[email protected] wrote:
The following is an excerpt from a piece in this morning's Inquirer.
I'm genuinely sickened by the thought that the city is going to run four
of what we, in UC, have come to know and hate as the "Foregone
Conclusion Forums" run by Harris Sokoloff -- now not just a prof in
Penn's Graduate School of Education but the "director of the Project for
Civic Engagement." We've all seen how these shams operate -- a
discussion carefully framed by the people who sponsor and run them,
leading to vague conclusions supposedly given credence by calling them
"principles" (or am I getting that term wrong?). Then the sponsors claim
-- well, the name says it all -- "civic engagement."
Al Krigman
From the Inquirer:
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Then, at 7 that night, the first of four community budget workshops
will take place, in which residents will have an opportunity to
consider actual city budget data for the 2010 fiscal year.
Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Project for Civic
Engagement, the forums will be run as workshops, and residents will
be able to comment on the budget decisions facing department leaders.
"We have interactive small-group exercises for citizens to work
together to figure out what they are and are not willing to live
with, and what we learn from that will become the advice we give to
the city," said Harris Sokoloff, director of the Project for Civic
Engagement. "We'll see what happens."
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without penn's help, the mayor held a series of 'town
meetings' about the city budget back in december, in the
wake of the news about the library cuts:
http://youngphillypolitics.com/mayor_nutter039s_town_hall_meeting_schedule
ironically, without even attending the first of these
meetings, sokoloff was pre-emptively telling us how the
mayor's meetings were all wrong and how he (sokoloff & co.
-- penn/inky's great expectations project and the penn
project for civic engagement) had it right:
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/opinion/20081126_Making__town_hall__meetings_work.html
the further irony here is that sokoloff & co. had already
conducted, in the spring, 10 forums on the budget -- one in
each city council district -- where citizens were asked to
talk about the mayor's six major budget areas.
who is in charge here? and when? who decides when 'town
forums' are done right and when they're done wrong? what is
an average citizen to think?
..................
UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
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