Sunday, February 26, 2023

Digital Public Policy: New Priorities for Nonprofits

 

                                                            Photo by Kier in Sight on Unsplash 

 
Proud to say this article, "Digital Public Policy: New Priorities for Nonprofits" has just been published. It is derived from lessons learned preparing the Integrated Advocacy report and this article on media coverage of civil society and covid

My co-authors, Toussaint Nothias and Amelie-Sophie Vavrovsky and I outline the many ways in which civil society is now bounded by and dependent on the many public policy domains that shape digital spaces. 

The most basic distillation of the argument is this: civil society is where we express ourselves, gather together (for non-market, non-state activities) and take collective action, often contrapuntally to the "mainstream" actions of markets and governments. In our times, most acts of expression (or mere communication) and gathering are dependent on information exchanged digitally. Just as digital practices and public policy shape online expression and assembly, civil society also shape digital practices and policies. They are entwined with each other. Whether we are considering public policy decisions about privacy, expression, assembly and association or considering regulations about philanthropy, nonprofit structures, and protest or free expression we are talking about enjoined systems.

You can download a copy of the article here. (hope this is not paywalled)


P.S. Thanks to everyone who has reached out to me after receiving these blogs posts/emails and offered good wishes, hoping that the return of the blog indicates an improvement in my health. I wish they were directly correlated. In fact, my return to blogging is motivated by the destruction of Twitter. I am chronically ill and disabled by Long Covid and am blogging when I can.

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