Approaches to Civic Intelligence
Class Approaches to Civic Intelligence
The number of approaches to civic intelligence is too large to count or even imagine. Spring 2011 in the program Civic Intelligence: Theory and Practice the class looked at two ways in particular as well as doing individual case studies where we studied organizations who we believed to exhibit civic intelligence.
The SeeMe or Semi-structured, Socio-technical Modeling Method is a modeling method developed in 1997 that was designed to simplify and standardize information systems during presentations so the information is easily understood by all in attendance.
The games projects were group projects in the Spring 2011 Civic Intelligence class made. The outline for the projects was fairly simple: create a game that teaches the people playing the game about civic intelligence.
The class case studies are all excellent approaches to civic intelligence, but going into any great detail in this section would be redundant and rather insulting to the authors who spent ten weeks putting their case studies together.
Real-World Approaches to Civic Intelligence
Other approaches to civic intelligence are group seminars like those practiced at The Evergreen Community College and other colleges as well as the U.S. Congress and other representative styles of government are other examples of the varied approaches to civic intelligence.
Seminars at The Evergreen State College are a part of the daily life of students, in seminar the class discusses the material (be it a movie, a book, a speaker. etc) and how it is relevant to the class as a whole.
Evergreen faculty member David Marr describes the seminar process: Seminars do closely resemble orchestral rehearsals. They are working sessions, full of false starts, much practice, and some extended flights of analysis and synthesis. But the analogy with the orchestra breaks down in one interesting and crucial respect: seminars operate with no equivalent to a musical score. Indeed, it is precisely something like a musical score that gets "composed" in the course of the seminar.
