view, be relevant to the public, and be sustainable.
We hope that these new commitments will build effectively upon the $18 million in grants that the Democracy Fund’s Public Square program has made over the past five years to support efforts that help journalism to become more audience-centered, trusted, and resilient.
This is all very much a work in progress. But we believe there is a strong future for journalism and we look forward to continuing to work with our grantees, the wider community of those working in news and engagement, and the public towards this mission.
Rebuilding trust in journalism means rethinking the relationship between readers, revenue and reporting. That idea is at the heart of a new project launching today.
The Membership Puzzle Project, a collaboration between New York University and Dutch news site De Correspondent, will create a laboratory to study ways community engagement can strengthen investigative reporting and make journalism more sustainable. With $515,000 in funding from Democracy Fund, First Look Media and Knight Foundation, the Membership Puzzle Project will tackle specific problems and develop scalable solutions for developing strong membership programs, and share those lessons throughout the United States’ journalism landscape.
De Correspondent launched in the Netherlands with one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in journalism and now has over 50,000 members paying $63 a year, with an 80 percent renewal rate. Their reader-funded $3.2 million budget supports 20 full time “correspondents” who work closely with their communities to report on issues of critical public interest. De Correspondent operates in the open, sharing their budget and decision-making transparently and building deep and diverse relationships with its community in ways that strengthen the reporting and the sustainability of the newsroom.
De Correspondent announced its expansion to the U.S. market today.
The site will be incubated at New York University for the first year, where professor Jay Rosen will help translate their model to the United States and convene leading thinkers and innovators from across U.S. to exchange ideas, spread best practices, and train people on both sides of the project. This two-way laboratory will serve as a catalyst for creating new ways of supporting and strengthening the Fourth Estate.
This project is part of more than $12 million in new grants dedicated to supporting a robust and free press announced by the Democracy Fund and our partners at First Look Media earlier this week. Other grants include $3 million each to the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, and ProPublica, $800,000 to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and $500,000 to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. In addition, Democracy Fund announced a $1 million commitment to a new fund to invest in state and local investigative reporting.
A healthy democracy requires a free and robust press that responds to the needs of its communities and holds power to account. The critical role of the press in American democracy, as expressed in the First Amendment, is rooted in the information needs of communities which seek to be self-governing. At a time when the press is under attack and traditional business models continue to erode, the public becomes all the more central to securing and supporting the critical democratic function of journalism.
Democracy Fund’s investment in this project builds on more than $18 million in earlier grants which have focused on supporting a vibrant public square in America. We are particularly excited for how this project can dovetail with the work of the recently launched News Revenue Hub which is providing shared membership administration and strategy for small local newsrooms and topical reporting sites around the country. That work is already seeing profoundly exciting results and they will be core partners in the work with New York University and De Correspondent.
For Jay Rosen, one of the pioneers of civic journalism in the 1990s, this project is the culmination of years of work focused on putting people at the center of journalism. Ten years after Rosen dubbed the term “the people formerly known as the audience” this project asks, what is the social contract between journalists and the public that we need today? De Correspondent provides one answer to that question.
De Correspondent has shown that when newsrooms embrace the public as core to their work they can navigate through the stormy waters we are currently facing. Together we believe this project can help more newsrooms chart a path towards a robust future.
Washington, D.C. – Today First Look Media and Democracy Fund announced more than $12 million in new grants to support an independent, robust free press. Three leading nonprofit news organizations – the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, and ProPublica – will each receive $3 million at a moment when the role of journalism in our democracy is facing unprecedented challenges.
These three grants, which are a collaboration between First Look Media and Democracy Fund, will help ensure journalists have the resources they need to meet the reporting challenges of today’s political landscape. The two organizations are also granting $500,000 to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University to expand accountability reporting collaborations between university students and professional journalists, and $275,000 for an innovative collaboration between Professor Jay Rosen at New York University and De Correspondent to test new models of community support for investigative reporting.
“A healthy democracy cannot exist without a vibrant public square in which hard-hitting, independent media inform the public and hold power accountable,” said Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman. “Investigative journalists play a crucial role in our political system. We hope this support extends the reach and depth of a remarkable set of nonprofit newsrooms at a pivotal moment in American history.”
Democracy Fund and First Look Media share a strong commitment to and belief in the critical role of the First Amendment; both organizations were created by philanthropist Pierre Omidyar.
“At First Look Media, we speak truth to power and tell the stories that matter — across our fearless journalism, films, TV, and digital,” said Michael Bloom, President of First Look Media. “We are thrilled to make these grants to others in our field who are also doing such important work during these critical times.”
First Look Media and Democracy Fund also independently announced additional grants today.
Democracy Fund announced an $800,000 grant to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to help ensure investigative journalists have the legal support and First Amendment protections necessary to pursue their work. Building on its ongoing commitment to transforming local news, Democracy Fund also announced the forthcoming establishment of a new fund for local and state investigative reporting, with an initial investment of $1 million. Democracy Fund is inviting other funders to join them in building a new resource to support state and local reporting; more information will be made available in the coming months. Democracy Fund also contributed $200,000 to the Knight Prototype Fund on trust in journalism.
“National and local nonprofit newsrooms are playing an increasingly important role and building new models for reporting through creativity, collaboration, and civic engagement,” said Tom Glaisyer, Public Square Program Director, Democracy Fund. “In so doing, they bring new people into journalism, highlight new voices, and tell fuller and deeply relevant stories.”
Since 2011, Democracy Fund has invested more than $18 million in support of a more vibrant public square, which includes efforts on local journalism, fact-checking, and newsroom diversity.
First Look Media is providing a grant of $550,000 over two years to support The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. This grant will support investigative reporting on Wall Street and on environmental issues for The Intercept. The Investigative Fund, an award-winning newsroom for independent journalists, incubates investigative reporting projects with the potential for social impact and publishes this work in editorial partnership with a wide variety of print, broadcast, and digital outlets.
“Reporters are facing unprecedented challenges in the current political environment, which demands bold, intensively researched journalism that simply is not possible in most newsrooms without outside support,” said Betsy Reed, Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept.
Democracy Fund and First Look Media will announce all the grants tonight at the Toner Prize Celebration honoring the work of the late Robin Toner, the first woman to be chief political correspondent for The New York Times. The event benefits the Toner Program in Political Reporting at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.
Democracy Fund and First Look Media Joint Grants, Total $9,775,000
The Center for Investigative Reporting, $3 million over two years – This grant provides general operating support to CIR as they pioneer new models of investigative reporting rooted in collaboration, community engagement, and creativity.
The Center for Public Integrity, $3 million over two years – This grant provides general operating support to CPI to expand its watchdog reporting and strengthen its ability to hold institutions accountable to the American people.
ProPublica, $3 million over two years – This grant provides general operating support to ProPublica, whose groundbreaking work combines hard-hitting investigations and cutting edge data journalism in service to communities.
The Investigative Reporting Workshop, $500,000 over two years – This grant provides general operating support to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University to deepen its model of accountability reporting, which fosters collaboration between students, professional journalists, and longstanding newsrooms.
New York University, $275,000 over one year – This grant will establish a laboratory for community-supported investigative reporting through a unique partnership between New York University and De Correspondent. The project will focus on developing sustainable business models for U.S. newsrooms rooted in new membership structures and draw on the lessons from a world leader in community-driven accountability journalism.
Democracy Fund Grants, Total $2 million
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, $800,000 over two years – This grant provides general operating support to the Reporters Committee to enhance its ability to provide legal resources and guidance for independent journalists and nonprofit news outlets, in addition to continuing its work with longtime partners in broadcast, print, and online news media.
State and Local Investigative Fund, $1 million initial investment – With this funding, Democracy Fund seeks to establish a new fund for state and local investigative journalism and invites other funders and donors to contribute and collaborate. The goal of the fund is to serve as a beacon for those who want to support local and state news, investigative beats, and nonprofit newsrooms.
Knight Prototype Fund on Misinformation, $200,000 over one years – Democracy Fund also contributed $200,000 to the Knight Prototype Fund’s $1 million open call for ideas on misinformation and trust in journalism, a partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation; the open call is accepting applications until April 3.
First Look Media Grant, Total $550,000 over two years
This grant supports a partnership between The Intercept & the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute for investigative reporting on Wall Street and on environmental issues.
About FIRST LOOK MEDIA:
A bold, independent spirit defines everything we do at First Look Media – from journalism that holds the powerful accountable, to art and entertainment that shape our culture. Launched by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, First Look Media is built on the belief that freedom of expression and of the press, diverse voices, and fiercely independent perspectives, are vital to a healthy democracy and a vibrant culture.
About DEMOCRACY FUND:
The Democracy Fund is a bipartisan foundation established by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar to help ensure that our political system can withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the American people. Since 2011, Democracy Fund has invested more than $50 million in support of effective governance, modern elections, and a vibrant public square.
It might be tempting for national newsrooms, most of which are headquartered on the coasts, to boost their travel budget in the wake of the 2016 elections. A common refrain in the media post-mortems that followed the elections was that national journalists and political reporters need to spend more time in small, rural communities the middle of the country. It’s true, we do need a wider diversity of stories and perspectives in media, but parachuting into “flyover country” isn’t going to solve anything.
In 2017, editors who are committed to telling more diverse stories about American communities across should partner with talented journalists on the ground who know the history, culture and context of the places they work. National newsrooms should approach these partnerships with humility and a spirit of reciprocity. Both national and local journalists have a lot to bring to the table — see for example ProPublica’s work on interactive satellite reporting paired with the boots-on-the-ground journalism of the New Orleans Lens. Plus, at a time of limited and dwindling resources, collaboration can help outlets strengthen both the stories they tell and the newsrooms that tell them.
Heather Bryant, a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, wrote about this in the wake of the election. Rather than flying in national staff or setting up new newsrooms locally, she argues, “journalism as a whole would be better served by supporting and improving the newsrooms that might already be in these places.” The results of Bryant’s fellowship research will be a valuable contribution, surfacing new models and best practices for local/national reporting. Follow her work on Medium here.
There are already some great models*:
In 2016 the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University launched a local/national reporting partnership, staffed by Tim Griggs who has worked for New York Times, Texas Tribune and Wilmington Star News. The project is based in part on the success of an earlier project — Toxic NJ — a collaboration of ten local newsrooms working with the Center for Investigative Reporting to report on small toxic sites across the state. The New Orleans Lens, mentioned above, has been a leader in this kind of creative collaboration.
Last year the Center for Investigative Reporting also launched Reveal Labs which they describe as “a series of partnerships across the country to form networks that help newsrooms find and tell tough stories, connect them to those most affected and bring them to a national audience through Reveal.” In 2015 Nieman Lab reported on how Reveal was embedding reporters in local newsrooms to expand investigative capacity and bring local narratives to a national audience.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Regional and Local Journalism Centers are bringing newsrooms together across state lines to report on shared issues across different regions. The centers are designed to both serve local people better and to “feed national public media news programs.”
Strengthening local newsrooms is not just about creating a runway for stories to bubble up to the national level or creating a training ground for journalists who aspire to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Creating healthier local news ecosystems that better serve local communities is critical to people living in those communities, and to democracy itself.
In a prescient post from March of 2016 Josh Benton of the Nieman Lab pointed out how digital journalism has become concentrated “more firmly than ever in New York and a few other major cities.” There is no beat where that is more true than in political and campaign reporting. And that, Benton notes, has had “real impacts on the kind of news we get.”
“America is a big, highly distributed place. Our democracy is structured around cities and counties and congressional districts and states,” writes Benton. “Our media used to be too.”
After the election Benton reminded us that many communities have faced a dramatic erosion in community institutions. “The factories shut down; the church pews were emptier than they used to be; the braided fabric of their towns had unraveled,” writes Benton. And for many “the local newspaper was one of those key institutions — the daily or weekly package of stories that connected you to your neighbors.”
This isn’t to say that we should go back to the “good old days” of journalism. Instead, it is an argument that we should work together to create brighter days down the road. We are better equipped to do that by working together than we are on our own.
In the most recent Nieman Reports, Nicco Mele calls for the rethinking of newsrooms as “civic reactors.” He calls on us to imagine a role for newsrooms that can begin to build new kinds of institutions to replace some of what Benton notes has been lost. He writes: “A possible future for journalism is more in the mold of grassroots organizing, where the newsroom becomes a sort of 21st century VFW hall, the hub of local activity.”
For national outlets, supporting community-driven news is an opportunity to reinvigorate the profession from the ground up and build new pathways for audience recruitment in the process. Rather than parachuting in, they can subsidize springboards for new talent and practice, and invite local newsrooms and communities to enrich national stories in the process.
This piece was originally published byMediaShift. Josh Stearns is the Associate Director of the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund. Follow him on Twitter and sign up for the weekly Local Fix newsletter on innovation, community engagement and local news.
This week in Chicago journalists from around the country will gather for the People-Powered Publishing Conference. The conference brings together innovators and pioneers who are connecting newsrooms and communities in new ways.
The Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program will be on hand at the event and is releasing a new paper, “How to Best Serve Communities: Reflections on Civic Journalism,” on the history of how newsrooms have partnered with their communities — from civic journalism to today’s engaged journalism.
This past August, our senior fellow Geneva Overholser wrote a blog post on the connections between civic journalism and engaged journalism. Geneva has expanded on this topic with a fuller reflection on the civic journalism movement in the ‘90s. In the paper she describes what civic journalism hoped to do and the lasting impact of ideas around engagement. We found this work to be very useful as we are in the beginning stages of developing a strategy to support engaged journalism.
In Geneva’s concluding thoughts she reflects that:
“Today’s engaged journalism, civic journalism’s replacement in this digital age, enjoys an utterly different environment from the one that confronted civic journalists — one in which disruption prevails, change is the new constant, and innovation is seen, almost universally, as essential. The contemporary movement is landing on far more fertile terrain.”
Engaged journalism repositions news and information as a service rooted in deep dialogue with the public rather than a product for them to consume. This kind of journalism understands that outlets can create better stories, stronger newsrooms, and more healthy communities by bringing people into the journalism process. Engagement generates feedback loops between audiences and outlets to improve relationships, representation, responsiveness, trust, and impact.
The Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program supports the practice of engaged journalism through research, relationships, convenings, and grants. Throughout this process, we will collect, share, and update learnings with the broader field to support a network of practitioners across the country. While this is a national trend, we’re especially interested to understand how it works on the local level.
Our belief is that this reorientation of local journalism towards engaged journalism is critical to fostering a thriving journalism landscape and a more engaged democracy. The people attending this week’s People-Powered Publishing Conference are on the front lines of this work and we look forward to learning from and with them. We hope that Geneva’s paper on civic journalism can provide the historical insight and direction to move forward in the context of financial collapse and technological disruption of traditional print and broadcast news.
The 2016 election cycle has been described as unique or like no other. Clearly at the Presidential level this election has been unlike other recent cycles, but it is also remarkably different in another way: the public is getting much of their news beyond television broadcasts, and they are responding, sharing, and engaging with politics in ways they never have before.
It is this change in the nature of our communications that Civic Hall’s Rethinking Debates project seeks to explore. It does so, not blindly, nor in an “add technology and the world will be better” kind of way, but rather with the sense that given the opportunity to engage the public before, during, and after debates, we should use it to explore how people learn about candidates and their positions.
There is no question that the challenges for productive debates are significant. Political polarization in the United States is more pronounced. Americans now have shorter attention spans than a goldfish. The standard format of a televised debate has turned—despite the efforts of moderators no less experienced or skilled than in the past—into what one might describe as a three ring circus. The networks may be expecting massive viewership for the upcoming Presidential debates but its viewership that is partly driven by the sort of enthusiasm one has for a wrestling match rather than something Presidential. In a context where disillusionment within the electorate with politics and candidates is extensive it seems more likely that the debates will not inform, but incite, not engage, but aggravate, not clarify but confuse.
In spite of all that, debates continue to be a staple of the campaign season in many races. They are seen as a key test of a candidate, intellectually, temperamentally, even a candidates’ body language and wardrobe choices become the subject of countless post-debate news clips.
Several groups are working on this challenge. The Annenberg Public Policy Center formed a working group and issued a report advocating for multiple innovations in the debates. The Open Debate Coalition has also been advocating for specific reforms around the debate format. Democracy Fund’s grantee, the National Institute for Civil Discourse, also recently issued civility standards for candidate debates. Politifact will undoubtedly be fact-checking the claims made during the debate and the Internet Archive, also a grantee, is using its capacity to help journalists and the public see how TV covers debates.
The Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program focuses specifically on supporting efforts to help people understand and participate in the democratic process. We invested in Civic Hall’s work because, as their new report reminds us: “The debates are [the public’s] one opportunity in the campaign to see and hear the candidates speak directly to each other in a face-to-face encounter.”
In their extensive report, “Rethinking Debates: A Report On Increasing Engagement,” and at their recent mini-conference, Civic Hall brought together experts to explore technologies and platforms that have the potential to strengthen debates, increase their relevance, and ensure they continue to be central, but in different ways than in the past.
A few of the most promising ideas include:
CNN’s use of a technologically advanced auditorium and polling of an in-person audience to add nuance and immediate responses that could be fed back into the debate via the moderator seemed to successfully pair the strengths of a moderator and an advanced facility.
Google’s election hub, a platform developed in collaboration with Watchout a local organization in Taiwan. The platform allowed the public to generate questions for Presidential candidates. It elicited 6,500 questions that generated 220,000 votes and 5 questions were used in the debates.
At a state level: In New York, Silicon Harlem hosted a debate and utilized Microsoft’s Pulse tool and the above mentioned Open Debates Coalition had their question generation tool adopted for a debate in Florida. Both provided opportunities for the public in the United States to become more engaged in driving the questions used prior to and during the debate.
We hope that as this debate season gets underway we will see more examples both at the state and local and perhaps at the Presidential level that will be new models to follow if we’re to better serve the American public as they consider who they wish to vote for.
Click here to learn more about Civic Hall’s Rethinking Debates Project.
For all of their enormous clout globally, Washington and the San Francisco Bay Area can be pretty insular places. It’s a dynamic that’s reinforced by the know-it-all attitude of the dominant professional class of each. Washingtonians working in governmental circles think nobody understands politics like they do, while Bay Area tech professionals claim to be transforming humanity through lines of code.
I recently had the opportunity to travel to the Bay Area in an effort organized by the Lincoln Initiative to bring these two dynamic but distant communities closer together. They actually have much more in common than it seems: Plenty of Bay Area technologists are deeply passionate about government and politics, while D.C. supports a vibrant and growing civic tech scene. But the bicoastal bubbles still have a lot to learn from one another.
The Lincoln Initiative invited me and other D.C.-types on a tour of several Bay Area civic and political tech firms, including Crowdpac and Brigade. The leaders of these start-ups demonstrated a deep commitment for improving American politics by making public participation easier and more satisfying. They have developed sophisticated new online tools designed to draw more people into the political system and make it easier to find and organize like-minded fellow citizens. The scale of their ambition to help Americans re-engage with the democratic system is inspiring.
I was struck along my tour by how the tools these firms were developing focused on a single critical problem within the current political system, whether it be the dominance of mega-donors in campaign finance or the difficulty of building networks of like-minded voters. In the context of the Silicon Valley bubble’s fondness for elevator pitches of business plans, this makes sense (Brigade’s Matt Mahan, for example, described Brigade as the “LinkedIn for politics.”)
But few in Washington would take the approach that the difficulties of effective governance at the federal level can be solved by a killer app. Our system of government is shaped by countless competing priorities and power dynamics. Simply adding more of something to (or taking it out from) the system is unlikely to generate much change in a modern democracy.
Democracy Fund’s Governance Program, for example, learned in the process of constructing our systems map that problems of campaign finance and civic engagement combine with other factors to affect the performance of the federal system in complex ways. As some D.C.-based civic tech firms and nonprofits believe, there may be greater leverage in improving the responsiveness of federal politics by focusing first on solutions that can strengthen government institutions. Without doing so, devising new online tools to amplify the public’s voice simply adds more noise to an already cacophonous system.
Congress can be a peculiar and frustrating place. The perspective of Washington insiders can help Silicon Valley create tools that align with how the institution really works and how members and staff do their jobs. With this awareness, the enormous technical talent present in the Bay Area can better be brought to bear on the challenges facing our democracy.
The work of bridging the bicoastal bubbles on civic tech by groups like the Lincoln Initiative is a great first step in this effort. Hopefully in the near future, techies can leave their own bubbles and head east.
The Elections Program at Democracy Fund proudly welcomes the Center for Civic Design as its newest grantee.
By virtue of its ultimate goal – “ensuring voter intent through design” – the Center for Civic Design seeks to improve the voter experience by designing election materials that are understandable to an electorate with diverse educational, personal, and cultural backgrounds and learning styles. Its expert leaders, Whitney Quesenbery and Dana Chisnell, not only improve voting through usability testing and applied design research but also develop tools and best practices for use by local election officials.
You might, however, be asking yourself, “why is the design of election materials important?” The most obvious answer can be summarized in two words: butterfly ballot. Okay, how about “Florida 2000?” “Bush v. Gore?” (Does the “v” count as a third word?)
When a voter accidentally skips or misreads a piece of important information, that oversight can quickly lead to a missed opportunity to cast a vote or have that vote count. Even with the growing trend toward digitizing some aspects of election administration (notably, the move to online voter registration and the adoption of e-poll books), let’s face it: most election processes still use paper forms that have a lot of required information packed into them. The likelihood of a voter skipping essential data fields is very high when presented on a paper form – especially when instructions look like a hodgepodge of technocratic mumbo-jumbo squished into irregularly-shaped boxes all seemingly sewn together WITH LONG STRINGS OF INSTRUCTIONS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS.
I think you get the idea. When I was a poll worker trainer in California, a supervisor of mine once described the election process as “a big paperwork party.” Her point was two-fold:
1) On the administrative side, local election officials are required to distribute and process thousands of paper forms to and from voters (and poll workers – but that’s a story for another day). Every piece of paper received from voters helps officials determine important details like who’s eligible to receive which ballot, how many voters could show up to vote per precinct, or how many resources need to be allocated to polling places.
Here’s an example of information that must be communicated to voters from election officials in Minnesota. The Center for Civic Design and a team of volunteer experts around the country worked with the Secretary of State’s office to refresh its absentee balloting instructions after the 2008 election. As you can see, the difference is remarkable.
Minnesota Voting Instructions: BEFORE
Minnesota Voting Instructions: AFTER
2) From the point of view of citizens, most will receive and cast paper ballots. Those ballots can have several contests on them and come with a lot of instructions that voters need to see and understand in order to properly cast their ballot. Voters also encounter important materials like voter registration applications, envelopes containing official election materials, and voter information pamphlets.
One type of form that voters in most states must complete is the voter registration application. As you can see from the example below, the Center for Civic Design, working closely with collaborator OxideDesign Co., redesigned Pennsylvania’s voter registration form. Pennsylvania recently implemented online voter registration, but many of its voters still rely on the paper form to register. The paper form is designed to coordinate with the online form, letting voters choose the way of registering that works best for them. Which do you think is easier to read?
Pennsylvania Voter Registration: BEFORE
Pennsylvania Voter Registration: AFTER
The Center for Civic Design works with election officials, government and nonprofit organizations, and the public to achieve its ultimate goal of accurately capturing voter intent. Its leaders’ painstaking research and collaborative projects to improve the voter experience make the Center for Civic Design a fantastic addition to our portfolio. Welcome to the Democracy Fund team!
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.
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