Moody’s Chapter Six Discussion Questions:
- Simmons uses the majority of chapter six to explain the Office of Environmental Quality (OEQ) website on storm water pollution prevention. Simmons explains that after asking the community what types of things they would like to see on the website and observing how community members used the website, the students asked Simmons’ information design class to join the project and help with website development. Simmons explains on page 148 that “effective civic websites…must go beyond special software and even typical usability issues to address how useful the site is for helping citizens address the complex and messy problems they must solve to participate in environmental decisions.”
Search the web for examples of civic websites (“that is, websites designed, in part to encourage public involvement” (pp. 148). Try to find one which obviously attempts to encourage citizen involvement and one which looks as though citizens’ concerns were not even considered. Explain what makes each website citizen-friendly or unfriendly. If you are unable to find an example of each, just try to find two substantially different designs and what you think they are doing right or wrong to encourage citizen participation. Post links to the websites in your response.
- Simmons uses the end of chapter six to discuss service learning projects for students in composition and technical communication courses. Simmons expresses the importance of making sure the students are “require[d]…to consider multiple stakeholders in an issue [and] encourage[ing] students to see their work as change not charity” (pp. 150). Simmons further states that students must learn to be “user advocates outside of the classroom” (pp. 151).
Examine your own life experiences. Do you have a moment which stands out as an example of when you acted as a “user advocate?” Perhaps you have been involved in a service learning project; if so, do you think that it prepared you in the way Simmons explains it should have? Why or why not? If you have not participated in a service learning project or cannot think of a time you were a user advocate, discuss how you would design a service learning project if you were a composition or technical communications teacher. Be sure to model your design off of the principals explained by Simmons.
Moody’s Epilogue Discussion Questions:
- During the first half of the epilogue Simmons discusses the Army’s hurried attempts at finding a place to dispose of the VX agent, due to time constraints levied after the September 11 attacks. Simmons discusses on page 159 that “as of September 2006, the neutralized VX was still stored in intermodal shipping containers at Newport.” On page 158 she explains that an independent study showed that “terrorists could form [the neutralized VX] back into VX by changing the PH with household vinegar.” On page 160 Simmons states that it isn’t fair to withhold information from the public under the guise of national security because it “makes it more difficult for citizens to access information that enables them to make informed decisions about their lives and communities.”
Is it possible that Simmons’ focus is too narrow at this point in her argument? The information she provides on pages 158 and 159 not only tell a terrorist how to revert VX agent but where a whole lot of it is stockpiled. Would it not be better to make that sort of information difficult to discover, even if it means that normal citizens have difficulty accessing the information and as such have difficulty making informed decisions? In Star Trek Spock famously stated, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Simmons’ argument seems to contradict Spock’s sentiment. Share your thoughts on this take. Do you agree with Spock or with Simmons?
- Toward the end of the epilogue Simmons starts to examine how technical information is provided to the public. Simmons’ argument is that it is the responsibility of subject matter experts to “dumb down” their technical information or create more user-friendly interfaces so that the general public can more easily access it.
It is well known that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for not following the law. Society accepts this fact and convicts criminals for committing an offense regardless of whether or not they claim ignorance. This standpoint asserts that since the law is publically available, the public should know it. Lawmakers do not go out of their way to “dumb down” the technical language of the law or to create user-friendly interfaces for citizens to locate and understand the law. Should information about environmental policy be any different? Share your thoughts about why or why not you feel the way you do.
Writing Public Science 
Search the web for examples of civic websites (“that is, websites designed, in part to encourage public involvement” (pp. 148). Try to find one which obviously attempts to encourage citizen involvement and one which looks as though citizens’ concerns were not even considered. Explain what makes each website citizen-friendly or unfriendly. If you are unable to find an example of each, just try to find two substantially different designs and what you think they are doing right or wrong to encourage citizen participation. Post links to the websites in your response.
Here is the first website that I came across. http://www.udel.edu/cpc/ At first, it seemed like a good candidate for a website that promoted public engagement. As I scrolled down I saw lots of great charts and graphs. I thought, “this is great, there’s a lot of information in here.” However as I began to look around for places where the public could comment, for example, I didn’t see anything. I think this might be a great place for the public to gather information but not to give feedback. How disappointing.
The next website I came across seemed to do a better job. http://www.engage.northwestern.edu/about/index.html Here there are all kinds of programs listed where students can get involved which is great. I think it could have been better if there was also a call to get the public involved but most of the sites I found were run by universities attempting to interest their students in making a difference in community. While the is a good idea for hopefully setting up future citizens involved, I wonder why there didn’t seem to be more out there designed to meet the needs of your average Jane or Joe. Are college students and/or college grads the only opinions that a community should value? I think not.
It is well known that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for not following the law. Society accepts this fact and convicts criminals for committing an offense regardless of whether or not they claim ignorance. This standpoint asserts that since the law is publically available, the public should know it. Lawmakers do not go out of their way to “dumb down” the technical language of the law or to create user-friendly interfaces for citizens to locate and understand the law. Should information about environmental policy be any different? Share your thoughts about why or why not you feel the way you do.
I don’t necessarily think that the information should be dumbed down but I do believe terms should be defined. Those who do not work in the field (whatever field that may be) don’t have the privilege of knowing what the so-called experts are talking about. For example, I could throw a bunch of pharmacy terms that I am familiar with to a patient who comes to pick up her medication when she asks me a question when I am perfectly capable of explaining it in laymen’s terms. And I have done this before but it is usually by accident and not intentional. However, this would not be good practice. Though I suppose some might argue that this only true in the scenario because the patient is involved in my work, i.e. he or she is the one taking the medication and not me, however I say it applies to any situation where the public is affected either directly or indirectly by the decision being made. Simmons certainly proved her point about this with the UX example.
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Thank you for your post, Lisa!
I think you bring up an interesting point about college websites being the most abundant civic websites available. I wonder if this is because there hasn’t been enough of a public call-to-arms about civic discourse which would encourage any entity to publish a website for the general adult public? Just a thought.
Also, in regards to your statement, “I don’t necessarily think that the information should be dumbed down but I do believe terms should be defined.” I think that one issue Simmons has is that when information IS defined it is often defined in terms which do not clarify meaning. Much like the definition of nonpartisan which states “not biased or partisan.” This type of definition requires the definition to be defined. In complex systems of government these types of confusing non-definitions require a spiderweb of defining in order to get a grasp of the concept.
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Good point, Catherine. I guess I just assumed that it was given that definitions should avoid jargon and other words that the public doesn’t understand.
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Option 1, Question 4:
It is well known that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for not following the law. Society accepts this fact and convicts criminals for committing an offense regardless of whether or not they claim ignorance. This standpoint asserts that since the law is publically available, the public should know it. Lawmakers do not go out of their way to “dumb down” the technical language of the law or to create user-friendly interfaces for citizens to locate and understand the law. Should information about environmental policy be any different? Share your thoughts about why or why not you feel the way you do.
This is a really interesting comparison you’ve made here, legal law versus environmental policy. Responsibility in and of itself is such a tricky, difficult, abstract concept to pin down. Who is responsible in this act of knowledge transfer? The content specialists or the general public? After reading Simmons’ text, I think we’d all agree that it should be a relationship that values and depends on both parties. It should never be a wholly one-sided affair. It is the responsibility of both the public and the specialists (whether they be cops or Army engineers) to foster effective and useful communication on important issues that impact all parties involved.
But I do, in some parts, disagree with the statement that “lawmakers do not go out of their way to ‘dumb down’ the technical language of the law.” In fact, I think this is evident everywhere. Simple signs throughout parks and roadways prohibiting littering and other such offenses, often using simple, accessible language and imagery, helps inform the public that they cannot litter or pull off on a certain roadway or access restricted roads. I find most road signs of this nature to be extremely “user-friendly” so that even teen drivers for the most part understand what they can and cannot do on the road. Additionally, I feel like the majority of crime is committed knowingly. Often, many laws do not even need to be so clearly expressed or communicated because they have traditional power and have been engrained as parts of our society. We all know you can’t go into a store and take something without paying. It’d be silly and useless to post a sign outside every store. We know we cannot do this. Many would even feel a tangible sense of guilt, a bodily reaction, to theft. This is because society has effectively informed us of this through acculturation and other methods.
So I find we have a bit of a strawman argument here. No information should be intentionally restricted from the general public who is affected by it. As citizens, we have the right to this information – yet, we also have the responsibility to meet policy-makers and technical experts halfway by educating ourselves and taking action over issues we care about. I find, in many ways, we’re growing into a complacent society and putting all of the responsibility on politicians and experts is an evident effect of this. Policy-makers need to care for and value the opinion and input of the general public, but we as a public also need to make the effort to get involved, educate ourselves, and find effective ways to get involved and make an impact.
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Thanks for your post, Zach.
I would like to clarify that the types of laws you mention in your post are not the ones I had in mind when I wrote the question. The ones you mentioned are “dumbed down” you are correct. However, as an experiment, try to find out if a panhandler is breaking the law or not the next time you see one, based on that city’s ordinances. I can almost guarantee you that #1, it will be hard to find the local ordinances unless you know where to look. #2, that the language in the ordinance will be confusing at best. and possibly #3, you won’t even know the proper term to use the search function for finding the appropriate ordinance.
Your last paragraph is a very good summary I think. It really is more than just the lawmakers and S.M.E. who need to try to reach the public. The public has been increasingly expecting to be catered to by “the powers that be” rather than taking responsibility for their own lives.
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Ahh, I see, that makes a lot more sense. Thank you for the clarification 🙂 It’s interesting you bring up the panhandler issue – while I lived in Tampa, FL, our city was in the flux of passing quite a bit of legislation on panhandlers and the chronic homeless condition that seemed to be on the rise. One such piece of legislation that passed was that all the panhandlers trying to sell newspapers from roadsides or street medians (which was actually quite a bit) had to all wear orange safety vests. In theory, this seems difficult to enact given your population. But somehow, almost overnight, you’d see consistent orange vests on the panhandlers. I’m not sure how this new bill was enacted so quickly, but I found it surprising.
I think this comes down to government communication at the local level. Initiating a nationwide law like this, yes, would be really difficult, but somehow, the city of Tampa managed to communicate this issue and enact it rather quickly. Looking back, i think there was also some private help as well, since the local newspapers were implicit in the issue, and as a result, covered it quite frequently in their publications.
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In searching the web for civic websites my first thought was government (city/state) websites. A lot of information is typically given but there is not typically a lot of ways for the public to actually respond.
One website I reviewed was http://www.ccpa.net/. For a government website it offers a lot of information. The website gives many drop down menus dedicated to informing the citizens of things happening in their community, public records, important meetings, alert systems to sign up for, press releases, and even the ability to see open projects for bids. I also noticed an extensive list within the contact me area along with different people that work in that department. I don’t live in Pennsylvania and I don’t know how easy it is to actually contact someone but the website gives the image that it is an easy task. The only thing not directly on their website was an area for the public to share opinions but the website did provide links to twitter and facebook which they seem to update regularly.
Another website I looked at was http://www.foia.gov/. Although it looked promising as it deals with the Freedom of Information Act it seems to only be a gateway to view reports and data but as far as requesting public involvement…there was not a thing to see. Even the Feedback link was a chore to use.
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Thank you for your post Rebekah!
How interesting it is that the website for the Freedom of Information Act doesn’t encourage public involvement. At least it gives the public information, but it does lack in the involvement sphere. As you said, it looked promising and really is an ironic website to not encourage complete civic engagement.
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Great example here. As you mention it does seem like these sites are primarily focused on delivering information, delivering the final product, and not seeking outside construction or input from the general public (or really anyone). I did also navigate to the ‘Contact Us’ section and found the list of explicitly stated numbers to be helpful, but it’s smart to consider if this is really that helpful, or like when calling the cable company, are you thrown through loops of automated bots and re-connections? Maybe this proves that to truly assess the accessibility of a site/web-text, what have you, one must be a local of that environment and have had to use it in a real-life scenario? Interesting to consider. I also found the ‘Contact Us’ section, while clear and direct, to be less aesthetically pleasing than the site as a whole, as if they just dumped the contact info in there and wanted to move on.
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3) Is it possible that Simmons’ focus is too narrow at this point in her argument? The information she provides on pages 158 and 159 not only tell a terrorist how to revert VX agent but where a whole lot of it is stockpiled. Would it not be better to make that sort of information difficult to discover, even if it means that normal citizens have difficulty accessing the information and as such have difficulty making informed decisions? In Star Trek Spock famously stated, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Simmons’ argument seems to contradict Spock’s sentiment. Share your thoughts on this take. Do you agree with Spock or with Simmons?
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here a little bit and go the pro-expert pro-authority route. I touched on this a bit with one of my responses to the Option 2 questions for this week when I discussed my thoughts on the Army creating a barrier between themselves and the public in this case. I do think that Simmons’ focus is somewhat narrow here, although I can certainly see both sides of the argument. However, my question is, even if the public is involved and even if their opinions are considered, what if collectively their majority opinion is more likely to cause a detriment to the population? Does there not need to be an authority figure somewhere in this process to determine that? This is not to say that the public is not capable of thinking for themselves. This is to say that everybody is capable of being wrong, whether that be the public or the experts. But is there not a need to entrust that decision to a specific leader or leadership part? Otherwise, everything would be complete pandemonium. I was sitting through a presentation about leadership styles yesterday, and the presenter focused on three primary styles: 1) authoritative 2) democratic and 3) laissez-faire. Now, despite the fact that the presence of the leader varies throughout all of these styles, is there not always a leader present? Yes. At the end of the day, someone has to be the one to pull the trigger, even the democratic-style leaders. The public can make suggestions collectively, and those suggestions might be more or less considered depending on the participatory model, but is there not always one leader or leadership group calling the shots? Can the public ever be considered a leader, and how do we know for sure that our opinions are being considered? How do we know they’re NOT being considered? Maybe a leader makes a decision that they feel is best despite considering the public’s opinion – does that make them a dictator villain? I don’t think so. We created these positions in the first place because we trust them to have a greater degree of say about things; if it were always up to the general public, I doubt we would fare so well.
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Thank you for your post Brittany!
I think your opinion and my opinion are very much in line with each other. I chose to write this prompt this week because I thought it might ruffle a few feathers and promote some good debate, so I was surprised that your response actually agreed with my opinion on the matter. You make a great point that governments of any sort require the public to agree upon a leader who ultimately makes decisions for the masses. The public agrees that this leader is capable of making the tough decisions which can sometimes affect them negatively. I felt as though Simmons focused so hard on her thesis that she didn’t allow herself to include that point in her argument. But great points you made, i appreciate your response.
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Yeah, I appreciate Simmons’ stance on it no doubt and she supported her argument well, but she neglected to consider both sides and more or less made these organizations all sound like skilled manipulators. That may or may not be true, but I know it’s not always true. Also the older I get the more I realize the importance of asking questions and not just assuming everyone knows what they’re talking about – and that applies just as much to the public as it does to these leaders. There are plenty of people out there whose opinion I WOULDN’T want involved in major decisions that would affect my life (I think everybody can agree on that), even if they are given access to the appropriate resources for educating themselves.
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On this same note, I just watched a good TED Talk about leadership and what makes a good leader that I think can tie into our discussion.
At about the 7:10-7:15 minute mark, Simon shifts his gears and talks about an organization that doesn’t punish their employees for poor performance – instead, they coach those employees and offer them assistance. While his conversation is focused on employees within an organization, I think we can also apply this to the public and government officials, organizations, the military, etc. If these organizations who are in leadership positions COACH and HELP the public understand the issue, rather than punish them by shutting them out of the issue entirely, the public would naturally respond with trust and would feel a sense of confidence and safety. Even though the decision rides on the organization, which is how most of the decisions we’ve been discussing do, it is evident that those organizations care because they extend helpful information. Government organizations could benefit in these policy-making scenarios if they were to hire independent technical communicators or SME’s to come in and teach the public the technical side of things. Simmons’ work was full of feelings of mistrust and mistreatment, but perhaps the only thing needed to bypass that is this sense of teamwork. We already know that the public has a valuable perspective and has knowledge that experts and leaders won’t have -all they have to do to get it is establish this understanding of trust and camaraderie. If their goal really is to make the best decision for the masses, this should be a no-brainer. You can’t win anything by ticking off your “teammates,” even if you do have expert knowledge that they don’t have.
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