Category Archives: Politics

VTDigger.org lands grant

Posted on Tuesday, May 18, 2010 by No comments yet

Great news for the people of Vermont… Vtdigger.org just landed a grant to further develop their statewide news platform.  Congratulations Anne Galloway and Vtdigger.org!  From the Knight-funded grant giver

Nine promising community news projects from across the U.S. have been selected as this year’s New Voices grant winners. Each can receive up to $25,000 to launch a news initiative and work to sustain it over the next two years, J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism announced today…

This year’s winners were selected from a competitive field of 284 applicants. Including the new grantees, a total of 55 community start-ups have been funded from 1,533 entries since 2005. Of the 46 projects that have already launched over the last five years, 30, or 65 percent, are still going strong, five are working to launch or re-launch, and 11 did not continue after the two-year grant cycle…

Tipster at VTDigger.org –  This news start-up covering Vermont plans to build a crowdsourcing platform called Tipster to help develop stories. Using Tipster, readers and reporters will collaborate and exchange information to build in-depth reports. Future support is expected from business and college sponsorships…

Cooperation vs. Competion or Regulation

Posted on Monday, March 22, 2010 by No comments yet

Scott Heiferman’s tweet led me to take a closer look at the work of recent Nobel Laureate (economics) Elinor Ostrom.  She studies how cooperation works best in some cases… better than competition or regulation… our two dominant forms of organizing markets.  From a Forbes article

Garrett Hardin called his famous 1968 essay on shared resources “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He argued that a shared village grazing pasture would tend to get overused and eventually destroyed. But even Hardin later acknowledged that shared common resources did not inevitably have to end in destruction, saying that he should have called his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”

And from Fran Korton’s interview at Shareable

Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate…

Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question “case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.

Fran: Many people associate “the commons” with Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”… What’s the difference between your perspective and Hardin’s?

Elinor: Well, I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.

If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family’s long-term benefit is that you don’t destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.

Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right?

Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say “No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.” But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.

At the Workshop we’ve done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don’t allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest [the commons]. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, “Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?” Then they can come to an agreement.

That last bit there about communication leading to better community decisions… love it.  It’s so obvious. I guess that’s why it takes a non-economist Nobel Laureate in Economics to explain it to the economists of the world.  And, for what it’s worth, her observation jibes with what we see at Front Porch Forum too.  FPF leads to better communication among neighbors, more face-to-face conversation, and, in many cases, better community decisions.

Congratulations Dr. Ostrom!

Social Change 2.0

Posted on Friday, September 25, 2009 by No comments yet

I had the pleasure of introducing David Gershon’s work to Portland, Oregon more than a dozen years ago.  So Mike Lindberg’s quote about David’s new book caught my eye…

Social Change 2.0 exhilarates. David Gershon has not just laid out a compelling and coherent blueprint for social change, but the vividly written stories he shares make us realize that what we thought was impossible can actually be achieved. Having been a political leader in Portland for twenty years, where I worked closely with David, I saw firsthand the power of his work to change the lives of thousands of people. He may well be the number one expert on social change in our country.”
– Mike Lindberg, former Commissioner of Public Utilities and city council member, City of Portland, Oregon

David’s work has some interesting parallels to Front Porch Forum.  I look forward to reading it.  (Buy the book here.)