A Network Of Networks In San Diego – The Envision San Diego initiative hopes to shape a vision for the future of San Diego.

Envisioning a civil society

In "The Jihad vs. McWorld," author Benjamin Barber describes the Jihad as "the bloody search for bloodlines" and McWorld as "the bloodless search for markets." What is missing, Barber argues, is the call for "the commonweal" – the public good, the common goal at the heart of every free democratic society.

By John M. Eger

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040603/news_lz1e3eger.html

"Our world and our lives," he said, "are caught between what William Butler Yeates called "two eternities of race and soul, that of race reflecting our tribal past, that of soul anticipating the cosmopolitan future."

For the last several years, the San Diego Foundation and San Diego State University President Stephen Weber have been involved in an effort to "create a civil society," a program concerned with yet another dilemma as trend-interpreter Daniel Yankelovich might call it "for the soul of San Diego." In "The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict Into Cooperation," Yankelovich argues there is a "struggle between two one-sided visions of our future; the vision of the free market and the vision of the civil society."

"Underlying the first vision," he says, "is the conviction that in the new global economy, the free market, driven by technology and entrepreneurship, will shape a more prosperous, democratic and secure world than we’ve ever known. The conviction for supporting the second is that to renew our society and halt its moral decline, we must return to the noble – and profoundly traditional – dream of America as a city on a hill. In practice, this means finding a way to strengthen the values of community, faith, responsibility, civic virtue, neighborliness, stewardship and mutual concern for each other, values that are not inherent in the free market economy."

Last December, President Weber announced the formation of Envision San Diego: The Creative Community, a five-year commitment to create a new forum for civic engagement to serve our region. At its heart is a plan to bring our neighborhoods and the media together to start a community-wide dialogue to help define what our common future looks like and, in the process, bring these two forces or visions together.

The timing for such an effort is more urgent than ever, for as we enter the 21st century, creativity and innovation will be our greatest assets and hopefully lie at the heart of our greatest exports. We are fortunate to have a strong and growing high-tech and biotech business presence in our community and are optimistic that together we will form the needed business/academic/government alliance to move us forward.

But we must do so fully cognizant that a business-driven society that fails to embrace the values of its civil society, as Yankelovich has written, "without showing respect for its employees or customers, without inspiring people to give their creative best to their jobs, without employees and management understanding each other and without employees’ buying into management’s vision of the future (will) inevitably slip into mediocrity or worse."

Much of the good work to create the social capital of our region is already under way in San Diego. We have a number of networks, as columnist Rich Louv calls them, doing the public’s good. What is missing, we believe, is the "network of networks" – a vehicle to provide a new public space for our digital age so that the entire community can have, again as Louv says, "a conversation with itself."

In many ways, Envision San Diego provides the missing link and hopefully a model for those kinds of debates and discussions communities across the country are having as they try to reinvent themselves for the new global knowledge economy and society.

What has been absent in our own discussions is a recognition of the enormous role the media play in fostering civic awareness by educating and informing the public about the issues of greatest importance to the region. As Weber said in making the announcement, "I believe you cannot have an informed and effective citizenry if they do not know the issues and the media play a vital role in that informative effort."

Fortunately, in addition to SDSU’s International Center for Communications, which spearheaded this effort, KPBS TV and Radio and The San Diego Union-Tribune’s SignOnSanDiego.com, the paper’s online news and information source, the partnership has been joined by San Diego Magazine, The North County Times, KUSI TV, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable.

On March 31, Envision San Diego also created a large and growing affiliate advisory group – leaders from every walk of life, corporate, civic, institutional, including ordinary citizens and students from our high schools, universities and community colleges – to assist the media partnership in better understanding their concerns about the region and their hopes and dreams for its future.

While many San Diegans began logging on to SignOnSanDiego.com in early January of this year, the official launch on March 31 brought 150 concerned citizens together to create our "new public space" and begin the community-wide discussion. A one-hour video was produced and aired on KPBS May 31; it will be rebroadcast on KPBS and by some of Envisions’ media partners over the next few weeks. Perhaps more importantly, Envision is planning to take the town hall meeting "on the road" – to neighborhoods throughout the region – so others can take part in the "envisioning" process.

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Envision San Diego: The Creative Community

For more information and to get involved, readers can go http://www.signonsandiego.com, and participate in one or more of the forums going on every day, or http://www.kpbs.org to see what programs are being planned. To express interests and concerns, send e-mail to or call (619) 594-6933 or fax (619) 594-4488.

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The group meeting last March also began talking about partnerships between organizations and institutions already working in the greater San Diego community and to look for ways to work collaboratively to broaden and deepen the debate and discussion within our region. For that reason we have created five task forces for those interested, to start refining their discussions leading to the development of solutions and hopefully action.

We wish to make it clear that Envision San Diego’s goal is not to duplicate the efforts of existing organizations, but rather to partner with those already working within the community, help give their efforts broader visibility, and provide the momentum to move some of the most pressing issues to the forefront of public debate leading to action in our region.

We believe by working together collectively we can shape a vision of San Diego for the 21st century. Those areas of greatest interest, while still to be defined and grouped to reflect the interests and concerns of the community, include:

Civil society to include civic leadership, civic entrepreneurship and philanthropy

Livable places to include environment, land use planning, transportation, affordable housing and new information infrastructures

Creativity and Innovation to include art, technology, education and workforce preparedness

Healthy communities to include health care, wellness and life sciences

Regionalism to include governance in the digital age, San Diego/Baja relations, city/county decision-making.

Anyone can join the work of these task forces in person or online. All meetings will be transcribed and/or filmed and archived at http://www.signonsandiego.com. Together these task forces can create a new vision for San Diego, start to provide workable solutions for new ideas – perhaps support for some old ideas too – and in the larger scheme of things begin nurturing the vision of San Diego as a "Creative Community".

Eger is Van Deerlin Professor of Communications and executive director of the International Center for Communications at San Diego State University.