 Okay, folks, please find your seats. Please set your cell phones to mute. Please return your trays to an upright position. Thank you, please come sit down. Really excited to start our next session. So again, welcome back. I'm Mikha Sifri, the co-founder of Civic Hall and Civic Hall is partnering today with the Knight Foundation on this symposium on tech politics in the media. And as my co-founder and friend Andrew Ruchet said, subtext now what? Our next panel is gonna be focusing on the efforts of a lot of the groups that are here in the room today, which is to engage the public around the election in more meaningful forms of civic involvement. And some of that is directly around the question of making it easier for people to vote or to know who they're voting for or what they're voting on. And some of that is about the larger communal experience of voting or why we even care and how to make people care in ways that feel right and are useful to them. So like before, we're gonna hear presentations from each of our panelists and then we'll open it up to a conversation to follow along online or join in on the Twitter conversation. It's KF Civic Hall is the hashtag. It's the finger lickin' good hashtag. We make civic tech finger lickin' good. So anyway, without further ado, I wanna hand over the baton to my good friend, Seamus Kraft, who is the Executive Director of the Open Gov Foundation, known him for years working in the space where we can use open data to make government work better. We first got to know each other when I was working with the Sunlight Foundation. It's wonderful that he is still hard at work and doing great work. I'll let him tell you a little bit more and take you into the panel. Seamus. Hello, beautiful people. Thank you, Mika. Oh, there you go. And thank you to your partner in crime, Andrew Roche, for gathering a wonderful group of brilliant people, for putting on a heck of a party, and for having, frankly, the courage to ask really difficult questions of yourselves and of the community gathered here today and of the larger country. And boy, oh boy, are we asking some really hard questions right now. Civic engagement, civic technology, is it worth it? Have the last four or eight years? Has all of this effort gotten us? Has it gotten us to a place where we're happy, where we're sad? What role does voting play in the future of our country? I like to step back and I look at civic engagement and I ask myself this a lot at the Open Guh Foundation. Is it voting? And a lot of what we're gonna hear about today is that lever-pulling expression foundational to what it means to be a citizen in this country. Is that it? Is accessing information on where to vote? Is looking up information on a candidate's platform? Is calling your congressman, to me these seem like expressions of civic engagement. What works, what doesn't? Who's doing it right? Who's doing it poorly? These are really, really, really difficult questions. How do you engage with somebody whose worldview you don't share to say it as bluntly as possible? And I know these are difficult questions, but today, here on the stage assembled, are some of the brightest minds to help us answer them. First up, we'll hear from Eric. Eric is the founder and CEO of Citizen University. It's a fascinating organization seeking to build a stronger culture of citizenship. He's a widely published author, talented TED talker, and recovering public servant who held a range of senior positions under President Bill Clinton. Somehow, Eric also finds the time to be the executive director of the Aspen Institute's Citizenship and American Identity Program. Next up, we'll hear from Tiana Epps-Johnson. Tiana is the founder and executive director of the Center for Technology and Civic Life, where she and her team provide critical resources and training to support local election administrators. In a world where a third of all county election officials don't even have a website. Tiana and her team are needed now more than ever. Last June, they launched the election toolkit, which I hope we'll hear a little bit more about today, which is fast becoming an indispensable go-to resource for officials seeking to approve voter outreach and modernize how they run elections. Seth Flaxman is the co-founder and executive director of DemocracyWorks, where he's been strengthening the fabric of democracy by supporting greater citizen participation in elections and government. Seth is one of the geniuses behind TurboVote, which simplifies and streamlines how we vote. They're bringing a major dose of modern tech and design to the foundational civic engagement opportunity in our country, which far too often bears more resemblance to the 18th century than it does to our current one. TurboVote, which I believe turns seven this year? Sure. Wow, wow. The years are a blur. Who knows? TurboVote, which I believe turns seven this year, just helped its one millionth citizen register to vote. Bravo. And last, but certainly not least, we have Kay Krontieris. Kay is an ethnographer, strategist, and facilitator working to understand and transform civic life. Her applied research on how people actually use, or don't use, technology in their civic lives is groundbreaking, especially in how to activate what she calls interested bystanders to become interested engaged citizens. I've found that when super smart people and organizations from Google to the US Digital Service need to answer seemingly unanswerable questions at the nexus of people and civic tech, they call Kate. We have a wonderful discussion laid out for you today. If you have questions that you would like asked and if you're watching at home, send them to me on Twitter. I'm at Sheamus Craft and I'll have my feet up here to be able to work them into the conversation and if you're here in the room with us physically, we will have time to ask questions of our wonderful panelists after they present and we have a short discussion. First up, we have Eric. Eric Liu. Thank you, Sheamus, and thanks to Mika and Andrew and our Knight Foundation friends for bringing us all together here today. This has really been very nourishing already and I wanted to offer just a few framing thoughts here about civic engagement itself and then describe at Sheamus's request a project or two that we're running at Citizen University that might give us just some specific grist for our conversation later. Let me just back up a step. So Citizen University does work to democratize understanding of power in civic life. That's our broad mission. And so when we think about a phrase like civic engagement, we actually break that down into a couple of three chunks. I think of engagement as in one piece being about power, which I'll say more about later, but really actually trying to promote literacy in power, what it is, what forms it takes, who has it, who does not have it, why that is, how it is allocated. And we heard earlier today in some of the sessions when Brian and others were talking about media literacy. I think media literacy is a species of power literacy, but the idea that you think about power in terms of literacy, in terms of something that can be read and something that can be written is both literally and figuratively core to our work at Citizen University but also I think core to any notion of civic engagement. If you want to be engaged, you have to understand who runs stuff, who runs this town, who runs this building, who runs this organization, how stuff gets done, how decisions get made, and ultimately that question of who decides. The second piece of engagement that I think a lot about is imagination. And again, our friends at Civic Hall have really taken the lead in trying to popularize this notion of civic imagination as a notion. The first entity I think in the country that actually has a civic imagination fellow, my friend Andrew Slack, who founded the Harry Potter Alliance. And imagination I think is a critical component of this because if you simply have literacy and power and understand how things run today, that's necessary but not sufficient. It requires a dose of cultivated imagination and creativity to ask the what if question. What if power were allocated differently? What if the institutions and the channels and the conduits and the networks that we had for allocating power flowed differently? What would that look like? How would we rearrange those? And that's partly a tech question but it's also partly just as Donald Trump showed a gut instinct strategy question. How do you upend prior allocations of power? He was a genius at that. The third piece of engagement then is what I shorthand essentially is character. And by character I don't mean so much kind of individual virtue like honesty or diligence or anything. I mean character in the collective. Do you have pro-social virtues? Do you believe in mutuality and reciprocity and sharing of responsibility and sharing of sacrifice? Do you cultivate those virtues and values in others through institutions, through rituals, through rules and through the ways in which you just lead by example? So when you combine these elements of literacy and power, cultivated imagination and character, then I think you're playing with something that helps give I think a bit more texture to this idea of engagement. So that's just kind of the general table setting thing. And the particular thing that I wanted to tell you about was one project that we at Citizen University unfolded last year with the support of the Knight Foundation actually and it's called the Joy of Voting. This project grew out of a piece that I wrote last year in the Atlantic. Basically reminding us that there used to be in this country a culture of robust, creative, raucous participatory engagement around voting and elections. It was about street theater and open air debates and parades and battles of bands and so forth. Oftentimes battles of fists, you know, but there was this culture of joyful participation that existed in this country pretty much until the advent of television. And after the advent of television and in the succeeding kind of evolutions of screens that have shaped our civic life, that culture has begun to diminish and perhaps even evaporate. What I was saying in this piece was there's no good reason why we couldn't revive this joyful culture of voting. And there's no better opportunity to do that than at the local. And so fortunately, well, when that piece was published, it got a big response and our friends at the Knight Foundation agreed. And so we unrolled out this project last year called The Joy of Voting in which we worked in four cities, Knight cities, Philadelphia, Akron, Wichita and Miami. So very different cities, different parts of the country, some redder, some bluer. And in each of these cities, we convened gatherings of ordinary citizens, neighbors, activists, artists, designers, musicians, and we invited them just to generate ideas of ways in which you could create modern day versions of the great old social rituals that used to attend voting in elections. And in the end, we created a process of submission and ultimately chose in each of these four cities five projects. And they got modest grants, up to $3,500 each, to execute their ideas. And actually, I'm not sure if this, if the clicker is up here, if I have the right. Hey, okay, there's the beautiful logo we made for the Joy of Voting project. This first slide, of course, gives you a little taste of the kind of old culture of joyful voting and participation, which was partly about urban political machines, it was partly about immigrant arrival and immigrant claiming of this country. It was, of course, a public square that was nearly entirely white and predominantly male. But that was the kind of thing that we felt like could be updated in a 21st century way. I'm just gonna kind of burn through a few of these, I've slides for each of these cities. In Akron, the kinds of projects, the one on the right there is a project in which a theater group performed political and election theme plays in the back of a pickup truck that drove all through Akron. In Miami, what you had was, particularly at Miami Dade College, one of the country's largest and most diverse community colleges. This incredible election extravaganza that was a festival, essentially, that, as you can see, involved kind of American ninja-style fighting, as well as a contest to create, I voted buttons and bringing artists in to create, again, these ways in which people could engage more playfully and joyfully around elections. In Wichita, the activity ran the gamut from graffiti art curation around getting people to participate and vote in the elections, and a North End mixtape project in which musicians and residents of Wichita's North End showed up to really create music about how and why folks ought to show up and participate. Then in Philadelphia, of course, you had things that ran the gamut from the image on the right, which was kind of a more formal event in which new citizens were celebrating the fact that they would get to cast their first ballot as immigrants now naturalize the United States to the image on the upper left there, which was a punk rock concert performance that was about elections and participation that took place through Old Town Philadelphia. I do this quick kind of tour to give you just a taste of the ways in which what we tried to do was to awaken a spirit of joy. And you've probably been thinking as I've been talking, joy, like this is perhaps the least joyful political season in living memory. Like, what are you talking about, man? And I want to insist to you that it is vital that we commit to this idea of joy because joy isn't just about put on a happy face and pretending to be cheerful. Joy, fundamentally, is the kind of surface indicator of something that, when things are going right in the body politic, is happening beneath the surface. Joy is the indicator that there is a sense of collective purpose, that there is a sense of not-alone-ness, that there is a sense of imagination in the civic square, that there is a sense that people can come out of their isolation and actually throw crazy ideas out there and see the incredible combinatorial power of improvisation when lots of people throw stuff together. That's called art, but it's also called politics in a democracy, right? When lots of people decide to show up, come out of isolation, throw their crazy ideas together and realize that your chocolate and my peanut butter made a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. And that's crazy, and we hadn't ever anticipated that you could combine things in that way, right? And these are habits, simple as they may seem, that a generation or two of Americans have largely forgotten how to do. And I wanna close by reminding us that the reason why Joy matters is that in politics, as in economics, you have to attend both to the demand side and the supply side. And there are a lot of folks in this room here who are just outstanding, innovative folks thinking about new ways to increase the supply of tools and channels for engaging in politics. Some of them are tech tools and apps. Some of them are other formats, more analog formats, and that's great. At the same time, I think we are where we are in this country right now because we've been facing a crisis of demand, a crisis of declining motivation, a crisis of people thinking, why bother? The game is rigged, the system is rigged. Why should I participate? My vote won't count. And part of what we've got to do is to activate that sense of intrinsic motivation, to stimulate that demand. And I don't, at the end of the day, whether you're using new fangled technologies or not, the oldest human way to stimulate that kind of demand for purpose is to create joyful, creative, cultural, shared rituals and experiences where people can be part of something greater to themselves. And in so doing, change the very civic square that they'd been worried about or complaining about or felt isolated from in the first place. That's the aim of this project that we're doing at Citizen University and I'll be happy to talk more about it and other stuff we're doing as the conversation goes. Thank you. And again, I am Tiana Epps-Johnson and I'm the founder and executive director of the Center for Technology and Civic Life. I'm gonna kick things off with giving just a brief overview of what we do at the center for some of the new faces that are in the room. And then I'm gonna transition to a few highlights from our most successful civic engagement work in 2016. So just to kick it off at the center, we make voting easier by modernizing the way that local elections are administered. And with over 8,000 different entities responsible for managing some sort of piece of the elections process, you might imagine that there's a lot of work to do. And so we've created a really clear and specific focus on connecting county officials with the skills and the tools that they need to one, better inform voters, and two, to use data to make decisions so that they, for example, might be better at allocating resources at a polling place so that we see shorter or no lines when folks go to vote. So two of our most impactful projects of 2016 were our Civic Engagement Toolkit for Election Officials and another was our ballot information project. So I'm gonna kick things off with talking a bit in detail about what we did with our Election Toolkit. ElectionTools.org is a site of about a little over a dozen resources that election officials can use to better communicate with their voters, to increase things like registration, and to smooth operations at the polls. To make this a little bit more concrete, I'll give you a few specific examples of the tools that are in the toolkit. One of them is a free app that folks can use to measure wait time so that they can start to gather the data that they need to figure out where they need to make process improvements. Another tool is a clean front end that allows folks to display in real time election results that county officials can power just by a simple Google Doc. So again, free low cost technology that election officials can use to better inform their communities. Another one is a guide that is just focused on how election officials can use Twitter to better engage and communicate directly with the voters that they are serving. Since our launch of that project in June, we saw thousands of unique visitors from all 50 states in the District of Columbia. But more importantly, in the short window between June and the election, we saw election officials from across the country actually implementing these tools immediately and improving the ways that they were running elections for November. And this work is part of a larger ecosystem of work to modernize the way the elections are run from different tools like tech adoption and policy change and also really importantly, a culture change within the profession of election administration. And we're seeing some real results. One example is that average wait times from 2012 to 2016 have gone down across the country. Some preliminary research from Charles Stewart and MIT shows that Florida, for example, went from a 45 minute average wait time in 2012 to a wait time on average that was less than 10 minutes across the state. And that's very exciting, but there's still a ton of work to do. If we look at wait times again as a measure, we're still seeing persistent longer wait times in communities that serve people of color, for example. And wait times is just one measure of election performance that we could be looking at. One of our more public facing projects was our ballot information project, which is our effort to aggregate for the entire country the answer to the question, what's on my ballot? You interacted with this data if you looked up information about candidates through Google search. You may have also interacted with this data if you are a US user of Facebook and got that prompt on your newsfeed to get a preview of your ballot and click through as that was one of the tools that was powered by our information. And this was the third cycle that we've run the ballot information project and each time the engagement with this work is greater than we could have expected when we first sought out to do this. In 2012, we saw about 25 million hits on this data. In 2016, those numbers were blown out of the water. We saw 150 million interactions with this information through Google voter assistance tools. 44 million API hits on this information and through our partnership with Facebook, we saw over 9 million unique users engage with this information through the Facebook preview tool. And so in addition to those things, we saw different people build applications on top of this information that range from those lookup examples to a chat bot that was automated that Twitter launched to inform their users about what's on their ballot and other information. And one of my favorites, which was a civic education group in North Carolina that actually used our data to power real ballots and ran an election simulation with over 250 high schools across the state which had a lot of really fascinating information if you dig into the results of how those high schoolers voted. So I encourage folks to do that. And this work really reminds me of the power of partnerships and the power of getting information in the places that people are already at. We only have seven full-time staff and one software developer and are still able to sort of get this reach that again is always super exciting. But there is a ton of work also to do in this voter information space, especially as it relates to further contextualizing who are these people that are running for office and why is it important, especially to care about the folks that are further down the ballot. I think that's a huge growth area for this space of voter information. And also really thinking about how we might move beyond this episodic engagement that at a very high level around elections to more sustained engagement that's powered in part by these types of tools to get folks to engage in civic life ongoing beyond just elections. So with that, I will pause and I look forward to digging into this conversation more with you all through questions and up here with the rest of the panelists. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm Seth Flaxman. I'm the co-founder and CEO of DemocracyWorks, which is the name of our nonprofit and also something I still earnestly believe. And I have always been an elections geek. In high school, I would like drive my friends during the lunch break in high school to drive them to school board election, like drive them back. And I've always been that way. And so when I went to grad school, I was sort of shocked to realize that I'd missed three local elections. And looking into it was like each one I'd missed was for a dumb different process or information issue. Like I didn't know something. I'd missed a deadline. And I was in a place where I could do some research into just how voting works in America. And really for me, that was when I first opened my eyes to the voting crisis, the participation crisis we have in the United States where around 60% of us vote in presidential's and that's as good as it gets around 40% in midterms and between 25 and sometimes 5% in primary and local elections. And as I was doing this research though, I also found something hopeful in the data in its own way, which was that there were more voters not voting because of process issues, because voting didn't fit the way they lived than because of apathy, which is usually the story that we're told. And in that I really saw an opportunity for technology to modernize voting, make it more seamless and engage millions more people in our democracy. And so the first tool we decided to build was turbo vote and the idea someone would sign up and then we would text them whatever they needed to know to vote in all of their elections, send them forms if they needed forms, help with registration, vote by mail, whatever it is that someone needed to do. And we started by working with colleges. We, this year ended up working on around 180 campuses around the country. But we've also started figuring out how do we actually reach scale? How do we have an impact? So this year we did, we reached our millionth voter. A lot of that was through partnerships with big companies like Snapchat and Univision, Buzzfeed. And the, but we still look for ways to scale our impact. So in 2013 we were like let's go beyond turbo vote. The data itself is also useful to people. So we took over the voting information project which is started by Pew and Google. And so now if you Google where your polling place comes from that data comes from our work with the states. And this year the polling place data was searched for 123 million times. And people sort of searched on gettothepolls.com which is another site that we maintain for VIP 11 million times. And so these are starting, we're starting to feel like we're maybe hitting some numbers that can create change. And then last year we really started to figure well how do we get our technology to everyone? How do we actually get government to use the technology that we're developing? And we had our first two state contracts getting some of our technology to help voters through their election directors and specifically helping make vote by mail more reliable. Tracking ballots through the mail because that's one of the big things that, that's actually the number one thing that voters call in about and say to the vote by mail is where's my ballot? And we wanted to see if we could start there as a place to solve the problem. But all this stuff, honestly we have a voting crisis and we really felt like we needed to think bigger. And so this past year we launched a democracy moonshot to reach 80% turnout by 2024. Or to think about it another way, how can we increase turnout 20 percentage points across all elections over the next eight years? And we have some very powerful friends and allies who signed up with us. It is the largest corporate coalition ever working on voter engagement, including Facebook and Google, Starbucks and a bunch of other companies that are really seeing democracy as part of their mission, civic engagement as part of the corporate social responsibility they have for the country. And so getting to 80%, so where are we now? And what is hopeful about getting there? So where we are right now, over the past eight years, we have gone from 145 million registered voters to 200 million registered voters. So these numbers can move. We've also gone from 132 million Americans who voted in the 2008 election to 139 million Americans who voted in the 2016 election. The percentages hide those numbers and in fact actually haven't seen a lot of really good reporting on turnout in this past election beyond just the headline percentages because when the number of eligible voters increases too it can hide some of the more interesting facts. And one of the most interesting stories along those lines from 2016 was turnout in Denver in the county and city of Denver, Colorado where they saw 84% turnout and that includes among voters 25 to 34, 80% turnout. And this isn't the only county or city where we saw this but this is one of my favorites as an example because it really shows the power that election systems can have and who participates. So Colorado is the sort of developer of the Colorado model which is a sort of doing everything we know that works to make voting to serve voters as best as you can. And it includes a few different things that are really our North Star for how we move forward. So one is Colorado does ballot delivery. The mail a ballot to every voter and actually the majority of those voters drop off the ballots in person or at a drop box. Some can mail it back but ballot delivery does work. They then combine that with very clean voter rolls. They participate in a program called Eric Electronic Registration Information Center to make sure that they have the correct addresses of everyone they're trying to deliver ballots to. And then they combine that with two other things. They combine that with same day registration and voter service centers. So people can go to whatever polling place is closer to them, work or home. You can vote at any polling place and they use e-poll books so that they can keep track and make sure nobody votes twice. And even that though Denver has innovated on it because Denver was also layering on top text message notifications to their voters about where their ballots are, when election days are and all of these things together add up. Even if each one just creates three or four percentage points of change you can see real improvements in how many people are participating. And so for us over the next eight years we're gonna be focusing one on helping states with the technology they need, make it affordable and publicly owned so that as many, that should not be the hurdle for a state that wants to move to this or county that wants to move to this model. But it's also our North Star for when we work with our corporate or other partners to like what sort of technologies work. So for example this past election cycle there was an innovation at Harvard where we work with. Now at Harvard College they have an Oracle technology that everyone, it's a mandatory pre-check-in for students who are coming in before they even get to classes. They have to go through their checklist of things they need to do. And one of them is signed up for TurboVote. And it's a way to sort of provide an automatic voter registration without, just directly with colleges or other institutions that have access to their community and wanna get them engaged. And there are other companies where you can send notifications about an election is happening today. Your Senate primary is today. Your special election for Congress is today. And so if we know notifications work, we know making it easier to register work so we can both do that in government but we can also find ways to do it independently by working with civil society and using technology that makes things easier. So thank you. Thank you, good afternoon. And I count myself among the legions of fans of democracy works. I've just proudly recently joined the board and I think one of the things that's so exciting about the moonshot is that it's, the idea of making it a kind of rainbow 80% is really ensuring that we're reflecting kind of the population of the United States. So I'm really excited about that work. So my name is Kate Crunchieris and I am an ethnographer by training. And so I'm, for a living, I'm just nosy about people basically. That's how I like to live my life and that's how I think about many things including civic engagement and really thinking about to what end civic engagement and who are we talking about when we're talking about getting people involved. So, and I look at this work through the lens of sort of the interested bystander as Seamus described earlier. My work as an ethnographer has taken me to this question of, you know, we all know people around us who are paying attention to what's happening around them but maybe not actively voicing their opinions about those matters in a political sense or getting involved perhaps in a community or social sense. And so the question around that work which was done in collaboration with Google, the full support of Google and also the Knight Foundation. The question there was sort of like, what is it that could motivate these people who we will call interested bystanders? What would motivate them to be more involved in civic life? My collaborator on that project, John Webb, is also here in the audience as well. So what do we find about that? Sort of three paradoxes about the way that interested bystanders view civic life. The first is that they tend to have sort of low civic self-esteem but they're notably very involved in their community. So if you ask them sort of how civically involved they are, they sort of shrink a little bit and say, well, I'm not really not that civically involved. And then you learn later that actually they're doing some things as a volunteer in their community that somehow they don't count as civic. So they feel bad about the lack of action or their lack of influence and a kind of politically defined notion of civic life but take great pride and happiness and emotional satisfaction from the sides of civic life that are about kind of community and social involvement. A second paradox about the way that they think about civic life relates to power. So they note that power really comes from having a voice but they're very reluctant to share their own voice. And this gets at a lot of dis-ease around what they perceive to be kind of negative toxic political discussion that although debate is sort of the bedrock of democracy in a way, interested bystanders are really not interested in entering into any kind of political debate online or offline. They view it as a source of conflict and they're not interested in getting involved in conflict with their family members, with their friends, with their colleagues. So while they acknowledge that they could exercise their civic power to Eric's earlier points by expressing their opinions and becoming involved they're really hesitant to do so because they don't wanna jump into a cesspool of conflict as they perceive it. And a third paradox is really just their recognition that they could have a lot of power at the local level but they vote nationally. So interested bystanders when they vote tend to be voting in national elections even though they say they know that they have sort of relatively more power at a local level. They simply don't really think that it's sort of gonna make a difference if they get involved. And certainly when they vote they're voting out of a sense of kind of duty, civic piety, like it's something they should be doing but not because they can really meaningfully connect their vote with something that actually kind of matters in public life. So to this question of what is it that motivates them to kind of get over the hurdle and get involved in civic life? What we find is that they get involved in civic life when the public interest overlaps nicely with their self-interest. So the question or the motivation around self-interest is really very important for interested bystanders which we assess to be about half the US population 18 and above. And so what are those motivations? Interested bystanders tend to get involved when they have some prior personal or professional experience they feel that they can bring to bear. Maybe they have a particular training that's relevant to a community issue. Maybe they've experienced something in their past that they don't want other people to experience. There's some prior personal or professional experience. A second motivation relates to having clear interests at stake. They have a kid in the school system. Their house is in the community that's going to be rezoned for something else. But there's a particular interest that they have that they wanna protect. And a third motivation is really around seeking emotional fulfillment. That if there's an opportunity to kind of feel like one is being useful, to feel a sense of purpose, to feel a sense of power, then that's something that will also motivate them to get involved. So, and this was work that we did over the past couple of years and it left a lot of open questions as any piece of research kind of does. And we have fortunately the support of the Knight Foundation to try and start answering some of those questions. So, as we speak, we're doing a kind of second phase of research into some of these remaining questions in Charlotte, North Carolina, which if you've been following the news as a place that's experiencing disruptions in its political system at all levels and a lot of other sort of social trends of relevance. UNC Charlotte and Johnson C. Smith University are collaborating on a research project to kind of understand interested bystanders at a deeper level in Charlotte. And we're also collaborating with Google and Facebook as well in order to get this kind of mixed methods approach to understanding some of these same questions. So, we are implementing something that we did previously, a kind of civic segmentation of the population if you will, a sort of technique that's typically used in market segmentation and trying to apply that to the civic spectrum to understand from a quantitative perspective how kind of different typologies or groups shake out. We're doing interviews, we're doing focus groups, we're collecting sort of trending topics on social media and in local news outlets and hope to have a couple of other sources of data as well. So, it's like a data bonanza. We don't know how we're gonna analyze all this information, but it's really exciting, I think for a couple of reasons. The first is, again, our goal is to really look into how civic stuff kind of flows into a person's daily life, right? Instead of looking at civic behavior as this kind of standalone activity that people are like, okay, and now I'll go do my civic behavior, actually to think about how people live their lives. What are their goals for themselves? How do they think about what they're trying to accomplish for themselves, for their families, for their communities in the world and how does civic kind of fit into that? So, it's exciting to be replicating in a way some of these methods and learning. What's happening, as I said, in a city in the South, which tends to be a bit underrepresented in our understanding of some of these trends and particularly among young people. Charlotte is a destination for a lot of young people these days in a place, as I mentioned, that's going through some interesting kind of civic disruptions. I was there with them last week and I'm really excited to be able to share, I think, in the coming months or have them share, actually, what they have been learning there. The final kind of lens that I want to offer to this work comes from Thomas Patterson, who's a scholar at the Shorenstein Center, actually, and wrote a book called The Vanishing Voter, which is absolutely germane to this conversation about how to think about expanding civic engagement to be more meaningfully inclusive. He wrote it in 2002, just after the Bush versus Gore election. And I think the majority of his assessments kind of still hold is based on 80,000 interviews. So the end is pretty interesting there. And my takeaways from his work about what our movement needs to expand who is meaningfully involved in voting are sort of fivefold. So we need strategies that address first how to make elections compete successfully for eligible voters' time and attention against other life interests and factors. We need strategies that enhance political interest and knowledge among eligible voters. Here, I think Google, Facebook, the media generally can play a strong role. Third, how are we gonna change electoral practices and processes to increase turnout and involvement? And again, this is where Democracy Works Center for Technology and Civic Life are examples of important collaborators there for how to inspire a media portrayal of politics that's inviting and empowering rather than disheartening and negative. Eric, I think, has done a lot of work in that respect. And finally, how to sort of decrease, if we can, our mistrust of politicians, government, and the political process. And so I think those are five things that we need to bear in mind as we're thinking about they seem obvious in a way, but this is actually what we need to accomplish in order to increase the vote. So the last thing I'll say is just the more sort of salient and poetic thing I've heard recently, President Obama's farewell address was he said, democracy requires a basic sense of solidarity. And I'm still really chewing on the sort of how do we get to that basic sense of solidarity. My experience as a facilitator of discussions around power and privilege and identity tell me that it's not easy and make me feel actually very overwhelmed at that task. However, the amazing thing about working as a researcher is that people end up telling you very intimate details about their beliefs and their attitudes. And in fact, in the course of doing this interested bystander work, I've been privy to a lot of very discriminatory and biased ideas that a lot of people hold about each other in this country. And I think that that's something that we really need to focus on in terms of thinking about how those attitudes affect our civic behavior. Those are things that we can't sweep under the rug. That is the real grist of how many people are thinking about how they relate to others in our country at the moment. So I'm not sure how to get there, although I had this kind of vision this week of Barack and Uncle Joe doing a kind of truth and reconciliation process across the country, which I think would be fantastic. But at any event, I'll stop there and I really look forward to actually hearing what all of you have to say. Thank you for convening us today. Thank you all. Any questions in the audience? If you have them, hold your hand up. Excellent, excellent, excellent. While we're bringing the mic over for the first one, I have a question for the panelists and feel free to jump in with an answer. 2016 was a really crappy year for a lot of people. What is fueling your fire looking ahead to 2017 or to the next election whenever it may be in your world? What is, rekindle that fire for me? If I'm down on civic engagement, if I'm down on voting, inspire me. There is a sort of paper I was reading recently about what works to increase people's participation in voting, and there was a statement in there that called out to me where people really responded viscerally to the idea that the system is rigged against them, but the vote is one thing people can't take away. And so there is a sense that we're going back to basics when people feel like the system isn't representing them well enough on both sides of the aisle that there is a sort of like core DNA in our system is the vote. And that's why I focus my time there because I think you can sort of rebuild from scratch anytime with voting. I've had the privilege of volunteering to be a poll worker in every election that I'm able to be out of the office. And one of the duties that I've had both as a poll worker in Washington DC and also Chicago is being a deputized registrar of voters and having folks that are same day registering as first time voters and that being their first experience with the voting process. And that the joy on folks' faces when they come into polling places and cast their first ballot is just incomparable. And I cry almost every time. But I do feel that intense joy about voting and it's really amazing to help facilitate other people to feel the impact of them having a voice in the process. One of the, let's pivot off of voting for a second. One of the projects that we launched right after the election we weren't intending to launch until the new year but there was just so much agita and anxiety after the election that we just decided to hurry it up and four days later we started a project called Civic Saturday which is essentially kind of a civic analog to church. These gatherings where we are inviting people from all different backgrounds to come together and convene and it has, it is not of course literally about church religion or mosque religion or synagogue religion but it has a lot of the structure of this kind of again shared ritual, right? So there is song, there is silent reflection. There are readings of what you might think of as civic scripture, whether it's well known things like Lincoln or the preamble or lesser known things by lesser known people. There's discussion of those readings and then I give a sermon of sorts that is about these questions of reckoning with where we are right now, reckoning with questions of reconciliation or not and I'll tell you what, the kind of magnetic pull of creating this invitation has been so striking to me. We did it kind of on the fly and we just found, the very first one we just found a location which was the basement reading room of Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, if any of you have ever been there. It's just this, it feels like the underground and so you just, we had this crammed space where people were coming together for this kind of unusual experience that was surprisingly again emotional. It was not just rational, it was not just cognitively processing all of these political changes. It was expressing the fear, the anxiety, the hope and there were more than a few people who were hopeful after this election result and so these aren't weekly yet, they have been periodic, we've now done four of these but I tell you this gives me a lot of hope for what we're gonna be doing in 2017 is again, everybody including people in this room have been asking the question, what do I do, what do I do? Even an incredibly power literate group like this is asking what do I do? And my very short answer has been start a club. Start a club, anything. It can be something as elaborate as Civic Saturday where a couple hundred people show up. It can be a little study circle, it can be back to this morning's panel, a circle of people who become your own little media literacy club and you start learning how to reread the news and whatever it is, just start a club and start re-exercising that muscle. That's to me one of the big lessons of the Civic Saturday experiment. For me it kind of comes back to the idea of responsibility that we have. Responsibility doesn't typically give you hope but in this case, just stay with me. I think, I mean from a very personal visceral perspective I have a one year old daughter and I feel even more so now a great sense of responsibility about the kind of public environment that she walks into. And I think also I was reading this morning an article in The Times today, I don't know if others of you saw it about the Office of Presidential Correspondence which basically handles all of the letters that people write to the president about whatever's happening in their lives and if you want to have wet eyes, go read that article because these are really, really real issues and people in the past eight years have felt that the president could actually do something about something that was happening in their families. Maybe it was related to mental health, maybe it was related to school, going to school. Maybe it was the joy of, I don't know, becoming a citizen or something that they felt a connection or a need to share. I think the more pressing ones are the things where we have civic engagement in a way because we know we have to take care of each other on some of these most important sort of basics of life, health, safety, education. So that, I think, sense of responsibility can help kind of pull us through, even if we disagree with kind of what's happening politically at any level of government that we should have hope in the possibility that we can continue to hold ourselves responsible for each other. Thank you for lifting my malaise. First question. My name is Alita Karali, I'm from E the People. People are, to borrow a cable phrase, time shifting their voting habits and states like Oregon and Washington are moving to all mail ballots. What strategies do you think might be necessary to reach voters who are no longer voting at the same time on the same day? I can speak to part of that as a Seattleite and being in Washington. I will say that in general mail-in ballots and an all mail-in system has been good. I think it allows more time and opportunity for people to get themselves educated and be able to go on their various websites to talk about the ballot often in the company of others and that's great. But I think what is lost, of course, is, again, the shared face-to-face ritual of actually executing this right and responsibility. And so I think one of the things that people have begun to do in our state is really try to do this hybrid of using technology and using face-to-face to create ballot education parties, not ballot-filling-in parties, basically, right? Gatherings where you're gonna come together and a bunch of people are gonna throw everybody's ballot guides, whether it's progressive groups or the Seattle Times or whatever it might be, and you're gonna talk it through and you're gonna do it over a beer and you're gonna have a little fun with it, right? I think there are more and more opportunities for that, kind of taking this thing which is time-shifted and kind of floating out there and taking it as your object of congregation, basically. That's beginning to happen a bit more. I think the other thing that has to happen, though, and this is when Seth was describing the way that Colorado is flooding the zone with all different strategies, right? What we haven't yet done in Washington are some of these things that you were describing, the texting, the text reminders, the various other channels to get people to remember that to create a culture of actually dropping off your ballot at a ballot box, at a drop box rather than just mailing it in, there are kind of habits that can be, I think, inculcated in a way, right? I think most ballots in Washington State are just mailed in, even though there are drop boxes available, there aren't nearly the number that there could be where you could make it into a different kind of face-to-face or somewhat social ritual. Yeah, I agree with everything Eric said. I would add, for a lot of voters, I think younger voters, but I think a lot of voters, people go into the polling place so you know it's in the top of the ticket. They're encountering everything else for the first time. And so I actually think they're getting no information in most places if you're voting in person for most of the ballot. You're encountering it for the first time in a lot of ways. And so voting by mail is a very important thing and so voting by mail is a way to actually have informed voters for the first time where they can go on Facebook and say, does anyone have any idea what this ballot initiative means? Or they can Google the name of a local candidate and go to their website while they're in the process of voting. And I'm actually hoping that as more states do move to this method of voting, it will create demand for more information online as people change their habits and start going on Facebook and asking friends for what they know or going on Google and searching ballot initiative names or candidate names. One quick thing, there's been a little interesting phenomenon of people who, I mean there are organizations like there's an organization in Seattle called FUSE which is a progressive network of networks and they do a progressive voters guide that goes out by email and people will read that and AlphaNet will guide their ballot choices if they're in Seattle. But what's been interesting too is that this opportunity has arisen for individuals just informed citizens to sort of become trusted voices, right? And so a guy in Seattle, a friend of mine named Jay Blumenthal writes a detailed long email that goes through every ballot measure, every municipal judge, everything. And it's become sort of this go-to guide that for people on his email list, people trust. And I think the more that happens and the more Jay's start to emerge, the more interesting opportunities you've got. I think we have time for one more question right there. Dave Carp, George Washington University. We've circled around this, but I wanna ask it directly. What is the number one piece of work that your organizations will do in 2017 that you think they wouldn't be doing if Hillary Clinton was the president? Should we play the Jeopardy theme song? Yeah, I mean I'll honestly say I think we have the same strategy. We developed our strategy when we got started I think seven years ago. And it was, I see the modernizing voting for the way we live to be just a necessary thing that has to happen and our allies in doing this are usually the people Tiana works with, the county clerks, state election directors, people who have customer service first and foremost in their mind. And then trying to basically get voters to turn the institutions and companies that voters interact with on a daily basis into on ramps to voting and then connecting those to modernized election offices. And I think, and I've always been focused on the locals and primaries where I see the lowest turnout as really the biggest crisis and our democracy and it would have still been the biggest crisis regardless of who won in 2017. Yeah, I mean I will concur that our North Star is the same and our tactics are largely the same as what we had planned before. We spent the first week of this year reflecting on our 2020 vision for the work that we're doing and there are very few things that we are going to do differently just because of the outcome of the election. The work that we need to do to improve the process of how elections are administered is so fundamental to having a healthy democracy that can't change because of the outcome of any given election. I think that, so the research that I was speaking about previously in Charlotte, North Carolina was planned before the election and it's kind of continuing as planned. I think one opportunity we have is actually to shed some light on, you know, many people were surprised by the outcome of the election and they were surprised that certain groups voted in the way that they did. And so hopefully we have some opportunity to shed light on some of the human attitudes and motivations and behaviors behind those voting choices and how, again, how what's happening in my own life, you know, as a human, not necessarily as a civic actor, but how what's happening in my life affects the way that I think about participating in civic life. So hopefully we'll be able to shed some light on some of those questions. I would say organizationally concur with my other panelists here that in general, we haven't changed anything programmatically. There's a much more heightened sense of urgency. I think, you know, the silver lining in what's happened here is that our work has never felt more purposeful and I think a lot of people are now awakened to just the depths of the illness of the body politic and that's not even a partisan statement. There's just illness in the body politic. There's a lack of the literacies and engagement and responsibilities that we've been talking about here. The one thing I will say has somewhat not changed because this is something that had been said in motion before the election but now takes on a different resonance. So last week I flew down to Dallas and I spent Wednesday morning with Glenn Beck and some of you may know that Glenn Beck is in the process of an interesting metamorphosis. I'm not sure what is going to come of this and he's been doing it very publicly with Samantha Bee and others basically disavowing some of his most toxic acts and words and regretting his role in creating the political culture we have now and trying to make sense of things going forward. I would have wanted to go down and spend time with him regardless of the election result but because we have this result, one of the aspects of our conversation was this heightened sense of importance of creating cross ideological, cross partisan alliances in defense of the Republic, in defense of basic liberties and when there are threats coming from a president-elect or from an administration that some of these liberties may be challenged or some of the things that we take for granted as constitutional norms may be disregarded, that shouldn't be of concern only to people who were one time Hillary Clinton supporters, that ought to be a concern to people across the spectrum and it indeed is. I think so part of our work right now is just trying to find common cause and relationships with folks who will be working to again, ensure citizen power and the integrity of our constitutional system in a time where both are in question and I think on the last thing that I'll mention, out of my Aspen Institute program, we're launching a project this year called the Core American Arguments Project and this grows out of a sense that I had when about a week before the election when everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to win, people already fast forwarding to talk about reconciliation post-election and what most people meant when they said that was how can victorious Democrats be kind and compassionate toward Trump voters who will have lost, right? And so after the election I said, you know what? The result is different but the question remains pertinent. How shall there be reckoning with one another and true re-humanization our politics and a listening across these lines? And my view on this is actually that I don't want to rush to reconciliation, quite frankly, for two reasons. Number one, history shows us, I mean post-Civil War history shows us that oftentimes people want to hurry up and speed along reunion and reconciliation in order to entrench certain forms of injustice. That's how reconstruction ended prematurely, right? But number two, we shouldn't rush to reconciliation because we're where we are because there are in fact deep divides philosophically about the role of government, the role of citizen, the place of the market and we ought to have those fights, right? But my general thought is we shouldn't have fewer arguments in American political life, we should just have less stupid ones. And what that means is actually cultivating arenas and templates and formats for us to have better arguments. And I think you can lay out in American civic life a set of about half a dozen core polarities that we argue over and that we've been arguing over since before the Constitution, right? For those who are Lin-Manuel Miranda fans, it's Hamilton versus Jefferson, it's central government versus local, it's liberty versus equality, it's color blindness versus color consciousness. All of these core arguments that have been unfolding throughout American life in different motifs and in different times. And part of our illiteracy today as a people is that we don't even see those core polarities anymore, we don't talk about them. And so one project that we are undertaking with this heightened sense of purpose because the result was what it was, was to try to have these arguments in a way that can, again, not force an artificial contrived kumbaya, but just how to be grown-ups in how we deal with one another. Thank you very much. And let's give a round of applause to our awesome panel. Thank you very much.