Emily Shaw at the SunLight Foundation: “This is a challenging time for people who worry about the fairness of American governmental institutions. In quick succession, grand juries declined to indict two police officers accused of killing black men. In the case of Ferguson, Mo. officer Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, the grand jury’s decision appeared to center on uncertainty about whether Wilson’s action was legal and whether he killed under threat. In the case of New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo’s killing of Eric Garner, however, a bystander recorded and made public a video of the police... (More >)
Selected Readings on Cities and Civic Technology
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... (More >)
Participatory sensing: enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement
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... (More >)
Can Bottom-Up Institutional Reform Improve Service Delivery?
Working paper by Molina, Ezequiel: “This article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it provides new evidence of the impact of community monitoring interventions using a unique dataset from the Citizen Visible Audit (CVA) program in Colombia. In particular, this article studies the effect of social audits on citizens’ assessment of service delivery performance. The second contribution is the introduction a theoretical framework to understand the pathway of change, the necessary building blocks that are needed for social audits to be effective. Using this framework, the third contribution of this article is answering the following questions: i) under... (More >)
Organizing For Outcomes
Code for America Summit YouTube: “Michael Flowers, former Chief Analytics Officer for New York City, explores the organizational opportunities and challenges of supporting an outcomes-driven approach to service delivery and problem-solving in government and what he’s learned from doing this in the NYC Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics…” ... (More >)
Bridging Distant Worlds: Innovation in the Civic Space
A digital white paper by Public Innovation: “In an increasingly complex world, today’s challenges are interconnected. Many have argued that our civic institutions are not equipped to respond with the same velocity at which technology is advancing other sectors of the economy. While this may, in fact, be a fair criticism of our electoral, fiscal, and policy structures, a new mindset is emerging at government’s service delivery layer. Civic innovation offers a new approach to solving community problems that is emergent, generative, resilient, participatory, human-centered, and driven by a process of validated learning where core assumptions are tested quickly... (More >)
The Decalogue of Policy Making 2.0: Results from Analysis of Case Studies on the Impact of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling
Paper by Sotirios Koussouris, Fenareti Lampathaki, Gianluca Misuraca, Panagiotis Kokkinakos, and Dimitrios Askounis: “Despite the availability of a myriad of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based tools and methodologies for supporting governance and the formulation of policies, including modelling expected impacts, these have proved to be unable to cope with the dire challenges of the contemporary society. In this chapter we present the results of the analysis of a set of promising cases researched in order to understand the possible impact of what we define ‘Policy Making 2.0’, which refers to ‘a set of methodologies and technological solutions aimed... (More >)
City 72 Toolkit
“An effective preparedness platform customizable to your city. City72 is an open-source emergency preparedness platform that promotes community resilience and connection. This Toolkit is designed specifically for emergency preparedness organizations and provides the information and resources to create a customized City72 site for any city or region. It includes: how to create localized content, access to the code to build and install your City72 website, and tips for how to manage and promote your site.” ... (More >)
Online Tools Every Community Should Use
Courtney Subramanian at NationSwell: “Larger cities like Chicago, San Francisco and New York continue to innovate civic technology and bridge the divide between citizens and government, while this progress is leaving small communities behind. Without digital tools, staff or infrastructure in place to bring basic services online, small local governments and their citizens are suffering from a digital divide. But one Silicon Valley mind is determined to break that barrier and help smaller cities understand how they can join the digital movement…any civic technology should include the following eight tools: Bullets: Crime-related data that give residents a sense of... (More >)
Making We the People More User-Friendly Than Ever
The White House: “With more than 14 million users and 21 million signatures, We the People, the White House’s online petition platform, has proved more popular than we ever thought possible. In the nearly three years since launch, we’ve heard from you on a huge range of topics, and issued more than 225 responses. But we’re not stopping there. We’ve been working to make it easier to sign a petition and today we’re proud to announce the next iteration of We the People. Since launch, we’ve heard from users who wanted a simpler, more streamlined way to sign petitions... (More >)
