January 30, 2008

Citizen summit and the desire to destiny gap

The citizen summit held last night at the convention center was an interesting reading of the pulse of Columbus. Through anonymous voting on strategies to address key priorities -- such as education, transportation, business development and the arts --1500-plus attendees got to steer the civic agenda for at least one night.

We patted ourselves on the back and said very clearly we can do better. Strong sentiment emerged that education -- specifically supporting urban schools -- and transportation were high priorities for the gathered crowd. Our consensus self-image that we are "conventional midwest," something all seemed to understand even though it was never defined. We aspire to be "active," another vague allusion to youthfulness, entrepreneurship, and "hip."

While the speech to voting ratio was much too high (five pep talks is bit much), this coming together was a good thing and I would like to see more of it. But since I am a geek about processes like this, I have some critical observations that have me wondering if we accomplished what we were led to believe we would do.

Wisdom or wishful?

The event was placed in the theoretical context of keynote speaker James Suroweicki's book Wisdom of Crowds. In a nutshell, Suroweicki argues that given the right conditions, the aggregate judgement of the "many" is better than the judgement of the most informed individual. He has many anecdotes to prove this from guessing jelly bean counts, to predicting elections, to finding lost submarines. I find his ideas tantalizing; we all did as he primed us to revere the wisdom extracting process of touchpad voting we were about to undertake.

But I think Suroweicki's ideas had little relevance for what we did last night. Here is why:

All his examples of the wisdom of crowds are examples of the accuracy of the statistical mean, whether derived by simple averaging or complex algorithm. But our responses last night did not produce a statistical mean, they produced modal tendencies. For instance, while 45% of us said we wanted rail, that only reflects the plurality of sentiment, not the aggregated wisdom of the whole.

How could we average out public sentiment on transportation? We can't. And that points to the fundamental weakness of the "wisdom" theory for this process. You see, Suroweicki's examples are averages of group predictions. Predictions of amount, location, outcome. But what we did last night was express desire, not make predictions.

It is a very different question to ask "what do you think Columbus will do to make our community sustainable" than it is to ask "what do you want Columbus to do." The first may produce a highly accurate prediction. The latter only produces a distribution of desire that still needs to be resolved by good old fashioned politics. Suroweicki's theory is that the marginal judgement improves the whole. The process we followed the marginal to the margin.

Suroweicki also asserts that diversity is a necessary precondition for the wisdom effect to work. It was hard to tell if we had that diversity last night. From where I sat in the room, we did not appear to be that racially and ethnically diverse. And my assumption is that most in attendance also worked downtown within easy reach of the center. Would the crowd have been different if this were held on a Saturday afternoon?

It was also evident that downtown streetcar advocates did a significant amount of recruiting and lobbying. I'm fine with that. But it undermines the wisdom theory when the process becomes deliberative rather than simply aggregating judgement.

Desire and destiny

The wisdom theory is good for predicting where we will end up. Our destiny if you will. But the citizen summit was all about desire. The clear theme of the evening is that desire can shape destiny. Is there a nice tidy theory for explaining how that happens? Not that I know of.

But it is still fun to be part of the experiment.


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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool. Sounds like you liked the foundation but not necessarily the premise.

I have become wary of these types of things because, in my experience, they have often left me more frustrated than I was before about whatever the issue was.

For instance, last year I attended the governor's conference on graduation rates for black males. It was informational, it was inspiring, it was galvanizing, and it was only for that day. Why? Nobody failed to include or think through how to ride the wave. What resources and support would the people there have to make the change that they have come to realize needs to be made. We were told money was there..... But that was it.

Is this something that generally happens at these types of things? I'm new at this so I don't know.

Rich said...

The summit is part of a bicentennial process which is somewhat unique. The issues we voted on were derived from public input. There will be more neighborhood meetings coming up. Checkout the Columbus2012 site: http://www.columbus.gov/columbus2012/

It is true that in many cases the people have to lead so the leaders will follow.

I have also had my taste of dead-end dialogues with the City and others. The people just have to persevere.

Anonymous said...

Even if only 45% of the group supported rail, it was clearly a high priority for those folks. All we need is a dependable mode of transportation for those 45% to use and then the rest will follow. I think the summit was helpful to establish some priorities and even though some options were vague, it gives the planners some insight as to where to begin.

Rich said...

I agree there was strong support for rail and should be considered. My concern may appear academic, but if there is someone touting a method for reaching the best solutions, I want that method to work. I'm not sure it does in this context. But the measure of public opinion we gained is indeed valuable. And I'll be sure to write City officials to reinforce my desires.

Anonymous said...

I think you summed it up best with that last comment Rich.

- Did the logic behind the keynote actually apply to what we did? Probably not.

- Did we gain valuable input from knowledgeable Columbus citizens who aren't afraid to get involved in their community? Absolutely.

- Was it cool as hell that the city gov't even solicited people's opinions on these matters? I sure think so.

- Did the exercise also have other benefits like priming the bond package for passage, or just getting citizens out and involved? YES!