Information Communication Technology and the Street-level Bureaucrat: Tools for Social Equity and Progressive Activism
In: Human Development and Interaction in the Age of Ubiquitous Technology
Lester Leavitt – Doctoral Candidate: School of Public Administration, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA.
Abstract
This chapter presents a summary view of the theory behind an emerging information communication technology (ICT) that is being developed to provide marginalised populations with a tool to unite the previously fragmented voices of progressive-minded social equity activists. The theory suggests that with this technology, as a cloud-resident information system, seemingly incompatible progressive groups might enlarge their campaigns for social equity in ways that will allow them to form a global, heterogeneous network. The ICT allows for the capture of crowd-sourced artistic creativity, and through unique algorithms that have been shaped by academics in public administration, makes the media retrievable as policy-supporting narrative threads that embrace pluralistic thinking. The new narrative threads should also work to alter the discourse within local communities by diminishing the worldview threats associated with zero-sum ideology. This ICT is seen as critically important because of how powerful lobbyists (funded by global elites and predatory capitalists) have consistently been successful in skewing the outcomes of policymaking decisions and elections. The system is firmly rooted in the small-group, consensus-building organisational theories that have been advocated by some of the most respected authors in the field since the 1970s.

Keywords: narrative, solidarity, social media, crowd-source, governing, socio-technical system, ideograph, discourse, virtual reality, protest movement, informal institution.

Introduction
If nothing else, what engaged citizens should have learned from the global protests in 2011 is that young people are frustrated at their prospects for the future. Estimates are that on the weekend of November 12 and 13 that year, “Occupy” actions (organized by groups that trace their origins to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, the European austerity protests, and the Arab Revolutions) took place in 951 cities and 82 countries (Rogers, 2011). Nevertheless, very little structural change has taken place in the years since the 2011 protests. This chapter hopes to support the thinking that the failure of these and other contemporary efforts to change the governing paradigm has actually been a failure to identify hierarchical authority as the problem, in spite of numerous theorists who have pointed to this over the decades. This chapter argues that these efforts to alter the structural dynamics of governing have failed partly because the proposed new organisational structures failed to extract the institutional memory (specifically, the media material that is used to impact policymaking and its custodians from the grasp of the hierarchy. 
This chapter aims to demonstrate how current cloud technology not only makes change like this possible, but once the theory expands upon what the available options are the possibility emerges whereby the algorithms that give the policymaking institutional memory its utility could also be engineered to provide a functional direct democracy system (Leavitt, 2013, p. 458). This chapter will demonstrate this by first explaining how the ICT works within the most basic organisational unit of community governance, at which point it becomes apparent that through the algorithms of the institutional memory database, a global network could emerge organically. In support of taking this global view of a local problem, organisational theory expert Gareth Morgan wrote, “…we may be able to remove key problems [within our institutions] by changing the ‘rules of the game’ that produce them” (2006, pp. 332-333). Morgan, like Frederick Thayer 33 years before him, was referring to a complete restructuring of the hierarchical organisation, and by extension, the bureaucracy that controls which policy proposals are introduced, and which ones succeed (Thayer, 1973).
This chapter will first describe a new kind of organisational model that circumvents hierarchy (and the lobbyists that leverage it to their advantage) and precludes its return. The chapter will then describe the stakeholders for this new global (virtual) institution and explore their relationships with each other as populations that have traditionally been kept hopelessly fragmented; thereby easily keeping these populations oppressed and marginalised by hegemony. With this foundation, the chapter will conclude by describing how a reengineered institutional memory for the agenda setting process could be blended with information communication technology to unify all of these global populations and provide them with the tools for not only improving policymaking outcomes, but also a tool for self-governance.  

Governance and the Organisational Elite

It was the famed sociologist Robert Michels who wrote in 1911 about the iron law of oligarchy. In that piece “...he developed the view that modern organizations typically end up under the control of narrow groups, even when this runs against the desires of the leaders as well as the led. [...] Despite the best intentions, these organizations seemed to develop tendencies that gave their leaders a near monopoly of power (Morgan, 2006, p. 296).” In similar ways, modern theories about these organisational elites continue to underscore why the problems with government and public administration are what they are today (Farazmand, 1999, 325; Chen, 2009, p. 451; Thayer, 2002, pp. 107-115). In his review of the 2012 austerity crisis in Europe, Farazmand expresses his concern that the super-powers of Germany, France, Britain, and the United States have, through an allegiance with each other, created the largest Global Empire that the world has seen since the Fall of the Persian Empire 2300 years ago. Because the disproportionate burden of austerity is being imposed by these countries upon smaller, less powerful nations in an almost dictatorial manner, Farazmand sees this as creating points of bifurcation; a move that, in his view, would ultimately be beneficial to the smaller nations inasmuch as it will free them to begin a process of reclaiming their ability to determine their own futures (Farazmand, 2012a; Farazmand, 2012b). This introduces the much larger debate about the stratospheric increase in the wealth of the global elite, all in a time when middle-class wealth is stagnating, which was the topic of Thomas Piketty’s bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014, p. 24). 
Balancing social equity in the face of poorly-regulated capitalism will be a growing problem unless something is done to devolve the power downward once again; into the hands of the electorate where it was designed to be by the eighteenth-century engineers of democracy. Public administration, as an academic field, has tried to facilitate this process over the years, and in the 1960s (notably with the Minnowbrook I Conference in 1968) leaders became very vocal in proposing that the field assume an advocacy role in the defense of social equity for vulnerable and marginalised populations (Gooden & Portillo, 2011, pp. 1-14; Shafritz & Russell, 2002, p. 466). This, however, never happened, and in light of the severity of the current crisis of social inequity, academics are asking why. The failure, in the view of many, is blamed on a kind of wandering in the wilderness where everyone was scrambling to offer a more palatable free-market alternative form of government. Farazmand wrote of this period by stating how “organizational eclecticism” has prevailed for four decades now. The title of Farazmand’s article sums up his thoughts well as he asks, “Can we go home now?” (Farazmand, 2013, p. 219). 
This chapter argues that in order to facilitate this return to our “home” (i.e. the ideals of the 1960s), public administration needs to become far more multidisciplinary, enlarging our scope to include inquiry into social psychology, media and communication, and as advocated by this chapter, information systems that can be employed at the grassroots level. With improved tools, street-level bureaucrats, community organizers, social entrepreneurs, and any other progressive political activist will be far better equipped to fix the problems where they are first experienced. What arguably will emerge from the information communication technology being propoposed here is a mechanism for creating an efficient heterogeneous network (Leavitt, 2013, p. 460; Sandström & Carlsson, 2008, p. 507) that is simultaneously local at the most basic of levels, yet global in its scope and reach; a process now referred to as “glocalization” (Hong & Song, 2010).
Before this glocalization can emerge it will be vital that the people in less-powerful nations become as informed as possible in what their role is as a member of “the polis,” with polis being defined in the context that Deborah Stone used it in Policy Paradox; as “an entity small enough to have very simple forms of organization yet large enough to embody the elements of politics” (2002, p. 17). Having said that, however, the theories that trace the extent of control held by the global elite continue to show that there is a lack of a clear, practical method whereby oppressed populations can effectively participate. Such a mechanism has to exist before equal and fair access to the democratic process can be restored for marginalised populations (El-Mahdi, 2009, p. 1011). Because it hopes to do this, the ICT introduced within this chapter could be summarized as an effort to engineer a new paradigm for accessible democracy. For the sake of simplicity, the author has adopted the name MOCSIE Systems for this ICT.
MOCSIE is an acronym for Media Omniverse Collective for Social Initiative and Enterprise, and it is an information communication technology that has been six years in development, first as a media technology project as the capstone project of his bachelor’s degree in multimedia journalism, and more recently as an integration of several technologies into a comprehensive ICT platform.

Changing the Rules of the Game

Morgan and Thayer are not the only ones who have tried to bring in a new paradigm for how our public institutions are constituted. In the preface to his current edition of Public Organization, Denhardt writes, “As a theory of organization, [the history of past efforts of the field has] limited itself to instrumental concerns expressed through hierarchical structures, failing to acknowledge or to promote the search for alternative organizational designs.” His tone is almost as serious as Thayer's as he underscores how serious he is by adding, “If democracy is to survive in our society, it must not be overridden by the false promises of hierarchy and authoritarian rule. Democratic outcomes require democratic processes” (Denhardt, 2011, pp. x-xi; emphasis in original). 
While Morgan and Denhardt are current in the field, Thayer's views are almost 40 years old, but nevertheless, they have shaped the engineering of this proposed information system because he was one of the earliest, and arguably the most strident, in strongly advocating for a new paradigm that abandoned hierarchy. Thayer's suggestion was that society and its institutions be guided by an “almost infinite number of small groups” instead of a hierarchy (1973, p. 171). Being a visionary, Thayer did not concern himself with how these groups would be connected to each other because, like many of his era, he anticipated that the computer would soon make the impossible, possible, so he simply set out ideas for what “should be,” not what was practical at the time. As a starting point he set out to identify the ideal group size for consensus-building. As he traced the history of human civilization he found that most tasks seemed naturally suited for a small group process, and that the natural affinity was to gravitate into these small groups when work becomes especially challenging and the risk of an incorrect decision increases (1973, p. 8). He concludes on this topic by affirming that, “While common sense would seem to dictate that there can be no ‘magic’ number, five appears so often in so many environmental situations to carry persuasion with it” (Thayer, 1973, p. 8). In the references at the back of his book he cites over a dozen studies that support this number (p. 199). 
Figure 1 [filename: ictslb-figure1-hierarchy.tiff] shows what might best be described as a community oversight organisation that brings together 18 individuals and gives them a mandate to unify all of the policymaking needs of any number of local nonprofits and government agencies. These people can be thought of as the street-level bureaucrats of today. These people also happen to be the bureaucrats that are furthest removed from the policymaking decisions that, nevertheless, impact their daily work the most. Experience has shown that even when those street-level bureaucrats furthest from the center attempt to effect policy change, their ideas carry little weight as they advocate for change to their superiors; a process that Hal Rainey calls “…information leakage as lower-level officials communicate up the hierarchy” (Rainey, 2009). Figure 1 is a bit misleading though because it makes no attempt to distinguish which level of government these 18 individuals report to. 
In practice, in most Western democracies they will likely be divided into one of six divisions of government that are represented by Figure 2 [filename: ictslb-figure2-silos.tiff]. Street-level bureaucrats in traditional departments will find themselves reporting up a hierarchy to superiors who are in federal, state (or province), county (or equivalent), city, or school district administrative roles. At the street-level it is even more complicated because of the involvement of the nonprofit sector, which is represented by the sixth column in Figure 2. As noted in the right-hand sidebar of Figure 2, authority flows downward in these silos, but the decision-makers are furthest from the point of delivery for public goods and services, which is a violation of Mary Parker Follet’s Law of the Situation, in which she stated, "My solution is to depersonalize the giving of orders, to unite all concerned in a study of the situation, to discover the law of the situation, and obey that." (1926; emphasis added). 
What is outlined in this chapter is a new authority structure as represented by Figure 3 [filename: ictslb-figure3-informal.tiff], which shows how individuals who choose to collaborate or otherwise work together can bridge the dividing lines between the levels of government at the point of contact with the citizens, creating an informal institution. In today’s climate, where governments are deeply divided ideologically, they will only be able to do this if they have a new kind of information communication technology that will create a completely new institutional memory. This is what will allow for the uniting of the citizens with the street-level bureaucrats, community organizers, and the nonprofit sector. Note how the reconfigured organisational model that has been superimposed on the left side of Figure 3 represents the same 18 individuals that were illustrated with a hierarchical model in Figure 1. What should be immediately evident with this inset is that, even though every position is in an identical position to Figure 1 (remove all of the connecting lines), the superimposed model in Figure 3 operates with four linked groups, and is therefore free of a hierarchical structure. The “juggler” role (the individual in the middle) will be explained further along in the chapter when the first hypothesis is introduced, but suffice it to say at this point that this is the individual who brings the other 17 together without pursuing any kind of leadership authority.

Envisioning “Glocalization”

The goal of this redesign was to propose new relationships between existing people at the community level so that they would merge Thayer’s small-group, consensus-building ideals (1973, 1 p. 71) with Follet’s Law of the Situation. The inset in Figure 3 outlines four such groups that are captured in more detail in Figure 4 [filename: ictslb-figure4-stacked.tiff], but this chapter is about much more than reconfiguring community organisations. It is about creating a completely re-imagined institution that comes together organically without creating a hierarchy, which is what the stacking mechanism represented by Figure 4 is meant to illustrate. This, of course, is where the new paradigm can be imagined best if viewed through the lens of a virtual (cloud-based) institution. As a model for scalability, it is important to note that so long as the “institutional memory” is digital, and resident in the cloud, that same ICT that would serve a single organisation with 18 individuals in it (the inset of Figure 3) could be launched from enterprise-level platforms to serve thousands of city-based units simultaneously. 
Figure 4 simply illustrates a stack of ten such “community-based” layers, but in truth there would be no defined limitation. The existence of the relationships between individuals in the vertical columns of Figure 4 would not be impeded by political or geographical boundaries, and it could not be easily co-opted by any institutional elites because, in this day and age, the component parts of the informal institution could be easily tweaked and re-launched under a different name, and from another server. In other words, a group that is displeased with its current associations would simply “vote with their feet” and find a new “stack” that better represents their political leanings. It is important to note, however, that the new stack would likely still be tapping into the same institutional memory. The data does not change, just the associations within the stack.
Before leaving Figure 4, note that each of the four groups represent a different role within the new organisational structure. A policy group (right circle), with its six members, would oversee six all-encompassing social justice campaigns, a media group (top circle), with its six members, would oversee six all-encompassing genres of artistic creativity, an operations group (the oval in the front) would make sure that each unit runs smoothly, and a steering group of six that links the outer three groups (the square) would “govern” the community. The single, over-arching goal of the four groups at the community level is to unify the discourse within the community that each unit represents. According to Thayer’s theory, when functioning without a hierarchy, “unity” would come by striving for consensus. In governing this way, no “authority” would swoop in to enforce or impose new governing regulations of policy. Instead, agreement on policies and regulations would be pursued with discourse. It is important to note that this theory is not proposing to redefine all public institutions. Policing, for example, requires unquestioned authority in exchange for respect for the citizens’ right to due process. This theory, at this early stage, is only about determining policies that defend and advance social equity.
An important point that this chapter hopes to make later on through a sampling of literature on the global elite is that it is important to underscore how the MOCSIE Systems are not another social media site. As will be explained later, the fact that the media will be proactively and selectively solicited by politically motivated (progressive) social entrepreneurs and community activists elevates this information communication technology from being a simple crowd-sourcing social site to the point that it can be seen as a tool of democracy, free speech, and representative governance. It is not a passive system; it is an activist-driven, grassroots system for making the governing process truly, in every way, a consensus-building direct-democracy system.

The Twin Hypotheses

We live in a political climate where it is dangerous for a population to expose where they are most vulnerable because those in positions of power routinely exploit vulnerabilities, and the phenomenon is not limited to tyrannical regimes. In many cases, the policies of Western democracies have been incredibly oppressive and damaging to minority populations, and even women, who make up half the population! In reviewing the book, Globalization from Below, Peter Evans wrote, “Preoccupation with movement democracy is complemented by a profound distrust of established governance organizations” (2007, p. 62). It is noteworthy that he wrote that more than a year before the global financial crisis, and the book certainly foreshadowed the protests of 2011. 
This chapter recognises that within this emerging information communication technology, at the nexus of organisational behaviour and policymaking, resides a paradox of vulnerability and trust. The importance of building in a mechanism to compensate for this was seen as critically important because the trust of the common person has routinely been violated; the most glaring example being the events of more than three decades that led up to the 2008 financial crisis, followed-up by a failure to prosecute a single elite individual for any kind of failing in what will likely go into the record books as the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of humankind (Kolnick, 2012). Even beyond that, it has not seemed to matter whether a person lived in a democratic nation or one ruled by a dictator, because, in both cases, vulnerable people routinely have their trust in leadership violated. Mohamed Bouazizi, the individual credited with lighting the spark that fuelled all of the 2011 protests by setting himself on fire in a remote Tunisian town, should have been able to trust the police in his town to enforce the law equally. He was vulnerable to a corrupt system that was untrustworthy. 
It is believed that the MOCSIE Systems can (and will) achieve wide-spread use, and the measures of this success will revolve around twin hypotheses, each in turn intended to mitigate the problems of vulnerability and trust. The central-figure hypothesis is proposed to test whether or not people can be motivated to contribute to the institutional memory, as well as to glean narrative content from it in supporting effective policy proposals in the agenda setting process. This behavior will, of course, radiate out from those 18 individuals represented in Figures 3 and 4. There will, of course, be no organisation if nobody steps up to organize them, and this is where the central figure comes in, or, as pointed out in the inset of Figure 3, the “juggler.” There will need to be a person – a social entrepreneur – who is so driven by a passion for social justice that she or he will be willing to persist with dogged determination in the daunting task of bringing together a team of 17 existing (preferably recognized and respected) community leaders for a unified purpose of improving policymaking decisions on behalf of a population. 
This person will have to be a driven individual because, within marginalised populations, most people are reluctant to listen to the initial sales pitch for “yet another nonprofit advocacy group.” History has told most marginalised people to mistrust newcomers and individuals with grandiose ideas. At the root of the problem is hegemony, a topic that will be covered in detail further along in this chapter, but for now, suffice it to say it is because of hegemony that there is so much distrust of upstart leaders who come into a community with big promises. Hegemony essentially is what convinces people to just accept things the way they are because, even if things are bad, they might get worse if you “jerk on the chain” of the powerful and wake the sleeping tiger. The central figure will not only need to overcome this age-old tactic of fragmentation, but they will also have to be the kind of person that Al Sharpton is, who captured the spirit of this chapter well by simply stating, “A lot of things were acceptable – until we stopped accepting it” (Sharpton, 2011). 
While on the topic of hegemony, it needs to be pointed out that, for centuries now, philosophers and theorists have advocated that hegemonic narratives be deconstructed. While that might be one tactic of the proposed MOCSIE Systems, it will not be the main tactic. Hugh Miller suggests an approach that differs from most others in that he advocates for the displacement of harmful narratives like those advanced under the umbrella of hegemony. This displacement is accomplished by putting forth a new narrative that tells a more compelling story of how things should be different than they are (Miller, 2012, p. 108). The proposed tactics through which this will be done will be explained later in this chapter.
The second hypothesis, referred to as the collective-thought hypothesis, supports two ideas. First, as noted above, most marginalised populations know that they are vulnerable when the dominant group concentrates its power in a hierarchy, so in constructing a new paradigm an easily demonstrated alternative to hierarchy must first be put into place before existing opinion leaders will recommend to the community that they put their trust in the charismatic central figure who will necessarily emerge as their spokesperson. Undeniably, charisma makes a person a natural at leading and organising, but that charisma can be frightening to a population that has previously been sucked in by charisma and suffered as a result. To make matters worse for this central figure, the “capture” of a charismatic leader is a common practice of organisational elites who swoop in and make promises of greatness to those who rise to the top and, with the promise of money and/or power, turn them against the people that gave them their trust (Farazmand, 1999; Thayer, 2002). The collective-thought hypothesis supports making this central figure just another voice in one of the four consensus-building groups of the MOCSIE Systems organisational model (Figures 3 and 4). The very design of the model is engineered to circumvent this.  
Second, in addition to placing the central figure into the steering group (the linking square of Figures 3 and 4), rather than giving her or him a position in a hierarchy, the collective-thought hypothesis also relates to how the community-based governing unit is structured so as to germinate a consensus-building process for framing and contextualizing the growing repository of records in the institutional memory, enabling users from within the community to effectively displace those harmful, socially constructed narratives that are rooted in, and defended by, hegemony. Again, it is important to note that displace was used in that sentence, not deconstruct.
Space does not permit more detailed coverage of what leadership qualities the central figure (the juggler) will need to possess in order to accomplish the daunting task before them, but Figure 5 [filename: ictslb-figure5-juggler.tiff] represents six very specific, multidisciplinary talents that the MOCSIE Systems proposes to teach in what is intended to be a certificate program for individuals seeking leadership skills in social equity activism. They include skills in media, communication, sociology, political science, social psychology, information systems, artistic creativity, and of course, public administration.
Preparing a regimen for training this new breed of political activist is an integral part of the MOCSIE Systems. Again, citing Peter Evans from 2007, he predicted that the globalisation movement that was started by capitalists would eventually divide the elite class and open a window of opportunity for global solidarity (2007, p. 64). Seven years later, political scientist Randall Schweller dedicated an entire book to expanding this idea, referring to the phenomenon of destabilising the hegemonic forces as “global entropy.” In his book he documents just how ripe the world is for chaos if a new global power structure is not put into place quickly (2014). It is the opinion of this author that both of these men are correct. The window of opportunity is wide open at the moment, but the counter-hegemonic voices have yet to coalesce. The juggler role was engineered into this socio-technical system as the catalyst for the unification of progressive voices precisely because it was seen as the only kind of a leader capable of not only surviving, but also thriving, in the face of this entropy that Schweller describes so succinctly. 
Nowhere was the absence of this leadership talent more evident than in the wake of the protest movements of 2011 when we, as researchers, found ourselves combing through hundreds of web pages simply to excavate any semblance of a narrative thread that would support the kind of policy change capable of satisfying the protestors’ demands. The material was there because the protestors had been very faithful in holding their daily “circle time” (an Occupy Wall Street term) and drafting manifestos, so they had enormous amounts of “information.” What they lacked was the “system” to make it usable.

Overcoming the Instability of Funding

In the non-profit sector, grant making is just another institution of hierarchy. Even if this were not a problem unto itself, grant funding is notorious for its instability because, by its very nature, it lacks a guarantee that it will be there from one year to the next. In light of this, grant funding is currently only being pursued to fund the development of the MOCSIE Systems software and a start-up year of operations. Beyond that, the MOCSIE Systems have been structured in such a way that they should be self-funded by traffic to the global domain. Even at that, a monetized web domain will be just one of four revenue streams designed into the model. Items that are expected to be for sale through an online store are things like limited edition art prints, books, CD’s, DVD’s, postcards, bumper stickers, mugs, t-shirts, other apparel, bookmarks, and other related items. Additionally, revenue streams will also be realized from symposia, exhibitions, tours, and public speaking engagements by members of the collective. Finally, tuition fees from a future online university will round out the income streams. 
Although the ultimate self-funding model is still being engineered, it is the intent of the model that any profits be shared in similar ways to how the farmer’s cooperatives structured their marketplace more than a century ago; specifically, that members of the collective who have converted their talent into revenue streams should be compensated relative to their contribution. The difference, of course, is that in this collective no capital will have to be tied up in real estate. With its own revenue streams, it is hoped that the global institution will enjoy complete autonomy.

The Stakeholders

When it is proposed that this model be self-funding, most listeners interpret that to mean that it will look and “feel” like a business, and a business necessarily has stakeholders. From that perspective, then, the stakeholders of the MOCSIE Systems will be any marginalised or oppressed population, no matter where they might be located. If they are capable of generating a message in support of a desired policy change (i.e. media, in any of six genres), and they can somehow get that media into the institutional memory of the MOCSIE Systems, then they are, by definition, one of its stakeholders. 
Further to that, if you are a member of an oppressed or marginalised population, then you are also a survivor of abuse. Continuing on in this vein, survivors of abuse will always benefit by belonging to a therapy group. In this regard, the MOCSIE Systems will be seen by its stakeholders as a kind of mental health organisation, and that is a wonderful thing.  For this reason, the ICT database, by itself, will be engineered so that it can be accessed by the most vulnerable and marginalised people who stand the most to gain by affiliating themselves with it. 
As it relates to how crowd-sourcing of media might be considered an exercise of mental health therapy, research supports the fact that by simply having a validating outlet through which one can recount one’s abuse (i.e. their marginalization), a person begins the healing process and ends the cycle of submitting to further abuse. Studies show that survivors of abuse who do not talk about it impair their recovery (Lepore, Ragan, & Jones, 2000; Hemenover, 2003; Ruggiero et al., 2004). One psychologist writes, “Those who have survived [traumatic events] learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection to others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against […] despair” (Herman, 1997). Countless web pages have already become invaluable as virtual support groups to meet the demand, but, similar to the narratives of the 2011 protest movements, as a system it is hopelessly fragmented. That kind of data is invaluable in the policymaking process, but again, the data, as currently constituted, does not lend itself for use within an ICT. It is part of the web, but it is not useable in the ways outlined for the institutional memory that this chapter advocates.
Cast in this light, the amazing thing is that by its mere existence, the MOCSIE Systems could arguably qualify as a resounding success even if no data is ever retrieved from its database. Therefore, even though the topic of societal abuse (and its victims) will not come up again in this chapter, it needs to be understood that from a mental health standpoint, anything that alters the discourse inside a person’s own head will be therapeutic, and the natural outcome of that is that those loved ones and acquaintances of that individual will begin to hear a new discourse as well. 
Also, by extension, when a victim of societal abuse is introduced to a fellow survivor with a similar story, they also start a conversation (in those vertical stacks shown in Figure 4). When provided with a safe, nurturing, and supportive environment, these conversations will build momentum. As new narratives for living emerge, a change within the community begins to evolve, even if the change is not immediately visible to outside observers. For the remainder of this chapter, even though it will primarily discuss the institutionalized, proactive role that the MOCSIE Systems will assume in resisting some of the most powerful forces on the planet, the change that occurs in the hearts and minds of its individual participants should never be overlooked or underestimated for the degree of its impact. 

Collective Will and an End to Hierarchy

It should now be apparent that every element of the MOCSIE Systems is connected in some way to its institutional memory through its information communication technology. That is because, as shown by Figure 4, with its ten layers and 18 individuals in each layer, the institution per se could not exist outside of the ICT. It is, in the purest sense, a virtual institution that is cloud-resident. While the 18 individuals at the community level might see each other face-to-face on a daily basis, it is possible that most of the “work” that needs to be done is work that will require these individuals to be engaged with individuals in the vertical stack (the virtual realm) who are similarly situated in distance neighborhoods. In other words, “going to work” will likely not require interaction on the horizontal layer (the real world) as much as it will require going online to interact with your colleagues in the vertical columns of the stacked organisations. Regardless, in this model, a person's entire work environment is contained by the technology, and therefore, so is the decision-making process that guides how its crowd-sourced content will be utilized; both as media, and as a policy-making tool. 
Just to review then, when imagined as a matrix of 180 individuals, the Figure 4 representation of the MOCSIE Systems socio-technical model cannot be construed in any way to show a hierarchy. This should serve to reinforce how every decision is derived as a product of a collective effort. Similarly, the natural outcome of the work of the 180 individuals represented in Figure 4 will be that the supporting information that is guiding the policymaking process in ten cities (and by extension at the state or provincial level, and possibly at the federal level) will now be remarkably similar in each of the respective communities, regardless of where that community might be on the planet. For the sake of clarity, the model in Figure 4 was limited to ten horizontal (stacked) units, but in practice the composition of these stacks will be very organic, where affiliates can come and go based upon where they find their best allies. The stack will, of course, become unwieldy if it grows too “tall,” and it is therefore anticipated that most groups will affiliate themselves formally with about a dozen companion organisations where the “fit” is well-matched to neighborhood circumstances. The benefit, of course, comes from the feature that every group will have access to the same narrative threads emerging from the institutional memory and ICT, regardless of who generates them. Therefore, a national policy that is being worked on by hundreds of inner-city groups simultaneously could, in truth, be considered the outgrowth of several smaller “stacked” groups with 10 to 12 layers in each. 

An Algorithm for Social Constructionism

From a postmodern perspective it needs to be understood that what we think of as “truth” is a social construct. In keeping with this logic, the political “left” and the political “right” are also social constructs. We only know how to define “conservative” and “progressive,” or “liberal” and “libertarian,” because of narratives that have been handed down to us from our parents, grandparents, schoolteachers, and the media, to name just a few sources. In church, as illustrated so well by the character Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, we are taught that the only “tradition” worth preserving is the one that relates to our own culture (Stein, 1964). Edgar Schein wrote an entire book on “organizational culture” to put this into an institutional perspective (2010). 
The problem with that goal is that, based on those narratives, the deliberate progressive framing of this chapter advocates change from the traditional, which sets the stage for a confrontation with the conservative-minded. For a majority of conservatives, the leaders within their cultural institutions have typically framed change as a worldview threat. After all, from a governing perspective, nothing seems to propel a governing narrative within conservative crowds better than the fear that cherished traditions are being put at risk. This describes the ubiquity of the “Take our Country Back” narrative used by conservatives to motivate their electoral base in the United States. 
Given this understanding as a starting point, we can better understand governing narratives as they are now constituted in many parts of the world. What we have in many countries is a dialectical discourse; dialectical inasmuch as there are frequently two completely opposite dominant narratives. For this chapter, the dialectical nature of them can be thought of in terms of the viewpoints being 180° opposed to each other. In zero-sum terms, if one is correct, the other has to be wrong by default, which is why it is so easy to motivate conservatives with a worldview threat.
What is not implied with a vision of dialectical narratives is that there should be 178° of possible compromise between the two polar opposites; possibilities that will only be considered in a spirit of compromise, and which, in postmodernist terms, can only be realized by swaying public opinion in such a way that diversity or pluralism are also not framed as a worldview threat to conservatives. As shown in Figure 6 [filename: ictslb-figure6-scale.tiff], this principle might be more easily understood if the reader imagines a protractor overlaid onto a dialectical line between the political foes of the left and right.
At this point the nature of writing in policymaking terms becomes very reductionist, grossly oversimplifying the algorithms that will go into engineering the information communication technology, but it was felt that a simple discussion that conveys the idea of how narrative threads are germinated within the database was warranted. 
In spite of how dialectical politics were throughout the twentieth century in the United States of America, prior to the year 2000 the US Congress was still able to push through major and significant legislation. As shown by Figure 6, log-rolling between left-leaning progressives and right-leaning conservatives, while not always efficient, still allowed for legislation to be passed in the spirit of compromise (represented in Figure 6 by the “viable” section between point 3 and point 7). However, with the election of George W. Bush in 2000, that log-rolling process began to unravel. By the time Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 log-rolling and compromise on the part of political conservatives had become impossible. By the 2014 midterm elections, life in the United States had reached a “new normal,” with political extremism and a record-breaking “do nothing Congress” becoming the American way of life. 
Regardless of how similar or dissimilar other countries are to the United States, the MOCSIE Systems information communication technology could possibly provide the best way forward in countries where compromise has become impossible between ideological extremists who are now painting politics as a zero-sum game that should be approached with the same zeal as religious fundamentalism. With alarming regularity across the globe, when it comes to policymaking and the agenda setting process it is becoming increasingly clear that we, as citizens of these countries, will have to define the new governing narratives on behalf of, and for the benefit of, our legislative bodies. This discussion therefore now turns toward a discussion of how computer algorithms might be able to suggest viable and nonviable narratives as policy proposals by generating narrative threads that approximate what was illustrated by Figure 6. Again, as a reminder, this chapter takes a simplistic approach to what will inevitably be a multi-year process of refining incredibly complex software.

A “Consultable Record”

In the same year that Thayer published his book, back in a period when computer memory was still being loaded with punch cards, Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential cultural anthropologists of the 20th century (Shweder and Good, 2005), wrote about the importance of having a “consultable record of what man has said” (Geertz, 1973, p. 30). In 2000, Dvora Yanow elevated this thinking when she suggested that by, “Observing what people do and how they do it, listening to how they talk about the issue, reading what they read, and talking with them about their lives…”, a person becomes more in tune with what the policymaking needs of a population are because they come to understand the true issues of concern. She continues by stating that, “Out of this growing familiarity, the researcher-analyst will be able to identify the overlappings and commonalities…” (Yanow, 2000, p. 37). Both of these academics were talking about the value of having access to qualitative information as “institutional memory” (Thayer, 1973, p. 171). To these three academics, and countless others, the idea of having a readily available, relevant, research-supported narrative that informs the pressing social issues of our time was (and is) of critical importance. This is because this kind of information is critical to any number of disciplines, but as it relates to governance, the thinking is that this kind of information should be at the very core of every policy decision. 
There is one important point that needs to be made here for the readers that do not understand the nature of policymaking. Governing policies are not fact-based. Good research does not determine the direction of policymaking in the same way that a compelling argument does, and this is why we have social inequity in every part of the world. This ICT promises to back good research up with the compelling arguments that it needs in order to get better policies through the agenda setting process. It is anticipated that this institutional memory will be full of compelling stories that not only outline the seriousness of societal problems, but also, it is felt that by linking similar stories into narrative threads, and subsequently linking them to a viable policy proposal that will fix that problem, a new kind of governing narrative will emerge.

The Ideographic Records

As described earlier, the records within the MOCSIE Systems are called ideographs, and in their raw form they will exist in isolation from each other, like the bricks in a brick wall that arrived neatly stacked on pallets. Without the proper fields within these records, there could be no algorithm with which the necessary narrative threads could be invoked through the query mechanism, therefore the goals of the emerging virtual governing institution could not be accomplished. The system will also somehow need to support those small-group decision-makers represented in Figures 3 and 4. As noted, one group (the policy group) is charged with putting forward policy proposals, and another (the media group) is charged with framing the media so that it provides compelling narratives to propel each policy proposal through the agenda setting process. Beyond that, the entire team of 18 individuals is charged with altering the discourse within their own communities so that marginalised populations begin to see themselves through a different lens as well. To do this manually would be an enormous task, but with a crowd-sourced institutional memory with properly engineered search algorithms that generate narrative threads, it is expected that this process will be no more complicated than searching for something inside Wikipedia. 
Figure 7 [filename: ictslb-figure7-tiers.tiff] provides a graphic illustration of the institutional memory that captures the top four drill-down tiers of the media campaigns (top left exploded box) as well as a similar drill-down mechanism into the policy campaigns (bottom left exploded box). Each starts in the first tier with these twelve all-inclusive groupings (recall Figure 4, with its six media leaders and six policy leaders) before being broken out in the second tier into media genres (on the top media campaigns half) and sustaining institutions (on the bottom policy campaigns half). Beyond that the units are referred to as “communities,” which is a reflection of the research that supports the idea that “narrative communities” are, for many in the field of organisation theory, viable institutions unto themselves (Baker, 2006, p. 463; Schein, 2010, p. 70). This is why the individual elements of the second tier on the bottom half (i.e. one tier removed from the six policy campaigns) are referred to as sustaining institutions for the meta-narrative and micro-narrative communities (Leavitt, 2013, pp. 459-464). 
It is also important to note that the model is diagrammatic only insofar as it represents how people will intuitively think of the information communication technology. Technically though, only the top half refers to ideographs in the database, and is therefore referenced in the top left corner as the “institutional memory.” What is represented in the bottom half of the diagram is not a separate database of ideographs, but rather it is merely an illustration of how heterogeneous the policy network is, which is why the bottom half is labeled in the bottom left corner as “heterogeneous policy networks.” Figure 7 merely represents what had to be done mentally in order to computerize as much of this process as possible, providing the possibility of carefully identifying meaningful consensus-building fields where each ideographic record can be archived so that users can rate each one for its political “tone” on a scale of zero to ten, which, in keeping with Figure 6, has zero defined as the extreme political left (or the progressive liberal ideology) and ten defined as the extreme political right (or conservative libertarian ideology). 
As important as the query algorithm is in providing researchers with narrative threads, it is the person who stores the record (or provides the hyper-link) who has the responsibility to archive the record properly, otherwise the algorithm may have no idea what to do with it, and then the database custodians will be forced to delete it. To make it as easy as possible for contributors to properly archive their media, pre-defined pull-down fields derived from Figure 7 will obligate open-platform contributors to think through the process of what best describes their work, from both the media genre perspective, and the policy perspective. Once the record is uploaded or linked, other users and the database custodians will initiate the rating process by classifying, in their own opinion, where an ideograph lies on the political spectrum, thereby driving the green arrow of Figure 6.
Individuals who are active as contributors will also likely follow each of their ideographs after uploading them to see how others are rating it. If the activist gave their own record a 5, but everybody else is rating it with a 3 after it has been up for a while, the activist will realize that his or her contributions will never percolate to the top as viable. This realization should alter the discourse in the activist’s head because, up until that moment, they thought they were providing viable ideas for the governing process. In this way, traditionally divisive issues slowly converge, rising into the viable segment of the protractor (recall Figure 6), and the odds of having a vast collection of media that support a policy-proposal capable of making it through Kingdon’s “policy window” are greatly improved (Anderson, 2011, p. 93). For those not familiar with Kingdon, the “policy window” is where the politics stream, the problems stream, and the policy-proposal stream converge at precisely the right moment – kind of like having the planets line up.
Having said that, if our activist in the above example is firm in her or his resolve to change public opinion so that an ideograph that is currently rated as a three (nonviable) is eventually seen as increasingly viable, then there will be mechanisms in the MOCSIE Systems that this activist will be able to take advantage of in order to alter the discourse on their particular campaign. There is an upcoming section that will explore this process in more detail but it is being engineered to emulate the success of gay rights activists in the United States of America, where, over the past 10 years, public opinion moved from about 60% opposing gay marriage to about 55% approving it, as measured by almost every major polling organization.
By going through the above process for each record or link, certain contributors themselves will have to face an uncomfortable truth that is easily overlooked; the truth that positions of privilege are typically inherited, not earned, and worse yet, that the privilege that certain classes of people inherently enjoy is more often than not socially constructed by hegemonic narratives. Many will also have to face the fact that they are posting an ideograph that advances a zero-sum narrative. What the algorithms will highlight, in cases of white privilege and cases similar to it, is how hegemony rewards complicity. Hegemony, by design, means that unless something disrupts habitual behaviour (Miller, 2012, p. 54), then the favoured class will never be taught how to challenge their own harmful hegemonic views. Unless they do this, they will, by default, reap a benefit by simply remaining complicit. That thought bears repeating in another way: do nothing and nothing will change! In its simplest form, if you are a white, heterosexual, Christian male in almost any Western democracy, any kind of change can easily be painted as “undesirable” and “not in your best interest,” simply because you are already at the top of the ladder of privilege. 
In his resistance to the Vietnam War, and the tens-of-thousands of young men from some of America’s poorest families who were dying and otherwise suffering for what he thought was an illegitimate cause, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously spoke the following words at the Riverside Church, one year to the day before his assassination: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it” (King, 1967).

Creating Emergent Narrative Communities

King was a master of swaying opinions, and in this vein the other thing that becomes critically important for this information system is that it will have a mechanism to inspire a spirit of compromise during the actual media linking or uploading (crowd-sourcing) process. The single best opportunity to change minds and have people look at the situation from “outside the box,” so to speak, is to allow them to experience the elements of the algorithms while they are online contributing their media. For this reason, as noted above, each contributor will have to give their own ideograph a rating when they initially post it. Miller expressed the benefit of creating this kind of a “deciding moment” when he wrote that the goal is to get a person to think in their mind, “Most likely, I will do what I have done before, though maybe not this time” (Miller, 2012, p. 15; emphasis added). This is that instant in time when an emergent narrative community (Leavitt, 2013, pp. 461-462) can be germinated within the thoughts of an individual by the ICT algorithms.
Figure 8 [filename: ictslb-figure8-narratives.tiff] illustrates how the mechanism works by comparing dialectic narrative communities that have differing opinions about homosexuality. Technically speaking, the narrative community on the right that suggests that people are “born gay” is not dialectical to the one on the left because it embraces pluralism and diversity. Nevertheless, the sustaining institution that maintains discipline in the narrative community on the left will interpret any narratives from the sustaining instutions on the right as a serious worldview threat. This is why, “Being gay is a lifestyle choice,” is referenced as an interpretive monopoly. After all, the consequences to the sustaining institution would be enormous if sexual orientation is no longer seen as binary. Because of this, the harder the sustaining institutions on the right push their narrative, the more threatened the sustaining institutions on the left feel. This is where Miller’s suggestion comes from where he advises against deconstructing these centuries-old narratives, referring to them as “ostensive.” What he means by that is that the narratives are seen by conservative sustaining institutions as fixtures that cannot be challenged because they have always been that way (Miller, 2012, pp. 86-88).
The only way out of this stalemate then is to create a new narrative that is not a direct threat or challenge to the interpretive monopoly. This is what is illustrated at the bottom of Figure 8, referring to it as an “engineered shared premise.” If done properly, with a new sustaining institution to nurther it, a new emergent narrative community will be germinated.  

Programming Platform and Language

Work to-date on the prototype of the MOCSIE Web platform has been done in C# on a SQLServer platform. A pre-alpha version of the database storage and retrieval mechanism for the ideographs has been operational since mid-2012, and it also is providing an internal web page for selecting and viewing these ideographs. The official launch of a rudimentary beta release will not take place until mid-2015 and an enterprise level platform for the fully functional beta release is expected to take place in late-2015. This date could be advanced dramatically if approval is obtained to use overlays, allowing popular existing web content to be rated using the MOCSIE Systems algorithms without actually having to manually embed hyperlinks into the MOCSIE Systems records. Plans call for the MOCSIE Systems to be launched in conjunction with a language system that could make the ICT available in more than 11 languages on its launch date.

Solidarity Movements

When Time magazine honoured “The Protestor” as The Person of the Year for 2011 (Andersen, 2011), the article mentioned the global scope of the phenomenon. As noted earlier, some estimated that the protests took place in 951 cities in 82 countries (Rogers, 2011). With this in mind, take another look at the 10 layers of city-based units that are represented in Figure 4. Now imagine 951 layers represented in Figure 4 instead of just ten. It is useful to also imagine how each of the 180 individuals represented in Figure 4 will not only be a crowd-source contributor to the proposed ICT database, but each of them will also be a conduit and custodian for the content, naturally helping to frame and contextualize the consensus-building (discourse-altering) nature of the content that is brought into the database from the grassroots of an entire neighborhood. If expanded (in theory) to encompass the 951 cities that were engaged in the 2011 protests, this virtual institution would have boasted more than 17,000 individuals in its informal institution. Furthermore, those individuals would have represented 82 countries. These 17,000 activists, each as a representative for their own community, would have provided outreach to build the database, thereby extending the reach of the database to literally hundreds of thousands of fellow activists. This kind of networking would organically provide for an almost infinite sprawl of crowd-sourced material as digital content begins to aggregate from activists and community workers around the world. 
With that in mind we can take this example even further. As illustrated in Figure 7, the MOCSIE Systems are intended to embrace media of all kinds, and would provide for visual art, photojournalism, blogs, novels, non-fiction books, podcasts, YouTube videos, and any number of hyperlinks to other content already on the web. It could also be something as simple as a cell phone image that was uploaded with a text message caption added at a later point. It is important to note that this kind of content is being generated already, and whether or not this database exists will neither accelerate nor diminish the rate at which this data is posted to the Internet. The only thing that this database will do is allow for it to be accessed through the query language of an information system, thus weaving it together into compelling narratives. As noted above, it will also allow the media to be evaluated by fellow contributors and the general public.

Protestors and Their Media

A few examples might serve to demonstrate how deeply mobile technology has penetrated third-world countries and emerging democracies. A 2011 news story related how, in one African nation, more than half of the population did not have access to a bank facility, but over half of the adults had cell phones. In response to this, rather than build more branches, the banking industry has decided to move to mobile banking instead (Ghosh, 2011). In August 2011 cell phones and SMS technology allowed Kenyans to raise more than $200,000 from fellow Kenyans in the first 12 hours of a famine relief campaign. Of particular interest was the fact that, in the appeal to have citizens send a text as a way of donating money, the public was encouraged to donate what they could, even if it was as little as ten cents (BBC, 2011). Development has now reached the point where technology is truly global, and back as far as 2011 cell phones were already being offered in India, Turkey, and several African nations for under $15 (Fox, 2011).  
Advances such as these are important because, for the developing world, it is becoming more and more apparent that the future of equal rights for oppressed and marginalised classes is going to be dramatically accelerated by the presence of ubiquitous technology, whether through a cell phone, tablet, or laptop computer. As noted earlier in this chapter, artistic creativity and personal expression is what will comprise the records in this all-important institutional memory, and the easier it is to upload those records, the more likely it will be that there will be valuable content for policymaking that will support the needs of even the most oppressed population. If the crowd-sourcing is coming from a place where access to the Internet is regulated, so long as the records can be uploaded, all of the “housekeeping” for that data can then be done by expatriate “hactivists” that are doing their social equity activism from outside of the country itself. 
Returning again to 2011, one event, in December 2010, figures prominently in how the events of the year unfurled. Even though some of the details have now been embellished to the point of folklore (citing accurate sources is difficult in this instance), the ideograph of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi is representative of how powerful an ideograph can become. Bouazizi will forever be remembered as someone far more significant than a penniless fruit vendor from a remote town in Tunisia. Because of how that image became framed in the weeks after his death, it is now a signifier of something far greater. The connotation that now comes with that ideograph is one that allows it to serve as proxy for every young Arab who has done everything that they were told they should do in order to be a contributing member of society, and then through oppression was subsequently denied that dignity. Standing up to your oppressors, in the face of death, became a noble act (Thorne, 2011). Bouazizi’s death propelled a protest movement forward so rapidly in Tunisia that, within ten days, a dictator who had ruled for 23 years was forced to step down, flee the country with his family, and spend the rest of his life in exile. 
The MOCSIE Systems recognise and leverage the undeniable fact that, in all likelihood, if someone had not found a way to take and distribute that picture of Bouazizi in flames, there would have been no Mohamed Bouazizi ideograph. By the quality of the picture, it would seem that it was originally captured by a cell phone, not a journalist. Therefore, were it not for the technology that captured an event that lasted for mere seconds, and were it not for the technology that allowed that image to spread across the planet in mere hours, and then go viral, there might not have been a Tunisian revolution. Now, as an enduring ideograph, it continues to resonate in the minds of millions (Miller, 2004, p. 469). The institutional memory and ICT that is envisioned for the MOCSIE Systems promises to not only make what happened in Tunisia into something routine and organic (not the self-immolation, but rather the spontaneous news-of-the-moment), but also take it to the next step and allow the ensuing protest narratives to seamlessly evolve and emerge as ready-made governing narratives. 
In the case of a revolution, past experience has indicated that a new government framework that will represent the protestors almost has to be waiting in the wings for when a government is toppled or a marginalising policy is struck down by the courts. If not, other oppressive regimes that had been suppressed by a deposed tyrant (in the case of Egypt, the Islamic fundamentalists) quickly dominate the landscape. The MOCSIE Systems, as a narrative generator, promise to quickly convert the protest narratives into usable governing narratives that will develop organically almost as fast as the crowd-sourced records are uploaded.

Discourse Structuration and Hegemony

With the above detailed description of both the institutional memory and the ideographs that are archived there, we can now move on to how ideographs and narratives will be utilized as media tools. To do this, this chapter will now delve deeper into the process of discourse structuration. The term was used by Hajer in 1993 in Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance. Miller, in 2012, quotes Hajer as well, writing, “discourse-coalition is not so much connected to a particular person, but is related to practices in the context in which actors employ story lines and (re)produce and transform a particular discourse” (Miller, 2012, p. 33). Discourse structuration has never been a problem for the global elite, and it was Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political activist, who first described how power is retained by the ruling class by the way they structure the governing narratives to marginalise others, and therefore benefit them[selves] (Bates, 1975, p. 351; emphasis added). 
Returning to the idea above about the “othering” tactic of hegemony, it needs to be underscored that those carefully structured narratives not only tell a population who they should hate (a process called framing), but also, embedded in that narrative, is a cleverly engineered narrative that instructs the oppressed to consent to their own marginalization; a process called quiescence (Gaventa, 1980, v-xi; Scott, 1990, p. 71). That insidious narrative typically outlines the conditions under which certain benefits will inure to the submissive population so long as they cooperate with the elite (structuration; in this case by the oppressors). In many cases the only “benefit” promised is that, as bad as things might be, they at least will not get worse. What the MOCSIE Systems recognize is that, while the elite are already very good at doing this, there is nothing that stops the oppressed from doing the same thing to change the discourse so that a new narrative emerges that favors them instead of the elite. 
Unfortunately, this will only happen if the fractured progressive activists can reach consensus on the topics that they want to be advanced. This is why the institutional memory and ICT cannot be under custodianship of a hierarchy, and it is also why these decisions are all placed into the hands of small groups instead of larger committees. The way the process is designed to work is that, once consensus on the best narratives for the new solidarity movement is reached, those communities that are represented by each city-based group, will, themselves, elevate this narrative to the forefront through a framing and contextualizing process of their own. Returning to Figure 4, the six leaders in the media group take on the framing process, and the six leaders in the policy group take on the contextualizing process. After that, dissemination happens in every layer of every stack, and thus a new narrative has a good chance at displacing an older, marginalizing narrative that is only still surviving because hegemony has always had sustaining institutions that instinctively defend its narrative of oppression. This new bread of social equity activism will have to be a sustained effort because hegemony, like a virus that adapts to antibiotics, will adapt in an effort to survive. Hegemonic narratives are really hard to kill (i.e. displace, not deconstruct).
If it would help to provide an example of when the global population consented to their own oppression, a good case study would be the case of “trickle-down economics.” With some powerful academics taking the helm, the idea of supply-side economics was pushed throughout Western democracies with religious-like zeal. As an ideology, or new paradigm if you will, it was pitched in the 1980s and 1990s by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney, and the leaders of almost every other Western superpower. What this discourse told citizens is that if they would allow the super-rich to become obscenely-rich, then everybody would be better off. After all, these are the “job creators.” In hindsight we can see that what many (arguably wiser) academics warned us about was precisely what happened. Statistics on wealth accumulation show that the top 5 percent of the US population retained 81.7 percent of all new wealth in the period from 1983 to 2009 while the bottom 60 percent lost a 7.5 percent share of the total wealth gain in the same period (Mishel, 2011; Allegretto, 2011). As bad as it was, it got worse after the 2008 collapse of the global economy when the top 1 percent were found to have accrued 93 percent of all new wealth, with the bottom 99 percent experiencing growth of 0.2 percent (Saez, 2012, p. 7). 
Looking at the 2012 reincarnation of this trickle-down narrative it once again illustrates how marginalised populations are not monolithic (Wilkes, 2006, p. 510), and how the forces of hegemony can still advance their “divide and rule” tactic (Riggs, 1997, p. 354). This is why the ability to generate viable governing narratives is so critically important at this juncture in history. The proverbial “99 percent” of the Occupy narrative had both framed and contextualized alternative (better) taxation narratives that provided compelling reasons for a more equitable tax structure, (and in the case of Europe, for softer austerity measures), but before the Occupy policy proposals would have a chance at becoming actual governing narratives they needed some kind of a vehicle to propel those narratives into mainstream thinking. A “governing narrative,” in the context of this chapter is determined by whether or not the new policy-proposals of the counter-elite become viable (majority-supported) alternatives to the ideas being pushed by the global elite and their powerful lobbyists. In this regard, the 2011 protestors failed. The theory presented by this chapter suggests a reason as to why that happened.
Another example might help clarify how the narrative threads are organic to the institutional memory. In this example the issue of marriage equality will be utilized to demonstrate a point. For a topic that is as controversial as “gay marriage,” records will not be sorted topically at the top levels of the database, but will rather exist only in the third tier of a four-tiered drill-down mechanism (recall Figure 7). It is through this process that those wanting to upload crowd-sourced media become exposed to the inner-workings of the narrative-generating algorithm. In an example of drilling down to the fourth level, one would start at the Living Diverse gateway, which is a title that is being used as a pseudonym for all campaigns aimed at ending religious-based bigotry. The user will then drill down through LGBT issues (the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender sustaining institution), and through gay marriage (the meta-narrative community), before encountering the final sorting parameters (the micro-narrative communities). At this final record level all but one choice will highlight consensus-building ideals for the topic of gay marriage. For example, sorting options would include topics such as the “separation of church and state,” the “financial burdens” that gay marriage bans impose upon same-sex couples, and the “advantages to society” that full marriage equality will bring to a community when elderly gay couples are given the same financial and societal incentives as heterosexual couples to care for one another in their twilight years. These are just a sampling of the possibilities. Fostering a narrative of marriage as a social contract is at the root of this kind of discourse structuration.  Opposing views against gay marriage will have a place, but they will not be so narrowly defined, thereby not “structuring” (or contextualizing) the same kind of organic consumable narrative that is directed at fostering increasing tolerance for diversity. 
A similar approach will be made for all such divisive issues, thus giving consensus-building narratives a distinct advantage over narratives that would perpetuate the historical fragmentation of the counter-hegemonic, counter-elite, and progressive discourse.

Blogs as Ideographs

In addition to focusing on providing simple .jpg images as ideographs during the beta launch of this information system, the rudimentary system will also accommodate hyperlinks, primarily focusing on blogs. Even though an image (or rather a postcard, as they will be known within the database) can be heavily laden with connotation by the time it becomes an ideograph, it still only allows for a rather subjective policy message. Because of this, for the purpose of this chapter it becomes useful to think of a .jpg image ideograph as something that is sometimes better at applying social pressure (in an attempt to move the needle of public opinion as shown in Figure 6 above) than it is at defining a good policy-proposal. For example, the image of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi did not define a new policy in and of itself. Instead, it applied pressure on the needle and moved it in the direction of progressive (revolutionary) change. Now, in describing a few more of the details within the beta version of the MOCSIE Systems, we turn our attention to how actual policy proposals can be advanced through the agenda-setting process by this ICT database. It is here where blogs become the perfect tool, and a blog post on the RH Reality Check web domain becomes an excellent example of how this happens (Garrison, 2012).
The blog was authored by a user named Melissa, who had been raised in the Southern United States. In that environment she experienced the challenges of having no health care in the way that only a person familiar with the toxic soup of religious fundamentalism and severe Southern poverty might understand. The narrowness of that world-view is what shaped Melissa’s life until she was married and had children of her own. All she knew was what she had been told by her culture, and as bad as it was being poor and having no health insurance in a Southern state (which are notorious for having the lowest health outcome scores of all fifty states), she had been told, and she thoroughly believed, that universal healthcare would be far worse! Nevertheless, her husband took a job in Canada and they moved. She braced herself for what Canada’s awful healthcare system was going to force her to accept by government mandate. Her blog post, which artfully explained how Canada’s healthcare system won her over, will be summarized, linked to, and become searchable through the MOCSIE Systems database. By itself, with no additional narrative development on the part of a database custodian, it provides an excellent policy-proposal framework that is ready-made for legislative action in the United States and elsewhere.

Conclusion

As difficult as it was to keep the disparate parts of this chapter aligned, the one thing that should have been clear throughout is that the media that the counter-hegemonic forces need in order to support all of their policymaking endeavors is already out there, on the web, but it is simply too difficult to navigate to it. In this environment every person who seeks to create a narrative thread for a progressive policy endeavor is forced to start from scratch, which is really discouraging because the established governing narratives from the conservative side have decades, if not centuries, of history that have cemented policies into place. To make it worse, the conservatives’ networks are incredibly homogeneous, making it easy for them to plug their “structural holes” and bring people into line with the hierarchy, while the progressive networks are heterogeneous, making them far less efficient (Sandström & Carlsson, 2008, p. 510). 
In this climate, not only is it incredibly time consuming for a progressive to advance a policy proposal, but it is discouraging when the odds of succeeding are so low, and people disengage when they feel that their effort is not contributing to any kind of change. To make matters worse, in many instances, after a person puts in the effort to generate the kind of research needed to support a progressive policy argument, they find that there is no media channel through which one’s finished product can be effectively disseminated in a way that it will have any impact on the agenda setting process of a government, whether local, provincial, or federal. Global endeavors in this current climate all require the resources of a benefactor like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation before a “good idea” will have any impact. 
Beyond the difficulty in creating a compelling policy proposal, there is the problem of fragmentation. The gay community, relatively speaking, is tiny, but they are well funded, and they are very active. They would make an excellent ally in any campaign for policy change that is aimed at expanding diversity issues, and yet the Black Church in the United States is one of the most homophobic institutions. They similarly would never align themselves with women having the right to make family planning decisions where an abortion is one of the alternatives. This is the kind of “divide and conquer” tactic that keep minorities and women oppressed, and thus the counter-hegemonic voice is discordant and fails to gain any traction. It is in this arena where discourse structuration needs to be incorporated at the grassroots level.
The claim made by this chapter is that until there is a single institutional memory that will serve to enlarge the problems faced by progressive-minded individuals, there will be no unifying force for global solidarity. However, the theory presented in this chapter suggests that once every social justice community begins drinking from the same well we will all have occasion to meet and collaborate in our work, and pluralism will no longer be seen as something to fear. Only then will there be spokespeople (the central figures) who are speaking with a clear, cohesive voice that the counter-hegemonic forces will rally behind. 
A suitable metaphor for the current climate might be to liken the activity in the nonprofit sector to a bumper car arena in which every car has its steering wheel disconnected from the front wheel, but the gas pedal is held all the way to the floor. It is for this reason that the issue of trust comes into play. New nonprofits, with almost identical mission statements to an existing nonprofit, are incorporated every day, simply because the founders did not have the confidence that somebody else could do the job as effectively as they themselves could do it. In other instances it comes down to trust because much of the competition in the “third sector” is over who gets to stand at the microphone; an inherent flaw that is rooted in the hierarchical design of both large and small nonprofits.
Instead of allowing the above scenario to play out time and time again, imagine instead the collective thought of a community as it comes together in small, consensus-building groups. All it would take is to find that central figure; that one community leader with the skills of a juggler who is able to bridge the gap between vulnerability and trust so that the paradox can be reconciled. This will be the voice that actually “speaks,” but the words invoked by that voice will be the words of the collective. The narrative will be one that was gleaned from the real-life experiences of a population that took the time to deposit their singular “voices” into an ICT database over which they held a measure of control.
Looking back in history, the consensus seems to be that it was the printing press that ushered in the Age of Enlightenment and broke the strangle-hold that the absolute monarchs held over the merchant and peasant classes. Who’s to say that the Internet and ubiquitous technology today do not offer us a similar opportunity for a Second Age of Enlightenment? As Argyriades wrote, in speaking of this comparison, 
Debureauratization, the Reformation movement of our times, confronts us with this challenge: it could compound the symptoms of disorganization, indeed ungovernability, passivity, exclusion, marginalization, alienation, and anomie, which can be found all around us—or it could pave the way for a more democratic, more open, self-directed, and self-governed human society (Argyriades, 2010, p. 293). 
To achieve this “self-directed, and self-governed human society” would be an ideal outcome for the MOCSIE Systems, and if one takes the time to read Frederick Thayer’s book (1973), they might capture this vision and see how the technology of today makes possible what was then impossible. In this twenty-first century revolution of intellectual development, what should be hoped for is the ability to delegitimize old paradigms that facilitate oppression and displace them with new ones that flatten the hierarchies of power. The challenge will be to not repeat the mistakes of the peasant revolutions of the 18th century. In the long history of humanity it has never been enough to simply topple a government, because a new oppressor always seems to be at the ready to jump into the vacuum of the old hierarchy and simply fill each void with a different face, but one equally willing to oppress and marginalise a new class of “othered” people. In those instances, for those who seek power, the old axiom of hierarchy still applies: “When you are climbing a ladder, every kick is a step up.” 
If the marginalised and oppressed are to undertake a new kind of revolution, the new weapon that will allow the “peasants,” to pull off a definitive and permanent victory will be a tool that alters narratives, because only narrative, as a weapon, will deploy new governing methodologies as an organic part of any protest movement. And yet, there will be no uniform governing narrative until there is solidarity among the progressive voices. And so, under a new paradigm, when a protest movement next emerges and begins to find traction, it must first make peace with the other progressive allies that it will need at the end of the day when the task of governing has been earned. In the history of humanity, that seems to be the one ingredient that is always missing, and so history continues to repeat itself. When the counter-hegemonic forces find a way to do this, then history might one day refer to that moment as the dawn of the Second Age of Enlightenment.
References 

Allegretto, S. (2011). The state of working America’s wealth, 2011: Through volatility and turmoil the gap widens. Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper #292. EPI:Washington, D.C.
Andersen, K. (2011). The protestor. Time. Web. Dec. 14, 2011. 10 Jan 2012.
Anderson, J.E. (2011). Public policymaking, 7th ed. Boston: Wadsworth.
Argyriades, D. (2010). From bureaucracy to debureaucratization? Public Organization Review, 10(3). 275-297.
Baker, M. (2006). Translation and activism: Emerging patterns of narrative community. The Massachusetts Review,47(3), 462-484.
Bates, T. R. (1975). Gramsci and the theory of hegemony. Journal of the History of Ideas, 36(2), pp. 351-366.
BBC Mobile. (2012). Kenyans donate $200,000 by text for drought victims. Textually.org. Web. July 28, 2011. Jan. 10, 2012.
Chen, X. (2009). The power of “troublemaking”. Comparative Politics, 41(4), 451-471.
Denhardt, R. B. (2011). Theories of Public Organization, 6th ed. Boston: Wadsworth
El-Mahdi, R. (2009). Enough! Egypt's quest for democracy. Comparative Political Studies, 42(8), 1011-1039.
Evans, P. (2007). The ''movement of movements'' for global justice. American Sociological Association, 62(6), 62-64.
Farazmand, A. (1999). The elite question: Toward a normative elite theory of organization. Administration & Society, 31(3), 321-352.
Farazmand, A. (2012a). Institutionalized chaos and transformation of governance and public administration: Explaining the global crisis of capitalism. Public Organization Review, 12(4). Forthcoming.
Farazmand, A. (2012b). Predatory globalization, global crisis of capitalism, and the deepening crisis of the state: Why has public administration failed to grasp its own identity? Public Organization Review, 12(4). Forthcoming.
Farazmand, A. (2013). Conclusion: Can we go home now? Roads taken, targets met, and lessons learned on governance and organizational eclecticism in the public arena. Public Organization Review, 13. 219-228.
Follet, M.P. (1926). The giving of orders. Scientific foundations of business administration. 29-37.
Fox, Z. (2011). 5 tech innovations that could change the developing world. Mashable Tech. Web. Oct. 12, 2011. Jan, 10, 2012.
Gaventa, J. (1980). Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Garrison, V. (2012, July 16). How I lost my fear of universal health care. RH Reality Check: Reproductive & Sexual Health and Justice News, Analysis & Commentary. Retrieved from http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/07/12/how-i-lost-my-fear-universal-health-care 
Geertz, C. (1973/2000). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books.
Ghosh, P.R. (2011). The spectacular mobile phone revolution in Africa. International Business Times. Web. Nov. 17, 2011. Jan. 10, 2012.
Gooden, S.; Portillo, S. (2011). Advancing social equity in the Minnowbrook tradition. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 21(1).  1-14.
Hajer, M.A. (1993). Coalitions, practices and meaning in environmental politics: from acid rain to BSE. Chapter 12 in David Howarth and Jacob Torfing, Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 297-315.
Hemenover, S. H. (2003). The good, the bad, and the healthy: Impacts of emotional disclosure of trauma on resilient self-concept and psychological distress. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(10), 1236-1244.
Herman, J. (1997). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror. New York: BasicBooks.
Hong, P.Y.P., Song, I.H. (2010). Glocalization of social work practice: Global and local responses to globalization. International Social Work, 53(5), pp. 656-670.
King, M.L., Jr. (1967, April 4). Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Riverside Church, New York City. The Internet Archive. Retreived from http://archive.org 
Kolnick, J. (September 26, 2012). Redistribution of wealth has gone upward, not down, since early ‘80s. MinnPost. Accessed at http://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2012/09/redistribution-wealth-has-gone-upward-not-down-early-80s Viewed on November 30, 2012.
Leavitt, L. (2013). A purple primaries protocol for progressive policy victories in “deep-red” American states. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 35(3). 457-465. doi:10.2753/ATP1084-1806350306
Lepore, S. J., Ragan, J. D., & Jones, S. (2000). Talking facilitates cognitive-emotional processes of adaptation to an acute stressor. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 78(3), 499-508.
Miller, H. T. (2004). The ideographic individual. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 26(4), 469-488.
Miller, H. T. (2012). Governing narratives: Symbolic politics and policy change. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Mishel, L. (2011). We’re not broke nor will we be: Policy choices will determine whether rising national income leads to a prosperous middle class. Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper #310. EPI:Washington, D.C.
Morgan, G. (2006). Images of organization, updated. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.
Rainey, H. (2009). Understanding and managing public organizations, 4th ed. John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, CA
Riggs, F.W. (1997). Modernity and bureaucracy. Public Administration Review, (57)4. pp. 347-353.
Rogers, S. (November 14, 2011). Occupy protests around the world: full list visualised. The Guardian. Accessed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/oct/17/occupy-protests-world-list-map# Viewed on November 30, 2012.
Ruggiero, K. J., Smith, D. W., Hanson, R. F., Resnick, H. S., Saunders, B. E., Kilpatrick, D. G., Best, C. L. (2004). Is disclosure of childhood rape associated with mental health outcome? Results from the national women's study. Child Maltreatment: Journal of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, 9(1), 62-77.
Saez, E. (2012). Striking it richer: the evolution of top incomes in the United States (updated with 2009 and 2010 estimates). Pathways Magazine. Berkeley, CA: University of California – Berkley.
Sandström, A.; Carlsson, L. (2008). The performance of policy networks: The relation between network structure and network performance. The Policy Studies Journal, 36(4). 497-524.
Schein, E.H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership, 4th ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Schweller, R.L. (2014). Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Milleneum. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Shafritz, J.M.; Russell, E.W. (2002). Introducing Public Administration, 3rd ed. New York: Longman.
Sharpton, A. (Performer) (2011). Acceptable [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hdr-ToihZc . Web. March 5, 2012.
Shweder, R.A.; Good, G. (2005). Clifford Geertz by his Colleagues. Chicago.
Stein, J. (1964). The fiddler on the roof. New York: Crown Publishers.
Stille, A. (2011). The paradox of the new elite. New York Times. Web. Oct. 22, 2011. Jan. 13, 2012. 
Stone, D. (2002). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, Revised Edition. New York: W.W. Norton.
Thayer, F.C. (1973). An end to hierarchy! an end to competition!. New York: New Viewpoints.
Thayer, F.C. (2002). Elite theory of organization: Building a normative foundation. In A. Farazmand (Ed.), Modern Organizations: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (pp. 97-132). Westport, CT: Praeger
Thorne, J. (2011, Jan 13, 2011). Bouazizi has become a Tunisian protest symbol. The National. Web. Jan. 13, 2011. Jan. 13, 2012. 
Walsh, J. (2012). What's the matter with white people: Why we long for a golden age that never was. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Wilkes, R. (2006). The protest actions of indigenous peoples: A Canadian-U.S. comparison of social movement emergence. American Behavioral Scientist, 50(4), 510-525.
Yanow, D. (2000). Conducting interpretive policy analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.