New Community Paradigms / Gardens of Democracy - 3 views
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Brian G. Dowling on 05 Oct 12Metaphors matter, foundationally, in creating communities. Democratic governance is not best done through the machine of government but through a garden of governance by a community.
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Brian G. Dowling on 05 Oct 12Changing the relationship of citizens to government as called for by Code for America means changing the relationship of members of civil society to community and of community to government. Community needs to take over a greater role in governance from governance. Code for America provides some of the tools but not the craftsmanship.
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Brian G. Dowling on 05 Oct 12Code for America is networked across the USA but grounded in local communities. It is, however, too often leveraged through city councils and city management which is great for cities more in the fashion of Innovatatown than Parochialville. In some cases, it will need to be implemented from outside of city hall.
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Brian G. Dowling on 05 Oct 12A need to redefine the notion of self-interest. Human nature stays the same, what changes is human understanding from fatalistic to mechanistic to hopefully organic.
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Brian G. Dowling on 05 Oct 12The world is complex and networked not simple and add-on, systems are non-linear and non-equilibrium. Systems should not be described as efficient or inefficient but effective or ineffective. We are interdependent, cooperation drives prosperity and we are emotional approximators. Our systems are impacted positively or negatively by contagion.
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Brian G. Dowling on 05 Oct 12Viewing the world in a new way redefines your approach to politics. The mechanistic model of citizenship "atomizes" individuals according to Eric Liu. Under a Gardens of Democracy model, individuals are networked and citizenship can be redefined accordingly making true self-interest mutual interest as understood by Tocqueville http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch2_08.htm
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Brian G. Dowling on 05 Oct 12Understanding the new reality. You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. We need to be more than simple spectators to the political process. In my view, it means being more than simple participants in the existing system but redefining that system. We need to be more than customers and consumers of a system of community management and become co-creators of the system.
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Brian G. Dowling on 06 Oct 12We also use mechanistic metaphors in defining our economy, including "efficient markets". The economy is an ecosystem. Economies prosper best from the middle out not from the top down.
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Brian G. Dowling on 06 Oct 12Big government versus small government misses the point. According to Eric Liu government should be big on the what and small on the how. Government should strive to set great goals, does invest resources making them available at scale but the innovation to achieve those goals should come from the bottom up in networked ways.
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Code for America hosted Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu for a discussion of their recent book, "Gardens of the Democracy." In it, they challenge Americans to approach the world not as a machinery that needs to be perfected but as a garden that needs constant attention, discretion, and periodic weeding. The book argues that since society and technology have fundamentally changed, so must our notions of citizenship and democracy: turning "the machine" into a garden.