Future Here Now: Who Gets to Participate?
Coming Soon
We’re continuing to put final pieces together for the new book, Tell Ask Discuss Decide. One of the reasons why I became focused on digital (and in person) public engagement stemmed from all of the ways that I saw out conventional approaches to public engagement failing — in all kinds of contexts, from rural town hall meetings to urban plan open houses. As I deconstructed the experiences that I saw, and that I myself had, it became clear that digital public engagement was not just a good thing to do, but an absolute necessity: without it, we could not learn from massive swaths of the community.
This section described the barriers that different segments of virtually any community face, barriers that prevent them from being able to access the very basic right of having their voice heard when it comes to their community’s decisions. When you read these, the importance of including them seem pretty self-evident, but most of the time, we have completely overlooked them.
Tell Ask Discuss Decide will be out in about two weeks. If you want advance notice (and a special early adopter discount!) you can get on the list here.
And don’t forget that if you upgrade your subscription before the new format of Future Here Now launches in early May, you can take 25% off the cost (which is already less per month than just one of those coffees you had this morning). You don’t want to miss this chance!
More diverse participant populations
Conventional public involvement and deliberation techniques, as practiced in most of the Western democracies, were designed for use by a much narrower range of the population than we profess to want to include today. At the time when town hall meetings and most of our forms of public feedback were developed in the 1700s and 1800s (particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States), the proportion of the population that had the right to participate in community discussions or policy debates was limited to only white males of a certain level of prosperity and status. This meant that these citizens could spend extensive time at public meetings because they had family members, employees, slaves or other workers who would keep the operations of their farm or business going during their absence.
In the United Kingdom, property ownership standards for being able to vote were not fully lifted until 1918; while most U.S. states effectively eliminated property ownership standards by the 1860s, property requirements in some United States communities were not eliminated until Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections in 1966. And of course women, persons of color, immigrants, and persons with disabilities were consistently denied the right to vote across the Western democracies well into the 20th century.
While some persons who did not have the right to vote certainly did participate in public meetings, one can certainly see that lack of voting rights would curtail both the potential speaker’s sense of opportunity and the willingness of decision-makers to listen to them.
Today, the conventional in-person public meeting, typically held in the evening and requiring attendance for one to three hours, creates almost insurmountable challenges for a large number of persons from all types of economic, personal and cultural walks of life. Consider:
People whose employment does not fall into traditional office hours.
Although definitive documentation is lacking, employed adults in the U.S. increasingly work jobs that require their engagement at least some of the time during evenings, nights and weekends. These range from emergency room doctors to manufacturing technicians to fast food workers – virtually the full spectrum of professions, income levels and ethnicities.
For these workers, attending a typical evening public meeting may require extensive logistical arrangements, from finding a colleague willing to cover the work shift, to managing transportation, child care, client information and a host of other factors necessary to make the person available for the meeting. In the face of these challenges, it is likely that only a significant crisis will merit the personal effort, anxiety, and spending of a person’s social capital necessary for these residents to attend a traditional public meeting.
Senior Citizens
While many traditional public meetings in the United States and UK often appear to be dominated by seniors, this perception often masks the very large population of seniors who cannot attend an evening public meeting due to difficulties travelling. Whether the challenge is walking, driving at night, navigating the steps to the building or accessing public transit, senior residents may face significant challenges to in-person participation.
While internet and social media usage among seniors tends to lag other segments of the population, an increasing majority are not only using internet resources, but are relying on them to keep abreast of family, community and the world. By 2014, more than half of all persons aged 65 and older regularly used the internet, and of those nearly half used Facebook. {FOOTNOTE}
People with small children.
Several factors have made attendance at traditional public meetings more difficult for residents with small children in recent years. Changes in work patterns, and the increase in single head of family households and households where both parents work, means that people who want to attend a public meeting are less likely to have a spouse who can take care of the children at home during a meeting. Both the increase in working parents and changing standards of parenting mean that parents may be reluctant to leave their children in a stranger’s care while they attend a meeting. Although a few communities do demonstrate the foresight to provide child care for attendees of a meeting, some parents may worry about the quality and safety of the ad-hoc child care arrangement. Since sitting through a long and serious public meeting with an active small child may appear to be the only feasible option for many parents, the barriers to attending a traditional public meeting may prove insurmountable for these members of the population – a segment that many communities are highly anxious to keep in their city.
Persons who have physical disabilities.
Physical access to and attendance at a traditional public meeting can present a massive barrier, not just for some elderly residents as noted previously, but for persons who may live with a range of physical conditions. Although most public buildings in the U.S. have provided building and transportation access improvements in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, these accommodations may be limited or require advance requests, as may be the case if a sign language interpreter is needed. This may limit the ability for some disabled residents to participate in traditional public meetings – for example if the person finds out about the meeting too late to make arrangements for transportation or other accommodations.
Persons for whom spoken English is difficult to understand or speak.
Traditional public meeting methods rely extensively on the spoken word – and their structure assumes unquestioningly that everyone who wishes to participate will be able to understand and clearly speak in front of an audience in the dominant language. While this would have been a relatively valid assumption in most 19th century civic settings, it is not today.
Barriers range from physical to learning to psychological – persons may not be physically able to speak, they may not be fluent speakers of the dominant language, or they may experience debilitating fear of public speaking. Persons on the autistic spectrum, for example, can often express themse
lves quite articulately in writing, but may not be able to speak in a public setting. With approximately one in 68 U.S. children currently identified as falling on the autistic spectrum, relying on traditional public meetings has the effect of largely silencing these and other participants for whom public speaking is not possible.