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.

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.

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.

You, the staff person, are proud. You’ve done your job, and better, you’ve done it in a new and innovative way by using your organization’s web site as well as social media.

But what about the citizen? The citizen is walking away from the meeting just as uninformed as when they entered the room, and feeling cheated somehow.

What actually went wrong here?

The Internet — and especially social media — are often viewed incorrectly by planners and engineers working on public projects. They are quite often viewed as a method to disseminate information more efficiently. What they fail to realize is that communication is not about efficiency, it’s about building relationships. By telling someone to look elsewhere, you’re shutting off a conduit of relationship between yourself and a citizen. To put it another way, when helping projects get built the exchange of information is just as important as the content.

Is it the wrong move, then, to put your project information on your web site, to direct people there, or to use social media tools like Twitter? Not at all. These are all great ideas. They are not, however, replacements for real, face-to-face conversations, nor phone calls, nor email. Nor are they ways to reduce your personal workload. Viewing them through that lens turns public outreach into a mechanical model, which is all about efficiency rather than inclusivity.

Outreach is about building relationships. It’s about empowering citizens, not dehumanizing them. Use the Internet for public outreach. Use social media. But don’t use them as an excuse for bad communication or the elimination of face-to-face contact.

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.

First off, lets start with the trendiest of all social media tools, Twitter. Some attendees were using the system, tapping away at their laptops in the front row. It was kind of cool to load the #CNUtrans hash tag and see what people were saying. Yet how functional was it really? Most posts were just repeating what was occurring in the room, and while that might be useful to someone not in attendance, it wasn’t very useful to those that were here.

There were a number of bloggers present, including people from Reconnecting America and Streetsblog, along with Portland’s own Chris Smith. Few were live blogging, however, and the coverage on the net has been rather scarce.

Imagine if, instead, people had been using Twitter to share reactions and discuss topics as they were spoken about. Imagine if one of the conference staff were constantly on a laptop available by Twitter to answer questions and concerns about the day even as the conference moved on. There would be no need to pause for housekeeping issues.

I did notice someone was video recording a few segments, but why not webcast the conference? Why not at a minimum record the presentations and make them available on YouTube? Likewise, why not make an audio recording of some of them, and podcast the entire event?

To the credit of the conference, some presentations were being made available on the CNU’s webpage for the summit via Slideshare. (The organizers are attempting to get all of the presentations online, but some of the presenters have not yet gotten copies to the CNU.) This was smart, but it could have gone further. I would assume that all the presentations were in hand the day before the conference if not earlier — why aren’t they all online by the morning of their presentation?

(Of course, I’m in the middle of assisting a workshop in December and this critique will no doubt come back to bite me in the posterior.)

The point of this is not to throw rocks at the CNU Transportation Summit. The event was very well organized and effective. The issue, however, is that communication was emerging as a key component of transportation reform. Multiple presenters mentioned how important it will be to educate the public about why the current system is financially and culturally unsustainable, and why the CNU’s proposals are a worthy tool to employ in moving forward. This is, after all, a change management problem, as IBM’s Stan Curtis pointed out yesterday. In such situations, communication will be key.

Making the conference available as much as possible would have been a very powerful tool for helping to advance the Congress’ communications goals. Instead of thinking about a deliberative process and a communicative process as different, the web allows and even encourages the possibility of combining the two, and in the process increasing transparency at the same time. This is a possibility that should be harnessed whenever possible.

Stan Curtis from IBM Smart Cities presented what was likely the most challenging presentation given today.

Curtis first laid out some key concepts. First, the Earth, as Thomas Friedman pointed out in his book, is now flat. Innovations in the economy are returning less and less. Manufacturing can be done at almost any location as production can be so highly automated that the human cost is almost zero, and that automation can be undertaken nearly anywhere.

Tied into this is the increasing awareness in the private sector that saturation of goods is now being achieved. From cars to cell phones, cutting edge technologies can now be had in nearly any city around the globe with little difficulty.

What then might the future of economic activity be? Curtis suggests that services — the provision of an ability to do something — may outpace goods. In other words, it is not that nobody will buy a car in the future, but that perhaps the buyers would be firms that offer them on a service basis. A similar notion already exists with Zipcar, and Curtis pointed out that in many ways we have already arrived at this point in the private sector.What lags behind is government.

What is needed is political innovation. Innovation is what will lead the development of cities, and the development of cities will be a key economic engine for the 21st century. Waiting for Federal innovation, however, is going to be a long long wait. “There is only one Federal government,” said Curtis. “We believe that innovation will come from cities.”

One of the most famous rules of technology is Moore’s Law:

“Moore’s Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.”

Curtis pointed out that this rule — a rule of multiplicity — has proven true of almost all of technology, and is now being seen to apply to manufacturing. It may also apply to cities and how they develop. Population, for example, follows these rules, with bigger cities retaining populations and population growth at levels greater than smaller cities on a similar curve. This results in a long tail with a few big leading cities and many followers.

A technology model that might apply to civic construction would be the decentralized manufacturing process that is now common in industry. Said Curtis:

“The layout of the city and the supply chain is affected by efficiency. The last mile tends to be the key distance. Tech tends to be a last mile bet, the last mile will determine the cost structure. Its not necessarily the freeways. It’s the local [network that accesses] grocery stores, restaurants. and walkable neighborhoods.”

There was also a significant recognition of pointed noted throughout summit, especially the point that the dense street networks desired for retrofitting into more auto-dependent neighborhoods simply have no available funding source. “We’re not thinking of new buildings or new roads,” said Curtis. “We believe you when you say we can’t afford to build out of it. We’re going to have to do something with our existing things better.”

Some innovative notions mentioned by curtis included:

• Cyber commuting. “What university has the smallest carbon footprint? University of Phoenix. Nobody goes to class.

  “[At IBM Smart Cities] nearly half of our employees dont go to work [in an office]. This is just business. We changed our culuture to not require people to come to work 8-5 to respond to this. Why is Intel building everything in Hillsboro and putting all those footprints down [Highway] 26?

  “Give people choices to allow them to “vote” to be in a high density location without sacraficing their job.”

• Think service not mode. “People don’t buy a car or a cell phone, they buy a service. You’re thinking of designing roads and intersections but what you need to think about is services. What people want may not be intersections but service choices.

  “For example, if I want to buy groceries from New Seasons, I could walk, or drive, or ordering the stuff on the phone or online to be delivered.”

• Use Open Source decision making models.”A funnel program for decision making — its a simple technique — and creates a shared investment [with project stakeholders] in the model.

  “This is platform development.”

• Enhance, improve, and repurpose. “The greenest building is the building not built. Energy management is the greatest way to improve emissions.”
• Set standards.“Push to come up with standards for building the same way as [the] auto [industry] and aerospace. The car companies that reinvent parts every time don’t win.”

Lastly, Curtis emphasized that this is a “change management problem. Global networks will influence each other quickly” due to the rules of multiplicity. “Communities will learn quickly from each other.”

Right now, Andy Mortensen from Transpo Group is giving a very good presentation on a more sophisticated model of bike/ped assessment than Walkscore, aimed more and fine scale GIS assessment of planning concepts. Unfortunately, I have no time to add any more today, as the conference is about to wrap up for the evening. Be back tomorrow for day three.

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.