Melanie’s question generated a fairly good mumber of responses, but a slight majority of them displayed a trend that is troubling to me. I respondee in the comments section on the original post on Prattlenog, but I want to expand on it here.

A number of instructors responding to Melanie voiced concerns that connecting with students on social media crossed some sort of personal/professional dividing line. Some even suggested that they only wished to connect with students through a second, “professional” profile, keeping their personal profile to themselves. I highly disagree with both stances.

First, this stance is based on the conflation of “social,” “personal,” and “private.”  Education, it should be remembered, can be defined as a form of socialization within a discipline of knowledge. To be social, then, is not necessarily the same thing as being personal — unless one believes that every classroom is the instructor’s personal space. Even, however, when being social is being personal, to be personal is not necessarily to be private. 

This notion of privacy on the Internet is a legacy of the early years of the Internet, when the myth of online anonymity was born. Somehow the belief (despite IP logging and the use of cookies) that the Internet allowed anonymity meant that it was inherently predisposed to privacy. In other words, because it was possible to pretend to be anyone and therefore protect their identity, then the Internet both was and should be a place where a user could say anything without any consequences in the non-online world.

Privacy on the Internet, then, became the privacy of being able to shout before a global audience with the protection from consequences. It was the privacy of identity, not the privacy of action. This lack of personal responsibility on the Internet has become its most dangerous and most destructive quality. 

So when faculty members at colleges and universities say that they want to avoid social media connections with students, the position they are taking is untenable. Although they likely do not realize it, what they are saying is that they want the liberty of behaving in a way that is publicly inappropriate without their students witnessing it.

Choosing a second identity for students to connect with is just another extension of this logic. Essentially one identity — the personal profile — is the genuine identity, while the second identity — the professional identity — is a blind, a mask from behind which the instructor presents his-or-herself to students.

This is fundementally inauthentic. I feel this is a deeply disturbing and frankly unethical position to take. It is also fundementally inauthentic, during an era when the search for authenticity on the Internet is rising .   

The Internet is a public place, like a town square or a city park or a sidewalk. If what a faculty memebr is doing online is inappropriate for a student to see or know, then why is it appropriate for anyone to see it? Or to put it another way, just as with the those other physical public places, don’t act inappropriately on Social Media and it won’t matter if students connect with you there.

In short, I say this to my fellow instructors in the world of academia: be genuine, be you, but be responsible for what you say and do on social media, and being connected to students will not be an issue of concern. Authenticity trumps all.

Over the last year or so — and especially lately — there’s been a lot of rhetoric tossed around over TriMet. Between a bad editorial, a near-miss on a labor action, and lots of Internet drama, I think it’s time for some cooler heads to prevail.

1.) The Oregonian’s editorial against measure 26-119. As of today, I don’t know how I’ll vote on measure 26-119, which would fund $125 million worth of improvements for TriMet’s transit system. Chief among the items that would be bought with the proceeds of this bond measure are numerous busses to replace aging vehicles and improvements for pedestrians, elderly, and handicapped citizens.

I can however tell you that the Oregonian’s editorial against the measure in yesterday’s paper is a load of bunk.

First, the paper states that the bond measure will cost taxpayers “$30 to $43 more in taxes each year.” That’s dead wrong. 26-119 replaces an existing TriMet bond that is expiring. It’s cost will be the same as the old bond. In short, this is a renewal, and its passage will result in the same tax bill as homeowners get now. The editorial board for the paper had to know this was a renewal. I cannot believe they would be so incompetent as to not check the facts on this. So that means they ignored the truth and chose to intentionally portray this as a tax hike rather than a renewal.

Second was this gem:

Approving a bond measure is like buying something with a credit card. It may look appealing, but it multiplies the cost of a purchase by adding interest. That doesn’t seem like a smart way to go.

So if this is correct, the Oregonian just dismissed all funding of public projects via bonds as irresponsible credit-card-like spending. This is an insane notion. Bonding is one of the oldest, most respected, most stable ways of funding the purchase of new equipment or the construction of new projects. This is an intellectually dishonest position, unless of course the paper will now oppose all public bonds from this point forward.

Third, the paper suggests that TriMet should have been setting aside money for these things all along, and that because they haven’t set aside enough in the past, they shouldn’t get any now. This Monday-morning-quarterbacking must make the Oregonian’s editorial board feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it contributes absolutely nothing to solving our problems. The reality is that we start from today, with what we can affect today, and navel gazing with coulda-shoulda-wouldas about the past will not result in one improved stop, one replaced aging bus, or one additional LIFT service for our elderly and disabled citizens.

In short, the Oregonian’s editorial is both dishonest and dead wrong.

2.) Bus vs. rail budget rhetoric. Over the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of noise about how TriMet’s service cuts would not have been made if it hadn’t been building a rail system over the last three decades. A lot of noise is put out there — including by angry bus drivers — that MAX is only built at the expense of the bus network. There’s even transit equity activists out there now, trying to lobby for the agency to increase bus funding at the expense of light rail.

None of this is true and it’s time to knock it off.

Way, way, way back in 1969, an editorial in the now-defunct Oregon Journal noted that there could be no “taxation without transportation.” In this, the founding year of TriMet, there was concern that if the entire tri-county region was to pay to support the new agency, then the entire area needed service. In short, they argued in favor of transit equity, just as organizations like OPAL are doing today.

The irony: the Journal was warning about concentrating only on urban routes. “Already the idea is getting around that Tri-Met is to be operated primarily for the benefit of central Portland,” the editorial notes:

…the heaviest travel both on downtown streets and outlying roads comes during the morning and evening rush hours. Those drivers… are workers who earn their paychecks in Portland and take a large part of them out to the suburbs to spend. Both city and suburb will benefit by a smooth flow of traffic; neither can get along without the other.

What the Journal had recognized even in 1969 was that Tri-Met served two very distinct geographic markets: an urban, less affluent market, and a suburban and more affluent market. Despite the growth of high dollar urban living in Portland, this dynamic is still prevalent. To serve this mix, Tri-Met needed, in the Journal’s words, “truly metropolitan thinking.”

MAX light rail is part of that metropolitan thinking — in fact “MAX” stands for Metropolitan Area eXpress. Light rail is a key cornerstone to uniting diverse transit rider populations in one, cohesive system. Maybe in this era of tight budget constraints we’ve all forgotten that a little.

Just as importantly, light rail is a key cornerstone of our land-use system, our way of dealing with growth, and our very cultural fabric, as I’ve written about before. We as a region are not about to sacrifice our values or our long term goals because of short-term budget stresses. Our wallets are thinner, but what we believe in and stand for has not changed.

So let’s face it: we’re building the Orange Line to Milwaukie. And after that? Probably Southwest Portland, Tigard, and Sherwood, and maybe (if it’s ever built) a short stretch over the new Columbia River Crossing into Clark County. As a series of projects stretching over multiple decades, any delay we face creates a ripple forward that affects every project’s timeline.

So do you have to wait another 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes for your bus in order to ensure that the community won’t have to wait another year, five years, or a decade for high quality transit to be built? Yes. And if the people at OPAL really support good transit, then they need to drop their rallying cry of “bus riders unite” and replace it with “transit riders unite.”

Lastly, remember that all those pro-bus libertarians aren’t pro-transit at all. They just know that the only way to sell their opposition to (what they see as) the socialism of light rail is to support the (slightly less odious to them) bus system in opposition to it. This unholy alliance of pro-enviro justice groups and anti-light-rail libertarians has got to stop. Don’t kid yourself. If the latter ever got their way and axed MAX, the busses would be next on the chopping block.

3.) Bus driver / anti bus driver rage. These last few years have been tough for everybody, and nerves are fraying at the edge. A number of incidents have occurred over this time period wherein bus drivers have been involved in accidents, sometimes fatal. With press coverage of these incidents, the riding public has become more alert — perhaps downright paranoid — about their drivers following the transit agency’s rules. Some citizens have appointed themselves honorary TriMet supervisors, recording bus driver behavior on cameras and lodging complaints with TriMet about employees who talk about their work on the web. Two bus drivers who blog about their work ended up in hot water, with at least one of them yanking their TriMet related blog. The agency seems to be disciplining and firing drivers at higher rates than usual, and facing pressure from tight budgets has begun to question paying some of the cushiest medical benefits for transit workers in the nation.

It should come as no surprise that tensions are running a little… high.

The reality is that TriMet drivers have some of the hardest, most thankless jobs in the region. Think about it. When you drive the area’s major arterials, do you feel happy? For many of us, just 15, 20, or 30 minutes on the freeways and highways of the region at the beginning and end of day are enough to make us start yelling at other drivers and wanting to move to the wilds of Montana, never to see another soul again. Now imagine driving in that all day. Fun, huh?

Most bus riders probably know how stressful the job is because most bus riders probably have seen the same things I’ve seen: crazy drivers, accidents waiting to happen, the odd stray bicyclist not paying attention, the pedestrian stepping into a crosswalk against their light. But there are a few bus riders out there who have appointed themselves Captain Safety, their cell phone cameras at the ready.

You’re not helping things.

And to the drivers, forget that annoying, self-righteous moron who is stalking you on the bus hoping to send in their video to TriMet HQ and the local FOX affiliate. He or she is not representative of the rest of us, your riders, who you take care of every day.

As for the drivers themselves, I’m thankful that you didn’t stage a sick-out this morning. A soft strike such as a sickout will only serve to make the commutes of TriMet riders longer, slower, and more painful, and that anger won’t get turned against an agency that is trying to reduce what most perceive as over-inflated benefits packages for drivers. No, that anger will turn towards the drivers who called in sick, and in turn to all drivers. So it was a good strategic move not to call in sick.

But moving forward, we’re all having to deal with reductions to survive these times. Everyone. So by all means, fight for keeping the most benefits you can — that’s in your interest — but accept that they are on the table. Negotiate. Work towards a deal. What we all want — what we all want — is to have a functioning transit system that benefits the most people across the entire region. We all do have common ground to start from.

As the CRC is a multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction, multi-modal, bi-state project, it should come as no surprise that gaining a consensus on the form and funding of the bridge has been a significant challenge. The project has suffered a series of setbacks, culminating in a series of stakeholder revolts. The situation grew so bad that, earlier in the year, the governors of Oregon and Washington convened an Independent Review Panel (IRP) to conduct a review of the project and make recommendations for moving forward. 

Today, that report was released. In it are a number of very interesting criticisms and conclusions, but for now I’d like to focus on one particular aspect that I find absolutely fascinating: the CRC’s public involvement process. The IRP noted “perception that the CRC is not including and/or listening to public and stakeholder opinion and is not performing [required] public outreach….” The IRP further noted that many stakeholders lacked a sense of inclusivity and that as a result “There appears to be a lack of trust and credibility in what the CRC is doing and how it is proceeding.” (The above statements are from page 101 of the report.)

It is unusual for a public project to engender this broadly held lack of trust. The IRP is not discussing just a few local NIMBYs or a handful of special interests upset at not getting their way. What the IRP is describing here is an outright revolt by people who were involved with shaping the project, including people who had served on one of the numerous CRC working groups, bodies of stakeholders specifically designed to provide input. How did this happen?

The cause, as the IRP sees it, sounds hauntingly familiar. They describe a scenario wherein the working groups were not adeqautely communicated with to learn the outcomes of their input. From page 102:

“…lack of engagement in feedback with each of the groups and major stakeholders, explaining what decisions were made based on their advice, where the project was going, what their role would be in the future; and if necessary when and why the advisory group’s efforts were considered complete, has significantly contributed to the lack of trust and a perception that any information presented is more as a “sales pitch” versus genuine discussion and consideration of the concerns and issues being raised by the public.“

   
The supreme irony of the situation is that, in most cases, the IRP found that the recommendations of these working groups were being listened to and were affecting the outcomes of the project. The result was that the stakeholders were unable to perceive their role in the process as being both valued and necessary. To again quote from the report:  

“…there is a sense of loss of ownership in the project and a fear that whatever input was provided is no longer being considered or even rejected without comment or reason.  This further leads to a feeling, even if not correct, that the CRC was going through the motions and not truly engaged in a meaningful public input. This sense of loss of ownership and fear of rejection is then what leads to the lack of trust and credibility.“

  
Public participation professionals are usually most concerned with ensuring that the input of stakeholders gets communicated adequately and meaningfully up the decision-making chain. What is often forgotten–as with the CRC–is that the communication has to go back down the chain too, or credibility can be needlessly lost. Here, with the CRC, that error may result in the endangering of a very substantial project. The IRP, again, says it best (page 103):  

“If the feelings of lack of trust and credibility continue… the lack of agreement among the sponsors and buy-in from the community could seriously delay the CRC; or in a worst case scenario result in cancellation all together.“

For those who have a passion for public participation, the CRC is worth serious attention, especially from the standpoint of “lessons learned.” Hopefully, moving forward, it will also serve as an example of how to save a project from such shaky ground. Regardless of the outcome, the CRC’s public involvement process should prove interesting and instructive to watch over the coming years.

Over the last two years, as the economy shrank, local transit services here in the Portland region have been taking serious criticism. A number of narratives have emerged. One is that TriMet’s investments in rail expansion have come at the expense of the bus system. Another popular criticism is that TriMet places too much emphasis on changing land use patterns instead of transportation. Most recently, Dave Lister issued a kitchen-sink screed to these effects. The idea of the bus-hating, obsessively social-engineering TriMet has become the predominant narrative.

So far, most of these complaints have remained unanswered. Portland’s leadership on transit, transportation, and land use? MIA.

When this metro area embarked on light rail over twenty years ago, it was a conscious decision. Buses, yeomen transit though they be, were limited in their ability to handle high capacity loads and deliver the so-called “choice rider.” Rail, on the other hand, was more efficient and attracted new riders. But beyond that, yes, there indeed was a land-use component to a transit system with a rail core. Rail offered an opportunity to change how we lived in this region, and dovetailed with our vision of a denser urban area and a firm urban growth boundary protecting natural resources. Today, however, we as a region are letting that vision slip.

Have there been mis-steps along the way? Without doubt. Do we need to re-examine our commitment to other modes (like buses)? Yes. If TriMet is to be a credible voice in the region, it will need to meaningfully commit to greater geographic, economic, and social equity. By-and-large, that means the agency will need to pay more attention to capital investments in the bus system than it has for the last decade.

But in addressing such issues, we cannot let our vision of an expansive, efficient, accessible and highly utilized rail-cored transit system go by the wayside. Rail is one of the most critical components to our way of managing growth, and our vision of where this region is headed in the next half-century. We cannot abandon that vision to the rhetorical manslaughter of those who would see transit only benefit their own narrow needs, or worse yet, to those who see it as only a system of last resort for the elderly, disabled, young, and unemployed. We cannot lose ground to those who would use the rhetoric of bus disinvestment as a stalking horse to hide their opposition to our unique land-use system.

It is time for those who support the long-term vision of a denser, more livable metropolitan area to step up and provide some leadership on this issue. Say something. Do something! This cause is worth defending, and that that defense is apparently left up to relatively junior people such as me is shameful.

Last month, a really cool video on the impacts of social media got updated. I’m referring to this video, produced by Eric Qualman at Socialnomics:

I’m a big fan of the video, and often use it as a good, tight primer on how social media is changing our societies. And I say societies because it really is a global phenomenon, not just one for Western Civilization.

There is, however, one argument that Qualman lays out in the video that I’d like to take exception to. At one point, he shows a picture of Dale Carnegie and then a still of the character Don Draper from the AMC show Mad Men. The video then states that the future of marketing and corporate-citizen communications will required “acting[ing] more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men.”

For those of you who do not know the show, Mad Men follows the lives of a handful of men and women in the advertising industry in Mid-Century New York. Frequently the plot delves into the messy machinations of advertising campaigns, as the employees of the firm try to figure out how to get into the heads (and wallets) of consumers.

There is no doubt that social media is leveling the power playing field between corporations and citizens. In some cases, it has turned them into virtual “caged tigers”, prowling and pawing and ready to tear a company to shreds if it makes the wrong move. However, the kind of faith in grass-roots based communication that the Socialnomics video makes is rather naive, and also rather dismissive of one of the most powerful streaks of human existence, the narrative.

Humanity is a story-telling creature. We are constantly evolving narratives to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the world, to socially construct mutual understanding, and to cement our individual places in society. When Mad Men’s lead advertising man Don Draper spins a story around a product — casting, for example, the Kodak slide projector as a time machine taking us backwards and forwards on a carousel of memories — he’s telling us a story. He’s using all the great and awful arts of rhetoric and narrative to connect us to that product.

What social media has done has guaranteed the public a place in the narrative. Now, the average citizen has the ability to talk back, to exchange, to discuss the stories being placed before them. In so doing, however, all it really has done has placed the citizen back into their role as audience to a play — it should be remembered that an essential element of drama is that the audience plays a part as well.

The power of narrative — the power of what is on that stage before the audience — is the power of initiative and creation, and has not gone away. I hope that we will continue to see social media evolve and I hope that it will continue to foster a more democratic society throughout the world. We should not, however, invest in it the notion that it reduces, even one iota, the power of rhetoric and narrative.

Last Thursday, the Cascade Chapter of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) hosted its Public Meetings SOS workshop at the Kennedy School in Portland. The event exceeding our organization’s expectations, with over a hundred attendees from public agencies and governments throughout the Pacific Northwest.

The focus of this even was to discuss how public participation practitioners might be able to address the increased challenges facing them as opposition to public processes become more sophisticated. The events of this year showed how organized parties can dominate public meetings not with the purpose of providing their own input, but with the purpose of shutting down such input entirely regardless of the content. A panel of practitioners addressed the crowd and then worked with the attendees to formulate ideas.

A number of interesting ideas and stories emerged from the panel and the group as a whole, including panelist Jim Gladson of Berger/ABAM recounting a time when an environmental group lead a raccoon and a beaver to a podium to provide testimony. What did they do? “We responded to the disruption as if it were normal and accepted the testimony of the beaver and the raccoon.” When asked what they testified, he noted that “they did not want to be trapped.”

Ideas and questions generated by attendees were numerous.

On a more serious note, there were many practical lessons that emerged from the workshop, including:

As the workshop wrapped up, a bit of focus shifted to the possible roles of social media. “The public meeting isn’t dead,” said Gladson, “but it has a fever.” JLA Public Involvement founder Jeanne Lawson noted some of the work that her firm is doing in social media outreach, pointing out that the future of communication is more and more on the web. There are downsides, however, with Lawson noting how the comment sections on newspaper articles and the like are often filled with “vile” content that is not representative.

Lawson also noted that “public process is there to inform the decision makers, not to make the decision for them,” a comment that speaks very much to a point I have discussed here previously.

Overall the workshop was exceptionally worthwhile and showed just how much the local public participation community feels the need to craft better practices for meaningful inclusion of the citizens in the decision making process. It was a pleasure to be a part of this event, and thanks go out to everyone at the IAP2 Cascade Chapter who was a part of making this event happen.

Over last weekend, I attended the We Make The Media conference at the University of Oregon’s Turnbull Center. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the future of journalism, both in general, and in the Portland metropolitan region. I have already commented on the experience of attending the conference, but now I’d like to examine some of my takeaways from the event with an eye towards how the changing nature of journalism will affect the public participation (P2) (and to a lesser extent the media relations) profession. Although this event centered on this region, the lessons learned are broadly applicable.

First, the division between traditional journalism (as defined by the postwar mediums of print, radio, and television) and new media / amateur / citizen journalism is gone. Today, there are just as many people turning to new media journalists for news as to traditional sources. In many cases, the quality of the content being produced by the non-traditional media is just as sophisticated and readable as the traditional media. (Example: Jonathan Maus’ BikePortland.org.) It is no longer access to technology and distribution that determine who the media players are, giving content (be it subject or quality of reporting) more primacy.

This rise in citizen journalism will mean that the P2 and media relations fields will need to work closer and closer, not just on planning how to inform people about projects, but also in what channels and methods of communication to utilize. Gone are the days when media relations can center a media campaign around a press release mechanism. Further, it will be necessary to provide specific media outreach to non traditional media, meaning that you might be listing the contacts for “citizen joe’s blog” right alongside your contacts at the local daily newspaper on your media Rolodex.

As the Chinese wall between media relations and P2 is brought down, it will be important for the strategies of both efforts to be one. The work and words of a public information officer (PIO) will no longer be able to be at odds with or independent of P2 efforts.

The second major change in the media landscape is directional: media is now fully two-way. Centralized hierarchy based media is waning rapidly. While it may never go away completely, it may very well lose its primacy, especially among certain segments of your stakeholder base. In its place is technology enabled new media that makes two-way communication the center of its structure.

Media and public outreach, then, becomes less about disseminating information to the public and more about facilitating that most basic unit of communication, the conversation. This means that PIO/P2 people need to be prepared to respond to and dialogue with stakeholders. Don’t do what most newspapers do with their online content and assume that providing a comments functionality is enough. Use comments sections and other technology tools to acknowledge and in some cases respond to stakeholder input. Talk to each other, not at each other.

Third, accept that media is now multichannel than just three mediums. Using just one form of social media to communicate with, for example, is not enough. Not everyone is going to use Facebook or Twitter, powerful and popular as they are. Use them, sure, but keep an eye on the horizon for the next social media tool, and evaluate these new tools routinely to assess them for inclusion in your outreach kit. Note: don’t automatically join and use every social media tool you encounter, either; an article about social media on Mashable from 2007 listed over 350 different social media sites, and (as commenters to the story noted) it was incomplete even then. Follow Alexander Pope’s advice on fashion: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried / Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

Lastly, be aware that as traditional media wanes, the digital divide will shift into a media divide. Those without Internet access will be less and less likely to be served by analog forms of media, especially newspapers. Your organization may need to pick up the slack by producing its own analog media to reach those who are elderly, low income, or otherwise unable to utilize web-based media.

Newsletters and fliers, however, will likely not be enough, and will not deliver to your organization the two-way communication it will get from new media forms, thus disenfranchising some stakeholder groups. The solution? Mark out your calendar for more time out of the office and in people’s businesses, front porches, and living rooms. Pound the pavement, but before you do that, get yourself and your fellow P2 practitioners more training on interpersonal and small group communication as well as conflict management. Don’t put your people on the front line without the tools to survive exchanges in a healthy and positive way.

More recently, however, there has been an emerging trend of the political misuse of public meeting space. Proponents of particular viewpoints have been resorting to organized disruption. I don’t mean espousing their viewpoint, I mean shutting down the meetings entirely. It is a form of intimidation, a tactic designed to deny anyone the ability to have their voice heard. It is anti-democratic to its very core.

The most famous example of this dynamic has been the recent spate of health care related town halls — even when meetings had nothing to do with health care at all:

And lest anyone think this is simply a matter of bashing one political viewpoint, this tactic has been employed by both sides of the debate:

For communications professionals in the public sector, this is rarely charted territory. What does one do if your meeting generates a highly contentious turnout, or even an organized one bent on shutting the meeting down rather than engaging in dialogue? How can you keep the meeting functioning and allow the broadest range of citizens to have their voices heard?

The Cascade Chapter of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) is hosting a workshop dedicated to anger, emotion, and organized hostility next month here in Portland:

NEW IAP2 CASCADE CHAPTER WORKSHOP:

PUBLIC MEETINGS SOS: Navigating minefields and fending off organized hostility

Portland, Oregon | Thursday, December 10, 2009

From the national health care debate to neighborhood issues, dealing with anger and emotion in a public meeting can be hard. The emerging trend of organized disruption makes this situation even harder. How can you effectively deal with these challenges?

Join the IAP2 Cascade Chapter at its Public Meetings SOS workshop and help craft a practical, useful response.

The workshop will begin with a panel discussion bringing more than a century of public involvement experience, including:

Jeanne Lawson, founder of JLA Public Involvement

Jim Gladson, Public Involvement Senior Project Manager, Berger/ABAM

Sheri Wantland, Public Involvement Coordinator, Clean Water Services

Tony Faast, Staff Biologist, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Following the panel discussion, attendees will work with their colleagues to help to develop practical, effective methods for dealing with these difficult situations.

Together, we will find ways to address these challenges. Join us!

Event Details:
DATE: Thursday, December 10, 2009
TIME: 1:00 PM-4:30 PM
LOCATION: McMenamins Kennedy School Gymnasium, 5736 NE 33rd Ave, Portland, OR [Google Map]
(Snacks and refreshments will be provided.)
COST: Cost: $35 (Cash or check at the door only)

RSVP is highly recommended. For more information contact Sheri Wantland at 503-681-5111 or wantlands@cleanwaterservices.org. It should be an interesting afternoon of sharing problems and strategies that will help to deal with difficult meeting situations.

Last week, there was yet more grumbling about the Lake Oswego-Potland transit project, this time from Jack Bogdanski. The complaints were, in effect, that the use of a streetcar rather than other transit and transportation modes has already been determined in some back room somewhere, and that as a result the public involvement process is no more than window dressing. The evidence to back this argument? Jack suggests, in effect, that people will be unable to use the public involvement process to swing the project in a direction other than a streetcar, and therefore the process is illegitimate.

I raise this topic here not because I support the Lake Oswego streetcar. In fact, I have some serious doubts about this project’s viability, and have in the past offered criticism of the Portland Streetcar project in general. This notion, however, that a public involvement process is illegitimate because it is not a direct democracy is something that I have witnessed in many projects, and it is a matter that needs addressing, for the benefit of both citizens and communications professionals.

First, the public involvement process is not a political process. Decisions are not made by the populace in a public involvement process. Political decisions are made, rather, at the ballot, when the people vote either directly through initiatives or indirectly through the election of representatives. No other process in our system (save for juries) is a democratic political process.

So what, then, is the point of even having public involvement? The purpose of public involvement is to follow and inform a political decision and to include voices from the public during portions of the project that, if the public were not involved, would be driven purely by professionals with narrow training. It is to help balance the potential groupthink that would occur if everything was being run by engineers and planners and nobody else. It is also to keep the public that will be directly affected by a project informed and included, thus avoiding potential conflicts. It’s not a power space, it’s a dialogue space, where professionals consult with the public for advice, not consent.

Just as importantly, it should be noted that it would be nigh to impossible for the process to work any other way. Public involvement processes are qualitative, not quantitative. Regardless of the effort placed to seek input and participants, there are never enough people involved to be representative of an entire populace. Since the goal is to seek advice and therefore as diverse a set of opinions as possible, this is not a problem, but if the public involvement process were a public consent process, not only would variety be required but also numerical representation. The only way to equitably convert a public involvement process into a public consent process would be to place every project on the ballot for public vote, a condition so cumbersome that it caused the framers to create a republic rather than a direct democracy.

None of this, of course, means that once a political decision is made that there are no options left to the public to shape or stop implementation. The people can still apply political pressure through protest, seek to place initiatives on the ballot, attempt to recall politicians involved in the project, or campaign against those politicians during the next election cycle.

What is important to note, however, is that public involvement processes are not intended as a venue for democratic power, but rather for democratic advice. Government and agency staff seeking public involvement have the obligation to listen to the people, note concerns, and even try to address them, but they are not bound to comply with them. Public involvement does not exist to allow the people to be architects without a license, or transportation engineers without a degree.

Does this mean that if a project that seems unjust to a citizen, that that citizen ought not participate in a public involvement process? Not at all. It is always important to place input into the process, even if it isn’t input that project leaders want to hear. In addition, it is important to place objections on the record prior to starting processes such as those I outlined above, as a way of building a history and an argument.

To argue that a public involvement process is a joke because it is not an example of direct democracy is, however, a bit like arguing that pigs are useless because they don’t have wings.

Oregon has a reputation as a state with a high degree of transparency, thanks largely to its open meetings laws (see ORS 192.610, or the Oregon Department of Justice’s Public Meetings Handbook). Yet even here, we have an occasional slip back into the paleolithic age from time to time. The Oregonian reported last week that the City of Lake Oswego is considering restricting journalists who attend executive sessions of local government bodies to only those who are part of “established” media. The League of Oregon Cities, according to the same story in The Oregonian, may distribute the policy to the rest of the cities in the state as a possible model for statewide adoption. Established is defined, essentially, as traditional big media outlets. As The Oregonian reports:

After nearly a year spent considering the matter, a task force dominated by government and traditional media representatives has come up with a policy that could make it difficult, though not impossible, for new, independent bloggers to gain access.

…the burden of proof is on the individual to provide “substantial evidence” that he or she is a reporter. That individual must be a member of a recognized journalism association, work for a newspaper that the public body uses to publish public notices, or be recognized as a news source.

Attendance at an executive session might require a press badge issued by a recognized media organization, a recently published news article in the recognized publication or broadcast, or a letter on letterhead from an editor of the organization.

The purpose of executive sessions is to discuss contracts, hiring and firing of key staff, and other financial or sensitive matters that may require some degree of privacy to be effective. Here in Oregon, journalists have been allowed to attend (but not report on) what goes on in executive sessions since the current open meetings law was devised in the 1970s. The intention is that journalists are part of the democratic process, and their attendance at executive sessions would help to ensure honesty on the part of elected officials.

Naturally the Internet turns a lot of this topsy-turvey. Definitions of media have become harder and harder to make as the line between citizen and journalist blurs. As journalism moves from profession to civic responsibility, a notion I have discussed before, how will governments handle the executive session issue?

Here, it appears the answer is thought to be the restriction of the term journalist to apply only to those working for the entrenched, established 20th century media outlets. While the difficulty of creating an acceptable solution for the executive session issue — if everyone is a journalist, then everyone can attend an executive session and thus defeat the purpose of their very existence — this restriction to those allied with dead tree media is hardly what I would call a creative or enlightened position.

Particularly damning is this quote from the cover letter from the City of Lake Oswego’s task force:

A number of local governments in Oregon have faced new media persons asking to attend executive sessions as “media representatives” under the law.

Some governing bodies have been reluctant to allow new-media reporters into executive sessions because they have not developed a sufficient level of trust in new-media reporters and writers nor the institutions they represent.

Trust? While I understand the position of officials wanting to ensure that sensitive but proper and legal discussions stay confidential, this statement smacks of a game of insider favorites.

Journalism is changing rapidly. The same week that The Oregonian reported about the executive session issue, the USC Annenberg School for Communication renamed itself the School for Communication & Journalism, in recognition of the changing role of journalism within society. Says Geneva Overholser, the director of the School of Journalism at Annenberg:

For, even as its traditional models collapse, journalism is being reinvented. It is being reborn in new and exciting ways every day. And with this name change, we make clear the vital roles that Annenberg has played, and WILL play, in that reinvention.

Some — such as Annenberg, or the Knight Commission, and others — are on the bleeding edge of change, trying to understand new and better ways to approach this once central force of American life, while others are digging in their heels to try and stop change entirely. This month, it appears that Lake Oswego has sadly put itself in the camp of the progress blockers, and the citizens are the poorer for it.