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99 Nat'l Civic Rev. 2 (2010)

handle is hein.journals/natmnr99 and id is 1 raw text is: Note from the Editor Imagine you are a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a Democrat, say, who represents a swing district, and you've decided to conduct a town hall meeting so you and your con- stituents can discuss the issue of health care reform. This is the frightening scenario authors David Campt and Matthew Freeman conjure up in their article on keypad polling in this issue of the National Civic Review. I say frightening because some of those town hall meetings in the summer and fall of 2009 did not go as planned. Perhaps the media exag- gerated the extent of the mayhem by focusing on the worst dust-ups, but who can forget the scenes of shouting, sign wav- ing, booing, and name calling? One or two punches were thrown. People were even arrested. The authors' purpose in offering this hypothetical scenario is not to rehash the bitter debate over health care reform but to illustrate the potential benefits of audience response sys- tems, or ARS, in conducting public meetings. With ARS, a facilitator projects multiple-choice questions on a large screen. Handheld devices have been distributed to members of the audience, and they push buttons to respond anony- mously. The results are tabulated by computer software and can be displayed on the screen almost immediately. You may have participated in one of these meetings. You may even have thought the punching of keypads was a nice little mechanism to make you feel you were contributing some- thing. But the authors in their essay make a convincing case for ARS being more than just nice-to-have. David Campt is an expert on civic engagement, large meeting design, and programs for increasing institutional diversity. He has worked for an array of clients, among them the White House, members of Congress, the mayor of Washington, D.C., FEMA, and various foundations, universities, and nonprofit organizations. Matthew Freeman is a diversity specialist and dialogue practi- tioner; his clients have included the National Institutes of Health, Andover Newton Theological Seminary, Leadership Metro Richmond, the University of South Dakota, and New Detroit. Audience response systems, they write, allow each partici- pant in a meeting to have their voice heard on issues. They foster a greater sense of connectedness and community. Finally, they often push participants to a more nuanced under- standing of the complexities of finding solutions to problems for diverse populations. In a typical meeting, only the loud- est and most aggressive participants will get a chance to express their opinion. By contrast, keypad polling allows each individual to directly express a perspective on whatever questions are asked, note the authors. Whether they get to the microphone or not, each person's opinion is acknowledged and counted equally. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) 2 National Civic Review DOI: 10.1002/ncr.20001 Spring 2010 In some public meetings (again, the health reform town halls come to mind), it is difficult to know whether the feedback is representative. Is it a cross-section of a district or town, or a handful of the most passionate advocates on either side? By asking participants for demographic information, public offi- cials and audience members alike get an accurate reading of who is in the room; this allows everyone to know the degree to which meeting attendees are or are not representative of the community, neighborhood, or district. While acknowledging the individual contribution of each person, keypad polling simultaneously directs public attention to the diversity of answers in the room, they write. The authors take readers through two hypothetical scenarios. One is the aforementioned town hall on health care reform. The other is a meeting held by the local planning department to discuss a plan for downtown development. Each scenario is explored in some detail, for a clear illustration of how strategic use of keypads could result in much more pleas- ant, productive, and satisfying meetings. Finally, the authors address potential concerns that public officials might have about using keypad polling, notably cost, difficulty of implementing new technology, and the possibility of system failure. Polling technologies allow public officials to simultaneously probe the minds of an entire group of participants, the authors conclude. Not only does this allow every person in a group to have more opportunity to speak to the public official about issues of concern, but the official can leave the meet- ing with a quantitative picture of the group's perspective. These days, when we think about technology and how it can improve democracy, we often focus on such things as Internet forums or social networking tools, but keypad polling may be an underappreciated innovation. Groups such as America- Speaks have used it and other techniques to convene produc- tive dialogues on recovery planning in New Orleans, rebuilding at Ground Zero in New York, and, yes, even health care (see Pete Peterson's article on Common Sense California in this issue). Who knows whether we could have avoided the shoving matches and name calling during the health care debate? Some of those crowds were pretty determined to disrupt the process, and it seemed that nothing was going to change their minds. But at the very least it would have helped the people organizing those meetings get a sound reading on who was in attendance. It would have also given the quieter members of the audience a chance to be heard above the shouting. Michael McGrath Editor ier ScienC

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