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Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
>>SATALIA: Josh Lerner is co-founder and executive director of the Participatory
Budgeting Project a nonprofit organization that works with communities across North
America to decide how to spend public monies. His book "Making Democracy Fun"
explains why fun is an essential ingredient for strong democracy. We'll talk about why
Americans love democracy in theory but often hate it in practice, about the history of
games in politics and about why participatory budgeting has fans and critics. Here's our
conversation with Josh Lerner. Welcome to the program.
>> LERNER: Thank you for having me.
>> SATALIA: You're here at Penn State to receive the inaugural Lawrence and Lynne
Brown Democracy Medal for "Exceptional innovation in the advancement of
democracy." First congratulations.
>>LERNER: Thank you. That's a huge honor.
>> SATALIA: And explain a little bit about how you came to the attention of this new
institute, The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State.
>> LERNER: So I direct an organization called The Participatory Budgeting Project. It's
a mouthful. The basic idea is that we give people the power to decide how to spend
their tax dollars. So it's a very simple idea in theory that people should decide how to
spend their tax dollars rather than experts or government officials deciding behind the
scenes. So we took this idea that started out in Latin America and we translated it to the
U.S. and have been spreading it across the country, so empowering people across
different cities to come out to meetings, brainstorm ideas for things they would like to
improve in their community, in their parks, their schools, their streets, turn these ideas
into real projects, put them on the ballot, have a vote and then actually get to decide
how their tax dollars get spent, how millions of dollars get invested in their communities.
>>SATALIA: Before we find out more about how that's working in the United States I
want to talk a little bit about where this all began. It began in Brazil in 1989. Explain
what was happening there and what if anything can be translated? North America is not
Latin America.
>>LERNER: Sure and we tend to think that we know how to do democracy best in the
U.S. and what could we possibly learn from a country like Brazil? But there's actually a
lot of exciting innovations that are taking place in Latin America especially for
democracy and after dictatorship in Brazil in 1989, people were really frustrated with the
lack of opportunities to have a meaningful say and the new party came into power in
many of the cities and they tried to change the budget process, change the political
process so that it was not how much power or how much money or influence you had
that determined what got invested in your community, instead there was one person
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Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
one vote but not just to elect someone to decide for you but actually to directly decide
what government does.
>> SATALIA: When you first saw this you thought it was interesting but it didn't
immediately hit you as something that was transferrable to the United States. What
happened? What changed?
>> LERNER: Yeah, when I first heard about participatory budgeting I had the reaction
probably that a lot of people do that it sounds boring. It sounds kind of wonky and it
wasn't until I started to see people in Toronto where I was living at the time, people in
public housing, very low income, people who don't have a lot of power get really excited
about this process, about deciding how to spend money in their buildings and seeing
how rare it was that they had real power and how exciting this was for them that I
started to see the potential of it and so I went to Latin America for a year, saw how it
works first hand down there. Came back to the U.S. and started to share this idea with
people and most folks said no, that wouldn't work here. Maybe that works in Brazil or
Argentina or Europe or Africa or Asia but never in the U.S.
>> SATALIA: Which is funny because we are so pro-democracy we're trying to spread it
everywhere and yet you say and I think this is great. You write in your book you borrow
a phrase from Oscar Wilde who says, "The problem with socialism," we can change that
to democracy, "Is that that it takes up too many evenings and it's boring."
>> LERNER: Right, so we love democracy in theory but we hate it in practice. So we
pride ourselves in being a democratic country but we really despise our democratic
institutions, our governments, we don't want to come out.
>> SATALIA: We hate going to those meetings.
>> LERNER: We hate going to those boring zoning hearings or town meetings. It
doesn't have to be that way.
>> SATALIA: Well, you talk about Joe Moore who is the first American, in fact they
consider him an American trailblazer for being the first American, he represents the 49th
ward in Chicago, to embrace this whole idea of participatory budgeting. Tell us a little bit
about Joe Moore.
>> LERNER: Yeah, he's a city council member or alderman they call them in Chicago
and he had been in office for around 20 years when we first met. It's in the far northeast
corner of Chicago and he was really struck by this idea of giving people in his
community some real power over money. When he first heard about it he thought,
sounds great, too bad I'm not the mayor. Too bad I can't control this or do this for the
city budgets then he realized he actually did have a pot of money just for his ward for
his part of the city.
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Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
>> SATALIA: Because each ward gets something like 1.3 million dollars for capital
improvements and this is distributed to all of the wards and typically what the aldermen
would decide or how it would be spent.
>> LERNER: Exactly. He would sit down with a couple of his staff for an hour or two and
decide how the money got spent and he may have his finger on the pulse of certain
issues in the community but not others and so he said let's try engaging the whole
community in this process. I should mention too that he had a strong incentive to do this.
He was almost kicked out of office the prior election for being out of touch with the
community which again is something we see all across the country. Elected officials
have been in office for too long. They get out of touch. We get frustrated. We elect
someone new. They get out of touch. We elect someone new. It's a never-ending cycle.
It doesn't really solve to problem.
>> SATALIA: Well the good thing about Joe Moore's taking this on is that he won by a
landslide. People felt suddenly empowered.
>> LERNER: It worked out very well for him politically, so the next election after doing
participatory budgeting beforehand he won in a tight run-off with just 51 percent of the
votes after launching this program he won with 72 percent in a landslide. But the more
important thing is for the community. The community really felt empowered in this and
hundreds of people came out to brainstorm ideas.
>> SATALIA: Four hundred to a meeting that typically would only get a couple dozen.
>> LERNER: nd in this community 1600 people ended up voting to decide on how to
spend this 1.3 million dollars.
>> SATALIA: Tell me exactly how it happened? So a committee would work with Joe
Moore and say these are the kinds of projects we think are important. They'd research
the viability of these projects and then put it out to the public to vote. How difficult is the
voting process?
>> LERNER: The challenging part is taking ideas and turning them into projects that
can actually be done. And that is the part that we usually underestimate how much work
that is so we have typical community meetings where we ask people for their ideas and
we expect that in two hours we'll come up with good ideas and it's really not fair. It takes
experts and staff months or weeks to come up with good ideas and so for participatory
budgeting that's the starting point these brainstorming sessions, town hall meetings but
from there you want to take those ideas and turn them into viable projects you have to
talk with experts at the city. You have to go out and do more research. You have to
have a lot of discussions so that takes several months and that's where you have that
mixing of the technical expertise and local knowledge and at the end of that process you
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get a bunch of really great projects, things that have been vetted by the city or the
government that have a price tag on them that people will really get behind and then
you put those on the ballot for a vote and it's often really hard for people to the actually
decide what to fund because they're all good projects. So we have them think about
government waste and what's money good towards but when you see dozens of
projects that have a direct positive impact on your schools, your parks, your streets,
your libraries people want to fund them all and that's when they realize government is
hard that we have limited resources and unlimited needs and people are really starting
to understand how really difficult it is to make these decisions.
>> SATALIA: And when they see this dozen or so projects that are being voted on, they
can see which one will benefit the community as a whole rather than my little slice of the
park here.
>> LERNER: Exactly, people usually start out with their self-interests. They start out
thinking about what can I get for my community but then they see all the other projects
on the ballot and start to realize that there are other parts of the community that also
have important needs so for example, in New York where we're also doing participatory
budgeting there was a great story in the New York Times, a teacher at a school who got
involved because he wanted some improvements to his school's facilities.
>> SATALIA: The bathrooms.
>> LERNER: Actually before the bathrooms, so originally he wanted improvements to
the garden facilities at his school and he got involved and then through this process he
had to go do research on other schools in the district and find out what their needs were
and he went to a school in a lower income district and found out that the bathrooms
there in this public school there were no doors on the stalls and so kids just weren't
using the bathrooms and they were holding it in and it wasn't a good situation. So he
actually stopped advocating for his own school and started advocating for this other
school that he had never been to before.
>> SATALIA: Yeah, because suddenly he sees the other needs in this community.
>> LERNER: Exactly and that's what this process does. It lets people see how many
different needs there are and through a really safe and thoughtful process let them
reassess what's best for the whole community.
>> SATALIA: So it seems that this would all enhance everyone's sense of community.
>> LERNER: It really does and we find a lot of people and they comment on these
particular needs and they walk out thinking I may have won funding or not but the
important thing is it was a fair process and that everyone's voices were heard and they
had a real say.
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Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
>> SATALIA: But there are some who say, "Well wait a minute. We're the experts.
We're the one in the planning. We have degrees in urban planning and that sort of thing.
We know. This sounds great in theory but I'm not going there."
>> LERNER: Yeah, and it has been spreading very quickly and this is so new still that
we're only starting to see the potential of this so in Latin America it spread all over the
continent and I think we're just starting to see that now. So it's still very early. There are
officials that we talk with who say, "I was elected to decide. That's my job. I don't want to
abdicate my responsibility." I respect that. That's one approach but I don't think elected
officials know everything and we have seen that deferring everything to officials and
experts hasn't worked so well for our economy. The whole financial crisis was largely
the result of us not being involved and saying okay, you experts you decide how thing
get run and what we're hearing across the country is that people recognize this is not
working very well and they want something better. They want a better way. They want
to have a real say in how their money gets spent and recognizing that there's some
technical expertise but there's also a lot of local knowledge. People know their schools.
They know their parks. They know their neighborhoods and if you combine that local
knowledge with expertise elected officials will actually do a better job of governing
because they're actually connected to the community. They're not so isolated.
>> SATALIA: There are supporters obviously of participatory budgets but there are also
critics, those who say the process is too slow. It's agonizingly slow. Communities may
vote on something and I should add that even 16 year-olds are allowed to vote but then
local agencies may say, "This isn't happening." How do you get around those kinds of
problems?
>> LERNER: Yeah, I think it's important to compare this to the status quo. So right now
we have decisions that are mostly made behind closed doors by a handful of people
that often aren't really supported by the public and so things will be built or proposed
and then afterwards people will protest and then you will have hearings and say why did
we have that new housing go up? Why did we have those new renovations? That's very
costly for government having to constantly respond to that criticism, changed plans.
What this does is it brings people into the discussion before so they don't have to just
complain but they can actually proactively propose ideas and what we see is that it
reduces some of those costs of people protesting, having to change plans. It makes
sure that money is spent from the get-go on the top needs of the community not just the
top priorities of the technical experts but there's that real back and forth.
>> SATALIA: The perceived needs and the real needs on the grounds.
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>> LERNER: And also people find really creative ways to get things done to meet needs
for less money and to make the most of our very limited resources if they have some
say. If they have some skin in the game then they will work really hard to find cheaper
ways to get things done, to find matching funds, bring in other resources. We find
actually that places that do participatory budgeting it brings in additional resources from
elsewhere. People will go and look for other funds from the county, from the state, from
other jurisdictions because they see these are good projects and they need more
funding.
>> SATALIA: You wrote a book "Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can
Empower Citizens and Transform Politics." Games? Explain what role games play in
politics and in democracy?
>> LERNER: Right now the main role of games is that politics and democracy is largely
a spectator sport and we're on the outside observing it and it's very unfortunate. I think
that there's a lot of more potential for us to actually be active players in democracy and
in politics and I originally got into this, I had some friends who were game designers and
learned about all of the thinking and great innovation that went into designing games
that were engaging people in meaningful ways and they were all about making
decisions. When you're playing a game you're constantly deciding do you go left? Do
you go right? Where do you kick the ball? All these decisions and they're crafting these
really engaging experiences for people and I didn't see any of that thought going into
planning, organizing, community work, local politics. Instead, we have this model of
three minutes at the mic where you come up to the front of the room, speak for three
minutes, sit back down and usually nothing happens as a result.
>> SATALIA: And the people in the audience are just thinking about what they're going
to say. They're not even listening to the presenter oftentimes.
>> LERNER: And most decisions are already made beforehand and so I think everyone
actually recognizes it's a horrible model. It's painful. It's pointless but we keep doing it
and we could change the way those meetings work. We could change the way people
can engage in democracy. So what the book is really about is how can we redesign the
democracy to make it more engaging?
>> SATALIA: You actually talk about five kinds of games that are particularly relevant to
democracy and also 26 different game mechanics, things that need to be part of the
game to make them worthwhile and work in this context. Tell us a little bit about that.
>> LERNER: So games are very complex systems. So it's not just about adding points
to something kind of like MSG, sprinkle it in and suddenly it tastes good. Games are
very thought through structures and there's a lot that goes into them and if you look at
game designers and the theory and the work they do that there is kind of a mechanics
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Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
to it. So you can think of gears turning to makeup this big system of a game and so
what I did was I looked at those mechanics of games. What are the gears that make
games work and how can we take those and translate them into community meetings,
campaign, events? Part of that is through games, actually playing games, ice breaker
games, team building games things like that but also it's about redesigning decisionmaking and changing those processes so that they work more like games so for
example, having really clear rules when you start a process. So if you go into a meeting
you know what the rules are. Who can say what, what will be decided when, having
some competition and competition can be good. It can be really collaborative actually.
>> SATALIA: But are there winners and losers?
>> LERNER: So there are always winners and losers in politcs in the sense that there
are limited resources, limited things but you can make that competition more
collaborative and artificial. So thinking about soccer is a great example. Soccer is a very
competitive sport. You have two teams going at it. It's also very collaborative. People in
each team are collaborating intensely because of that competition and what I found is
that competition can drive people to collaborate in really productive ways and it doesn't
have to be winner take all. So a lot of the experiences that I talk about in my book and
actually participatory budgeting as well they are a group against system. So you're
competing against this system. Like in Solitary you compete against this system. You
have cards in the system and the cards are trying to beat you essentially. In
participatory budgeting you have groups of people coming up with projects trying to
develop them within the system with constraints of here's how much money we have.
Here is what's technically feasible, what isn't feasible and I find that when people are
given those rules up front and are empowered to have some competition they come up
with really great ideas and then the most important thing is to have real outcomes, real
measurable outcomes so that you know that if participate what will come of it. And it's
not just that you'll be in the meeting. You'll go home and that's the last you'll hear of it. In
participatory budgeting for example you come out to a meeting and you'll decide how
you'll spend a million dollars or however much money it is and that's really meaningful
for people.
>> SATALIA: As innovative as this sounds, you say in your book that there's actually a
long history of games in politics. You go back to the carnivals in the Middle Ages.
>> LERNER: Right, so and unfortunately the games have usually been used as a
distraction from politics, the kind of bread and circus that we have some circus on the
side and give people a little bit of bread and they'll be okay. And so games can be very
manipulative. They can also be disempowering. If you think about a lot of the electoral
politics and the horse race of the electoral politics it puts us right on the sidelines and
we're constantly watching other people duke it out but there's also a history of people in
different organizations and communities in Latin America and the U.S. using games and
meetings to take on more power, to take on more control over their communities.
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>> SATALIA: So far we have the United Nations, the World Bank, the Obama
Administration those three organizations really support participatory budgeting and with
Congress always embroiled in budgeting battles I'm wondering can this what you're
talking about number one making democracy more fun and participatory budgeting
could Congress use this?
>> LERNER: I think so. Not right now. It takes some time and that's one of the big
lessons I've learned from this is that democracy is really hard. So you can take the
simple idea like you should be able to decide how your tax dollars get spent sounds
simple but it's really complicated actually. It's a lot more complicated than we realize
and you need to make sure that you have the systems in place so that you can bring in
the expertise when necessary. You can reach out to everyone in the community and
building up those processes we spent hundreds of years building up processes for
representative democracy. I think we need to spend several years building up
processes for participatory democracy to let real people into that discussion and it will
take some time but I think actually it could work at the national level as well. We've seen
participatory budgeting work at the state level elsewhere, in other countries so this can
be scaled up it just takes a lot of thinking and hard work.
>> SATALIA: One of the pluses about this participatory democracy you say is that it
increases trust in government and it's bipartisan.
>> LERNER: That's right, so the idea that you get to decide the issues that affect your
lives I don't think that's Republican or Democratic. It's small D democratic and that's
what we all should be doing in this country and I find we worked in Republican
communities, Democratic communities, the whole mix and when you start talking about
those concrete needs in communities everyone wants better schools. Everyone wants
better park spaces. Everyone wants better communities and a lot of the rhetoric of
politics tends to fade away when you get into the details and see here's how much
money we have. How are we going to spend it?
>> SATALIA: If you look at where this is happening right now, you mentioned New York
City, we talked about Chicago, in Vallejo in California, in Toronto it's big especially
where they're talking about how to use public funds for housing but I'm just wondering
where else is there interest and do you find that it's more in Democratic ruled cities or
Republican ruled cities?
>> LERNER: Yeah, so there's been interest across the board and across the political
spectrum as well. In New York we're actually working in some Republican communities
as well which is very rare in New York City. But there it's really resonated in Republican
areas. The basic idea that you shouldn't have big government deciding for you that you
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Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
should actually get to decide how your money gets spent and people get that so we've
seen those cities that you mentioned. In Boston there's been a great process just for
young people so youth ages 12 to 25 decided how to spend a million dollars from their
city budgets which is amazingly empowering for these young people who normally don't
have much of a say and here they were deciding how they were going to spend a lot of
money from the city budgets and they're starting up that process for the second year
now.
>> SATALIA: You've been doing this long enough so I'm wondering if you get someone
16 to participate in this and to vote on which project is funded do you find that that
translates to make them a more active person in general elections for example, when
they're of voting age.
>> LERNER: Yes, so there's been some good research on this that shows that people
who participate actively are more likely to join a community organization, go to a
meeting, speak up, read newspapers, stay informed and we're starting to see some
signs that they're more likely to vote as well. It's still pretty early on but in Chicago for
example and in the 49th ward were they have done participatory budgeting the voter
turnout rate in the election following this was 3 percentage points higher than across the
city even though normally it was the same as the city average. So there was a
significant bump there.
>> SATALIA: You've been at this now for more than ten years is there one particular
story that stands out to you that this is why I'm doing this. This is why this is worth
investing in.
>> LERNER: Yeah, so there is a woman that I interviewed in Rosario, Argentina who
had gotten involved in participatory budgeting. She was a teacher in middle class and
she told me of a story after she had been participating for a year. She was dropping off
her son at rugby practice at a sports facility that was near one of the shantytowns, a
very poor or dangerous neighborhood in Rosario and she dropped him off and she was
on her way back home and it was evening and it was kind of cold and rainy and she
saw this family walking on the side of the road with grocery bags weighing them down
and carrying kids and she drove by them and then she stopped and went back and
offered them a ride, total strangers outside of a shantytown, not where you'd normally
stop and pick up hitchhikers and she gave them a ride. She drove them home, dropped
them off and I asked her why did she do this? It didn't seem very wise and she said that
she had spent the past year meeting with people just like that, sitting across the table
from them talking about how to improve their parks and their streets and their schools
and that she now saw them as neighbors. Even if she didn't know those people
individually she knew people like them and felt like she had a responsibility to them and
it really changed how she engaged with her city, with her neighbors and opened her up
to new experiences.
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Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
>> SATALIA: You know that's wonderful. I'm kind of curious what made you so
interested in civic action and in democracy. Did you grow up in a very political family or
why is this important to you?
>> LERNER: I didn't grow up in a particularly activist family. I think one of the turning
points for me is that I was in graduate school getting a planning degree and kind of on
the expert tract of developing that expertise so I could decide and I started to see
people who got engaged who weren't experts and how much they had to add to the
discussion and some of the residents in public housing in the Toronto that they had
great ideas for their buildings that I wouldn't have known about as a technical expert
and realizing that if we brought them in we could actually make better decisions
together and so it's giving people a chance to really speak having a voice and really
listening to them. People don't always have the best ideas at first but if you give them
some support, if you give them information, if you give them time they can make really
good decisions.
>> SATALIA: What do you see as the greatest threats to democracy and why does that
matter?
>> LERNER: The greatest threat for me is that most of us actually hate democracy in
practice that it's very painful for us to engage in democracy that you go to boring
meetings, it's very contentious, people arguing with each other and we've lost touch with
what democracy could be which is about us coming together and deciding on the issues
that affect our lives and making these decisions together in a collaborative process and
I think if we keep thinking of democracy as electing someone else to decide for you that
we're really limiting ourselves. So I'd just like to expand the notion of what's possible
with democracy, that democracy can be all of us making real decisions. It can be
enjoyable. It doesn't have to be this kind of civic chore that you should do but you really
don't want to do and there's so much else that democracy could be.
>> SATALIA: All right, thanks so many for talking to us.
>> LERNER: Thank you.
>> SATALIA: I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Josh Lerner. ComCast
subscribers can watch this program any time on Penn State On Demand. Find out how
through our website conversations.psu.edu where you'll also find more information on
the Participatory Budgeting Project. I'm Patty Satalia. We hope you'll join us for our next
"Conversation from Penn States."
WEB BONUS 1: RECOMMENDED READING
>> SATALIA: What book have you read recently that you'd recommend to others?
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Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
>> LERNER: So I've almost finished "The Fault in Our Stars" which I think will be out in
movie as well. And, for those of you who don't know, it's about a couple teens who are
dying of cancer. And sounds like a very depressing topic, right? It's one of the most
enjoyable books I've read in a while. And I think does a great job illustrating how you
can combine things that are very serious and very fun. It's so a book about kids dying
of cancer, that's hilarious. But it works. And it finds the humor in those very serious real
world experiences so that we can keep going and so that we can make the most of
them. And my work tries to do that as well saying these are very serious topics, these
are millions of dollars we're spending in our community, important decisions about our
neighborhoods. But we can also have fun with it and, actually, will work better if we do
have fun with it.
WEB BONUS 2: DEMOCRACY IN ACTION
>> SATALIA: In Toronto, where citizens who are in public housing are part of the
process, they have actually created something called allocation days. Tell us a little bit
about that, it sounds interesting.
>> LERNER: Yeah so in Toronto, the way participatory budgeting works is that tenants
in each building come together, brainstorm ideas for how to improve their building so
that could be getting your furniture for a rec room, repainting the walls, things like that.
And they pick the top priorities, the top 3 priorities for each building and they select a
delegate, someone to represent that building to go forward. Those delegates from each
building then meets together across the different buildings in the city and they have
these allocation days where the different delegates pitch their building's top idea. And
it's kind of like a game show format where each delegate will get a couple minutes,
they'll have some visuals, maybe do a little skit or a song or a dance and have some
posters and say, here is why we need funding for our building. And then, all the
delegates will vote on which project to fund, they can't vote for their own project though
and that's really important. So you have to look at what of the other projects are most
critical based on your understanding of those needs? And so you have people getting
to know the needs of different buildings across the city, different communities and then
voting which ones to fund.
>> SATALIA: You know as you're describing that, I'm thinking, there have to be people
who are saying, this is trivializing these really important issues and I am not in public
service to entertain people.
>> LERNER: Right so there's this notion that politics is serious and games and fun are
not serious. And I understand where that's coming from. I think it's a mistake that fun is
actually very serious. If you think about the things that we enjoy most, it's not-- you're
not actually sitting there giggling and laughing with a broad smile on your face. Usually
when you're having--
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>> SATALIA: -- You're engaged.
>> LERNER: You're really engaged. When you're having the most fun if you are
playing a game. If you're doing something you're passionate about, you are deeply
engaged and at your peak. And what we've seen in games is that this is when we're
feeling most fulfilled. We're kind of in this below state where there's a perfect match
between the challenges we're confronted with and our abilities. And we're constantly
being tested, but just at the limit of our abilities. That's what fun is. And it feels really
meaningful for people and I think that politics can also be more meaningful if we gave
people a chance to really test their abilities, to apply themselves. And it can make
politics and democracy actually work. So it's not just about making it fun, but in that
process, we can make it work. The other critical point that I want to mention is that
saying that politics and democracy shouldn't be enjoyable is basically saying it's only for
people who like politics regardless of whether it matters, regardless of whether it's
tolerable. So the kind of usual suspects. The people who always show up at meetings,
the people who are usually more affluent, older and we're saying that's who will-- .
>> SATALIA: -- And you're actually seeing that in the United States, that is, compared
with Latin America.
>> LERNER: You do.
>> SATALIA: It is more of the middle income and the middle upper incomes
participating in this.
>> LERNER: Exactly. That's who participates most in politics. And so we're only
seeing the really narrow segment of the population as reflected in politics. And we're
leaving lots of people on the outside. And so if we make politics and democracy
something that people would actually want to participate in, not just the experts, but
people that are ordinary folks who want to participate in, we bring in all these other
voices and make sure that democracy represents us all.
>> SATALIA: I can just hear it now, hey Bill, are you going to the council meeting
tonight? Instead, it's like could you please come to this council meeting.
>> LERNER: Exactly.
WEB BONUS 3: PLAYING GAMES
>> SATALIA: The part I'm thinking of, though, is who can design these games? Can
they go to a shelf or go to your program and say, give me a game that's going to work in
my community for this particular issue?
13
Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
>> LERNER: Yeah so there is a whole industry around serious games. Games For
Change is a national organization that brings together game designers and non-profits.
You can also implement a lot of these lessons learned into your work without a game
designer. And I hope that my book offers some tools for that. What I try and do is
translate some of that expertise from the field of game design into language and ideas
and techniques that you can use in your own community or in your own town. But it is
really important to think that through and to be careful. It's hard to design games. One
of the biggest lessons I learned is how important it is to play test games. So to take it
and test it out by playing it and you realize all kinds of things that would-- you wouldn't
figure out just looking at the instructions. But when you actually start to play it, it's pretty
complicated and you get a ton of great feedback that way. So I couldn't stress that
enough of making sure that you take the time to read about how to do this, to test out
new techniques and there are experts that can help as well.
>> SATALIA: Surgeons will use video games to improve eye hand coordination for
example. Games are used in education, games are used in business, different kinds of
competition, games are used in architecture. These are things, I'm assuming, that
these industries have figured out on their own. Tell us a little bit about why these
games work in all these different venues.
>> LERNER: Yeah so business is a great example of where a lot of big corporations
now are using games both to make their work more effective, but also to identify the
best team members. And so they can look at how people are playing a game like World
of Warcraft and identify some of those core competencies and skills that they would
need in their employees. And so a lot of businesses have realized that games are
actually a great way of building up people's skills. They're a great way of assessing
what people can do. And they've integrated them throughout their work. Government is
a bit behind. Again, the stigma against fun, the stigma against games, but if huge
corporations are recognizing the value of games, I think the government could as well.
>> SATALIA: You look at a company like Google and an integral part of the entire
workday is that people have fun. They want to get up and go to work in the morning
and they don't really want to leave at the end of the day.
>> LERNER: Yep exactly. And that's why there's so much creativity innovation there.
And we can do that in government too. Actually one of the cities that I talk about in my
book, Rosario, Argentina, city council passed a day of games in which staff throughout
the city take half hour, an hour out of their day and play games. And connect with the
community, go out into the streets, and it's been really helpful for stimulating some of
those new ideas, that collaboration, getting people talking with each other.
WEB BONUS 4: EVERYONE COUNTS
14
Conversations from Penn State
Episode 703: Josh Lerner
Transcript
>> SATALIA: What feedback are you getting from your first book, "Making Democracy
Fun"?
>> LERNER: I think people are really eager for new ways to engage so democracy is
spreading throughout all parts of our life, so we can vote on reality shows, on T.V. and
through our stores and corporations and there's so many more opportunities for people
to vote and participate, but not in governments. And we're seeing these kind of old
systems that are very reluctant to change in government. And so I'm finding a lot of
excitement about this, the people have recognized that there can be a better way, that
government and community can actually be meaningful for people, but we have to step
back and really rethink how we're doing things.
>> SATALIA: You have a new book coming out, "Everyone Counts". Tell us a little bit
about it.
>> LERNER: Yeah so that's a book that's being published together with the democracy
medal for the participatory budgeting project. And it's a short little book that talks about
some of the experiences with participatory budgeting like in Chicago that we've talked
about. And it's just an essay so it's meant to be accessible for anyone to read, you can
buy it online, there's apparently a good podcast version so you can listen to it while
you're cooking dinner as well. And what we tried to do is take this concept that sounds
kind of complicated, participatory budgeting, and break it down into stories and terms
that everyone can understand.
>>END OF WEB BONUS QUESTIONS<<