Global Practices of Building Civic Culture

Civic Technology Community Group,

Here is a link to a new report, Global Practices of Building Civic Culture: https://www.ids.ac.uk/publications/global-practices-of-building-civic-culture/ .

While building civic culture is a topic that we haven't explored yet here in this group, I am optimistic about ways that technology can continue to contribute to strengthening civic culture within and across communities.

The report explores the relevance of each of the following strategies for strengthening civic culture in a global context:

  1.
deepening civic commitment
  2.
building civic skills and infrastructure
  3.
providing encouragement
  4.
reckoning and repairing
  5.
strengthening community
  6.
building a democratic civic culture in which people can channel emotions and recognize individual experiences

The report describes civic catalysts, culture workers who strive to strengthen civic communities, and lists the following tools and approaches:

  1.
strengthen bonds through creating spaces for conversations
  2.
make use of the power of art and creativity
  3.
develop locally rooted and locally led spaces for civic gathering
  4.
building capacity and collective power

Reacting to the report, beyond viewing community forum technologies as tools for enabling group deliberations for developing and responding to public policies and/or for enabling participatory budgeting activities, there are these broader civic cultural topics to consider, e.g., actively strengthening communities.

Perhaps civic catalysts could share information about cultural events on communities' calendars and to share multimedia to communities' forums, e.g., pictures and videos from these cultural events?

Brainstorming, perhaps "calendar synchronization", resembling or built using ActivityPub, would be worthwhile to explore. With such technologies, communities wouldn't need centralized or official community calendars, e.g., on their towns' or cities' websites. Instead, multiple interoperating websites could provide people with means to organize and navigate their communities' events. Alternatively, multiple calendars could be subscribed to by individuals and these calendars could each automatically add, merge, update, remove, and reschedule events on their calendaring apps. Perhaps events could also be updated by means of adding typed hyperlinks to them, as and after the events occurred, so that people could browse into the past using calendars on websites or apps to view any documents, pictures, and videos from the events...


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski