Mapping by Kate Gasporro: “…The field of civic technology is relatively new. There are limited strategies to measure effectiveness of these tools. Scholars and practitioners are eager to communicate benefits, including improved efficiency and transparency. But, platforms and cities are having difficulty measuring the impacts of civic technology on infrastructure delivery. Even though civic technology platforms write case studies and provide anecdotal information to market their tools, this information does not communicate the challenges and failures that local governments face when implementing these new technologies. At the same time, the nascency of such tools means local governments are still trying to understand how to leverage and protect the enormous amount of data that civic technology tools acquire.
By mapping the landscape of civic technology, we can see more clearly how eParticipation is being used to address public service challenges, including infrastructure delivery. Although many scholars and practitioners have created independent categories for eParticipation, these categorization frameworks follow a similar pattern. At one end of the spectrum, eParticipation efforts provide public service information and relevant updates to citizens or allowing citizens to contact their officials in a unidirectional flow of information. At the other end, eParticipation efforts allow for deliberate democracy where citizens share decision-making with local government officials. Of the dozen categorization frameworks we found, we selected the most comprehensive one accepted by practitioners. This framework draws from public participation practices and identifies five categories:
eInforming: One-way communication providing online information to citizens (in the form of a website) or to government (via ePetitions)
eConsulting: Limited two-way communication where citizens can voice their opinions and provide feedback
eInvolving: Two-way communication where citizens go through an online process to capture public concerns
eCollaborating: Enhanced two-way communication that allows citizens to develop alternative solutions and identify the preferred solution, but decision making remains the government’s responsibility
eEmpowerment: Advanced two-way communication that allows citizens to influence and make decisions as co-producers of policies…
After surveying the civic technology space, we found 24 tools that use eParticipation for infrastructure delivery. We map these technologies according to their intended use phase in infrastructure delivery and type of eParticipation. The horizontal axis divides the space into the different infrastructure delivery phases and the vertical axis shows the five eParticipation categories. Together, we can see how civic technology is attempting to include citizens throughout infrastructure delivery. The majority of the civic technologies available operate as eInforming and eConsulting tools, allowing citizens to provide information to local governments about infrastructure issues. This information is then channeled into the project selection and prioritization process that occurs during the planning phase. A few technologies span multiple infrastructure phases because of their abilities to aggregate many eParticipation technologies to address the functions of each infrastructure phase. Based on this cursory map, we see that there are spaces in the infrastructure delivery process where there are only a few civic technologies. This is often because there are fewer opportunities to influence decision making during the later phases….
The field of civic technology is relatively new. There are limited strategies to measure effectiveness of these tools. Scholars and practitioners are eager to communicate benefits, including improved efficiency and transparency. But, platforms and cities are having difficulty measuring the impacts of civic technology on infrastructure delivery. Even though civic technology platforms write case studies and provide anecdotal information to market their tools, this information does not communicate the challenges and failures that local governments face when implementing these new technologies. At the same time, the nascency of such tools means local governments are still trying to understand how to leverage and protect the enormous amount of data that civic technology tools acquire…..(More)”
