Selected Readings on Cities and Civic Technology

Curated on Posted on by Julia Root

By Julia Root and Stefaan Verhulst

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of civic innovation was originally published in 2014.

The last five years have seen a wave of new organizations, entrepreneurs and investment in cities and the field of civic innovation.  Two subfields, Civic Tech and Government Innovation, are particularly aligned with GovLab’s interest in the ways in which technology is and can be deployed to redesign public institutions and re-imagine governance.

The emerging field of civic technology, or “Civic Tech,” champions new digital platforms, open data and collaboration tools for transforming government service delivery and engagement with citizens. Government Innovation, while not a new field, has seen in the last five years a proliferation of new structures (e.g. Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics), roles (e.g. Chief Technology/Innovation Officer) and public/private investment (e.g. Innovation Delivery Teams and Code for America Fellows) that are building a world-wide movement for transforming how government thinks about and designs services for its citizens.

There is no set definition for “civic innovation.” However, broadly speaking, it is about improving our cities through the implementation of tools, ideas and engagement methods that strengthen the relationship between government and citizens. The civic innovation field encompasses diverse actors from across the public, private and nonprofit spectrums. These can include government leaders, nonprofit and foundation professionals, urbanists, technologists, researchers, business leaders and community organizers, each of whom may use the term in a different way, but ultimately are seeking to disrupt how cities and public institutions solve problems and invest in solutions.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Readings (in alphabetical order)

Books

Goldsmith, Stephen, and Susan Crawford. The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance. 1 edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2014. http://bit.ly/1zvKOL0.

  • The Responsive City, a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age, is the culmination of research originating from the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative, an ongoing project at Harvard Kennedy School working to catalyze adoption of data projects on the city level.
  • The “data smart city” is one that is responsive to citizens, engages them in problem solving and finds new innovative solutions for dismantling entrenched bureaucracy.
  • The authors document case studies from New York City, Boston and Chicago to explore the following topics:
    • Building trust in the public sector and fostering a sustained, collective voice among communities;
    • Using data-smart governance to preempt and predict problems while improving quality of life;
    • Creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer money with digital tools; and
    • Spearheading these new approaches to government with innovative leadership.

Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. 1 edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. http://bit.ly/17Y4G0R.

  • In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
  • He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
  • He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure; instead, it is how citizens are using ever-changing and grassroots technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient” that will make cities ‘smart.’

Reports + Journal Articles

Black, Alissa, and Rachel Burstein. “The 2050 City – What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today and Tomorrow.” White Paper. New America Foundation – California Civic Innovation Project, June 2013. https://bit.ly/2GohMvw.

  • Through their interviews, the authors determine that civic innovation is not just a “compilation of projects” but that it can inspire institutional structural change.
  • Civic innovation projects that have a “technology focus can sound very different than process-related innovations”; however the outcomes are actually quite similar as they disrupt how citizens and government engage with one another.
  • Technology is viewed by some of the experts as an enabler of civic innovation – not necessarily the driver for innovation itself. What constitutes innovation is how new tools are implemented by government or by civic groups that changes the governing dynamic.

Patel, Mayur, Jon Sotsky, Sean Gourley, and Daniel Houghton. “Knight Foundation Report on Civic Technology.” Presentation. Knight Foundation, December 2013. http://slidesha.re/11UYgO0.

  • This reports aims to advance the field of civic technology, which compared to the tech industry as a whole is relatively young. It maps the field, creating a starting place for understanding activity and investment in the sector.
  • It defines two themes, Open Government and Civic Action, and identifies 11 clusters of civic tech innovation that fall into the two themes. For each cluster, the authors describe the type of activities and highlights specific organizations.
  • The report identified more than $430 million of private and philanthropic investment directed to 102 civic tech organizations from January 2011 to May 2013.

Open Plans. “Field Scan on Civic Technology.” Living Cities, November 2012. http://bit.ly/1HGjGih.

  • Commissioned by Living Cities and authored by Open Plans, the Field Scan investigates the emergent field of civic technology and generates the first analysis of the potential impact for the field as well as a critique for how tools and new methods need to be more inclusive of low-income communities in their use and implementation.
  • Respondents generally agreed that the tools developed and in use in cities so far are demonstrations of the potential power of civic tech, but that these tools don’t yet go far enough.
  • Civic tech tools have the potential to improve the lives of low-income people in a number of ways. However, these tools often fail to reach the population they are intended to benefit. To better understand this challenge, civic tech for low-income people must be considered in the broader context of their interactions with technology and with government.
  • Although hackathons are popular, their approach to problem solving is not always driven by community needs, and hackathons often do not produce useful material for governments or citizens in need.

Goldberg, Jeremy M. “Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation.” Governing, August 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOKnhJ.

  • In this piece, Goldberg argues that innovation and entrepreneurship in local government increasingly require mobilizing talent from many sectors and skill sets.

Black, Alissa, and Burstein, Rachel. “A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work.” IBM Center for the Business of Government, October 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOFZP4.

  • In this report, Burstein and Black examine the recent trend toward the creation of innovation offices across the nation at all levels of government to understand the structural models now being used to stimulate innovation—both internally within an agency, and externally for the agency’s partners and communities.
  • The authors conducted interviews with leadership of innovation offices of cities that include Philadelphia, Austin, Kansas City, Chicago, Davis, Memphis and Los Angeles.
  • The report cites examples of offices, generates a typology for the field, links to projects and highlights success factors.

Mulholland, Jessica, and Noelle Knell. “Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map).” Government Technology, March 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1ycArvX.

  • This article provides an overview of how different cities structure their Chief Innovation Officer positions and provides links to offices, projects and additional editorial content.
  • Some innovation officers find their duties merged with traditional CIO responsibilities, as is the case in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City. Others, like those in Louisville and Nashville, have titles that reveal a link to their jurisdiction’s economic development endeavors.

Toolkits

Bloomberg Philanthropies. January 2014. “Transform Your City through Innovation: The Innovation Delivery Model for Making It Happen.” New York: Bloomberg Philanthropies. http://bloombg.org/120VrKB.

  • In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies funded a three-year innovation capacity program in five major United States cities— Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans – in which cities could hire top-level staff to develop and see through the implementation of solutions to top mayoral priorities such as customer service, murder, homelessness, and economic development, using a sequence of steps.
  • The Innovation Delivery Team Playbook describes the Innovation Delivery Model and describes each aspect of the model from how to hire and structure the team, to how to manage roundtables and run competitions.

Smart citizens. How internet facilitates smart choices in city life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Ericsson Consumer Lab: “The idea of smart cities is an intriguing concept. However, the future will partly be a story of how the architects defining the way our future cities operate are going to be citizens themselves. As the internet makes us more informed, we are in turn making better informed decisions.
We are becoming smart citizens and through our changing behaviors, efficient practices and smarter social norms are developing in our cities.”

Participatory sensing: enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New White Paper by the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (Australia): “Local government (such as the City of Melbourne) is accountable and responsible for establishment, execution and oversight of strategic objectives and resource management in the metropolis. Faced with a rising population, Council has in place a number of strategic plans to ensure it is able to deliver services that maintain (and ideally improve) the quality of life for its citizens (including residents, workers and visitors). This publication explores participatory sensing (PS) and issues associated with governance in the light of new information gathering capabilities that directly engage citizens in collecting data and providing contextual insight that has the potential to greatly enhance Council operations in managing these environments. Download: Participatory Sensing: Enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement (pdf: 2.3mb)“

Mapping information economy business with big data: findings from the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NESTA: “This paper uses innovative ‘big data’ resources to measure the size of the information economy in the UK.

Key Findings

  • Counts of information economy firms are 42 per cent larger than SIC-based estimates
  • Using ‘big data’ estimates, the research finds 225,800 information economy businesses in the UK
  • Information economy businesses are highly clustered across the country, with very high counts in the Greater South East, notably London (especially central and east London), as well as big cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol
  • Looking at local clusters, we find hotspots in Middlesbrough, Aberdeen, Brighton, Cambridge and Coventry, among others

Information and Communications Technologies – and the digital economy they support – are of enduring interest to researchers and policymakers. National and local government are particularly keen to understand the characteristics and growth potential of ‘their’ digital businesses.
Given the recent resurgence of interest in industrial policy across many developed countries, there is now substantial policy interest in developing stronger, more competitive digital economies. For example, the UK’s current industrial strategy combines horizontal interventions with support for seven key sectors, of which the ‘information economy’ is one.
The desire to grow high–tech clusters is often prominent in the policy mix – for instance, the UK’s Tech City UK initiative, Regional Innovation Clusters in the US and elements of ‘smart specialisation’ policies in the EU.
In this paper, NIESR and Growth Intelligence use novel ‘big data’ sources to improve our understanding of information economy businesses in the UK – that is, those involved in the production of ICTs. We use this experience to critically reflect on some of the opportunities and challenges presented by big data tools and analytics for economic research and policymaking.”
– See more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/mapping-information-economy-business-big-data-findings-uk-0#sthash.2ismEMr2.dpuf

Smart cities: the state-of-the-art and governance challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Paper by Mark Deakin in Triple Helix – A Journal of University-Industry-Government Innovation and Entrepreneurship: “Reflecting on the governance of smart cities, the state-of-the-art this paper advances offers a critique of recent city ranking and future Internet accounts of their development. Armed with these critical insights, it goes on to explain smart cities in terms of the social networks, cultural attributes and environmental capacities, vis-a-vis, vital ecologies of the intellectual capital, wealth creation and standards of participatory governance regulating their development. The Triple Helix model which the paper advances to explain these performances in turn suggests that cities are smart when the ICTs of future Internet developments successfully embed the networks society needs for them to not only generate intellectual capital, or create wealth, but also cultivate the environmental capacity, ecology and vitality of those spaces which the direct democracy of their participatory governance open up, add value to and construct.”

Look to Government—Yes, Government—for New Social Innovations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christian Bason and Philip Colligan: “If asked to identify the hotbed of social innovation right now, many people would likely point to the new philanthropy of Silicon Valley or the social entrepreneurship efforts supported by Ashoka, Echoing Green, and Skoll Foundation. Very few people, if any, would mention their state capital or Capitol Hill. While local and national governments may have promulgated some of the greatest advances in human history — from public education to putting a man on the moon — public bureaucracies are more commonly known to stifle innovation.
Yet, around the world, there are local, regional, and national government innovators who are challenging this paradigm. They are pioneering a new form of experimental government — bringing new knowledge and practices to the craft of governing and policy making; drawing on human-centered design, user engagement, open innovation, and cross-sector collaboration; and using data, evidence, and insights in new ways.
Earlier this year, Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation (which Philip helps run), teamed up with Bloomberg Philanthropies to publish i-teams, the first global review of public innovation teams set up by national and city governments. The study profiled 20 of the most established i-teams from around the world, including:

  • French Experimental Fund for Youth, which has supported more than 554 experimental projects (such as one that reduces school drop-out rates) that have benefited over 480,000 young people;
  • Nesta’s Innovation Lab, which has run 70 open innovation challenges and programs supporting over 750 innovators working in fields as diverse as energy efficiency, healthcare, and digital education;
  • New Orleans’ Innovation and Delivery team, which achieved a 19% reduction in the number of murders in the city in 2013 compared to the previous year.

How are i-teams achieving these results? The most effective ones are explicit about the goal they seek – be it creating a solution to a specific policy challenge, engaging citizenry in behaviors that help the commonweal, or transforming the way government behaves. Importantly, these teams are also able to deploy the right skills, capabilities, and methods for the job.
In addition, ­i-teams have a strong bias toward action. They apply academic research in behavioral economics and psychology to public policy and services, focusing on rapid experimentation and iteration. The approach stands in stark contrast to the normal routines of government.
Take for example, The UK’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), often called the Nudge Unit. It sets clear goals, engages the right expertise to prototype means to the end, and tests innovations rapidly in the field, to learn what’s not working and rapidly scales what is.
One of BIT’s most famous projects changed taxpayer behavior. BIT’s team of economists, behavioral psychologists, and seasoned government staffers came up with minor changes to tax letters, sent out by the UK Government, that subtlety introduced positive peer pressure. By simply altering the letters to say that most people in their local area had already paid their taxes, BIT was able to boost repayment rates by around 5%. This trial was part of a range of interventions, which have helped forward over £200 million in additional tax revenue to HM Revenue & Customs, the UK’s tax authority.
The Danish government’s internal i-team, MindLab (which Christian ran for 8 years) has likewise influenced citizen behavior….”

Activists Wield Search Data to Challenge and Change Police Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the New York Times: “One month after a Latino youth died from a gunshot as he sat handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser here last year, 150 demonstrators converged on Police Headquarters, some shouting “murderers” as baton-wielding officers in riot gear fired tear gas.

The police say the youth shot himself with a hidden gun. But to many residents of this city, which is 40 percent black, the incident fit a pattern of abuse and bias against minorities that includes frequent searches of cars and use of excessive force. In one case, a black female Navy veteran said she was beaten by an officer after telling a friend she was visiting that the friend did not have to let the police search her home.

Yet if it sounds as if Durham might have become a harbinger of Ferguson, Mo. — where the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer led to weeks of protests this summer — things took a very different turn. Rather than relying on demonstrations to force change, a coalition of ministers, lawyers and community and political activists turned instead to numbers. They used an analysis of state data from 2002 to 2013 that showed that the Durham police searched black male motorists at more than twice the rate of white males during stops. Drugs and other illicit materials were found no more often on blacks….

The use of statistics is gaining traction not only in North Carolina, where data on police stops is collected under a 15-year-old law, but in other cities around the country.

Austin, Tex., began requiring written consent for searches without probable cause two years ago, after its independent police monitor reported that whites stopped by the police were searched one in every 28 times, while blacks were searched one in eight times.

In Kalamazoo, Mich., a city-funded study last year found that black drivers were nearly twice as likely to be stopped, and then “much more likely to be asked to exit their vehicle, to be handcuffed, searched and arrested.”

As a result, Jeff Hadley, the public safety chief of Kalamazoo, imposed new rules requiring officers to explain to supervisors what “reasonable suspicion” they had each time they sought a driver’s consent to a search. Traffic stops have declined 42 percent amid a drop of more than 7 percent in the crime rate, he said.

“It really stops the fishing expeditions,” Chief Hadley said of the new rules. Though the findings demoralized his officers, he said, the reaction from the African-American community stunned him. “I thought they would be up in arms, but they said: ‘You’re not telling us anything we didn’t already know. How can we help?’ ”

The School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a new manual for defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges, with a chapter that shows how stop and search data can be used by the defense to raise challenges in cases where race may have played a role…”

Colombia’s Data-Driven Fight Against Crime

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

One Monday in 1988, El Mundo newspaper of Medellín, Colombia, reported, as it did every Monday, on the violent deaths in the city of two million people over the weekend. An article giving an hour-by-hour description of the deaths from Saturday night to Sunday night was remarkable for, among other things, the journalist’s skill in finding different ways to report a murder. “Someone took the life of Luís Alberto López at knife point … Luís Alberto Patiño ceased to exist with a bullet in his head … Mario Restrepo turned up dead … An unidentified person killed Néstor Alvarez with three shots.” In reporting 27 different murders, the author repeated his phrasing only once.

….What Guerrero did to make Cali safer was remarkable because it worked, and because of the novelty of his strategy. Before becoming mayor, Guerrero was not a politician, but a Harvard-trained epidemiologist who was president of the Universidad del Valle in Cali. He set out to prevent murder the way a doctor prevents disease. What public health workers are doing now to stop the spread of Ebola, Guerrero did in Cali to stop the spread of violence.

Although his ideas have now been used in dozens of cities throughout Latin America, they are worth revisiting because they are not employed in the places that need them most. The most violent places in Latin America are Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — indeed, they are among the most violent countries in the world not at war. The wave of youth migration to the United States is from these countries, and the refugees are largely fleeing violence.

One small municipality in El Salvador, Santa Tecla, has employed Cali’s strategies since about 10 years ago, and the homicide rate has dropped there. But Santa Tecla is an anomaly. Most of the region’s cities have not tried to do what Guerrero did — and they are failing to protect their citizens….

Guerrero went on to spread his ideas. Working with the Pan-American Health Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank, he took his epidemiological methods to 18 other countries.

“The approach was very low-cost and pragmatic,” said Joan Serra Hoffman, a senior specialist in crime and violence prevention in Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank. “You could see it was conceived by someone who was an academic and a policy maker. It can be fully operational for between $50,000 and $80,000.”…

Can Government Mine Tweets to Assess Public Opinion?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at Government Technology: “What if instead of going to a city meeting, you could go on Twitter, tweet your opinion, and still be heard by those in government? New research suggests this is a possibility.
The Urban Attitudes Lab at Tufts University has conducted research on accessing “big data” on social networking sites for civic purposes, according to Justin Hollander, associate professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts.
About six months ago, Hollander began researching new ways of accessing how people think about the places they live, work and play. “We’re looking to see how tapping into social media data to understand attitudes and opinions can benefit both urban planning and public policy,” he said.
Harnessing natural comments — there are about one billion tweets per day — could help governments learn what people are saying and feeling, said Hollander. And while formal types of data can be used as proxies for how happy people are, people openly share their sentiments on social networking sites.
Twitter and other social media sites can also provide information in an unobtrusive way. “The idea is that we can capture a potentially more valid and reliable view [of people’s] opinions about the world,” he said. As an inexact science, social science relies on a wide range of data sources to inform research, including surveys, interviews and focus groups; but people respond to being the subject of study, possibly affecting outcomes, Hollander said.
Hollander is also interested in extracting data from social sites because it can be done on a 24/7 basis, which means not having to wait for government to administer surveys, like the Decennial Census. Information from Twitter can also be connected to place; Hollander has approximated that about 10 percent of all tweets are geotagged to location.
In its first study earlier this year, the lab looked at using big data to learn about people’s sentiments and civic interests in New Bedford, Mass., comparing Twitter messages with the city’s published meeting minutes.
To extract tweets over a six-week period from February to April, researchers used the lab’s own software to capture 122,186 tweets geotagged within the city that also had words pertaining to the New Bedford area. Hollander said anyone can get API information from Twitter to also mine data from an area as small as a neighborhood containing a couple hundred houses.
Researchers used IBM’s SPSS Modeler software, comparing this to custom-designed software, to leverage a sentiment dictionary of nearly 3,000 words, assigning a sentiment score to each phrase — ranging from -5 for awful feelings to +5 for feelings of elation. The lab did this for the Twitter messages, and found that about 7 percent were positive versus 5.5 percent negative, and correspondingly in the minutes, 1.7 percent were positive and .7 percent negative. In total, about 11,000 messages contained sentiments.
The lab also used NVivo qualitative software to analyze 24 key words in a one-year sample of the city’s meeting minutes. By searching for the same words in Twitter posts, the researchers found that “school,” “health,” “safety,” “parks,” “field” and “children” were used frequently across both mediums.
….
Next up for the lab is a new study contrasting Twitter posts from four Massachusetts cities with the recent election results.

The Next Frontier of Engagement: Civic Innovation Labs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Maayan Dembo at Planetizen: “As described by Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School who developed the term “disruptive innovation,” a successful office for social innovation should employ four main tactics to accomplish its mission. First, governments should invest “in innovations that are developed and identified by citizens outside of government who better understand the problems.” Second, the office should support “‘bottom-up’ initiatives, in preference to ‘trickle-down’ philanthropy—because the societal impact of the former is typically greater.” Third, Christensen argues that the office should utilize impact metrics to measure performance and, finally, that it should also invest in social innovation outside of the non-profit sector.
Los Angeles’ most recent citizen-driven social innovation initiative, the Civic Innovation Lab, is an 11-month project aimed at prototyping new solutions for issues within the city of Los Angeles. It is supported by the HubLA, Learn Do Share, the Los Angeles *City  Tech Bullpen, and Innovate LA, a membership organization within the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. Private and public sector support for such labs, in one of the largest cities in America, is highly unprecedented, and because this initiative in Los Angeles is a new mechanism explicitly supported by the public sector, it warrants a critical check on its motivations and accomplishments. Depending on its success, the Civic Innovation Lab could serve as a model for future municipalities.
The Los Angeles Civic Innovation Lab operates in three main phases: 1) workshops where citizens learn about the possibilities of Open Data and discuss what deep challenges face Los Angeles (called the “Discover, Define, Design” stage), 2) a call for solutions to solve the design challenges brought to light in the first phase, and 3) a six-month accelerator program to prototype selected solutions. I participated in the most recent Civic Innovation Lab session, a three-day workshop concluding the “Discover, Define, Design” phase….”