Connecting with one another is key

By Dan Moulthrop

Vindicator

The election is over, and if there’s one thing we may have learned from this campaign season, it’s that our civic sphere is broken. We live in a moment when our major parties are capable of nominating — and then supporting — astonishingly unqualified candidates. Campaigns are spending more money than ever before, yet candidates and their advisers remain incapable of focusing even their own attention on solutions, much less that of voters.

About a month ago in his New York Times column, Thomas Friedman quoted a Stanford political science professor describing our current quandary as “two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country.” That professor, Larry Diamond, went on to say, “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations.”

Indeed, bankruptcy seems an apt analogy when applied to Ohio’s most pressing problem, a looming budget deficit estimated at over $8 billion (roughly 18 percent of the current budget). Ohioans heard little about potential solutions in recent months as both parties focused on campaign tactics, instead of the much more difficult but vital business of communicating a vision for governing.

This moment presents us with practical and philosophical challenges. The practical challenges are obvious: How do governing bodies — the State of Ohio, the City of Lorain, Bath Township — survive or thrive with diminishing resources? The philosophical challenge is less clear, but can a nation of citizens well-practiced in the skill of hurling epithets become a people capable of listening to, understanding and respecting — even valuing — a difference of opinion?

Opportunity

One of the reasons we can meet these challenges is that this moment also presents us with opportunity. The emergence of an entirely new class of media in the last four years has completely rebuilt the ways we connect with one another. We’re more likely to organize a local campaign — be it for a ballot issue or for healthy snacks in school vending machines — via Facebook and Twitter than we are with a Xerox machine and a Rolodex. The old tools are still useful, but there’s little doubt social media has exponentially expanded the political and civic action toolbox.

Whether this is happening effectively in politics or not, citizens are harnessing these tools and making their communities stronger. Jim Cossler of the Youngstown Business Incubator has taken tools most of us use to share pictures of our kids and track our business contacts and put them toward tangible economic development. In Kenya, a project called Ushahidi enables citizens to use a text message to report Election Day violence. Those reports immediately update an online map tracking the scale and prevalence of the violence, turning every citizen with a cell phone into a potential election monitor.

That’s only the beginning. The next wave is social media expressly for civic good. Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, is launching Jumo.com, a new effort to keep people connected to the non-profits they support. CEOs for Cities is working on a project to bring citizen brainpower to bear on the increasingly difficult work of municipal budgeting. And in Northeast Ohio, the project I help lead, The Civic Commons, is working on new ways to build conversations and connections that make participation in civic life easier and more effective.

Civic participation

So, the election is over. For much of our lives, we have considered our participation in that great democratic moment as the highest form of civic participation, and often, our involvement ended at the ballot box. The challenges and opportunities this moment presents tell us the ballot we cast is only the beginning.

If we are to repair our civic sphere, we won’t do it by throwing up our hands, shaking our heads and walking away. We repair it by participating and, when we do so, demonstrating civility and maybe even a deeper interest in listening to the opinions of others than we have in the past. That conversation is beginning. You’re invited to join it.

Dan Moulthrop is Curator of Conversation at The Civic Commons, which he describes as a new way to bring communities together with conversation and emerging technology with a goal of productive collective civic action. Find out more at theciviccommons.com.