Residents
Be quiet! Why? The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king. Why do you think that she is a witch?
Who are they?
It’s complicated. We would refer to them as people who live or work in the community, and those who are affected by policies, products, and services in that community. With social media and quick communication, the distance between where one is a resident and where ones’ community is blurring.
On Community
Complicating this player is the term Community. It often obscures more than reveals, and is often a very personal and unique definition, with local context being key. We think of community is a local grouping of people, at a specific place, at a specific point of time, who come together as the body politic. Eesh.
The combination of people, commerce, memory, and technology makes pinning down community difficult, and the concept of Intersectionality is actually quite helpful in helping define community.
Using neighborhoods is also problematic: some places such as the greater Chicagoland area’s neighborhoods are strictly defined by statute, where in New York the real estate complex is constantly trying to redefine neighborhoods in order to make them more desirable.
That’s why community - while messy - is where we’ve gotten to.
On Residents, not Citizens
Note: we might have used the word citizen in the past, but that term is both not correct and doesn’t describe the actual facts on the ground. Each community is made up of a unique mixture of citizens, resident aliens, visitors, and those who are undocumented. This isn’t some sort of political correctness not to use citizen, but rather a true accounting of the whole people who reside in a locale.
Needs
- Awareness of what is happening in their community, and the time to comprehend and react to this change
- Greater context of how these changes might actually affect residents
- Reduction in fear-mongering
- Confidence that their civic institutions are listening to them, and that the process is fair
Tactical Democracy is a toolkit to help you make meaningful person–to–person engagement in order to empower successful communities.
Learn about the Mindsets you need, how the Players behave and act; what Situations might be best to
deploy Tactics for engagement, to move the Players through their Journey, creating deeper empowerment.
Whoa, there's a lot of terms – check out the Glossary of Terms, and if you want to see everything, goto the sitemap.