I understand civic renewal as the fostering of a public space for civic debate and engagement, achievable through various means of awareness-raising, protest and community-building. Combining all of the above, Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz’ “Carry That Weight” on-going endurance performance art piece is a case in point.

“Carry That Weight” was initiated in August 2014 by Ms. Sulkowicz to protest against sexual assault and to denounce Columbia’s handling of her and other students’ sexual assault complaints. When Ms. Sulkowicz filed a complaint about the alleged rape that she says she endured on the first day of her sophomore year, the only reaction that she faced from the administration was inaction as she struggled to prove her case. “Carry That Weight”, which consists of her carrying a mattress (similar to those Columbia uses in it’s dorms) around campus is her response to the unfolding of the events. As she said in an interview for the Columbia Spectator: “I was raped in my own dorm bed and since then, that space has become fraught for me. I feel like I’ve carried the weight of what happened there since then.” By placing a mattress in the public space, Ms. Sulkowicz’ piece is symbolic in that it invites (Sulkowicz says she never asks for help but never refuses it) passers-by to help her “carry that weight” and the piece will go on as long as Sulkowicz’ alleged rapist is not expelled or has graduated.

Image: Andrew Burton, Getty Images

Ms. Sulkowicz performance piece, which was described by Roberta Smith, the senior art critic of the New York Times, as “a lever for art and political protest,” is particularly interesting to bring up in light of a discussion on the creation of a public space for civic debate and engagement.

Not only does “Carry That Weight”raise awareness and contribute to the national discourse on sexual assault, “rape culture” and violations of Title IX on American university campus, but the attention the performance gained and the protest-communities that it inspired such as the Columbia University students-lead organization “Carrying That Weight Together” make it and the organizing around it an example of civic renewal, which culminated in the October 29th national day of collective action “to support survivors of sexual and domestic violence on college campuses (…) by encouraging students, staff, and faculty of colleges to carry a mattress on campus that day as a tangible way to show their support for survivors and for ending sexual violence and rape culture.” Photographs of this civic media initiative were gathered under the hashtag #CarryingThatWeight and Tumblr.

Photography: University of Pennsylvania, #carrythatweight, tumblr

Hence, the evolution from Emma Sulkowicz “Carry that Weight” to the nation-wide community organization “Carrying That Weight Together” provides a powerful example of how performance art, in that it opens a public space for discussion, inspires and is used as a means for civic renewal.

According to a Pew Research poll, the share of Americans who claim no particular religion went from 7% in the 1990s to 20% in 2012 (and 33% within the 18-30 demographic) [1]. This massive trend away from religiosity in America’s youth poses an interesting challenge for civics. In America, religion has always been about more than God – the church (used here and for the rest of this post in the metonymic sense) has been the center of American communities since the founding of the country and the primary place where moral norm-setting and intergenerational interactions occurred. If we look at some of our proudest civic movements in the history of America – the abolition of slavery, the passage of the nineteenth amendment, the civil rights movement – the church seems to have played an integral role as a center for community organizing and political debate around social issues. So what happens in an America where the church no longer exists as the center for social, moral and political discussion?

Source: http://issi.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/shared/docs/Hout%20et%20al_No%20Relig%20Pref%202012_Release%20Mar%202013.pdf

The Sunday Assembly appears to be a promising attempt to fill that void. A movement started in 2013 by two London-based comedians, it has since grown to 28 assemblies consisting of thousands of people across the world. According to their website, The Sunday Assembly is an organization “dedicated to helping the people that attend, and the folk in the wider community, to make the most of this one life that we know we have.” In essence, they are all of the aspects of a church community minus God. Church hymns are replaced with pop songs, bible verses with science, philosophy and poetry. All of the content of The Sunday Assembly’s services fits into one of their broader themes: to live better, to help often and to wonder more.

Source: http://sundayassembly.com/

It is still too early to tell how successful this movement will be. Alas, the first service I would have gone to was cancelled due to the absolutely beautiful weather we’ve been having here in Boston so I have yet to experience a service for myself.

Yet the core tenets of The Sunday Assembly – community, celebration, a sense of altruism – are all intentionally identical to the core tenets of the prototypical church community. So the question then becomes do these components need God to function? Do they function because they are inherently valuable? Or do they rest on the fact that the church already has a group of people who have a strong commitment to each other and an assumption that they share deeply intimate characteristics in common?

Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, but my hypothesis is that God doesn’t have to be involved in the building of such a community. The group of people who would potentially be members of The Sunday Assembly actually does have a lot of deeply intimate characteristics in common and those traits will come to the forefront in such a setting. The act of being interested in such a community likely means they have rejected the formal religious institutions that have surrounded them for the majority of their lives. It also means they have likely spent much of their life dealing with the societal and social consequences of making such a choice. They are the people that sometimes envy the religious communities of others when they gather to celebrate religious holidays. They are the people that worry their children may feel left out during holiday season, and question whether or not they are depriving their children of a life experience by not introducing them to religion simply because of their own personal convictions against it.

There are deep emotional commonalities among the target audience for The Sunday Assembly. For that reason I believe the Sunday Assembly model will be successful and will become an important replacement for the church community in an age of decreasing religiosity. And in doing so, I think it will also take the place of the church as the center of community and, by extension, civic discussion and social change.

References:
[1] http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/19/event-transcript-religion-trends-in-the-u-s/

From class discussions, and the readings so far, the idea of representation has struck me as being fundamental to a civic society. In this entry, I will talk specifically about political representation in the United States. Although a seemingly never ending crisis historically and globally (I haven’t read enough critical political theory to know if there have been any real examples of “pure representation”) I find that in the United States today there is an interesting phenomena where there is an increasing concentration of powerful special interests– bound legally–with increasing citizen participation online, outside of traditional political organizations to raise awareness, increase transparency, start movements, and write petitions. Which raises two questions. Who is the government really representing and do citizens need to be represented by the government to have influence?

I remember when I was in 8th grade, I was obsessed with the 2000 presidential election. It was the first election I had ever paid attention to. It was exciting to witness American democracy at work even if I was too young to vote. And then everything I learned in social studies up to that point, made me totally unprepared for what happened next. Election day came and there was no winner. The weeks that followed were full of anxiety trying to understand the difference between the electoral college and the popular vote, as well as the Florida recount. And then eventually the Supreme Court made the decision for us. In a 5-4 vote, they ultimately decided that Bush won the election. My confusion led to distrust, and I ended up grabbing a marker and wrote on a plain white t-shirt, “the Supreme Court shouldn’t decide the election, the People should” and I wore it to school the next day.

Fast forward to the 2012 federal election and the most recent 2014 state elections. Although the Supreme Court didn’t decide elections like in 2000, they made an important ruling that may have implications for elections to come. In 2010, The Supreme Court ruled in “Citizens United vs the FEC that “the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation.” Basically it gave Super Pacs, 501 C4 charitable organizations, the ability to spend an unlimited amount of money as independent expenditures on elections without having to disclose their contributors. A loophole in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that “prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury to fund “electioneering communications” (broadcast advertisements mentioning a candidate) within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election.

The reason this is important is because when a politician is funded by a specific organization, they tend to have to make sure they represent the interests of the organization, perhaps over their own constituents’ interests. To put it more simply, money talks. However at the same time, there are examples of citizens using their own initiative to make those financial contributions and interests more transparent to the general public. Take the example of a browser plugin created by 16 year old Nicholas Rubin, a “designer, developer, and photographer” from Seattle. Rubin’s plugin called Greenhouse, works for safari, firefox, and chrome.

After downloading Greenhouse, whenever you are on a web page where a Senator and Representative’s name is mentioned, the name is highlighted and you can hover over it to see what industries have financially backed them and how much money they received.

Take this article: Mass. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey call for release of additional $34 million in low-income heating assistance funds.

Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey are both Democrats from Massachusetts but have different financial contributions.

There is even a list that ranks politicians in terms of the % of small contributions that make up their total contributions. Small contributions make up 44.8% of Elizabeth Warren’s total contributions and only 1.3% of Ed Markey’s.

Rubin, although just a high school student, has more tools at his disposal than a marker and a white t-shirt. He can turn frustration into activism on the internet. He is also a board member of an online community/campaign called represent.us which is attempting to mobilize support for the American Anti Corruption Act:

Model legislation that sets a standard for city, state and federal laws that prevent money from corrupting American government. It fundamentally reshapes the rules of American politics and restores The People as the most important stakeholders in our political  system. An Anti-Corruption Act has three primary outcomes:

• Stop political bribery by overhauling lobbying and ethics laws

• End secret money by dramatically increasing transparency

• Give every voter a voice by creating citizen-funded elections.

Maybe the better question is, is there such a thing as a common good? Can the government truly represent the interests of everyone? It’s certainly not new that some interests are more powerful than others, but I’m not sure if there has ever been a time where there has been such concentrated power in special interests, along with, as Nancy Fraser would call it, multiple participatory public spheres. What is not yet known, is if these multiple participatory public spheres can compete against the more powerful interests.

I would like to talk about one of the most complex problems in modern democracies: the crisis of representation. There is no consensus about causes, consequences and solutions to this crisis, but every citizen in modern democracies strives for more and better political representation. Everyone wants to see members of parliament discuss the issues they consider most important.

I am not going to ask if representative democracy is the best option. This is an important question, I am sure, but I want to talk about possible initiatives to improve the representative system once this is the reality in the most of the democracies today.

On one hand, we have to admit that fighting for better representation is part of the democratic life. It’s a crisis, of course, but it’s necessary for the system to work well. New identities, new agendas, new problems always compete for public attention and for representation in the political system. This starting point is necessary to avoid overly pessimistic perspectives.

On the other hand, I think that something should be done to improve the political experience between citizens and their elected representatives. The first challenge is to understand what representatives can do and what they actually do in congress. If we look to mainstream media landscape, it’s hard to find news about representatives if he/she isn`t in a high position in the congress hierarchy.

To address this problem, some Brazilian researchers from Pontifical Catholic University-Rio de Janeiro (led by Professor Arthur Ituassu) created a webpage to organize information about federal deputies [representatives in the Brazilian lower house: Câmara dos Deputados or Chamber of Deputies].

Named O que fez seu Deputado [What has your deputy done], the webpage is simple, but fast and easy to use. On the site, you can find a short bio of the deputy, what bills he/she voted for or against, attendance, speeches, bills drafted and parliamentary committees that the deputy is engaged in. The project covers only deputies from Rio de Janeiro.

Although the data available on this website is already public in other places, this is a particularly helpful tool because citizens can access a variety of information about what deputies are doing in a single page. So they can compare the deputies’ activities. Everyone knows that having good sources of information to make decisions is fundamental for a healthy democracy. So, during elections, this project can help people evaluate what is the best choice, if the deputies who she/he voted for in the past did a good job or if it’s better chose someone else.

Having more information about what deputies did isn’t groundbreaking, but I think this is the first step. If citizens know what exactly their representatives have done, they can chose better during elections and express their opinions in the public sphere or directly to their representatives. The next step is create additional ways for individuals or groups (social lobby) to pressure representatives and governments – there is already some innovative tools with we can do it (Avaaz.com).

I know that O que fez seu Deputado isn`t the solution, but I am sure this is a simple and effective tool that can help people learn more about their representatives. The challenge is to improve the relationship between political systems and citizens as this is a fundamental pillar of modern democracies.

I remain unconvinced that there is a growing crisis in civics. Ours schools may be woefully incompetent at educating students on the fundamentals of our nation’s government and history; there is no indication, however, that this problem at the present is any worse than it has been at any point in time. Likewise, it’s probably true that younger generations have little to no inclination of joining the musty old ranks of institutions such as the Rotary Club; it is equally likely that they have found berths in volunteer and community organizations far more suited to the Internet era. The demise of the behemoths that have dominated the social landscape for decades past should be no cause for alarm, so long as their niches are filled by successors.

Yet while a declinist view might be too eagerly pessimistic, many persistent problems in civics remain unsolved. In an era where faith in government is steadily waning, the spirit of volunteerism still thrives, but at the cost of an estrangement from the political structure. The problem is thus one of disenchantment with the idea of government as an agent of change. From this comes the perceived irrelevance of the state and the casual ignorance with which it is approached.

How then, to inspire confidence and recast the image of the government as force for social progress, especially among the young? One method is to make painfully obvious the ways in which policies have a direct impact on individual lives. I propose the creation of a webapp that, upon the entering of a user’s location, income, ethnicity, and other information, direct them to debates on current government actions that have a high possibility of affecting them directly. The app would ideally give a succinct outline on how the user would be affected, present arguments made on both sides, and ask the user for an initial, cursory vote, as well as a short summary of why they voted in that direction. With the user’s permission, it would then show Facebook friends that voted similarly and differently, and allow them to initiate conversations. Such a tool could be integrated into civic studies classes quite easily and would harness preexisting social connections to spark dialogue. Having been shown what is at risk, students would be incentivized to stay informed both for their own best interests and for the substantiation of any views that they might have supported and broadcast to their network of friends. The next logical step would be to suggest local organizations or other groups that are relevant to what they have discussed, with the hope that they would get involved.

This is all well and good, but it faces the challenge posed to any sort of tool on the Internet: how would we convince people to use it? Some solutions may be found within last week’s readings. It could be made a part of the classroom, or the freshman orientation process at universities. If designed well enough, it could be spread across social networks. The idea is to have it necessary for the average citizen to use it only once. Having been faced with the implications of certain policies, they would then be obliged to stay informed.

One of the most important civic crises in the U.S. is the declining interest in voting. In the November 2014 midterm elections, only 36.4% of eligible voters participated, the lowest rate since World War II. Even participation rates for presidential elections are about 5-10% lower today than they were 50 years ago. The reasons for this decline are hotly debated. Many researchers claim that the rise of personal technology like televisions and computers has isolated individuals from their communities and instilled a belief that political processes have little effect on them.

In the November 2012 and 2014 elections, Facebook attempted to reverse this trend by allowing users to post stock “I voted” statuses celebrating their participation in the elections. The following user interface was used in 2014:

With a user base of over 150 million Americans by November 2014, Facebook was in the perfect position to influence voter turnout. Facebook’s hope was that if people saw many of their friends post these statuses, they would be compelled to vote as well. To make voting as easy as possible, Facebook also displayed a map showing the polling locations closest to users.

Facebook evaluated the effectiveness of similar efforts in 2010, when it estimated it had about 61 million users in the U.S. That year, the “I’m a Voter” button that Facebook displayed to its users did not actually post a status; it simply logged the information to Facebook’s servers. For some users, the button was presented along with a list of the users’ friends who had also clicked it. In other cases, this list was not presented. Facebook reported that in about 20% of the cases where the friends list was presented users clicked on the “I’m a Voter” button; the figure was only 18% in the case without the list. Facebook claimed that seeing that their friends voted inspired additional people to vote in the case with the friends list, and it estimated that in total its efforts increased voter turnout by around 300,000. These results seem credible, but it is unclear whether Facebook properly controlled for the possibility that users were simply more likely to report whether they voted if their friends did as well; their actual rates of voting may have been unaffected.

In 2012, besides showing the aforementioned button, Facebook also placed news stories higher on certain users’ news feeds in the run-up to the election. Since these news stories were predominantly about the election, the affected users saw much more election-related content on Facebook prior to the election. When election day rolled around and users began reporting whether they voted by their “I’m a Voter” button clicks, Facebook found that 67% of affected users decided to vote, while only 64% of unaffected users voted. This experiment has fewer apparent confounding factors than the 2010 button experiment. However, it strays into grayer ethical territory. Facebook was heavily criticized recently for manipulating the news feeds of various groups of users to trigger emotions like happiness, sadness, and anger. While news articles are unlikely to cause negative emotions, some users may nevertheless be opposed on principle to such active distortion of their news feeds.

Overall, I found Facebook’s efforts commendable and am impressed by their results. Their work tackled an important civic crisis at a very large scale and provides great data for future civic renewal efforts.

Most data for this post was obtained from the following article: http://www.vox.com/2014/11/4/7154641/midterm-elections-2014-voted-facebook-friends-vote-polls

Last August saw the historic events of the Michael Brown shooting unfold in dramatic fashion on the streets of Ferguson and in headlines across the country. They brought up a very old conversation, police race relations, with a renewed sense of urgency. At its heart, this issue is a crisis of confidence in the trustworthiness of the police—a major problem for an institution that exists to serve the people and relies on their support.

In the search for solutions, technology has been a popular option. Dashboard or body cameras have been tried to mixed success in police departments across the country, but issues abound. In some cases, the cameras can simply be turned off. Even when the cameras do capture alleged misconduct, questions remain about how useful that video could even be. That fact was thrown into sharp relief by a New York jury’s decision not to indict the officer involved in the death of Eric Garner, despite the existence of video documenting the incident. I propose that the root problem is one of incentive—simply put, for all their good and noble intentions, police have a strong disincentive to document their own wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, the party with the strongest incentive to make progress on this problem is the community itself, especially its marginalized segments. Thus, I propose a new technology which would empower these groups to act in their own interest: CopWatch.

CopWatch would be a fairly simple mobile app. Users could use the app to report an interaction with the police. GPS data would be taken from the phone, and the user could specify the nature of the interaction (traffic stop, stop and frisk, etc…) and a “satisfaction rating.” The app would also support mobile video or photo uploads to document the interaction.

This data could be used to map not just police action, but also the nature of those actions and the effects that those actions have on the local community. It could be the case, for example, that two neighborhoods might have similar levels of police interaction, but while one neighborhood saw almost exclusively positive interactions, the other was dominated by negative ones. These maps could be compared against crime and demographic data to see where police are over patrolling relative to the population and crime rate.

By itself, data doesn’t do much. But trends uncovered by the data could help inform policy decisions to help tackle these problems. Data could also help justify police action to citizens when it is legitimately warranted; after all, the burden of police-community relations does not fall only on the police. This data could help police prove the effectiveness of police tactics, which would also help bolster public trust.

A dataset like that generated by CopWatch could also help a nation capitalize on differences between existing policing regimes. Perhaps the police in Denver have certain very effective policies in place, while police in Cleveland are not doing as well. CopWatch data could help identify model districts and facilitate the adoption of good police techniques. This would help turn the diversity of policing styles inherent in a large nation like America into a major asset.

It is unlikely that any single solution could hope to tackle such a huge problem, but it is almost certain that police and citizens alike will be turning to technology for help. Technology that empowers the groups with the strongest incentive to improve the status quo will likely prove to be a powerful tool, be it in the form of CopWatch or something else. If thoughtfully constructed, such technology also stands to improve policing altogether.

When talking about civic crisis, I was thinking what is the civic crisis in China, or is there a civic crisis in China? In summary, there are three types of civic crisis discussed in this class;

1. People (especially young students) are lack of basic knowledge (arguably) required in public life;
2. People no longer care about politics, and they do not show up in votes.
3. People no longer gather in community meetings such as Bowling Clubs.

The first two problems seemingly do not exist in China: Chinese students are quite fluent in civic knowledge, partly thanks to the “inhumane” education system around examinations. Writing around policies and public affairs is an essential part of Chinese language/literature test (which is a tradition since the era of dynasties), and taking College Entrance Examination is the only way for Chinese students (especially those from rural areas) to enter a college. In a high school in Hebei being heavily criticized as “test-taker factory”, the school “put news stands and kiosks in every floor of their buildings”, in hope of getting their students familiar with public topics that may appear in tests.

The second problem is a bit of tricky. In one side, Chinese people are eager to talk about politics, no matter they are students, office workers or taxi drivers. However, does it mean that if China hold a national election as western countries, people will show up and vote? Unlikely. Looking at other asian places like Taiwan and Japan, general citizen’s engagement in politics are quite unsatisfactory. There seems to be a gap between “showing interest in politics” and “taking civic action”, especially “taking the action as scholars and intellectuals expected”.

This connects to the third “crisis”: how do people gather together, form a public, and take actions? This could be a problem for Chinese people.

China offers a governance system different than most of the countries. Instead of considering Chinese Communist Party as a political party to promote a certain ideology I would like to analogize it to a big corporation. It has a HR sector (Zuzhibu, department of organization), where officials are (often quantitatively) evaluated and promoted all the way towards the president; it has a customer support sector in each level (Xinfangchu, correspondence and visitor department) to respond to complaints of the people; it has a PR sector (Xuanchuanbu, department of propaganda, or advocacy) to promote its ideas and services. It has lots of good and evil traits of a big enterprise: it is stable, well strategized, respond to changes swiftly, while customers seemingly do not have a say on its management at current stage.

So in this sense, is civic still relevant in China? My answer is yes. There are many cases in business world that a company fails its customers, either by producing sub-standard products or ignoring the demand of consumers (which could be a severe problem when there is no competitors). And in the ideal form of Chinese government (if you agree that there MAY be a different political system from the western world), the public should be the board members of the state. A Cafe, or bowling club is still in need. This is where Baidu Tieba come into play.

(image: a screenshot of Baidu Tieba: the Gay forum)

Baidu Tieba (meaning “Posting Cafe” in Chinese) combines search engine with forums. You search for any keyword and it will lead you to a discussion board, either an existing one or a new one to be created (synonyms are automatically redirected, and users can choose to merge two boards into one). Forums are not a new thing, but the key success of Tieba is creating a long tail for forums: everyone can find the forum and its interest group. Tieba soon became the favorite tool for fan communities in comics, animes, popular figures, and TV shows. Till now, it has more than 1.5 billion registered users, 8.2 million forums, 3.5 billion discussion topics, and over 64.6 billion posts.

But what’s powerful in public life is that local governments soon found people are creating forums for their towns, districts, and villages. People start to comment on any affair in their neighborhood, and start to complain about injustices. Tieba was the start of several collective actions (what Chinese call for things like protest) and government start to monitor and respond to what people say in their Tieba, since they can’t just censor it because they do not have the authority to censor a national web platform.

Long tail also benefits marginalized communities. Gays and Lesbians found their groups, and patients of any common or uncommon diseases can easily form a group online and seek for help. After the user formed the habit of using Tieba, they start to search for other things they may be interested in. This further break down discussion silos haunting most of online platforms. Another device to break down silos is the “friend forum” function: a forum can invite other forums as friends. In time of vacation, it is a ritual that forums send “ambassadors” to post on other forums to maintain their “friendship”.

Baidu Tieba is an excellent example that what civic tech can foster something that is not possible before, even though the technology is not designed for civic use at the first place, and the company is still trying to shift its focus to entertainment which is more profitable.

Are we really bowling alone? Putnam warned us against the crumbling social fabric of America and its effects potentially devastating effects on democracy. He wrote at length about America’s ‘social capital’ defined as “social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”. It is the idea of anomie with which I am, as a student of sociology educated in France, the most familiar. French sociologist Émile Drukheim defined social integration as the ways in which an individual’s actions are matched with a commonly accepted system of social norms, practices and beliefs. When there is a systematic mismatch, he calls it “anomie” Thus, a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion could also produce perpetual anomie.

If we are, now, to believe Putnam, then we must acknowledge the fact that we are living in a society of anomic misanthropes. I do not agree. There might have some truth to this claim true when Putnam wrote his first article on the subject in 1995. Meanwhile, however, the social networks, Facebook, Twitter, P2P have astoundingly intruded our lives. I would argue that communities were not annihilated. Their form simply changed.

It is true that we do not bowl together anymore. We Skype, we couch surf, we like each other’s profile picture, we share Ubers.

Would Robert Putnam write the same book today? It is questionable.

Taking a look at his publication list, I noticed a growing concentration on religious social network nowadaus. It is an interesting subject but in the case of American remarkably “twentieth century”. Some would say, maliciously, that the professor carefully avoided the subject that threatened to undermine the argument of his magnum opus.

Twenty years ago and without the ever-growing significance of social networks, such concepts as « Sharing/ collaborative economy » would have been readily dismissed as utterly inapplicable. Zipcar, Air BnB, and Uber have since then quietly intruded our everyday life. The sharing economy is defined “ a new socio-economic ecosystem built around the sharing of human and physical resources. It includes the shared creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services by different people and organizations.” Collaborative economy is in essence horizontal and de-institutionalized. It is a new and alternative socio-economic system that embeds relationships sharing and collaboration at its heart – across all aspects of social and economic life.

In this system, economy shifts back from estranging institutions to the people. It restores a polyvalence of competence that would have pleased Hannah Arendt when she wrote “Vita Activa”. People are comsumers and at the same time also suppliers of goods and services : they create, collaborate, produce, co-produce distribute and re-distribute. Micro-entrepreneurship is celebrated, trade is completed peer-to-peer (P2P). Within the business structures, people ‘human(e) capital’ are highly valued. Their opinions and ideas are respected and integrated as far as possible in the production proccess

The concept of collaborative economy might seem utterly anachronistic. We know of a sharing economy from 1800 Massachusetts in A Midwife’s Tale (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich) and other accounts of economic structures in pre-industrial societies. Yet we do good to instill at least a little bit of ‘pre industrial anarchy’ into our highly institutionalized consumption-based societies. Sharing economy bring a fresh attempt at a solution to today’s most pressing issues: climate change, waste, fragile social cohesion.

If I share a car with my floormates, I will consume more self consciously and responsibly. I will have to interact with my neighbors. I will produce less waste and learn to wait, to moderate and to plan ahead. To me this sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?

This is why I admire the website Ouishare, that promotes such initiatives.

The perks of a collaborative system http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/2014/12/01/collaborative-economy-innovation-framework/

In an effort to show the work that the civil society has been developing for the last years, more than ten NGOs mounted an exhibition at the Guadalajara City Museum, called “Tómala” (take it), the exhibition showed in a playful way the work of the activists in different issues, from human rights to urban mobility and political accountability.

The main idea behind the effort was to connect to more people and demonstrate that the civil society is working hard trying to develop a more human city, also the exhibit was looking forward to encourage more people to take action in different issues. During the time that it was mounted there were conferences and discussion panels that were streamed to a broader audience.

After the exhibitions finished and new connections were made between NGOs the ¡Tómala! exhibition pivoted into a new “organisation of organisations” a new network for collaborative work from NGOs and citizens. Now one of the main actions that the network is performing is called “Diálogos de frente” (Front dialogue), where they host discussion panels from a variety of issues that affect the citizens in a direct or indirect way.

Photo by ¡Tómala!

The team behind the ¡Tómala! initiative work closely with civic leaders, generating new panels and looking for new ways to generate a dialogue between politicians, NGOs and citizens, they have made different dialogues and then they generate an abstract with key points that is published in their web making it easier to any interested citizen to get informed about an specific issue.

¡Tómala! website

The ¡Tómala! initiative has been around for more than one year, I found really interesting that they keep doing the dialogues and the people is keeping going to them, I would say is a new opportunity in Guadalajara to be involved in public issues and get to know more people, at the end the network that is being build with this events could evolve into something really interesting and at least a more informed and participatory society.