The September Project is a great idea for promoting public deliberation. Libraries across the country will hold public discussions on the third anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. The library systems that have already signed up are shown on this map. Here’s an overall description of the project, written by its organizers:

On September 11, 2004, citizens across the U.S. will come together at their local libraries to discuss ideas that matter to all of us. Through

talks, debates, roundtables, and performances, citizens will share ideas

about democracy, citizenship, and patriotism. What better way to spend

September 11th, recently designated “Patriot Day,” than by participating

collectively, thinking creatively, and becoming a part of the

well-informed voice of the American citizenry?

Public libraries provide all citizens open and free access to information.

Almost all communities in the US have at least one library. There are over

16,000 public libraries in the US, and that’s not including university

libraries, K-12 libraries, and church libraries. In other words, libraries

constitute an impressive national infrastructure. Moreover, 96% of public

libraries have computer technology that can serve to connect events across

the nation, thereby constituting a national and distributed media

infrastructure. In this way, the September Project will foster a national

conversation with, for, and by the people.

The September Project has three goals:

1) To coordinate with all libraries — big and small, urban and rural —

to host free and public events on September 11;

2) To work with all forms of media — mainstream and alternative;

corporate and independent; print, radio, film, and digital — to foster

and sustain public discourse about issues that matter;

3) To foster an annual tradition for citizens around the world to

recognize and give meaning to September 11th.

The aim of The September Project is to create a day of engagement, a day

of community, a day of democracy.

John Gastil of the University of Washington and I are co-editing a book on deliberative processes. We have the chapter authors lined up and are about to sign a contract. Each chapter will describe a concrete experiment that involves citizens in structured discussions of public issues or problems. A non-exhaustive list of these experiments would include the National Issues Forums, Study Circles, Deliberative Polling, and America Speaks in the US; several online experiments; and very important non-US cases such as the participatory budging process in Porto Allegre, Brazil (in which very large citizens’ councils actually allocate a portion of the city’s budget).

Along with Rose Marie Nierras of LogoLink, I’m applying for a small grant to interview political activists and people who promote public deliberation, to get some sense of the differences between these approaches.

On a simple definition, “deliberation” means convening a diverse group of citizens and asking them to talk, without any expectation or hope that they will reach one conclusion rather than another. The population that is convened, the format, and the informational materials are all supposed to be neutral or balanced. There is an ethic of deference to whatever views may emerge from democratic discussion. Efforts are made to insulate the process from deliberate attempts to manipulate it. In contrast, the simple view of “advocacy” implies an effort to enlist or mobilize citizens toward some end. At their best, advocates are candid about their goals and open to critical suggestions. But they are advocating for something.

To be sure, there are versions of advocacy that incorporate genuine deliberation, just as there are deliberative exercises aimed at policy goals. Nevertheless, there is at least a potential tension between the two approaches. Many advocates for disadvantaged populations explicitly say that deliberation is a waste of their limited resources. And some proponents of deliberation see organized advocacy as a threat to fair and unbiased discussion; hence their efforts to protect deliberative forums from being “manipulated” by groups with an agenda.

Our full proposal is available online, and comments are welcome on a dedicated website.

We are now two days into the “Researcher & Practitoner” meeting that I described yesterday. We tried to get consensus (among 40 people) on a set of factual statements about public deliberation that we could post on a website for public use. For the most part, the academics in the group rejected the statements that the practitioners proposed, on the ground that the research base was too weak. Therefore, we harvested a very long list of plausible, informed hypotheses about deliberation. This may be a more useful product than a set of consensus propositions.

The conversation has generally been very rich and disciplined (and hard to summarize). Instead, I’ll report the following thought that occurred to me. We seem to have a choice between two general approaches. We can randomly select people to deliberate on a public issue (giving them incentives to participate, as if in a kind of jury); or we can try to motivate a large and diverse segment of the population to seek out voluntary opportunities for deliberation. Both approaches are widely used by practitioners in the field of Deliberative Democracy.

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I’m on my way to the National 4-H Center for a meeting organized by the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. We’re calling it a “Research & Practitioner Meeting,” because it combines leading scholars who study public deliberation with practitioners who run actual public discussion forums. Our goals are to set an ambitious research agenda for the field, and also to pick some small projects that can be funded out of our existing money. I was on the planning committee for the conference, so I’m excited about it.

Connected to this conference is a proposed book that John Gastil has organized, although I’m the co-editor. Anyone who might like to write a chapter on a particular approach to public deliberation should check out the Call for Papers that John has written.

On a completely unrelated note, I had a chance last week to meet Maryland’s Senator Barbara Mikulski. With the loss of Senator Wellstone, she is the only community organizer in the Senate. Not knowing anything about me, she said that America needs a new progressive era. I couldn’t help replying that I had written a book with that very title. I’m sure this made me sound like a self-promoting academic; and if I were going to promote myself, I would have preferred to tell her about our community work in Prince George’s County. In any case, she then made a speech in support of Americorps, which she has championed since it was created.