When I first moved to Bowen Island back in 2001, there was a very active discussion board of Bowen Island issues called the Bowen Island Phorum. This was a typical late 1990s bulletin board type website. Locals could join and make posts and sometimes the discussions would cascade over four or five pages with replies into the hundreds on especially contentious or important issues to our little community.
Although that place drove me crazy with frustration a lot of the time, and I used to issue earnest warnings about the tone of some of our debate, which, probably seemed like naive handwringing to the untrained eye, nevertheless, it was our place owned by one of our neighbours and supported by advertising from our local businesses, which is the only way that the host could afford the hosting fees.
Most of us knew each other, and there was the occasional Juventus evening at the pub or the Legion when we would get together with name tags showing our Phorum handles just so we could put a face to the bluster.
When Facebook became widely used around 2010 discussion at the Phorum dried up completely. The first Facebook group for Bowen Islanders was a buy and sell group which very quickly turned into discussions about other things. Another one of our neighbours then created a page called “Bowen Island Everything Else” mostly to take the pressure off the buy and sell page. In short order, that became our de facto community Facebook group. As far as I’m aware every small town and neighbourhood has one now.
Once this shift happened conversations at the Phorum shrank down to a handful of participants. Facebook was just too convenient for everyone to use. In the end, this meant that maintaining the Phorum was pointless. There was no reason for local advertisers to spend their money there and the discussions were faster and more modern over on Facebook. At the same time, of course, generational shifts in how we used discussion sites on the web had changed and those of us who began in the 90s were watching the next generation of users connect on the corporate owned social media sites. The Phorum is gone.
In the last few months, there has been a lot of conversation amongst my friends and neighbours about leaving social media but the one thing they say that will keep them on Facebook is the connection to our local community. While most have found it easy to leave the the gushing torrent of nonsense that now floods our Twitter timelines, with Facebook we still have connections to neighbors.
However, here in Canada, Facebook has refused to pay legacy media for publishing their content, something the other social media sites have done the result of this choice by Facebook is that news links cannot be shared in Canada on that platform. And that means that the conversations that happened on Facebook are almost exclusively rumour and opinion.
It’s also tragically clear to me that many people in our community who participate in Facebook use that site as their only interface to the worldwide web. When links are shared, often the discussion shows clearly that people haven’t read the posted article. People share things like weather alerts or emergency Information without understanding what it means or how it affects them. I realized last week that nothing I get from Facebook is unique to that site. Between our local emergency services app, news and updates from our municipality, buying the local newspaper, (yes we still have one) I get everything I need. If I want opinions, there’s a small group of people I often meet at a local coffee shop or at the pub with whom I can share wildly misinformed lies and speculations. As you do.
So it seems easy enough for me to leave. But as I’ve posted my intention to do so, friends have shared with me their worry that if they leave Facebook, where will they get their local news and stay connected to what’s happening in the community?
And this right here is the cost of us all buying the convenience of Facebook at the expense of the hard work of building community. What happens on Facebook is not community. It is an empty calories version of deliberation and belonging. It gives the illusion of connection and conversation while simultaneously acting the same way big box stores do in small towns: by crushing what is local through convenience and lower prices. The community bears the cost.
And now, there may legitimately be fewer ways for people to connect locally There is no social media platform as easy to use or widely distributed as Facebook. Starting a local mastodon instance might bring in 10 or 12 early adopters, which still might make it worthwhile to do. Resurrecting the Phorum seems unlikely and there are no alternatives to Facebook, thank God.
Upon reflection, I realized that most of the local people that bug me on Facebook I don’t know in real life. There are folks I have blocked over the years, and I couldn’t even tell you if they live here now. I don’t hear their opinions, I don’t know who they are in real life, and I realize now that any irritation they have given to me is basically spectral. They are ghosts in my life. If I were to run into them at the coffee shop or the pub, I would probably like them, because most people around here are likable, and funny and strange and when you meet them face-to-face, it doesn’t really matter what small part of them rages against one politician or another from time to time. When they’re helping you out out of a ditch or sharing a beer around a campfire at the beach, you get to see folks for who they really are. Each one different each one annoying in their own way, but, over time, most become likeable, if not downright loveable, familiars.
Losing these connections is what Facebook has done to us. And when those are gone, so too, are the raw materials of community. Those materials help us to build the connections that we need to rely on one another when disasters or emergencies like fires earthquakes or pandemics strike us. They also just make life worth living.
Thursday, for example, I was running some errands when I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. He invited me to walk with him and his dog and so we did, through the forests down to the sea, checking out some new public works and finally ending up at the pub taking a glass of whiskey together. It was two hours drifting spent in the company of a neighbour talking about whatever struck our fancy.
Building community is slow and inconvenient because it requires you to spend hours hanging out with people and talking about nothing in particular. That’s the point. That’s the feature.This is what awaits us in the other side of the decade and a half we have had of outsourcing our attention and hearts to people with malevolent interests who are working against a slow, delicious, deeply connected sense of belonging.
I’m close to shuttering my Facebook account now. If for some reason, you wanna find me, drop me a note and we’ll go for a beer.?
It is time to leave the enclosures. It is not worth trying to make our social networks work under the terms of unfettered fascists and venture capitalists who prey on our attention for profit.
From time to time I have conversations that remind me of the principles that guide my own work in different aspects of facilitation and engagement. Today, in two different design conversations, I was reminded of these again, and I took a few notes as we were talking. These aren’t the be-all and end-all of good practice, but they are things that roll off the tongue and are basic heuristics for how I structure and facilitate public engagement sessions.
- Ask constructive questions. One of my pet peeves is when folks want to structure a public engagement with a presentation of a half- or well-formed policy proposal and ask “What are we missing?” In most cases once a piece of legislation or a plan reaches the consultation stage, the decision is already made that we are going in THIS basic direction. The “What is missing?” can imply that there is room to throw the whole thing out, or it invites ideological contributions that can derail the conversation. Instead, share material and then ask “what would make this stronger?” or “What would make this fail if we didn’t’t address it now?”
- Foster participant ownership: Real transparency can demand of us that we ask participants to share information with us in their own words, in their own handwriting, and in their own voice. As much as possible, have your participants shape their own input, and make sense of it together. The extent to which you are coding data, making summaries, and writing reports and responses alone and outside of the group’s work, is the extent to which they are being left out of the process. So think very consciously about that.
- Ask authentically curious and open-ended questions: in North American culture we have a pre-disposition to asking yes/no questions. We can often appear very curious in doing so, but a question that leaves only two or three possible answers doesn’t actually allow a person to fill it with their wisdom. A simple example is something like “Do you think this proposal will work?” questions that start with verbs and ending question marks usually logically invite a yes or no answer. So practice crafting a question that allows for thoughtful reflection, and provides answers that you cannot yet see such as “how can you see this proposal working?” or “what is your reaction to what we just shared?” Also, avoid questions like “do you think we should go with this proposal or something different?” which still invites a binary choice even though people may choose to answer it with more detail. If you require a follow up question to make a person’s answer more clear, then ask that question in the first place.
- Clarify how responses are to be used: There is nothing worse than being invited to a public consultation meeting only to have your ideas dismissed or ignored. Perhaps the only thing worse is being invited to a process where you believe you are helping to make a decision when in reality the decision is being made elsewhere. I call this “engagement washing.” It’s so important to frame public meetings so that participants are clear about what is happening and what is not happening so that they can make an informed choice to participate and how to participate.
- Facilitate difference, not consensus: Most public engagements are not decision-making processes. Many times in my career I have had to hold decision-makers accountable for making decisions and not outsourcing them by saying “the community needs to agree on this before we implement it.” The role of the community is to be a difficult, diverse, conflicted, heterogeneous, mass of opinions and ideas. Decision makers are elected to make decisions in that context. When facilitating public engagement, I tell my clients that our job will be surfacing differences and not arriving at consensus. Illuminating differences helps decision-maker make good strategic choices and helps them to understand the costs and impact of their decisions.
- PAvoid the tyranny of inclusion. Many engagement processes suffer from what I call the tyranny of inclusion. This operates when we believe we need to respond to every single comment and piece of advice equally. Practically speaking, that requires us to respond to a focus group or expert panel in the same way as we might respond to an anonymous troll who left a comment in passing on a survey form or in a social media thread. When structuring engagement processes, I usually shape circles of engagement that make it clear that the more responsibility you have for the outcome. The tighter the feedback loop for your advice. This principal goes hand-in-hand with design principles of equity of voice and inclusion of different lived expertise in engagement and decision-making, and there is no perfect balance.
- Engagement practice can sustain or undermine democracy: in the courses I teach on engagement I stress this point constantly: how we engage affects people’s feelings and trust of democratic processes. Engagement processes that are restrained, restrictive, or opaque signal and unwillingness to engage with the messy realities of community and citizen. Open, validating and meaningful engagement that can help shape public policy. Decisions helps build, and strengthen democratic participation. This should go without saying, but seeking efficiencies in engagement processes can have the effect of smoothing over all the tricky bits that make democracy and participatory life rich, creative, and co-owned. So be conscious about the choices you make when structuring engagement.
So those are a few. There are many more besides these, not to mention rigorous thinking about power. But these are among the most important ones to begin with for me.
Thomas Homer-Dixon writing in the Globe and Mail this weekend:
Constitutive moments are a special kind of historical inflection point. Powerful actors like U.S. presidents always operate within a constellation of macro-trends, cultures, institutions, and social and political alliances. But during constitutive moments, they have a rare opportunity to radically reconfigure that constellation because the usual constraints on selecting from, combining, and adjusting its elements are greatly weakened. The systems they’re operating within are abnormally susceptible to massive change.
Leaders who effectively exploit these opportunities can create not just profoundly new ways of doing things, but also new ways of seeing things. A constitutive moment shifts our deepest understandings of the world and its possibilities, and to the extent that these understandings partially create the world around us, it shifts our world’s essence itself
I’m coming back from nearly 2 weeks working in the United States and I would be lying if it didn’t feel like it was a little bit like watching the film of people enjoying the last few minutes of their holiday before the tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004. I’m not sure if the foreboding dread I feel for my friends and colleagues in the States is an over-reaction, or whether I’m not taking it seriously enough. I think Homer-Dixon‘s article captures it quite well. It’s a constitutive moment, and what that means remains to be seen, but I’m reading articles about the fragility of Canada and our inability to meet what’s coming without strong and visionary leadership. I’m reading articles and opinions I never imagined would appear in mainstream newspapers. I see that we are at a loss. Mired in the apprentice moment.
The people we’ve been working with over the past two weeks, in academic institutions in Texas, and community organizations, and foundations, and frontline agencies in Alaska, are the best people. They are the folks that will be present for what’s coming. They are the ones who are always extending care, who are putting the best interests of their students and clients and colleagues front and center. I leave them feeling concern and love and admiration for them. Many are scared. Some are ready. Others are welcoming this moment. It’s not simple.
We truly have no idea what is coming. And so I leave this montage of four images which I took on a walk around downtown Seattle on Saturday, and which captured my mood and the feeling of the city on a beautiful cold, perfectly clear, January 18, 2025.
Our ferry, Queen of Capilano, sailing in Snug Cove back in 2009 before she had her capacity increased.
Got word today that BC Ferries is embarking on an initiative to renew their community engagement practices. This is important to me because I rely on BC Ferries to get to and from my home on Bowen Island to te mainland. They are a critical player in coastal life in British Columbia. in 2003 the government of BC, a liberal party who favoured privatization, turned them from a Crown Corporation (and operating entity owned by government to serve the public good) to a private corporation. Or at least a quasi-private corporation; the province owns the only share. This was largely done to get BC Ferries capital debt off the government’s books so they could show that they were combatting public debt. It was a bait a switch game, but it has not improved services for Islanders in BC. It has become less accessible for Islanders to voice concerns and propose solutions because its the services contract that guides operations (the Province has a fixed price services contract with the company) and not actually public needs. This is what happens when you privatize public services. You get enshittification because the company needs to shift its focus from public service to operational sustainability, and in the cases of purely commercial organizations, profit and return to shareholders
BC Ferries used to have Ferry Advisory Committees in the communities where they operate, and these FACs, as they were known, were important channels for communications between islanders and the company. Increasingly it seems like these haven’t been very effective, as FACs can’t really influence capital construction, and at least on our island, BC Ferries has been completely unwilling to work with us on issues like ferry marshalling, traffic management and service improvements.
Now they are reinventing their process and have started an engagement process to do so. I breathed a big dispirited sigh when I saw that they are calling the first phase “best practice research.” There are no “best practices” for how to deal with the kinds of issues BC Ferries is facing either as a company or in its interaction with our island. We are in literally unprecedented times.
The advise I will be giving to BC Ferries will be that they need to adopt a approach to working with Bowen Island, and other island communities, that seeks to develop experiments and small changes that can help us learn more about how to make things better. We have many challenges and Islanders have a lot of ideas with respect to traffic management, marshalling, services schedules, equipment, collection of fees and infrastructure development, especially as they get closer to the scheduled Snug Cove Terminal capital project. Now is the time for us to experiment and find what works. I would also advise them to work with a group of citizens on Bowen who can act as a kind of ongoing citizens assembly – studying the problems together, learning about constraints, and co-creating ideas which BC Ferries can help implement. What is required for that is for BC Ferries to trust Islanders and to be a part of the solution by offering time, money and influence resources to see what we can discover by putting some ideas into play. I’ve signed up to receive their communications. I’m not too confident they will adopt the kinds of approaches I’m talking about, but I’ll let them know.