At this week's Round Table, s part of our series on creating healthy discourse online, Divya, Inica, and Madeline spoke with Macon Phillips, founder of Starling Strategies. Macon headed President Obama’s White House’s digital strategy during Obama’s first term after playing a central role in the 2008 presidential campaign’s pioneering use of new media and technology to mobilize supporters. Much of what he learned and applied there informs his worldview and the work he’s doing today, including starting a podcast of his own called “Talk About Power.” And talk about power we did! Macon talked us through the evolutions he’s seen in tech over the last dozen years and their implications. He shared the projects he’s proudest of having worked on in the White House and State Department, and even shared Obama’s “secret sauce” in using tech and social media. Macon named his firm after starlings because of the way the birds flock together in powerful formation, creating something greater than the sum of our parts—like democracy itself. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Isaiah, Olivia, and Madeline continued our series on creating healthy discourse online in conversation with Cathy Buerger, Director of Research at the Dangerous Speech Project at American University. Today, many fear that free speech can go too far and feel it should be regulated in some way--but who do we trust to make decisions about what we can say and not say to prevent hate speech? Dangerous speech is a more specific term than hate speech, defined as speech that can inspire violence. DSP works to find ways to counter dangerous speech without constraining free speech--which we found SUPER interesting and empowering, as we are proponents of ensuring that discourse allows for dissent and representation of different views. 

Over the past few years, Cathy has been investigating user-led counter speech efforts from around the world.  She’s interviewed over 50 individuals globally, and recently completed a digital ethnography of one of the largest groups of counter-speakers, which has over 74,000 members currently working to improve online discourse in Sweden. As an anthropologist by training, Cathy brings valuable lenses to this work and ones we greatly benefitted from in this conversation with her. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Eliza, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline and Olivia spoke with Ben Gordon of CitizenLab, a digital democracy platform that facilitates communication and co-creation between cities and their communities. Residents can post, discuss, and upvote their own ideas or choose to vote, prioritize, and fund projects and programs that their city is considering. Over 200+ cities around the world use CitizenLab to engage, consult, and deliberate with their residents and manage their ideas - both asynchronously and live through their online workshops feature. This helps cities become both more responsive and more efficient in their engagement efforts. This is, of course, all the more important since we’re all stuck at home. Ben notes that social platforms initially had no norms, so a lot of bad behaviors evolved. Conversely, CitizenLab creates vibrantly democratic online spaces for governments to engage and learn from their communities, and for residents to discuss and deliberate with one another about the local issues that matter to them. CitizenLab is working to create an expectation of two-way communication and a culture of continuous engagement between constituents and elected officials.  We’re VERY excited about this proposition and hope you will be too. Thank you for joining us!