I want to think now about how communities can equip themselves to make better use of information to take action and hold those in power accountable.
The outside-in effort that I talked about last time naturally leads us to think about the people they serve as users or consumers or audiences. But those are not communities, not even if we disaggregate them into subgroups defined by shared characteristics ... living in a particular geography. being Black or Hispanic or Asian or white, owning a business, and so on.
That's not to say the groupings aren't useful. They can be quite helpful for analyzing policy impacts or patterns of need. But they do not exist as groups that "take action" or hold anyone accountable in any meaningful way.
So let's begin by briefly considering what we actually mean by "community."
What is a community?
A community is something more than just a group with shared characteristics or even shared interests. The people living in a single apartment building may be a community or they may not. They certainly have some shared interests and a shared geography, but if they don't actually know one another or interact, if they aren't connected through actual interpersonal relationships, they don't rise to the level of I would think of as a community.
So at a minimum a community is a group of people who are connected via interpersonal relationships.
What's interesting about that definition is that it leaves things rather vague. How many interrelating people or interrelationships do you need to form a community as opposed to a friend group or two or more loosely connected subgroups? How many direct relationships are needed within the community? What about people who are co-located with a community but who have no relationships within it? And to what extent does a community persist when people leave or join?
To me that's a fascinating and critical feature of a community: it's fuzzy and dynamic. People come and go. Some exist alongside it for a while and then come to see themselves as part of it, others remain permanently disconnected. Individuals within a community may have direct relationships with lots of others or just a few. Communities can even merge with other communities if enough relationships arise between their members.
In other words, communities evolve. Which is exactly what community builders and organizers count on!
When I started thinking about how to define a community, my initial intuition was to include *shared interests* in the characterization. It is certainly true that people who share a community also have shared interests. It's also true that shared interests are foundational for a community's ability to act or advocate.
But as I wrote this it became clear that communities rarely have much more than a vague awareness of their shared interests, if that. In fact, gaining consciousness of specific shared interests is exactly what a community needs to do in order to be able to advocate and take action.
Becoming Publics of Accountability
So how does such consciousness come about?
One way is to have a crisis that forces a community to recognize a shared interest. If the crisis is compelling enough it can further drive the community to mobilize and undertake some sort of action. Neighbors quickly discovered shared interests and reasons to act together in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, often in surprising and beautiful ways.
As a model for accountability and community action, however, it leaves a lot to be desired. It is reactive, rather than proactive and, most importantly, the community ends up organizing around a particular issue, which means the organization loses salience as soon as the issue is resolved.
Ideally the order should be reversed: organize, then act.
Which brings us back to where we started. Because communities that effectively take action and demand accountability share an important characteristic: they are organized. As Jeffrey Stout puts it in Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America: "Democratic political power derives from being organized." And gaining and strategically wielding political power is what "being effective" actually means.
In practical terms, Stout's book details what the kind of broad-based organizing that empowers communities actually looks like. The process itself is that taught by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the organization founded by Saul Alinsky based on his experience organizing communities in Chicago. The IAF method involves a careful grassroots process that both identifies shared issues on which the community can take action and allows the emergence of leaders who earn their entitlement to speak on behalf of the community.
The process is one of forming what Stout terms a "public of accountability," an accountability both of community leadership and of public officials to the community as a whole. He writes:
By constituting enduring publics of accountability, citizens' organizations can make the activity of holding officials responsible a perpetual, rather than merely episodic, affair. The same interactive process also increases the chances that citizens will vote and will inform themselves and one another about matters of public concern.
In other words, community organizing is what enables the transformation of the community's ability to make effective use of the (also hopefully transforming) information ecosystem.
A couple last thoughts ...
First, while the terms outside-in and inside-out made particular sense in the context of the information ecosystem and a community's ability to make use of it, I want to propose that it is better than "bottom-up" as a frame for thinking about rebuilding democratic practice in this country. We are accustomed to thinking about hierarchies and locating the power at the top. I suspect the picture that emerges from inside/outside thinking about communities vis-a-vis more encompassing entities results in a more accurate understanding of power relationships, actual and potential.
The last thought is that a consequence of the thinking I've worked through over the last couple articles is that building resiliency and building democracy are not two different things. They are the same.
This is the last in a 3-article mini-series:
Moving Beyond Defense: Two key elements for building a better future
Building the Local Information Ecosystem: Thinking outside-in and inside-out
Accountability From the Inside Out: Creating publics of accountability (this article)
Links & Thoughts
The how we need now. The Niskanen Center just released a report by Jennifer Pahlka and Andrew Greenway with "a thorough diagnosis of today’s state capacity challenges, as well as a promising path forward." The focus is on the federal government, but parts are of interest for local governance as well. One sentence stuck out for me since I think it has consequences not only for how we plan initiatives, but for how we hold organizations accountable for them as well: "The best planning tests the riskiest assumptions first and is fastest to adjust based on those learnings."
The semantic shriveling of the word 'investing.' Mackenzie Scott's post on how she distributed $2bn of her divorce settlement. Scott notes that the word's "big, beautiful, original definitions" include "To devote resources for a useful purpose. To endow with rights. To clothe." Speaking of words, "semantic shriveling" is just an awesome use of them!
Open-government nonprofits are dying off just when they're needed most. Interesting essay by Daniel Schumann on the catastrophic fall-off of financial support for nonprofits supporting and advocating government transparency. It is my hope that creating community-level demand for transparency and accountability is part of the path toward addressing this.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.