John Bell in AlJazeera: “A quarter century after the demise of the Soviet Union, is the Western model of government under threat? …. The pressures are coming from several directions.
All states are feeling the pressure from unregulated global flows of capital that create obscene concentrations of wealth, and an inability of the nation-state to respond.Relatedly, citizens either ignore or distrust traditional institutions, and ethnic groups demand greater local autonomy.
A recent Pew survey shows that Americans aged 18-33 mostly identify as political independents and distrust institutions. The classic model is indeed frayed, and new developments have made it feel like very old cloth.
One natural reflex is to assert even greater control, a move suited to the authoritarians, such as China, Russia or General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi‘s Egypt: Strengthen the nation by any means to withstand the pressures. The reality, however, is that all systems, democracies or otherwise, were designed for an industrial age, and the management of an anonymous mass, and cannot cope with globalised economics and the information world of today.
The question remains: What can effectively replace the Western model? The answer may not lie only in the invention of new structures, but in the improvement of a key component found in all: The citizen.
The citizen today is mostly a consumer, focused on the purchase of goods or services, or the insistent consumption of virtual information, often as an ersatz politics. Occasionally, when a threat rises, he or she also becomes a demandeur of absolute security from the state. Indeed, some are using the new technologies for democratic purposes, they are better informed, criticise abuse or corruption, and organise and rally movements.
But, the vast majority is politically disengaged and cynical of political process; many others are too busy trying to survive to even care. A grand apathy has set in, the stage left vacant for a very few extremists, or pied pipers of the old tunes of nationalisms and tribal belonging disguised as leaders. The citizen is either invisible in this circus, an endangered species in the 21st century, or increasingly drawn to dark and polarising forces.
Some see the glass as half full and believe that technology and direct democracy can bridge the gaps. Indeed, the internet provides a plethora of information and a greater sense of empowerment. Lesser-known protests in Bosnia have led to direct democracy plenums, and the Swiss do revert to national referenda. However, whether direct or representative, democracy will still depend on the quality of the citizen, and his or her decisions.
Opinion, dogma and bias
Opinion, dogma and bias remain common political operating system and, as a result, our politics are still an unaffordable game of chance. The optimists may be right, but discussions in social media on issues ranging from Ukraine to gun control reveal more deep bias and the lure of excitement than the pursuit of a constructive answer.
People crave excitement in their politics. Whether it is through asserting their own opinion or in battling others, politics offers a great ground for this high. The cost, however, comes in poor judgment and dangerous decisions. George W. Bush was elected twice, Vladimir Putin has much support, climate change is denied, and an intoxicated Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, may be re-elected.
Few are willing to admit their role in this state of affairs, but they will gladly see the ill in others. Even fewer, including often myself, will admit that they don’t really know how to think through a challenge, political or otherwise. This may seem absurd, thinking feels as natural as walking, but the formation of political opinion is a complex affair, a flawed duet between our minds and outside input. Media, government propaganda, family, culture, and our own unique set of personal experiences, from traumas to chance meetings, all play into the mix. High states of emotion, “excitement”, also weigh in, making us dumb and easily manipulated….
This step may also be a precursor for another that involves the ordinary person. Today being a citizen involves occasional voting, politics as spectator sport, and, among some, being a watchdog against corruption or street activism. What may be required is more citizens’ participation in local democracy, not just in assemblies or casting votes, but in local management and administration.
This will help people understand the complexities of politics, gain greater responsibility, and mitigate some of the vices of centralisation and representative democracy. It may also harmonise with the information age, where everyone, it seems, wishes to be empowered.
Do people have time in their busy lives? A rotational involvement in local affairs can help solve this, and many might even find the engagement enjoyable. This injection of a real citizen into the mix may improve the future of politics while large institutions continue to hum their tune.
In the end, a citizen who has responsibility for his actions can probably make any structure work, while rejecting any that would endanger his independence and dignity. The rise of a more intelligent and committed citizen may clarify politics, improve liberal democracies, and make populism and authoritarianism less appealing and likely paths.”
Protect the open web and the promise of the digital age
Richard Waters in the Financial Times: “There is much to be lost if companies and nations put up fences around our digital open plains
For all the drawbacks, it is not hard to feel nostalgic about the early days of the web. Surfing between slow-loading, badly designed sites on a dial-up internet connection running at 56 kilobits per second could be frustrating. No wonder it was known as the “world wide wait”. But the “wow” factor was high. There was unparalleled access to free news and information, even if some of it was deeply untrustworthy. Then came that first, revelatory search on Google, which untangled the online jumble with almost miraculous speed.
Later, an uproarious outbreak of blogs converted what had been a passive medium into a global rant. And, with YouTube and Facebook, a mass audience found digital self-expression for the first time.
As the world wide web turns 25, it is easy to take all this for granted. For a generation that has grown up digital, it is part of the fabric of life.
It is also easy to turn away without too many qualms. More than 80 per cent of time spent on smartphones and tablets does not involve the web at all: it is whiled away in apps, which offer the instant gratification that comes from a tap or swipe of a finger.
Typing a URL on a small device, trying to stretch or shrink a web page to fit the small screen, browsing through Google links in a mobile browser: it is all starting to seem so, well, anachronistic.
But if the world wide web is coming to play a smaller part in everyday life, the significance of its relative decline should be kept in perspective. After all, the web is only one of the applications that rides on top of the internet: it is the standards and technologies of the internet itself that provide the main foundation for the modern, connected world. As long as all bits flow freely (and cheaply), the promise of the digital age will remain intact.
Before declaring the web era over and moving on, however, it is worth dwelling on what it represents – and what could be lost if this early manifestation of digital life were to be consigned to history.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the technical paper a quarter of a century ago that laid out the architecture of the web, certainly senses the threat. The open technical standards and open access that lie at the heart of the web – based on the freedom to link any online document to any other – are not guaranteed. What is needed, he argued this week, is nothing less than a digital bill of rights: a statement that would enshrine the ideals on which the medium was founded.
As this suggests, the web has always been much more than a technology. It is a state of mind, a dream of participation, a call to digital freedom that transcends geography. What place it finds in the connected world of tomorrow will help define what it means to be a digital citizen…”
The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis
David Lazer: “…big data last winter had its “Dewey beats Truman” moment, when the poster child of big data (at least for behavioral data), Google Flu Trends (GFT), went way off the rails in “nowcasting” the flu–overshooting the peak last winter by 130% (and indeed, it has been systematically overshooting by wide margins for 3 years). Tomorrow we (Ryan Kennedy, Alessandro Vespignani, and Gary King) have a paper out in Science dissecting why GFT went off the rails, how that could have been prevented, and the broader lessons to be learned regarding big data.
[We are The Parable of Google Flu (WP-Final).pdf we submitted before acceptance. We have also posted an SSRN paper evaluating GFT for 2013-14, since it was reworked in the Fall.]Key lessons that I’d highlight:
1) Big data are typically not scientifically calibrated. This goes back to my post last month regarding measurement. This does not make them useless from a scientific point of view, but you do need to build into the analysis that the “measures” of behavior are being affected by unseen things. In this case, the likely culprit was the Google search algorithm, which was modified in various ways that we believe likely to have increased flu related searches.
2) Big data + analytic code used in scientific venues with scientific claims need to be more transparent. This is a tricky issue, because there are both legitimate proprietary interests involved and privacy concerns, but much more can be done in this regard than has been done in the 3 GFT papers. [One of my aspirations over the next year is to work together with big data companies, researchers, and privacy advocates to figure out how this can be done.]
3) It’s about the questions, not the size of the data. In this particular case, one could have done a better job stating the likely flu prevalence today by ignoring GFT altogether and just project 3 week old CDC data to today (better still would have been to combine the two). That is, a synthesis would have been more effective than a pure “big data” approach. I think this is likely the general pattern.
4) More generally, I’d note that there is much more that the academy needs to do. First, the academy needs to build the foundation for collaborations around big data (e.g., secure infrastructures, legal understandings around data sharing, etc). Second, there needs to be MUCH more work done to build bridges between the computer scientists who work on big data and social scientists who think about deriving insights about human behavior from data more generally. We have moved perhaps 5% of the way that we need to in this regard.”
How Maps Drive Decisions at EPA
Joseph Marks at NextGov: “The Environmental Protection Agency office charged with taking civil and criminal actions against water and air polluters used to organize its enforcement targeting meetings and conference calls around spreadsheets and graphs.
Those spreadsheets detailed places with large oil and gas production and other possible pollutants where EPA might want to focus its own inspection efforts or reach out to state-level enforcement agencies.
During the past two years, the agency has largely replaced those spreadsheets and tables with digital maps, which make it easier for participants to visualize precisely where the top polluting areas are and how those areas correspond to population centers, said Harvey Simon, EPA’s geospatial information officer, making it easier for the agency to focus inspections and enforcement efforts where they will do the most good.
“Rather than verbally going through tables and spreadsheets you have a lot of people who are not [geographic information systems] practitioners who are able to share map information,” Simon said. “That’s allowed them to take a more targeted and data-driven approach to deciding what to do where.”
The change is a result of the EPA Geoplatform, a tool built off Esri’s ArcGIS Online product, which allows companies and government agencies to build custom Web maps using base maps provided by Esri mashed up with their own data.
When the EPA Geoplatform launched in May 2012 there were about 250 people registered to create and share mapping data within the agency. That number has grown to more than 1,000 during the past 20 months, Simon said.
“The whole idea of the platform effort is to democratize the use of geospatial information within the agency,” he said. “It’s relatively simple now to make a Web map and mash up data that’s useful for your work, so many users are creating Web maps themselves without any support from a consultant or from a GIS expert in their office.”
A governmentwide Geoplatform launched in 2012, spurred largely by agencies’ frustrations with the difficulty of sharing mapping data after the 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The platform’s goal was twofold. First officials wanted to share mapping data more widely between agencies so they could avoid duplicating each other’s work and to share data more easily during an emergency.
Second, the government wanted to simplify the process for viewing and creating Web maps so they could be used more easily by nonspecialists.
EPA’s geoplatform has essentially the same goals. The majority of the maps the agency builds using the platform aren’t publicly accessible so the EPA doesn’t have to worry about scrubbing maps of data that could reveal personal information about citizens or proprietary data about companies. It publishes some maps that don’t pose any privacy concerns on EPA websites as well as on the national geoplatform and to Data.gov, the government data repository.
Once ArcGIS Online is judged compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act, or FISMA, which is expected this month, EPA will be able to share significantly more nonpublic maps through the national geoplatform and rely on more maps produced by other agencies, Simon said.
EPA’s geoplatform has also made it easier for the agency’s environmental justice office to share common data….”
Open Data is a Civil Right
Yo Yoshida, Founder & CEO, Appallicious in GovTech: “As Americans, we expect a certain standardization of basic services, infrastructure and laws — no matter where we call home. When you live in Seattle and take a business trip to New York, the electric outlet in the hotel you’re staying in is always compatible with your computer charger. When you drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I-5 doesn’t all-of-a-sudden turn into a dirt country road because some cities won’t cover maintenance costs. If you take a 10-minute bus ride from Boston to the city of Cambridge, you know the money in your wallet is still considered legal tender.
But what if these expectations of consistency were not always a given? What if cities, counties and states had absolutely zero coordination when it came to basic services? This is what it is like for us in the open data movement. There are so many important applications and products that have been built by civic startups and concerned citizens. However, all too often these efforts are confided to city limits, and unavailable to anyone outside of them. It’s time to start reimagining the way cities function and how local governments operate. There is a wealth of information housed in local governments that should be public by default to help fuel a new wave of civic participation.
Appallicious’ Neighborhood Score provides an overall health and sustainability score, block-by-block for every neighborhood in the city of San Francisco. The first time metrics have been applied to neighborhoods so we can judge how government allocates our resources, so we can better plan how to move forward. But, if you’re thinking about moving to Oakland, just a subway stop away from San Francisco and want to see the score for a neighborhood, our app can’t help you, because that city has yet to release the data sets we need.
In Contra Costa County, there is the lifesaving PulsePoint app, which notifies smartphone users who are trained in CPR when someone nearby may be in need of help. This is an amazing app—for residents of Contra Costa County. But if someone in neighboring Alameda County needs CPR, the app, unfortunately, is completely useless.
Buildingeye visualizes planning and building permit data to allow users to see what projects are being proposed in their area or city. However, buildingeye is only available in a handful of places, simply because most cities have yet to make permits publicly available. Think about what this could do for the construction sector — an industry that has millions of jobs for Americans. Buildingeye also gives concerned citizens access to public documents like never before, so they can see what might be built in their cities or on their streets.
Along with other open data advocates, I have been going from city-to-city, county-to-county and state-to-state, trying to get governments and departments to open up their massive amounts of valuable data. Each time one city, or one county, agrees to make their data publicly accessible, I can’t help but think it’s only a drop in the bucket. We need to think bigger.
Every government, every agency and every department in the country that has already released this information to the public is a case study that points to the success of open data — and why every public entity should follow their lead. There needs to be a national referendum that instructs that all government data should be open and accessible to the public.
Last May, President Obama issued an executive order requiring that going forward, any data generated by the federal government must be made available to the public in open, machine-readable formats. In the executive order, Obama stated that, “openness in government strengthens our democracy, promotes the delivery of efficient and effective services to the public, and contributes to economic growth.”
If this is truly the case, Washington has an obligation to compel local and state governments to release their data as well. Many have tried to spur this effort. California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom created the Citizenville Challenge to speed up adoption on the local level. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has also been vocal in promoting open data efforts. But none of these initiatives could have the same effect of a federal mandate.
What I am proposing is no small feat, and it won’t happen overnight. But there should be a concerted effort by those in the technology industry, specifically civic startups, to call on Congress to draft legislation that would require every city in the country to make their data open, free and machine readable. Passing federal legislation will not be an easy task — but creating a “universal open data” law is possible. It would require little to no funding, and it is completely nonpartisan. It’s actually not a political issue at all; it is, for lack of a better word, and administrative issue.
Often good legislation is blocked because lawmakers and citizens are concerned about project funding. While there should be support to help cities and towns achieve the capability of opening their data, a lot of the time, they don’t need it. In 2009, the city and county of San Francisco opened up its data with zero dollars. Many other cities have done the same. There will be cities and municipalities that will need financial assistance to accomplish this. But it is worth it, and it will not require a significant investment for a substantial return. There are free online open data portals, like ckan, dkan and a new effort from Accela, CivicData.com, to centralize open data efforts.
When the UK Government recently announced a £1.5 million investment to support open data initiatives, its Cabinet Office Minister said, “We know that it creates a more accountable, efficient and effective government. Open Data is a raw material for economic growth, supporting the creation of new markets, business and jobs and helping us compete in the global race.”
We should not fall behind these efforts. There is too much at stake for our citizens, not to mention our economy. A recent McKinsey report found that making open data has the potential to create $3 trillion in value worldwide.
Former Speaker Tip O’Neil famously said, “all politics are local.” But we in the civic startup space believe all data is local. Data is reporting potholes in your neighborhood and identifying high crime areas in your communities. It’s seeing how many farmers’ markets there are in your town compared to liquor stores. Data helps predict which areas of a city are most at risk during a heat wave and other natural disasters. A federal open data law would give the raw material needed to create tools to improve the lives of all Americans, not just those who are lucky enough to live in a city that has released this information on its own.
It’s a different way of thinking about how a government operates and the relationship it has with its citizens. Open data gives the public an amazing opportunity to be more involved with governmental decisions. We can increase accountability and transparency, but most importantly we can revolutionize the way local residents communicate and work with their government.
Access to this data is a civil right. If this is truly a government by, of and for the people, then its data needs to be available to all of us. By opening up this wealth of information, we will design a better government that takes advantage of the technology and skills of civic startups and innovative citizens….”
Procurement and Civic Innovation
Derek Eder: “Have you ever used a government website and had a not-so-awesome experience? In our slick 2014 world of Google, Twitter and Facebook, why does government tech feel like it’s stuck in the 1990s?
The culprit: bad technology procurement.
Procurement is the procedure a government follows to buy something–letting suppliers know what they want, asking for proposals, restricting what kinds of proposal they will consider, limiting what kinds of firms they will do business with, and deciding if what they got what they paid for.
The City of Chicago buys technology about the same way that they buy health insurance, a bridge, or anything else in between. And that’s the problem.
Chicago’s government has a long history of corruption, nepotism and patronage. After each outrage, new rules are piled upon existing rules to prevent that crisis from happening again. Unfortunately, this accumulation of rules does not just protect against the bad guys, it also forms a huge barrier to entry for technology innovators.
So, the firms that end up building our city’s digital public services tend to be good at picking their way through the barriers of the procurement process, not at building good technology. Instead of making government tech contracting fair and competitive, procurement has unfortunately had the opposite effect.
So where does this leave us? Despite Chicago’s flourishing startup scene, and despite having one of the country’s largest community of civic technologists, the Windy City’s digital public services are still terribly designed and far too expensive to the taxpayer.
The Technology Gap
The best way to see the gap between Chicago’s volunteer civic tech community and the technology that the City pays is to look at an entire class of civic apps that are essentially facelifts on existing government websites….
You may have noticed an increase in quality and usability between these three civic apps and their official government counterparts.
Now consider this: all of the government sites took months to build and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Was My Car Towed, 2nd City Zoning and CrimeAround.us were all built by one to two people in a matter of days, for no money.
Think about that for a second. Consider how much the City is overpaying for websites its citizens can barely use. And imagine how much better our digital city services would be if the City worked with the very same tech startups they’re trying to nurture.
Why do these civic apps exist? Well, with the City of Chicago releasing hundreds of high quality datasets on their data portal over the past three years (for which they should be commended), a group of highly passionate and skilled technologists have started using their skills to develop these apps and many others.
It’s mostly for fun, learning, and a sense of civic duty, but it demonstrates there’s no shortage of highly skilled developers who are interested in using technology to make their city a better place to live in…
Two years ago, in the Fall of 2011, I learned about procurement in Chicago for the first time. An awesome group of developers, designers and I had just built ChicagoLobbyists.org – our very first civic app – for the City of Chicago’s first open data hackathon….
Since then, the City has often cited ChicagoLobbyists.org as evidence of the innovation-sparking potential of open data.
Shortly after our site launched, a Request For Proposals, or RFP, was issued by the City for an ‘Online Lobbyist Disclosure System.’
Hey! We just built one of those! Sure, we would need to make some updates to it—adding a way for lobbyists to log in and submit their info—but we had a solid start. So, our scrappy group of tech volunteers decided to respond to the RFP.
After reading all 152 pages of the document, we realized we had no chance of getting the bid. It was impossible for the ChicagoLobbyists.org group to meet the legal requirements (as it would have been for any small software shop):
- audited financial statements for the past 3 years
- an economic disclosure statement (EDS) and affidavit
- proof of $500k workers compensation and employers liability
- proof of $2 million in professional liability insurance”
Social media effects on fostering online civic engagement and building citizen trust and trust in institutions
Anne Marie Warren, Ainin Sulaiman and Noor Ismawati Jaafar in Government Information Quaterly: “This paper tests the extent to which social media is shaping civic engagement initiatives to build trust among people and increase trust in their institutions, particularly the government, police and justice systems. A survey of 502 citizens showed that using social media for civic engagement has a significant positive impact on trust propensity and that this trust had led to an increase in trust towards institutions. Interestingly, while group incentives encouraged citizens to engage online for civic matters, it is civic publications through postings on social media that intensify the urge of citizens for civic action to address social issues. Post-hoc analysis via ten interviews with social activists was conducted to further examine their perceptions on trust towards institutions. The overall findings suggest that institutions, in their effort to promote a meaningful and trusting citizen engagement, need to enhance trust among the public by fostering social capital via online civic engagement and closing the public–police disengagement gap”
Loomio: The world needs a better way to make decisions together.
Loomio: “Real democracy is about collaboration: groups of people getting together and making decisions that work for everyone….Loomio is free and open software for anyone, anywhere, to participate in decisions that affect them…
Loomio fills a critical gap: bringing online talk to real world action. Social media and email have made it so easy to communicate, but a decision is what turns talk into action. Right now, there’s no easy way to make decisions together online. It’s like a missing piece of the internet.
We’ve taken all the learning from thousands of groups using our beta prototype and designed a whole new platform for truly inclusive decision-making: Loomio 1.0″
We’ve taken all the learning from thousands of groups using our beta prototype and designed a whole new platform for truly inclusive decision-making: Loomio 1.0″
Social Media as Government Watchdog
Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal: “Two new data points for the debate on whether greater access to the Internet leads to more freedom and fewer authoritarian regimes:
According to reports last week, Facebook plans to buy a company that makes solar-powered drones that can hover for years at high altitudes without refueling, which it would use to bring the Internet to parts of the world not yet on the grid. In contrast to this futuristic vision, Russia evoked land grabs of the analog Soviet era by invading Crimea after Ukrainians forced out Vladimir Putin‘s ally as president.
Internet idealists can point to another triumph in helping bring down Ukraine’s authoritarian government. Ukrainian citizens ignored intimidation including officious text messages: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” Protesters made the most of social media to plan demonstrations and avoid attacks by security forces.
But Mr. Putin quickly delivered the message that social media only goes so far against a fully committed authoritarian. His claim that he had to invade to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea was especially brazen because there had been no loud outcry, on social media or otherwise, among Russian speakers in the region.
A new book reports the state of play on the Internet as a force for freedom. For a decade, Emily Parker, a former Wall Street Journal editorial-page writer and State Department staffer, has researched the role of the Internet in China, Cuba and Russia. The title of her book, “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are,” comes from a blogger in China who explained to Ms. Parker how the Internet helps people discover they are not alone in their views and aspirations for liberty.
Officials in these countries work hard to keep critics isolated and in fear. In Russia, Ms. Parker notes, there is also apathy because the Putin regime seems so entrenched. “Revolutions need a spark, often in the form of a political or economic crisis,” she observes. “Social media alone will not light that spark. What the Internet does create is a new kind of citizen: networked, unafraid, and ready for action.”
Asked about lessons from the invasion of Crimea, Ms. Parker noted that the Internet “chips away at Russia’s control over information.” She added: “Even as Russian state media tries to shape the narrative about Ukraine, ordinary Russians can go online to seek the truth.”
But this same shared awareness may also be accelerating a decline in U.S. influence. In the digital era, U.S. failure to make good on its promises reduces the stature of Washington faster than similar inaction did in the past.
Consider the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the first significant rebellion against Soviet control. The U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, said: “To all those suffering under communist slavery, let us say you can count on us.” Yet no help came as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, tens of thousands were killed, and the leader who tried to secede from the Warsaw Pact, Imre Nagy, was executed.
There were no Facebook posts or YouTube videos instantly showing the result of U.S. fecklessness. In the digital era, scenes of Russian occupation of Crimea are available 24/7. People can watch Mr. Putin’s brazen press conferences and see for themselves what he gets away with.
The U.S. stood by as Syrian civilians were massacred and gassed. There was instant global awareness when President Obama last year backed down from enforcing his “red line” when the Syrian regime used chemical weapons. American inaction in Syria sent a green light for Mr. Putin and others around the world to act with impunity.
Just in recent weeks, Iran tried to ship Syrian rockets to Gaza to attack Israel; Moscow announced it would use bases in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua for its navy and bombers; and China budgeted a double-digit increase in military spending as President Obama cut back the U.S. military.
All institutions are more at risk in this era of instant communication and awareness. Reputations get lost quickly, whether it’s a misstep by a company, a gaffe by a politician, or a lack of resolve by an American president.
Over time, the power of the Internet to bring people together will help undermine authoritarian governments. But as Mr. Putin reminds us, in the short term a peaceful world depends more on a U.S. resolute in using its power and influence to deter aggression.”
Design Action Research with Government: A Guidebook
Next City: “Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and researchers with Emerson College’s Engagement Game Lab have spent the last few years working to cobble together a methodology for figuring out whether the city’s civic innovations, from apps that track bumpy roads to contests to redesign streetscapes, actually work, and how to fix them when they don’t. They’re out now with a 21-page booklet on what they’ve learned so far, called Design Action Research with Government: A Guidebook.
The DARG approach, as they guidebook’s authors deem it, calls for pairing civic inventors with academics and, through design experimentation and continuous on-the-ground testing, building things that real citizens willingly use.
Take Citizens Connect, the city’s mobile tool for letting the public report problems like potholes, graffiti and broken sidewalks. Launched in 2009 in partnership with the New Hampshire development shop Connected Bits, it has proven popular. But some in the mayor’s office had the sense that users didn’t feel the same connection to the process that someone gets from ringing up the Mayor’s Hotline and explaining to a real-live human about the teenagers bouncing a basketball against a metal garage door at 3am. Speaking with an operator, says Eric Gordon, a professor of civic media who heads Emerson’s Engagement Game Lab, sparks “a certain amount of storytelling and commitment to the issue.”
The Citizens Connect app had been designed with social features, Gordon notes, “but it doesn’t mean that people are going to use it the way you built it.” Indeed, when the researchers started surveying app users, they found that 38 percent never even looked at other users’ complaints.
The DARG methodology, Gordon and his colleagues says, requires them not only to define a goal, but also to think hard about whether it’s a valid ambition. Is it worthwhile to make citizen reporting more social? They decided that it was, because a real objective isn’t just better pothole patching but, says Chris Osgood, co-chair of Boston’s New Urban Mechanics, making good on this bit of wisdom from Jane Jacobs: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Gordon and Osgood decided that getting there meant giving citizen reporters a better sense of how they shape day-to-day life in the city.
Their research prompted them to start building a “civic badging” API, or chunk of behind-the-scenes code, called StreetCred. The code can plug into reporting platforms and integrate with existing platforms like Foursquare and Instagram. It can also participate in ‘campaigns’ of activities, like reporting a hundred potholes, checking in at community meetings, and participating in spring clean-up drives. A new version is due out this spring, Gordon says, and eventually outside groups will be able to create their own campaigns through the tool…That guidebook is available here and below.”