CONTACT: Jim Hellegaard, New York Law School Public Affairs,
212.431.2191, jhellegaard@nyls.edu
LINK: Democracy Design Workshop
NEW YORK, NY, June 24, 2003—The Democracy Design Workshop at New York Law
School, a laboratory dedicated to fostering civic innovation in support of participatory
and deliberative democratic practice, has been awarded an $80,000 grant by the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The grant will fund the Workshop’s Interactive Democracy
Inventory, a Web-based global repository of best practices in participatory
and democratic governance.
Designed to foster democratic capacity through information exchange and networking,
the Inventory provides a knowledge infrastructure to inform and connect practitioners
worldwide. This fully searchable database is intended to facilitate problem
solving and stimulate innovation through the application of participatory and
democratic solutions. The Inventory allows members of this community of
interest to upload, index, and search information about organizations, practices,
events, scholarship and law. It also helps match those “doing democracy” to
those studying and documenting participative practices across multiple domains.
Early work on the Inventory was funded by AmericaSpeaks and the Council of
Europe.
The Democracy Design Workshop (old.nyls.edu/democracyhome.php) is directed
by Beth Simone Noveck, an associate professor of law at New York Law School,
where she also directs the Institute for Information Law and Policy. She is
a founding fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The
Workshop aims to be a meetinghouse for thinkers and practitioners who, through
research, dialogue and design, explore how to use technology to strengthen democracy
online and off.
"We are delighted by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation support for
our work,” Noveck said. “By using cutting-edge, open-source technology for the
promotion of strong democracy, we can create a tool for the exchange of best
practices and ideas in collaboration and participation, helping practitioners
learn from and engage with one another.” Noveck added, “The Inventory
is our flagship civic innovation design project. It is the knowledge base
to support our civic innovation endeavors and represents precisely the kind
of interdisciplinary, problem-solving work that should be part of contemporary
legal education.”
New York Law School Dean Richard A. Matasar said he is pleased that the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund has chosen to support the Democracy Design Workshop. “In the coming
years, the challenge to all democratic institutions will be how to involve citizens
in decision-making,” Matasar said. “Without such participation, the legitimacy
of government might be questioned. And, without the information that ordinary
citizens can provide, decisions cannot be informed. Professor Noveck and
her students are working on novel solutions to this problem and this grant will
provide strong support for their work."
Supported by New York Law School and by the Information Society Project of
the Yale Law School, the Workshop continues those schools’ long tradition of
working across conventional boundaries. The Workshop draws upon the best current
thinking - and thinkers - in law and policy, ethics and philosophy, communications
and media, business and organizational theory, science and technology, and the
arts. All of these disciplines are essential to building and strengthening the
social practices of democracy and the deliberative structures upon which they
depend.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (www.rbf.org) promotes social change that contributes
to a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world. Through its grant-making, the
Fund supports efforts to expand knowledge, clarify values and critical choices,
nurture creative expression, and shape public policy. The Fund’s programs are
intended to develop leaders, strengthen institutions, engage citizens, build
community, and foster partnerships that include government, business, and civil
society. Respect for cultural diversity and ecological integrity pervades the
Fund's activities.
The Fund's Democratic Practice program focuses on four goals. Two of those
goals, encouraging civic engagement and fostering effective governance, are
pursued largely in the United States. The Fund’s other goals—enhancing access
and promoting participation, and ensuring transparency and accountability—focus
primarily on transnational institutions. In addition, the Fund may pursue one
or more of these program themes in a limited number of the Fund’s “pivotal places,”
based on a careful assessment of local needs and priorities. Recognizing that
there is no single model of effective democratic practice, the Fund will emphasize
flexibility and adaptability to different contexts.
ABOUT NEW YORK LAW SCHOOL
Located near the centers of law,
government, and finance in New York City, New York Law School is one of the
oldest independent law schools in the United States. Its faculty of noted and
prolific scholars has built the school’s curricular strength in the areas of
tax law, labor and employment law, civil and human rights law, media and information
law, urban legal studies, international and comparative law, and interdisciplinary
fields such as legal history and legal ethics. The Law School enrolls 1,400
students and has more than 11,000 graduates.
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