participation

participation

I'm not sure "participation" will be the title of my blog or just of my first post. In this post, I want to show you, the reader, where I'm coming from as I start this class.

So what's a social work student doing in an information technology class? It's been my experience over my short career as a student in this field that "social worker" is a loaded term to most people. Including myself. I don't want to say too much about this except that I don't want to grow up to be like the lady on the TV show Judging Amy (an older-aged person who works directly with abused children). What I am attracted to, and what the particular academic program I'm taking allows me to study, is the administration of programs or organizations that have a human services aspect to them. My academic program--as layover from a few decades ago, I think--also focuses on "organizing", as in, "I'm a community organizer". Fewer and fewer social work students enter my particular program looking to learn about organizing as more positions open up under the managed care system for licensed social workers who want to practice therapy. I do not want to give the impression that I don't think therapuetic social workers are valuable (/invaluable) workers in society. However I admire the apparent idealism of people who want to work in, and "organize" in, disadvantaged communities and who move away from the therapist/client model. And while I don't think I have the skills for being a traditional community organizer, I like the paradigms and tools that organizers use and think maybe the same tools could be used by an administrator in a human services/ social work field.

Finding places (organizations) like this seems a little hard to me, though, as non-profits move toward professionalization. In my non-profit management class last year (with Kevin Kearns), I presented on Civic Participation. What I learned in my research was that which is considered "political action" today is carried out by PACs, or Political Action Committees, which often have little or no connection to masses of citizens on the ground. In further research I read "Bowling Alone" by Putnam, and learned about those contemporary organizations which do have connections with large groups of people, but which carry out their actions through very impersonal, highly non-commital ways of "organizing", such as Greenpeace and their direct-mail campaign. I believe Putnam calls this something like "participation by pen"--or something like that: all you have to do to show your support for a cause is sign over a check to your favorite organization. If Putnam were writing this book today I am sure he would discuss the mass email campaigns of Moveon.org and others which work in similar, non-comittal, ways.

For my presentation on the topic of Civic Participation I needed to interview the executive director and/or Board of an organization which represented "civic participation". Having read my class text and Putnam, I now understood that the prospects for this were bleak. I had no interest in "PACs", and no large interest groups, that I knew of, were headquartered in Pittsburgh. The organization that my partner and I ended up at was The Thomas Merton Center. You may have seen their publication around campus, the New People. Apprehensively, my partner and I presented about their pay-equity (the Executive Director made the same amount as the Administrative Assistant), small staff, and informal programming structure. Basically, this organization had few-to-none of the qualities of a well-run non-profit which we had been studying...but it had a committed, fairly large, and participatory group of stakeholders, who were sucessfully organizing for many different issues on the local scene, such as public transit. To my suprise, my professor actually liked the choice of organization to present on, although I think it may have been because of a sense of nostalgia for the old days or something.

It's this jump from one extreme to the other (from a PAC to the Thomas Merton Center) that I sense in the class discussions we have had on information technology so far. I'm guessing this is mostly because, as students, we are not aware of the inroads that have been made thus far by folks who are interested in making information technology more participatory and democratic. (Or using it as a vechicle for participation and democracy.) It's a discussion that I'm finding over and over again in my social work classes...how do organizations that claim to be for the people stay true to empowering people, do not further marginalize or oppress them, and still remain successful in the market? How can technology do the same things?

I went through many of the pages off of Stu's web site and found that past classes of his had tutored the elderly in basic information technology. I can understand how that is one of those places which blended participation and technology. I also tend to think of my part-time job at the East End Food Co-op when I think about alternative forms of participation and organizations that aren't entirely responsible to "the market", as Lessig would say. Lastly, I am also greatly affected by a class I took about five years ago called "The Rise of the Religious Right", where we were assigned to monitor and report weekly on a site which was conservative or right-leaning in its stance, such as the Christian Coalition (and others that are more subtle but still as effective--maybe more effective). What this brought to our attention was how well-organized, technologically, these groups were, and how they had amassed a loyal and active support-base, largely through technology.

This is the big picture of where I'm coming from. I can see the connections but I don't know where I want to go from here, i.e., what I want to get out of this class. And I hope my other posts won't be as long.

posted by citizen_liz @ 2:23 PM