On Culture of Possibility podcast #33, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard realize that, having talked a great deal about cultural democracy, they have yet to dive into the second half of that topic.
Many people take democracy for granted, but what is it really: certainly more than majority rule and voting every once in a while.
Where is it practiced? What’s standing in the way of democracy’s full realization and what can we do about it? How can culture advance democracy?

According to his website, John L. McKnight “was raised a traveling Ohioan, having lived in seven neighborhoods and small towns in the eighteen years before he left to attend Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois”.
While working at the Chicago Commission for Human Relations, the first municipal civil rights agency, he learned the Alinsky trade called community organizing. He co-founded the Health & Medicine Policy Research Group with Dr. Quentin Young, co-founded The Gamaliel Foundation with Greg Galluzzo, and was a founding board member of National People’s Action led by Gale Cincotta. He is currently on the board of Communities First Association, the Abundant Community Initiative, and the Asset-Based Community Development Institute.
In this episode Owen Kelly reads several extracts from The Careless Society, a book he has returned to several times, draws comparisons with the work of Ivan Illich, and points to McKnight’s more recent work.

On September 14 Comic Book Resources reported that “Bill Willingham, the creator of the long-running Vertigo series, Fables, which was recently revived as part of DC's Black Label line of comics, has announced that he is putting the characters into the public domain as a result of years of disputes with DC over his contractual rights to the characters of the series, which is about a group of mythological beings who were exiled from their homelands to go live among humans. … Willingham announced that, as of tomorrow, "15 September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including all related Fables spin-offs and characters, is now in the public domain. What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time. It’s done, and as most experts will tell you, once done it cannot be undone. Take-backs are neither contemplated nor possible."
This episode follows on from last month’s discussion of enshittification. Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss whether Willingham can in fact put his creation into the public domain, how this relates to Creative Commons licences, and what all this might mean in terms of licensing work that has been co-created by a team or a community.

We have come to the third month of 2023 with five Fridays in it, and so we look back at another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie continue their discussion by focussing on the resurgence of interest in ideas of cultural democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, and the relationships between these and previous ideas.
This episode stands as the third in a series. It follows on from Episode 4 which looked at a kind of pre-history of cultural democracy, and Episode 6 which discussed the relationship between the community art movement in the 1980s and cultural democracy.
They refer to the Art with People book that Malcolm Dickson edited in 1995, and look at the work of the Scottish Cultural Policy Collective. They discuss work carried out by Kings College and AHRC this century, and the attempt to build a grassroots Movement for Cultural Democracy in the last few years.
Finally they imagine the possibility of writing a history of cultural democracy that does not situate it as an oppositional movement, but sees it as a vision of a possible future.

This episode took several turns for the unexpected and veered wildly off piste in ways that turned out to make for a very interesting discussion. We begin with Chris Baldwin mysteriously missing in action, as Owen Kelly and Steve Trow discuss the ways in which the distribution of lottery funding has led to poorer areas effectively donating money for cultural provision in much richer areas.
As Steve reaches his conclusions Chris Baldwin arrives from somewhere in Bulgaria and somehow brings the recording crashing to a halt. Once we have reconnected we discover exactly what has delayed Chris, and go on to discuss what we might learn from it in terms of community, solidarity and the climate crisis.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #32, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Caron Atlas of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York (NOCD-NY) and Arts & Democracy, two excellent groups that bridge culture, communities, and policy.
Caron shares a wealth of stories of how creativity can be built into the fabric of communities, informing life on the ground as well as policymaking, including NOCD-NY’s recent forum to reimagine New York City.
Learn about participatory budget, trust-based funding, and much, much more.

We spoke with Ed Carroll and Vita Gelūnienė in April, as part of the series of ICAF specials, when we discussed The Cabbage Field, a community opera developed by Zemuju Sanciu Bendruomene in Kaunas in Lithuania. While attending ICAF we discovered that Ed knew a lot more than we did about the internal workings of the Faro Convention, and we asked him to explain it to us.
In this episode Ed does just that. The Convention “is based on the idea that knowledge and use of heritage form part of the citizen’s right to participate in cultural life as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Article 1 of the convention states that "rights relating to cultural heritage are inherent in the right to participate in cultural life." Article 4 states that "everyone...has the right to benefit from the cultural heritage and to contribute towards its enrichment."
The convention itself acts as a “framework convention” and a kind of lodestar for FCN, the Faro Convention Network, which guides the work and offers “extensive knowledge, expertise and tools, within a framework for constructive dialogue and cooperation”.

According to Wikipedia, “Cory Efram Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics”.
He recently coined the neologism “enshittification” to describe the process that online platforms go through, from offering their users free services, to offering advertisers cheap access to their users, to trapping both in a walled garden, to dying as both users and advertisers struggle to break free.
Like all neologisms the term does not teach us anything new. Rather it enables us to name and therefore discuss something we have kind-of known for some time. In this episode Owen Kelly looks at some of the implications of these discussions.