The Resilience Councils will have a third, major task besides gathering civil society input and cooperating with state organs to counter FIMI; they will need to involve citizens. Citizens are to be part of the research process, from developing research questions and hypotheses to interpreting and disseminating the project results. They are seen as separate from academia, policymakers, civil society organisations, and local and regional government officials.
Boston potholes challenge
There have been multiple attempts to actively involve citizens in implementation processes. A major challenge was discovered while engaging citizens in the fixing of potholes. Like in many other cities, Boston (USA) has an app allowing individuals to report potholes. What researchers found is that “quests for sidewalk repairs were concentrated in really wealthy neighborhoods, and those wealthy neighborhoods actually tended to have higher quality streets on average. And, the growth of repairs in those neighborhoods was also higher. So one way to interpret what they found was a sort of "feedback loop" between government responsiveness and future citizen requests.” The apparent reason for this is that “[p]eople that complain about things tend to be whiter, they tend to be richer, they tend to be older.” And when they see that their complaints have an effect, they complain some more.
Involving less privileged communities
The question of how to involve less privileged citizens is a tough one for many governments, both national and local. One solution is to involve less privileged ‘communities’. As became clear at many EU Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) meetings I attended, this is an inconvenient method. To start with, many state organisations choose the easy option of communicating with community representatives only. The problem with this approach is that often these representatives are not backed up by their communities and cannot follow up in their communities.
The alternative is to involve less privileged citizens on an individual level. But, this approach is not only costly and time-consuming, it is also challenging. In many cases, less privileged citizens are underserved by governmental organisations. As a result, many individuals have turned to civil society organisations (CSOs) that offer substitute services. These CSOs, as a rule, are culturally closer to less privileged individuals but often are also politically radicalised against mainstream democratic politics. State organisations on the other hand face a double trust challenge in involving less privileged citizens: one of not providing sufficient services and one of being culturally less similar.
Not state organs
Fortunately, Resilience Councils will not be state organs, even though they will have a legal, formal foundation. They will consist of representatives of CSOs. That does not mean that for the representatives engaging less privileged citizens is a given. The major challenge for them is, like with community representatives, to be sufficiently backed up by less privileged citizens and to be capable of engaging them. When this is not a challenge to them, a next challenge appears. Since these more integrated CSOs might be culturally dissimilar to state organs’ representatives and may be radicalised against mainstream democratic politics, the second challenge is how to include representatives of these CSOs in the Resilience Councils without jeopardising the democratic mission of these councils.
A possible solution: stochocracy
Recently, President of the European Commission Von der Leyen announced a ‘democratic shield’ against FIMI. Although it is currently unclear what his shield is to encompass, what is clear is that societal resilience is to be a cornerstone. In her statement at the European Parliament Plenary on July 18, Von der Leyen mentioned ‘further encourage media literacy programmes’ as a policy recommendation.
It’s obvious that Resilience Councils should be a part of the democratic shield. And, they need to actively engage individual citizens beyond merely providing media literacy. Von der Leyen has a possible solution for just that. In 2022, an experimental conference was organized under the name ‘Future of Europe’ (CoFoE): “An inter-institutional effort by the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council, the CoFoE brought citizens together in four transnational citizens’ panels to discuss several topics in view of developing a series of recommendations on the future of Europe.” (European Policy Centre) From time to time follow-up Citizens’ Panels are organised to provide recommendations to the European Commission and national authorities on policy areas such as combatting hatred. The composition of Citizens’ Panels is based on a stochocratic principle: representatives are selected randomly. Employing this ‘lottocracy’ might be a useful instrument for Resilience Councils too to select citizens to engage with, while circumventing the challenges of the Boston feedback loop, working with representatives, and with potentially radicalised CSOs.
Another possible solution: online communities
The Citizens Agenda is a journalistic initiative to involve citizens more closely in the election process. According to journalism professor Jay Rosen, it consists of identifying one’s target group as a newsroom, asking the target group “what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes”, interpreting the answers, and constantly checking the interpretation. “Now, turn the citizens agenda into instructions for campaign reporting that connects with the issues people care most about. Around the top priorities you can do in-depth journalism. Given a chance to ask questions of the people competing for office, you can turn to the citizens agenda. And if you need a way of declining the controversy of the day, there it is.”
In the field of disinformation Maldita and Mutante are examples of professionals working with online communities.
Maldita
Maldita focuses on questions and reporting (‘crowdsourcing’) from their community. If the community input on a topic passes beyond a threshold (f.i. for hoaxes: more than ten times in one hour), a debunking process is started. This means the misinformation is often not at a viral stage yet, unlike the situation in which social media are monitored.
The fact that people feel heard drives the community. As a result, people trust Maldita. Some individuals in the community check in every day with the Maldita staff in Twitch and Discord channels and treat them as their friends. To keep coping, Maldita has automated a part of the contact with its community.
Mutante
Mutante calls its form of intervention ‘social conversation’. It consists of three phases that were originally conceived as chronological and linear but are currently rather seen as circular or spiral. The first phase is ‘talk’, the second ‘understand’, and the third ‘act’.
‘Talk’ is designed to identify misconstrued forms of understanding reality, either by people not understanding or by people accepting these misconstructions. This identification using asking and listening makes clear which information is to be verified and to be provided in the second phase, ‘understanding’, using a more traditional journalistic approach. In this second phase, Mutante acts as a third actor besides the sender and the audience, by adding its own constructed, non-objective meanings and providing information on one specific topic to which the public is invited to respond. Mutante starts the conversation with journalistic questions that function as a kind of beacon during the conversation. The objective of Mutante’s social conversation is to influence audiences – to hack the context – in order to transform the audience’s understanding of reality towards a more human rights-based understanding. Typically a conversation lasts two to three weeks and ends with meta content in which a summary is given of what has been learned during the conversation as well as an explanation of what Mutante does. In the third phase, ‘act’, a call-to-action is provided which allows for approaching disinformation in a proactive manner. The horizon is to influence public decision-making but Mutante is not there yet, although there were some initial breakthroughs. While the main focus of Mutante is on their communities, it doesn’t see itself as an advocate of these audiences because they are diverse and have different needs. But Mutante does stand with them in the process of action in that it does not just tell people to act but directs its call to action both to itself and its audiences.
TL;DR
Resilience Councils will need to involve citizens in their activities. Two options seem feasible: randomly selecting citizens to engage with or initiating and maintaining online communities.
