Pico
Pico
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

That is a wonderful advice and I believe it clearly answers my question. I guess I should start doing it myself, but I sometimes suffer from 2 main impediments to this:

  1. Procrastination. Even at my ‘day-job’, even though I love it, and it’s only worse in these kinds of ‘side projects'. I believe that’s ineherent to the human condition, but I’m a designer (so also a member of that club of losers who studied liberal arts) and maybe that’s why I’m not too shy to admit it ;) …
  2. Shyness. Not shyness in general – I don’t think I’m an overly shy person – but a kind of shyness to approach people on the street and start asking them about their problems. I do this all the time for my ‘day-job’ as a product manager, but usually those people I approach are not complete strangers, and I have a kind of ‘mandate’ (from the organization I’m working for) to do it, so it serves as an excuse to start the conversation.

I realize those are factors that no one can help me with, it has to come from inside. And your response inspires me to become a little more proactive. I have actually been involved in these kind of activities before, as part of a workshop about civic participation, but once it ended so did my involvement.

From that experience I find that the most difficult part is to “bring together everyone you possibly can to address that problem”. Even the people who were involved in that same workshop were very difficult to bring together to actually start solving the problems we identified once the ‘mandate’ from the workshop wasn’t there anymore.

I believe this is one of the biggest problems of our (so called) democracies — the lack of will to participate from a lot (if not most) of the ‘regular citizens’. And by participation I don’t (just) mean voting, but actually taking — researching actual problems and start solving them. Too often voting is confused with participating.

I think that lack of participation is something very difficult to mitigate with a bottom-up approach, spurring from the individual level. That was one of the main reasons I joined the movement I mentioned before (DiEM), but even there you see participation in the range of 20% of the members. Members who proactively signed up and joined.

I do believe however that this issue is far worse at the regional and national (or federal) level than at the local — municipal — level. I completely agree that municipalities should have broader mandates and more access to funds. Unfortunately, at least in Portugal, I believe the trend is the opposite — to narrow the municipal authority and reach. I believe that to be the major change that has to come from the top-down.

Sorry for the long reply and, again, thank you for writing / compiling the original article and for the comprehensive answer to my comment. (I still have to update the medium app, otherwise I would give you a big round of applause… but I’ll give you a ❤️ instead!)

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    Pico

    Written by

    Pico

    A customer-oriented product 'guy', I am also a certified Product Owner currently working at BetBright!

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