When I first moved to Bowen Island back in 2001, there was a very active discussion board of Bowen Island issues called the Bowen Island Phorum. This was a typical late 1990s bulletin board type website. Locals could join and make posts and sometimes the discussions would cascade over four or five pages with replies into the hundreds on especially contentious or important issues to our little community.
Although that place drove me crazy with frustration a lot of the time, and I used to issue earnest warnings about the tone of some of our debate, which, probably seemed like naive handwringing to the untrained eye, nevertheless, it was our place owned by one of our neighbours and supported by advertising from our local businesses, which is the only way that the host could afford the hosting fees.
Most of us knew each other, and there was the occasional Juventus evening at the pub or the Legion when we would get together with name tags showing our Phorum handles just so we could put a face to the bluster.
When Facebook became widely used around 2010 discussion at the Phorum dried up completely. The first Facebook group for Bowen Islanders was a buy and sell group which very quickly turned into discussions about other things. Another one of our neighbours then created a page called “Bowen Island Everything Else” mostly to take the pressure off the buy and sell page. In short order, that became our de facto community Facebook group. As far as I’m aware every small town and neighbourhood has one now.
Once this shift happened conversations at the Phorum shrank down to a handful of participants. Facebook was just too convenient for everyone to use. In the end, this meant that maintaining the Phorum was pointless. There was no reason for local advertisers to spend their money there and the discussions were faster and more modern over on Facebook. At the same time, of course, generational shifts in how we used discussion sites on the web had changed and those of us who began in the 90s were watching the next generation of users connect on the corporate owned social media sites. The Phorum is gone.
In the last few months, there has been a lot of conversation amongst my friends and neighbours about leaving social media but the one thing they say that will keep them on Facebook is the connection to our local community. While most have found it easy to leave the the gushing torrent of nonsense that now floods our Twitter timelines, with Facebook we still have connections to neighbors.
However, here in Canada, Facebook has refused to pay legacy media for publishing their content, something the other social media sites have done the result of this choice by Facebook is that news links cannot be shared in Canada on that platform. And that means that the conversations that happened on Facebook are almost exclusively rumour and opinion.
It’s also tragically clear to me that many people in our community who participate in Facebook use that site as their only interface to the worldwide web. When links are shared, often the discussion shows clearly that people haven’t read the posted article. People share things like weather alerts or emergency Information without understanding what it means or how it affects them. I realized last week that nothing I get from Facebook is unique to that site. Between our local emergency services app, news and updates from our municipality, buying the local newspaper, (yes we still have one) I get everything I need. If I want opinions, there’s a small group of people I often meet at a local coffee shop or at the pub with whom I can share wildly misinformed lies and speculations. As you do.
So it seems easy enough for me to leave. But as I’ve posted my intention to do so, friends have shared with me their worry that if they leave Facebook, where will they get their local news and stay connected to what’s happening in the community?
And this right here is the cost of us all buying the convenience of Facebook at the expense of the hard work of building community. What happens on Facebook is not community. It is an empty calories version of deliberation and belonging. It gives the illusion of connection and conversation while simultaneously acting the same way big box stores do in small towns: by crushing what is local through convenience and lower prices. The community bears the cost.
And now, there may legitimately be fewer ways for people to connect locally There is no social media platform as easy to use or widely distributed as Facebook. Starting a local mastodon instance might bring in 10 or 12 early adopters, which still might make it worthwhile to do. Resurrecting the Phorum seems unlikely and there are no alternatives to Facebook, thank God.
Upon reflection, I realized that most of the local people that bug me on Facebook I don’t know in real life. There are folks I have blocked over the years, and I couldn’t even tell you if they live here now. I don’t hear their opinions, I don’t know who they are in real life, and I realize now that any irritation they have given to me is basically spectral. They are ghosts in my life. If I were to run into them at the coffee shop or the pub, I would probably like them, because most people around here are likable, and funny and strange and when you meet them face-to-face, it doesn’t really matter what small part of them rages against one politician or another from time to time. When they’re helping you out out of a ditch or sharing a beer around a campfire at the beach, you get to see folks for who they really are. Each one different each one annoying in their own way, but, over time, most become likeable, if not downright loveable, familiars.
Losing these connections is what Facebook has done to us. And when those are gone, so too, are the raw materials of community. Those materials help us to build the connections that we need to rely on one another when disasters or emergencies like fires earthquakes or pandemics strike us. They also just make life worth living.
Thursday, for example, I was running some errands when I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. He invited me to walk with him and his dog and so we did, through the forests down to the sea, checking out some new public works and finally ending up at the pub taking a glass of whiskey together. It was two hours drifting spent in the company of a neighbour talking about whatever struck our fancy.
Building community is slow and inconvenient because it requires you to spend hours hanging out with people and talking about nothing in particular. That’s the point. That’s the feature.This is what awaits us in the other side of the decade and a half we have had of outsourcing our attention and hearts to people with malevolent interests who are working against a slow, delicious, deeply connected sense of belonging.
I’m close to shuttering my Facebook account now. If for some reason, you wanna find me, drop me a note and we’ll go for a beer.?
From time to time I have conversations that remind me of the principles that guide my own work in different aspects of facilitation and engagement. Today, in two different design conversations, I was reminded of these again, and I took a few notes as we were talking. These aren’t the be-all and end-all of good practice, but they are things that roll off the tongue and are basic heuristics for how I structure and facilitate public engagement sessions.
- Ask constructive questions. One of my pet peeves is when folks want to structure a public engagement with a presentation of a half- or well-formed policy proposal and ask “What are we missing?” In most cases once a piece of legislation or a plan reaches the consultation stage, the decision is already made that we are going in THIS basic direction. The “What is missing?” can imply that there is room to throw the whole thing out, or it invites ideological contributions that can derail the conversation. Instead, share material and then ask “what would make this stronger?” or “What would make this fail if we didn’t’t address it now?”
- Foster participant ownership: Real transparency can demand of us that we ask participants to share information with us in their own words, in their own handwriting, and in their own voice. As much as possible, have your participants shape their own input, and make sense of it together. The extent to which you are coding data, making summaries, and writing reports and responses alone and outside of the group’s work, is the extent to which they are being left out of the process. So think very consciously about that.
- Ask authentically curious and open-ended questions: in North American culture we have a pre-disposition to asking yes/no questions. We can often appear very curious in doing so, but a question that leaves only two or three possible answers doesn’t actually allow a person to fill it with their wisdom. A simple example is something like “Do you think this proposal will work?” questions that start with verbs and ending question marks usually logically invite a yes or no answer. So practice crafting a question that allows for thoughtful reflection, and provides answers that you cannot yet see such as “how can you see this proposal working?” or “what is your reaction to what we just shared?” Also, avoid questions like “do you think we should go with this proposal or something different?” which still invites a binary choice even though people may choose to answer it with more detail. If you require a follow up question to make a person’s answer more clear, then ask that question in the first place.
- Clarify how responses are to be used: There is nothing worse than being invited to a public consultation meeting only to have your ideas dismissed or ignored. Perhaps the only thing worse is being invited to a process where you believe you are helping to make a decision when in reality the decision is being made elsewhere. I call this “engagement washing.” It’s so important to frame public meetings so that participants are clear about what is happening and what is not happening so that they can make an informed choice to participate and how to participate.
- Facilitate difference, not consensus: Most public engagements are not decision-making processes. Many times in my career I have had to hold decision-makers accountable for making decisions and not outsourcing them by saying “the community needs to agree on this before we implement it.” The role of the community is to be a difficult, diverse, conflicted, heterogeneous, mass of opinions and ideas. Decision makers are elected to make decisions in that context. When facilitating public engagement, I tell my clients that our job will be surfacing differences and not arriving at consensus. Illuminating differences helps decision-maker make good strategic choices and helps them to understand the costs and impact of their decisions.
- PAvoid the tyranny of inclusion. Many engagement processes suffer from what I call the tyranny of inclusion. This operates when we believe we need to respond to every single comment and piece of advice equally. Practically speaking, that requires us to respond to a focus group or expert panel in the same way as we might respond to an anonymous troll who left a comment in passing on a survey form or in a social media thread. When structuring engagement processes, I usually shape circles of engagement that make it clear that the more responsibility you have for the outcome. The tighter the feedback loop for your advice. This principal goes hand-in-hand with design principles of equity of voice and inclusion of different lived expertise in engagement and decision-making, and there is no perfect balance.
- Engagement practice can sustain or undermine democracy: in the courses I teach on engagement I stress this point constantly: how we engage affects people’s feelings and trust of democratic processes. Engagement processes that are restrained, restrictive, or opaque signal and unwillingness to engage with the messy realities of community and citizen. Open, validating and meaningful engagement that can help shape public policy. Decisions helps build, and strengthen democratic participation. This should go without saying, but seeking efficiencies in engagement processes can have the effect of smoothing over all the tricky bits that make democracy and participatory life rich, creative, and co-owned. So be conscious about the choices you make when structuring engagement.
So those are a few. There are many more besides these, not to mention rigorous thinking about power. But these are among the most important ones to begin with for me.
The set up for the weekly staff meeting at the Alaska Humanities Forum offices in Anchorage.
We spent the day yesterday with our colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF) preparing for the Art of Hosting that begins this morning. AKHF is an organization that has long embraced the Art of Hosting as a way of operating both their internal organizational functions and their relationship and gatherings with their partners and programs. All over the world there are organizations like this, not always obvious or seen by the global Art of Hosting community, because they labour away on their own work. But until the pandemic every staff member of this organization was sent south for an Art of Hosting once they were hired on. It has been six years since that happened so we are here to partly fulfill that need and to work with several of their partners.
What’s great about this is Kameron Perez-Verdia is on our team. As President and CEO of the organization, he is embodies the practices of participatory leadership which he first learned at a Shambala Institute Authentic Leadership in Action workshop back in 2008 with Toke, Monica and myself. Kameron was raised in the whaling village of Utqiagvik, which is the most northerly point in Alaska. We talked a lot yesterday about the kinds of community gatherings that take place there when the whale hunting crews bring in humpbacks for the community. We talked about the importance of presences and check ins in meetings and how that grounded start to important work is a critical aspect of every part of day to day life, from whaling to a staff meeting in Anchorage.
Kameron and I were talking about the balance between chaos and order yesterday as we were exploring how we could teach the four-fold practice together and he shared with me a term that Yupik elders had taught him about dynamic balance: Yuluni pitallkeqtuglluni, which translates roughly as “just enough to live a good life.” It refers to the amount of connection that we need in a gathering or community, or the amount of structure in a meeting or a process to bring about a feeling of family (tuglluni means family) but allows for agency. We talked about “balance” which in the Yupik world is not a stable equilibrium between two competing forces, but a dynamic, constantly sensed state that is reposnsive to the context.
Perhaps this will be come a theme of our work in the next three days, but it’s a helpful way to contextualize the practices of the Art of Hosting: presence, participation, hosting and co-creating. Each of these are context dependant, which is why they are practices. Bringing just enough to live a good life is the art that implicit in the name of the practice “Art of Hosting.” While many folks seek a stable, always applicable tool or way of doing things, the art of hosting or participatory leadership is about the application of a world of practice to an ever changing context. In being sensitive to what is needed, and how to do it depending on conditions, we constantly create the right balancing moment between too much and not enough, just enough to live a good life.
We start in 2 hours.
Confirmed yet again that the way to build community, and indeed strengthen participatory and democratic societies is to do work together.
Peter Levine, who I feel like everyone should read, has a nice little blog post today that serves as a bit of a gateway to his own research and thoughts on this topic. Here’s his basic thesis:
People are more likely to trust institutions if they are involved in diverse, participatory groups, because such participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information.
A few times this past year I have been in situations that have borne out this reality, for better or worse. For example working with folks in different places on the opioid crisis, for example, it is clear to me that folks can come together across all kinds of ideological differences if there is actual work in the centre to do. Grappling with the realities of governance, community building, the provision of services and policy making is edifying work. It’s hard, and requires relationship and commitment. Everyone has opinions about things, but rolling your sleeves up and getting to work is where relationships and therefore community is built.
It has been true for a while, but community engagement – the traditional “ask the people what they think” kind – is now clearly a dead end way to make things happen. Polling drives policy and as a result you get truly stupid decisions that don’t at all improve life for people but rather just keep the voters electing populists to power. Simplify problems, seed the population with simple platitudes and memes, convince them that “your guy” has the answers and then poll them on the results.
Trust in democratic institutions, a key theme of Peter’s work, is undermined by this approach to community. People don’t believe polls (except the analytics folks working for parties that shape narrative as keenly as marketers working with personalized market segmentations – see what I mean?) and people don;t believe in surveys either. A recent survey in my home community of 5000 people had 250 returns, to which a suspicious refrain of Facebook amongst folks with zero statsitics backgrounds was “That’s all? How can they make decisions based on such a paltry sample.”
The exercise of engagement is often window dressing. It can result in hundreds and hundreds of text answers on qualitative surveys that have no rhyme nor reason to them. Comments like “fix the potholes on Elm Street” don’t mean anything without context, even if a bunch of people say them. And worse still when you ask people how to make the neighbourhood safer, you will be stuck with all manner of opinion and regurgitated talking points fed to folks who know nothing about sociology, criminology, policing or urban design. The value of the content is nil. The value of the exercise is “we consulted with the community and decided to fix the pot holes on Elm Street as a way of solving the problem of community safety.” And so leaders do what they want.
Election success now is about saying you will do a thing, then doing something and successfully externalizing all the bits that didn’t work so you can take credit for the small thing you did. If people buy what you are selling, you will get re-elected. It’s easier just to say vacuous things like “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes and Bring it on Home” over and over and over and over again until people get so sick of you that they elect you to office just to shut you up. From there, you meet the realities of governing, and memes and slogans won;t get you through.
But there are ways out of this state of affairs. On the decision-making side I think we should be investing heavily in citizen assemblies, such as the one currently underway in Saanich and Victoria which is exploring how to merge two cities. These bodies, in which citizens are chosen at random and enter into a learning journey together to understand the issues at play and recommend courses of action. My friend and colleague Aftab Erfan has recently written about the results and potential of citizen assemblies to do proper engagement which honours democratic and participatory principles and generates meaningful accountability for elected leaders in using their power.
And, back to Peter Levine’s work, I believe there is a tremendous potential in the approach of shared work that he advocates above. Some of the most engaging work I have done has included Participatory Narrative Inquiry approaches, which help people gather, listen to and make sense of each other’s stories as they seek openings and affordances for taking action on complex topics. The process itself builds the social connectivity that builds the basis for collaboration and community. It complexities the work of building things like justice (which Peter has a lot to say on) and helps us to understand that there is no single authority that can deliver the perfect outcome in a society.
Democratic societies thrive where there are democratic institutions that help stabilize the conditions that create freedom and diversity of association, participation and contribution. We are entering a period of dire outlook for this kind of rich ecosystem of collaboration. Get out there and make things together with others.
if you are a non-profit/social services leader in BC, then we would love to have you at a free workshop we’re offering in the new year! It’s about using complexity practices to prepare for and navigate crisis and disruption in our organizations and communities. You can learn more and register at this link.
This work has its roots all the way back in 2020 when Ciaran and I ran a Participatory Narrative Inquiry project for a group of organizations serving people with disabilities about how folks were coping during the early days of the pandemic. We learned a lot from that project it still feels relevant and necessary five years later. This work is being supported by our non-profit partners who want to see more resources and support available to leaders in this sector to find paths through the turbulence of crisis, no matter where it comes from. We’ve created a mini-guide which uses Cynefin as a decision making framework for working in crisis. The mini0guide is available to everyone, and we’re hosting two afternoon workshops in January and February next year (more if there’s interest!) aimed at non-profit leaders in BC to provide a more hands-on introduction to the content and explore practical application together.
Our goal is to build community and provide meaningful, practical, accessible tools that bridge the gap between theory and practice. The workshop is free, but space is limited. If you can’t make those dates/times, click this form where you can sign up for updates about future offerings and future versions of the guide as well. Feel free to comment here with any questions.
Please share this invitation!