Monthly Archives: May 2010

creating informed communities (part 5)

This is the fifth of five strategies proposed to achieve the goals of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. See Monday’s post for an overview.

Strategy 5: Organize People to Defend the Knowledge Commons

The Knight report does a great job of showing that healthy communities need information. Information is a “public good,” in the economist’s sense, because excluding people from its benefits is difficult and expensive once the knowledge has been produced. Generating and protecting public goods raises special challenges for which we need effective, grassroots advocacy organizations.

The main challenges facing public goods are, first, that individuals may not be motivated to produce things that benefit everyone (when instead they can “free-ride” on others’ labor), and second, that individuals, firms, and governments may be tempted to privatize public goods for their own advantage. Today, many knowledge artifacts that once would have been rivalrous can be digitized, posted online, and thereby turned into public goods. On the other hand, knowledge can be privatized and monetized, as when intellectual property is over-protected or when university-based research is influenced by corporate funding. It is also possible for knowledge to be under-produced, if there are insufficient incentives to develop it and give it away. For example, too little research is conducted on diseases that affect the poorest people in the world.

Civic knowledge–knowledge of relevance to public or community issues–does not come into existence automatically, nor is it safe from anti-social behavior. The documents in a town archive, the reporting that filled a traditional town newspaper, and the artifacts in a local museum all took money and training to produce, to catalog, and to conserve. Once produced, these goods are fragile. They can literally decay or burn, and they are subject to manipulation or inappropriate privatization.

For example, access to state court decisions in the United States is provided exclusively by private firms, mainly the West Publishing Company and LEXIS/NEXIS. The public’s interest in affordable and convenient access to public law would be undermined if these firms over-charged or provided poor quality.

In 1998, with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Congress extended most existing copyrights in the United States for 95 years. Congress thus granted monopoly ownership to works that had been created as long ago as 1903–requiring anyone who wanted to use these works to locate the copyright holder, seek permission, and pay whatever fee is demanded–and asserted a right to extend copyrights as frequently and for as long as it liked. In his dissenting opinion to the court decision that upheld this law, Justice Breyer wrote, “It threatens to interfere with efforts to preserve our Nation’s historical and cultural heritage and efforts to use that heritage, say, to educate our Nation’s children” (537 U.S. 26, 2003, 26). If Justice Breyer was correct, the Sonny Bono Act was an example of knowledge of civic value being turned from a public good into a private commodity by state power at the behest of private interests.

Given such threats, we need associations that play the following roles:

    1. Advocacy. Policies to benefit the “knowledge commons” would include protection of free speech, appropriate copyright laws, public subsidies for libraries and archives, and public funds to digitize archives. Beneficial policies are public goods that often lose out to private interests that profit more tangibly from selfish policies. For example, everyone benefits from free access to historical texts, but a few companies profit much more substantially from their own copyrights. Independent, nonprofit associations can rectify this imbalance by recruiting voters, activists, and donors to promote the public interest in government. The American Library Association, for example, has been a strong advocate for knowledge as a commons.

    2. Alliances. Communities across the country have information needs and valuable, accumulated public knowledge. Attacks on free information anywhere are threats to free information everywhere. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” That is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote as he and his colleagues built a civil rights movement. As a result of their work, when civil rights were viciously repressed in one location, people got on buses from other places to come and protest. We may not need bus trips, but we do need people in each community to feel that the information commons in other places matters to them as well. In practical terms, that requires networks of associations that have working ties.

    3. Education, broadly defined. People do not automatically acquire an understanding and appreciation of valuable civic knowledge, nor the skills necessary to produce and conserve such knowledge. Each generation must transmit to the next the skills, motivations, and understanding necessary to preserve knowledge as a commons. Government-run public schools may have a role in this educational process, but they should not monopolize it. A more pluralistic and independent education depends on private nonprofit associations that recruit and train people to be community historians, archivists, naturalists, artists, or documentary filmmakers (among other roles).

creating informed communities (part 4)

This is the fourth of five strategies proposed to achieve the goals of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. See Monday’s post for an overview.

Strategy 4: Generate Public “Relational” Knowledge

Citizens need facts about organizations, leaders, and issues. They need rival interpretations of those facts, and deliberative public judgments based on such interpretations. Citizens also need to understand the relationships among people, organizations, and issues. All competent civic and political actors, since the beginning of time, have held in their heads implicit “network maps” that link ideas and individuals in their community. They know, for example, that if they want to talk to the leader of the town, they should go through an accessible individual whom the leader regularly consults. If someone raises a local issue, they can link it to relevant organizations and to related issues.

In recent years, three developments have underlined the importance of such thinking. One is the “The New Science of Networks,” as Albert-László Barabás subtitles his book Linked. This science is the mathematical exploration of nodes and network ties as they arise under various conditions, and it has yielded powerful insights, such as the value of “weak ties” and the importance of individuals who connect disparate communities.

The second development is the enormous popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, which are driven by webs of relationships. These sites have popularized the concept of network ties and underlined their importance. But Facebook and other corporate social networks keep the relational data–the “network map”–to themselves. They do so to protect users’ privacy and also to give themselves a valuable asset. For example, to reach everyone at Tufts who has a Facebook account, we must pay Facebook to advertise. We cannot see a list of users who have Tufts connections.

The third development is the art of relational organizing. Relational organization groups such as the Industrial Areas Foundation and the PICO and Gamaliel Networks do not begin with clear and fixed goals. They decide what their causes should be by means of long periods of listening and discussing within diverse networks that they carefully nurture. They are highly skilled at mapping networks to identify power relationships, excluded groups, and key hubs. [See, e g., Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 31-2..

The next step is to democratize the possession of effective network maps, so that they do not exist only in the brains of skilled organizers or on the servers of Facebook and MySpace. Informed communities should have access not only to discrete facts and lists of organizations–nor should they be satisfied with geographical maps that show the physical location of organizations. They should be able to build and consult public network maps that allow them to identify power, influence, exclusion, division, and other attributes of relationships, not of individuals.

Working with Lew Friedland and his colleagues at Community Knowledge Base, we have been experimenting with public network maps in two contexts:

  • We have begun to create computer-based games in which classes of high school or middle school students quickly generate network maps of local issues, organizations, and people. The following is part of a real map concerned with water issues in the Tampa, Florida area. It was quickly created by a class of 9th graders, who pooled their knowledge to produce a sophisticated understanding. (One node is open to reveal notes the student has typed.)

  • We are also in the midst of creating an open network for the Boston metro area in which nodes will be organizations or issues, and anyone will be able to add to the map, use it to recruit volunteers, and navigate it to explore the structure of this region’s civil society. It’s not ready for a public launch, but one can explore the map here.

These are just preliminary experiments. They do not yet harness the full potential of network analysis and visualization, nor the power of computers to harvest network data automatically from websites. My basic recommendation is that governments and foundations should invest in providing transparent relational data along with the other information that is already online.

creating informed communities (part 3)

This is the third of five strategies proposed to achieve the goals of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. See Monday’s post for an overview.

Strategy 3: Invest in Face-to-Face Public Deliberation

Today I focus on a particular recommendation in the Knight report, number 13, which is: “Empower all citizens to participate actively in community self-governance, including local ‘community summits’ to address community affairs and pursue common goals.”

Face-to-face discussions of community issues have been found to produce good policies and the political will to support these policies, to educate the participants, and to enhance solidarity and social networks. In the terms of the Knight Report, they turn mere information into public judgment and public will. I’m still moved by the Australian participant in a planning meeting who said, “I just can’t believe we did it; we finally achieved what we set out to do. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done in my whole life, I suppose” (quoted in Gastil and Levine 2005, p. 81).

I agree with the Report: “As powerful as the Internet is for facilitating human connection, face-to-face contact remains the foundation of community building.” The whole array of online communications contribute to civil society, but dedicated online deliberative spaces–despite some potential for improvement–have been basically disappointing so far. The open ones are subject to pathologies that you don’t often see in the physical world. For example, the White House open government forum on transparency was almost hijacked by proponents of legalizing marijuana (PDF, p. 9). In a face-to-face setting, especially in a discrete physical community, it would be very difficult to swarm a public session in that way.

In order to make real-world deliberations work, several conditions must be met. There must be some kind of organizer or convening organization that is trusted as neutral and fair and that has the skills and resources to pull off a genuine public deliberation. People have to be able to convene in spaces that are safe, comfortable, dignified, and regarded as neutral ground.

There must be some reason for participants to believe that powerful institutions will listen to the results of their discussions. They may be hopeful because of a formal agreement by the powers that be, or even a law that requires public engagement. Or they may simply believe that their numbers will be large enough–and their commitment intense enough–that authorities will be unable to ignore them.

There must be recruitment and training programs: not just brief orientations before a session, but more intensive efforts to build skills and commitments. Ideally, moments of discussion will be embedded in ongoing civic work (volunteering, participation in associations, and the day jobs of paid professionals), so that participants can draw on their work experience and take direction and inspiration from the discussions. There must be pathways for adolescents and other newcomers to enter the deliberations.

We have examples:

  • Bridgeport, CT–an old port and manufacturing city of 139,000 people–was a basket case in the 1980s. It was hard hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs, crime, and the flight of middle-class residents to the suburbs. The city literally filed for bankruptcy in 1991. The next mayor was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for corruption. The schools were so troubled that 274 teachers were arrested during a strike in 1978.

    Bridgeport is now doing much better, to the point that its school system was one of five finalists for the national Broad Prize for Urban Education in both 2006 and 2007. A major reason for Bridgeport’s renaissance is active citizenship.

    In 1996, a local nonprofit group called the Bridgeport Public Education Fund (BPEF) contacted organizers who specialize in convening diverse citizens to discuss issues, without promoting an ideology or a particular diagnosis. No one knows how many forums and discussions took place in Bridgeport, or how many citizens participated, because the 40 official “Community Conversations” were widely imitated in the city. But it is clear that at least hundreds of citizens participated; that many individuals moved from one public conversation to another; and that some developed advanced skills for organizing and facilitating such conversations. A community Summit convened in 2006–fully ten years after the initial discussion–drew 500 people. The mayor, the superintendent, the city council, and the board of education had agreed in advance to support the plan that participants developed. [See Will Friedman, Alison Kadlec, and Lara Birnback, Transforming Public Life: A Decade of Citizen Engagement in Bridgeport, CT, Case Studies in Public Engagement, no.1, Public Agenda Foundation, 2007; and Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung, “Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities,” an Occasional Research Paper from Everyday Democracy and the Kettering Foundation, 2009]

    So far, I have described talk, but the civic engagement process in Bridgeport involves work as well. Each school has an empowered leadership team that includes parents along with professional educators. The professionals take guidance from public meetings back into their daily work. People who are employed by other institutions, such as businesses and religious congregations, also take direction from the public discussions. Meanwhile, citizens are inspired to act as volunteers. The school district has a large supply of adult mentors, many of them participants in forums and discussions. In turn, their hands-on service provides information and insights that enrich community conversations and improve decisions.

    Bridgeport’s citizens have shown that they are capable of making tough choices: for instance, shifting limited resources from teen after-school programs to programs for younger children. There is much more collaboration today among businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies. Everyone feels that they share responsibility; problems are not left to the school system and its officials. The School Superintendent says, “I’ve never seen anything like this. The community stakeholders at the table were adamant about this. They said, ‘We’re up front with you. The school district can’t do it by itself. We own it too.’” [Friedman, Alison Kadlec, and Lara Birnback]

  • Hampton, VA, is an old, blue-color city of about 145,000 people. Like its fellow port city of Bridgeport, 465 miles to the north, Hampton has struggled with deindustrialization, although Hampton benefits from Army, Air Force, and NASA facilities within the city.

    When Hampton decided to create a new strategic plan for youth and families in the early 1990s, the city started by enlisting more than 5,000 citizens in discussions that led to a city-wide meeting and then the adoption of a formal plan. “Youth, parents, community groups, businesses, and youth workers and advocates … met separately for months, with extensive outreach and skilled facilitation.” [Carmen Sirianni and Diana Marginean Schor, “City Government as an Enabler of Youth Civic Engagement: Policy Design and Implications,” in James Youniss and Peter Levine, eds., Engaging Young People in Civic Life (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999)]

    The planning process ultimately created an influential Hampton Youth Commission (whose 24 commissioners are adolescents) and a new city office to work with them. The Youth Commission sits on top of a pyramid of civic opportunities for young people. There are also community service programs that involve most of the city’s youth; empowered principals’ advisory groups in each school, a special youth advisory group for the school superintendent, paid adolescent planners in the planning department, and youth police advisory councils whom the police chief contacts whenever a violent incident involves teenagers. Young people are encouraged to climb the pyramid from service projects toward the citywide Commission, gaining skills and knowledge along the way. Political engagement is so widespread that almost 80 percent of Hampton’s young residents voted in the 2004 election, compared to 43 percent in Virginia as a whole. The system for youth engagement won Hampton Harvard’s Innovation in Government Award in 2007.

    Engagement is not limited to young residents. When Hampton’s leaders decided that race relations and racial equity were significant concerns in their Southern community that was about half White and half African American, they convened at least 250 citizens in small, mixed-race groups called Study Circles. The participants decided that there was a need to build better skills for working together across racial lines, so they created and began to teach a set of courses–collectively known as “Diversity College”–that still trains local citizens to be speakers, board members, and organizers of discussions. [William R. Potapchuk, Cindy Carlson, and Joan Kennedy, “Growing Governance Deliberatively: Lessons and Inspiration from Hampton, Virginia,” in Gastil and Levine, 2005, p. 261]

    Hampton’s neighborhood planning process has broadened from determining the zoning map to addressing complex social issues. Planning groups include residents as well as city officials, and each may take more than a year each to develop a comprehensive plan. Like the young people who helped write the youth sections of the City Plan, the residents who develop neighborhood plans emphasize their own assets and capabilities rather than their needs. There is an “attitude of ‘what the neighborhood can do with support from the city’ rather than ‘what the city should do with the neighborhood watching and waiting for it to happen.’” [Potopchuk, Carlson, and Kennedy, p. 264.]

    Hampton has thoroughly reinvented its government and civic culture so that thousands of people are directly involved in city planning, educational policy, police work, and economic development. Residents and officials use a whole arsenal of practical techniques for engaging citizens—from “youth philanthropy” (the Youth Commission makes $40,000 in small grants each year for youth-led projects), to “charrettes” (intensive, hands-on, architectural planning sessions that yield actual designs for buildings and sites). The prevailing culture of the city is deliberative; people truly listen, share ideas, and develop consensus, despite differences of interest and ideology. Young people hold positions of responsibility and leadership. Youth have made believers out of initially suspicious police officers, planners, and school administrators. These officials testify that the policies proposed by youth and other citizens are better than alternatives floated by their colleagues alone. The outcomes are impressive, as well. For example, the school system now performs well on standardized tests.

I would draw the conclusion that is also implicit in the title of Carmen Sirianni’s recent book, Investing in Democracy. You can’t get “community summits” and other forms of excellent engagement on the cheap. They take a long-term effort and resources that are normally a mixture of money, policies, and people’s volunteered or paid time.

creating informed communities (part 2)

This is the second of five strategies proposed to achieve the goals of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. See Monday’s post for an overview.

Strategy 2: Universities as Community Information Hubs

Most people and organizations that produce, exchange, and interpret information have their own axes to grind. They have ideological or philosophical commitments as well as interests to promote–and that is perfectly appropriate. Yet we have always been better off when a few institutions declare neutrality. They volunteer for the role of promoting high-quality discussion, debate, and analysis and they try not to drive everyone to a particular conclusion.

An example was the metropolitan daily newspaper as envisioned in the Progressive Era. I realize that no newspaper was ever fully neutral, nor was neutrality ever the highest criterion of excellence. But metro dailies adopted rules and procedures that were influenced by the ideal of neutrality, such as the separation of their editorial pages from their news pages. They could be held accountable for fairness, balance, objectivity, and accuracy. And–to varying but important degrees–they did enhance public dialogue with neutral information.

But the metropolitan daily newspaper is in grim condition today. Public broadcasting stations have a similar mission–and NPR’s audience is rising fast, even as newspapers falter–but broadcasters can’t play this role alone. Nor can civic associations like the League of Women Voters; that sector is also in decline.

Universities must step up. As the folks at Community Wealth note, “Institutions of higher education have an obvious vested interest in building strong relationships with the communities that surround their campuses. They do not have the option of relocating and thus are of necessity place-based anchors. While corporations, businesses, and residents often flee from economically depressed low-income urban and suburban edge-city neighborhoods, universities remain.”

Moreover, higher education is not just any sector with $136 billion in spending and $100 billion in real estate holdings. The business of colleges and universities is the production and dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of dialogue and debate. They provide an impressive infrastructure for serving their communities’ information needs. And some are already excellent models.

  • Portland State University in Oregon has chosen the motto “Let Knowledge Serve the City.” Since the early 1990s, the University has tried to align much of its teaching, research, and outreach to address specific issues in the city. A hallmark of its approach is lengthy, ambitious, multi-year projects that involve formal partnerships between several units within the university and several community-based organizations or networks and local governmental agencies.

    Over a five-year period, as part of one coherent effort to protect a watershed (composed of urban streams), numerous classes of PSU students collected environmental and social data, educated local children and developed high school curricula, created videos, facilitated public discussions of the watershed, and directly cleaned up wetlands and constructed facilities. These classes did not work alone but in close cooperation with each other and with a large array of civic organizations [Dilafruz R. Williams and Daniel O. Bernstine, “Building Capacity for Civic Engagement at Portland State University: A Comprehensive Approach,” in Maureen Kenny, ed., Learning to Serve: Promoting Civil Society through Service Learning (Volume 7 of International Series in Outreach Scholarship), Springer, 2002, pp. 261-2].

    PSU brings impressive resources to such work: 17,000 students, scholars and laboratories, purchasing power and facilities–none of which can be picked up and moved to another location. The university and the city share a fate, and the university understands that. Its commitments extend well beyond watersheds: its partnership with city schools is equally ambitious, and there are other examples. The university has encouraged its faculty to deliberate issues that arise when an educational institution addresses a city’s problems, using Study Circles as the format for these discussions. [Williams and. Bernstine, pp. 270-274.]

Certain networks exist to promote such work nationally, notably Campus Compact (an association of 1,000 college presidents who have committed to “lead a national movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education”); the American Democracy Project of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU); and The Democracy Imperative. Land-grant universities have an especially strong heritage of local public service and a remarkable resource in their extension offices, which exist in virtually every county in the United States.

But significant reforms would have to be achieved before colleges could provide community information hubs.

1. They would have to accept this as one of their important missions, not only in abstract statements, but as a matter of real investment. Providing timely information of local relevance and with input from neighbors trades off against other intellectual pursuits. Overwhelmingly, rewards and prestige flow to scholars whose work is original and generalizable. Communities need work that is true, relevant, and accessible. You can do some of both, but you can’t add the local work without subtracting a bit of something else. Creating community information hubs within higher education requires at least a modest shift of priorities.

2. They would need to aggregate the scattered knowledge produced by their professors, students, and staff. One of the advantages of the traditional metro daily newspaper was its format–a manageable slice of information every day, with the top news on the front page, a few hundred words of debate in the letters column, and space for the occasional in-depth feature. In contrast, a great modern university produces a flood of material for an array of audiences. Universities need to think about common web portals that accumulate and organize all their work relevant to their physical locations.

3. They would need appropriate principles and safeguards. You can do good by going forth into a community to study it, to portray it, and to stir up discussion about it. Or you can do harm. Much depends on how you relate to your fellow citizens off campus. Relationships should be respectful and characterized by learning in both directions. In this context, “research ethics” means far more than the protection of human subjects from harm; ethical research is directed to genuine community interests and needs and builds other people’s capacity for research and debate. Like faculty, students must be fully prepared to do community service well, and held accountable for their impact. One tool that has been proposed to uphold such principles is a community review board (composed of community leaders, faculty, and students), which would have to approve all projects funded as “community service.”

Most of the incentives that prevail in higher education work against becoming community information hubs (see this and this). When the incentives in a free and competitive market undermine the common good, some outside force should reward the behavior that we need. In this case, the federal and state governments and private foundations should channel some of their funds toward local information projects in higher education.

creating informed communities (part 1)

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities has issued a report entitled Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age. This report makes 15 recommendations, including the following that are related to my work:

  • Expand local media initiatives to reflect the entire reality of the communities they represent.
  • Engage young people in developing the digital information and communication capacities of local communities.
  • Empower all citizens to participate actively in community self-governance, including local “community summits” to address community affairs and pursue common goals.
  • Emphasize community information flow in the design and enhancement of a local community’s public spaces.
  • Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.
  • (see also the list of “potential action items” in an appendix to the report)

I have been asked to recommend ways that we can meet these objectives. This week, I plan to write five consecutive blog posts about strategies. As always, critical feedback is welcome.

Strategy 1: A Civic Information Corps: Using the nation’s “service” infrastructure to generate knowledge

Community service and the combination of service with academic study (“service-learning”) have rapidly grown. Since the 1980s, civilian service has been institutionalized with funded programs, paid professionals, and rewards. In response to effective advocacy, the Federal Government founded the Points of Light Foundation in 1990, passed the National and Community Service Act of 1990, and launched AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National Service (later, the Corporation for National and Community Service) in 1993.

There is no single “corps” in AmeriCorps; instead, the Corporation funds intermediaries that include national nonprofits with diverse models and constituencies–City Year and Public Allies are two well-known examples–plus schools, universities, Native American nations, and local nonprofits. YouthBuild, the Peace Corps, and the Corps Network (a coalition of 143 Service and Conservation Corps) are additional components of the national service movement that happen not to receive AmeriCorps funds. Meanwhile, some large school districts and universities and one whole state (Maryland) have enacted service requirements for all their students. Several states and major cities also have official service commissions. Colleges and universities now look for prospective students with service experience.

Probably as a result of these incentives, opportunities, and requirements, three quarters of high school seniors reported volunteering at least “sometimes” by the year 2003, and 80 percent of incoming college freshmen reported having volunteered in high school. The Corporation for National and Community Service reports that about 8 million young adults (age 16-24) volunteered in 2008. These trends received an extra boost in 2009, when Congress passed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which authorizes a tripling of AmeriCorps to 250,000 annual slots.

All these volunteers represent an important base for civic activity in the United States, at least potentially. “Service” activities range widely, and some have little connection to knowledge or information. It is not uncommon for young people involved in service to be bused to a park or an urban street and simply asked to pick up bottles or paint walls. AmeriCorps as a whole does not specify learning outcomes or require intellectually challenging opportunities for youth. Much emphasis is placed on the work performed, e.g., the number of homes weatherized. On the other hand, certain service projects generate public knowledge to an extraordinary extent. For example:

  • There are 1,500 Bonner Scholars at 24 colleges and universities, all involved in community service and other forms of civic engagement, such as community research. Using a grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service (the Learn and Serve America program), the Bonner Foundation promotes the use of social media tools–such as wikis and videos–by all of its Scholars. Methods involve social-media trainings at all of its meetings and conferences, an elaborate online platform for shared work at each campus and nationally, and ten competitive subgrants to Bonner campuses that do more intensive work with social media. At the heart of the online platform is a wiki site with hundreds of documents on social issues, student projects, tools, and best practices. After receiving the Learn & Serve America grant, Bonner began to plan PolicyOptions, an additional wiki platform for news and policy background information that will enable campuses to establish local, campus-based PolicyOptions Bureaus that are affiliated through a national network, sharing information and a common web platform.
  • With funds originally from the Cricket Island Foundation, we at CIRCLE funded young people in the Cabrini-Green Housing Projects in Chicago to document the full story of their community, which is nationally famous for its murder rate but has many other dimensions. Cabrini Connections today is rich with documentary videos, research reports, and photo essays.

Although independent evaluations are scarce, these programs (and many like them) are probably strong on two dimensions: they provide valuable community service in the form of knowledge, and they educate their participants by developing advanced skills.

The Knight Foundation report calls for a “Geek Corps for Local Democracy,” consisting of college graduates who would “help local government officials, librarians, police, teachers, and other community leaders leverage networked technology.” Corps members would educate local partners and also form a national learning network.

That sounds like a good idea, but I would relax two implied limitations. First, I would broaden eligibility well beyond college graduates. Just over half of adults between the ages of 20 and 29 have any college experience at all, and a majority of those do not hold four-year college degrees. A Greek Corps need not be limited to the quartile that is most successful (or privileged) in conventional ways. There are lots of talented individuals who have fallen off the college track, who would benefit from service, and who might contribute more than college graduates in terms of local knowledge and cultural savvy.

Second, I wouldn’t limit their role to merely providing technical support for the nonprofit IT infrastructure. I would involve them in creating knowledge and culture. The best format might be a new “corps” (although I wouldn’t call it a “Geek Corps,” because there would be an emphasis on creativity and cultural diversity that we don’t normally associate with geeks). Alternatively, the federal government might provide incentives for all kinds of service groups and organizations to focus on community knowledge. These groups would not have to focus narrowly in information or communications. If knowledge was an important byproduct of their work, they could join the national learning network, which would be separately funded and staffed.

In practical terms, if you organized after-school service activities for teenagers in, say, Chicago, and you emphasized community-based research, reporting, photo documentation, mapping, archiving local records online, or IT support for nonprofits, you could qualify as a “community knowledge producer.” You would then be able to send a designee to meetings, apply for training opportunities, log onto a virtual learning network, and apply for specialized grants.