Collaborative Study Lab

oreillyradar: todaysdocument: UNCLE SAM WANTS your IDEAS! As...

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:26:23 -0400

todaysdocument:

UNCLE SAM WANTS your IDEAS!

As a federal agency, the National Archives is working to implement the President’s Digital Government Strategy. We need to hear your ideas for how we can better serve you.

What National Archives services would you like to see optimized for mobile use?

What systems should we make available via APIs?

What part of the nation’s archives would you like to be able to access on a mobile device? What would you do with our history if it were made into data, accessible through an API? What data would you need?

Let the archivists know, because they’re looking for ideas.

“According to new research from the U.S. Forest Service,...

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 09:54:14 -0400

“According to new research from the U.S. Forest Service, an average of two-thirds of all trees in cities are the result of natural regeneration. Only one-third of trees are deliberately planted.” “Trees are reproducing and filling in empty spaces far more efficiently than any tree planting program ever could.” (via You Didn’t Plant That: Where Urban Trees Really Come From - Neighborhoods - The Atlantic Cities)

What should we build at the Code Across Austin Hackathon?...

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:42:49 -0400

What should we build at the Code Across Austin Hackathon? Suggest, support, & discuss ideas on Neighborland: http://bit.ly/PpcFoV

"We’ve done a lot of work all over the world, and one of the things I find we have in common is we..."

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 00:10:11 -0400

“We’ve done a lot of work all over the world, and one of the things I find we have in common is we know that politics is absolutely the heart and soul of what might seem like design projects because it’s about who makes decisions, who has more power and influence than others to shape cities. Designers typically either run away from or ignore politics and political structures, and that’s impossible if you want to have any impact. You need to understand it, and you need to, A), understand the political structures, why decisions are made in certain ways and not others, B), embrace it, not be afraid of it, and C), probably most importantly, challenge it.”

- Education, Urbanization & Citizen Activism – This Big City Meets Aseem Inam & Miguel Robles-Duran | This Big City

Can Civic Crowdfunding Kickstart Urban Innovation?

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 23:30:34 -0400

Kickstarter has been very successful at funding art, music, and design projects that may have not been funded through traditional channels. But will civic crowdfunding—the direct funding of public projects by citizens—prove as successful?

This principle of going straight to the customers to fund new projects is an exciting prospect for nonprofits and urbanists who are looking for alternatives to grants for funding their projects. Civic crowdfunding startups such asSpacehive, Citizinvestor, and Patronhood are built upon that notion. But there are plenty of skeptics among urbanists and civic hackers, who are troubled by the concept of civic crowdfunding, or doubt whether the model can work.

Alexandra Lange’s essay “Against Kickstarter Urbanism” argued that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter are too reliant on gimmicks for the model to be effective in pursuit of “worthy goals”. She states, “a suitable funding platform for a watch is not a suitable funding platform for a city,” suggesting that only projects with catchy themes and slick presentations will be funded. She argues that less exciting and smaller scale projects would not be able to compete for funding with flashier ones.

While more exciting projects that are well promoted and presented are likely to receive greater attention, the openness and large scale of crowdfunding actually may give smaller projects a better chance of getting funded when compared to competing for limited grant funding or donations from a small circle of friends. Crowdfunding connects a smaller project with more potential resources, so even if they do not receive the majority of funding then at least more people can see their idea online and give them a better shot at getting their smaller requirements met. Smaller scale civic improvement projects may also have a better shot at getting funding from sites like Patronhood or Citizinvestor that are entirely focused on hosting project to improve cities then they would on Kickstarter that focuses more mainstream topics, such as film and music.

While sites like Kickstarter can expose projects to more potential donors, funding is still not guaranteed for most projects. While the service invites anyone to propose a project, Kickstarter’s co-founder Yancey Strickler toldWired, “Fifty-six percent of projects don’t meet their goal”. In a related post,Seth Godin notes that the crowdfunding model only works for projects that are likely to succeed or already have a dedicated fanbase.

Although securing funding for projects civic or otherwise is still difficult, crowdfunding sites can offer an alternative to the standard gridlock of funding public projects. Currently if a an individual or nonprofit wants to get their project funded they have to raise the money through their connections. Putting their projects online gives them a better chance of reaching beyond the resources they personally know. Plus, sites that are dedicated to funding civic projects will attract people who are interested in those types of projects creating a multiplier where more projects bring in more people to fund them, whereas searching for grants and offline donations does not have quite the same effect.

Although crowdfunding can be an alternative route to getting civic projects funded, a frequent criticism of the crowdfunding model is that civic projects should be funded through taxes and managed by city governments. Caitlyn Duer wrote, “we pay taxes, we vote, and the person we vote into office directs our tax money into the projects we want to see.” The view that government should be able cover every civic need is unreasonably idealistic. It would be ideal if taxes paid for everything, but there is a difference between the way things should be and the way they are.

Waiting for government should do a better job has proven to be an ineffective strategy. It is also important to consider that, for reasons too numerous to mention here, taxpayer money simply does not cover every civic need. While Duer wrote that, “the resources of government far outstrip Kickstarter’s,” there is actually a lot of restrictions and limitations on what kinds of project government can fund. Improvement projects that involve new construction or purchasing of equipment is known as capital spending and usually composes a small percentage of a city’s budget. Capital spending usually has a minimum cost from a few thousand for a smaller city to $35,000 for NYC and a minimum “useful life” of around five years. There are also complicated processes for approving projects and allocating funding. Crowdfunding tools provide a way to cut through some of the bureaucracy around funding and access new streams of resources to add to what government already provides.

Duer makes a certain kind of sense to say that the old methods of bringing people together in physical meetings to lobby their government for change is worth keeping and I completely agree with that thinking. Where I diverge is in thinking that civic engagement must mean participating in a certain process of change or method of interacting with government. Taxes pay for a lot of public services and infrastructure but citizens could also fund some projects directly. Adding direct funding of projects is far from redundant to taxes. Crowdfunding is an addition to taxes that involves greater citizen input and decisionmaking.

Another issue with simply paying taxes and electing representatives to decide how to spend them is that it does not engage citizens in the process. Crowdfunding gives people the opportunity to decide the terms of their civic involvement. They can choose to support projects they like and this gives them a greater connection with their city and its future.

While there are offline methods of citizen engagement, such as participatory budgeting, these methods are more difficult to scale than online ones. Although participatory budgeting allow citizens to propose and select capital spending projects through a thorough process of physical meetings and voting, they require a large time commitment from participants, including government, that raises barrier to participation. A lot of people do not have time to attend all of the necessary meetings and many governments are also unwilling to commit to the substantial involvement required to make these processes work.

While the thorough processes of participatory budgeting have yet to be reproduced online in as effective of a manner as they are in auditoriums around the world, those auditoriums will never hold as many people who could participate online. Civic crowdfunding is an opportunity to engage more people in these processes and open up more financial resources so that more projects can be funded, not all but more.

katiehayesluke: B-side images from a story I worked on for NPR...

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 10:58:48 -0400

katiehayesluke:

B-side images from a story I worked on for NPR about Neighborland in New Orleans.

@Neighborland Business Cards! (Taken with Instagram)

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 21:44:15 -0400

@Neighborland Business Cards! (Taken with Instagram)

Crowdsourced Pollution Monitoring

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 18:49:37 -0400

For the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a non-profit dedicated to citizen sourced pollution monitoring, the Ushahidi platform for crowdsourced reporting and mapping was a natural choice for their already impressive toolset. The “bucket” in Bucket Brigade is a low-cost air monitoring tool that citizens can deploy in their neighborhoods to gauge toxic releases from nearby chemical plants. Ushahidi is a free and open source platform originally developed in 2008 for Kenyans to report and map post-election violence via text, email, or web. Now the Ushahidi platform has spread all over the globe in deployments ranging from crisis mapping the Japanese earthquake of 2011 to “improving Beijing’s urban transportation” to providing a platform for the Bucket Brigade to build a crowdsourced pollution map called iWitness.

The Ushahidi powered iWitness pollution map enables citizens to report chemical accidents and pollution related to the 2010 BP oil spill via text, email, or web. These eyewitness reports combined with reports from the National Response Center (Federal portal for oil and chemical spills) are geotagged to an interactive map giving a clear picture of pollution trouble spots. Citizens can also sign up for alerts to warn them when pollution is reported near their area.

Ushahidi is one of most successful civic technology applications with Fast Company naming them one of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies. The main reasons Ushahidi has been deployed all over the world and in so many varieties of uses are that it is free to use and adapt to whatever context is needed and it is a solid app. Lets use Bucket Brigade’s pollution map to examine some of Ushahidi’s key dynamics and attempt to extrapolate why the app works so well and how it has spread.

The core focus of Ushahidi is on citizen sensors and location based reporting. While Ushahidi can include reports from government and media, its most exciting feature is its utilization of crowdsourced reporting through citizen sensors. Citizen sensors are everyday people who can monitor a situation happening in their environment and report it, in Ushahidi’s case anyone with a cell phone or Internet connection can be a citizen sensor. The Bucket Brigade writes why citizen sensors are vital to monitoring air quality in Louisiana:
“Community members who live next to oil refineries and chemical plants are constantly told by industry officials that their operations are safe and that the air is healthy to breathe. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the federal Environmental Protection Agency often lack appropriate and consistent methods of monitoring air quality – their monitoring stations are often sporadic and don’t all test for the same chemicals. Furthermore, the placement of monitoring stations is a decision made in conjunction with industry, which often pushes for strategic locations that see the least amount of pollution.”

The challenges of government led air quality monitoring in Louisiana is a classic gap between the resources required to provide an adequate service and the limited capabilities of government. Monitoring air quality and building an accurate map of chemical pollution is a massive task that requires a massive solution. While federal and state resources were not enough to satisfy the need, the Bucket Brigade leveraged the Ushahidi platform to supply that massively scaled solution by enabling citizens to easily report pollution. This is a great illustration of using modularity to provide massively scaled solutions. Modularity means breaking down a difficult problem, such as monitoring air quality, into smaller pieces (citizen sensors) that can then be reassembled to form an expansive and detailed picture (pollution map).

Another strong element of Ushahidi is that it is free to download and open source meaning that it can be adapted for a nearly limitless variety of uses. The Bucket Brigade was able to add a powerful tool to support their efforts because much of the work in creating the platform was already done by other teams using and improving the tool. Open source tools let groups like Bucket Brigade build custom solutions atop proven platforms enabling them to build low-cost and reliable solutions.

OFFICIAL BLOG FOR THE 25TH WARD, CITY OF CHICAGO: VOICE YOUR IDEAS ABOUT 3 IMPORTANT PROJECTS IN THE 25TH WARD!

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:51:28 -0400

OFFICIAL BLOG FOR THE 25TH WARD, CITY OF CHICAGO: VOICE YOUR IDEAS ABOUT 3 IMPORTANT PROJECTS IN THE 25TH WARD! :

25thwardchicago:

Ald. Danny Solis is introducing an exciting online partnership with the creators of Neighborland, which aims to encourage public input opportunities with a powerfully simple platform to connect on community issues.

SUBMIT YOUR IDEAS: Fisk Coal Power Plant

SUBMIT…

Civic Tech is Not Alone: Connecting with Local Knowledge

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 23:08:00 -0400

Problem: Limited glass recycling options in New Orleans
Engagement: 169 Neighbors posted on Neighborland that they “want the ability to recycle glass in New Orleans.”
Solution: Local business, Phoenix Recycling, discussed this desire on Neighborland and launched a program to collect local glass to use for construction projects.

In my very biased assessment (I work for Neighborland), this process exemplifies the practice of civic hackers building tools to help people find solutions for their own neighborhoods instead of imposing solutions from the hacker’s point of view. Paul Davis mentioned this when he wrote “more apps for social justice, less bar finders for hip urbanites.” I am working on implementing Neighborland in my hometown of Houston, TX because:
A. I am a very persuasive beggar
B. I saw a team of civic hackers who are focused on building an open-ended tool for community groups, local gov, and everyday citizens to collaborate on their own solutions for their own communities.

Eric Liu wrote a great piece calling for the rise of “citizen citizens” or the average person to step up and take responsibility for improving their communities. Liu argues that citizens are to blame for irresponsive and inefficient government when he writes, “we aren’t stuck in sclerotic government and extractive politics. We are these things. Our actions and omissions contribute to the conditions we decry.” Liu’s conclusion is, “citizenship, in the end, is too important to be left to professionals. It’s time for us all to be trustees, of our libraries and every other part of public life. It’s time to democratize democracy again.” Liu’s message speaks to the heart of the Gov 2.0 movement and exemplifies the mission of promoting citizen participation through technology. I know that I personally identified with Liu’s call for action, I work for a civic technology company, I must be a citizen citizen or even a triple-citizen since I help others become double-citizens.

Although I surely agree that we need more engaged citizens, it is easy to forget that there are already many passionate people who are devoted to improving their communities. It is important not to entirely discount the effort of professionals, like civil servants who have dedicated their careers to serving their communities - maybe civic technologists are professional citizens as well. It feels good to think of ourselves in the Gov 2.0 field as the vanguard for civic change but we are not the only community of engaged citizens working towards civic improvement.

While members of the Gov 2.0 community are very well connected to each other, we are not as well connected to other communities for civic change, especially those that are not early adopters of technology. There is a solid logic to going after the “low hanging fruit” and connecting to governments and civil society organizations who embrace tech as a tool for civic improvement but there are many more resources outside of those early adopter circles. Just as one of the core tenants of Gov 2.0 is including citizen resources to improve communities, including external resources also needs to be part of the Gov 2.0 process. There are community organizations, advocacy groups, and government departments that have the local, political, and technical knowledge necessary to effecting civic change. Civic tech groups certainly know how to build tools but without connecting to that local knowledge the effectiveness of those tools is compromised. It is tempting for a civic tech group to identify a problem and then implement a tech-sexy solution without consulting external groups but that process is just as wasteful of resources as a government that tries to implement a solution without involving citizens in the process.

Who knows more about what a neighborhood or city needs than the people who live and work there and are passionately devoted to improving it? Inclusive processes, such as participatory budgeting, involve collaborations between local government, technical expertise, and citizens to identify the true needs of the community and actionable solutions that all sides are agreeable to and responsible for. Collaboration is not just the goal of Gov 2.0 it could also be the method for achieving that goal.

Civic tech can be a civic improvement multiplier if it is built for the people who know where the problems are but just need better processes for solving them. Creating a tool to solve a problem may solve one problem but a tool designed to help people solve their own problems solves many and solves them in a way that is more meaningful to their needs. Gov 2.0 does not need to be the vanguard for change. We can do more if we connect with and support others who can lead change in their own communities.

Candy Chang + Neighborland comes to Minneapolis By Forecast...

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 08:50:22 -0400

Candy Chang + Neighborland comes to Minneapolis

By Forecast Public Art

Saving Lives With Civic Tech

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:24:00 -0400

Almost 1,000 Americans die every day from sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), making it the leading cause of death in the US. One of the reasons SCA is so deadly is because permanent brain damage or death can result if the victim does not receive CPR in less than 8-10 minutes and professional response times commonly come dangerously close to exceeding this period. The Pulse Point app (iPhone, Android) was created in 2010 to help reduce these response times by connecting locally available CPR-trained users to those in need of assistance.

When 911 receives a CPR assistance call, the dispatcher enters the details into the 911 system. This information is then also sent to Pulse Point, which alerts app users who are within a certain distance of the victim. The alert is in the form of a push notification that provides GPS directions to the victim’s location so that the user can administer CPR as quickly as possible.

While increasing emergency response times seems like an infrastructure problem, Pulse Point uses information and communication technology to offer what Naveen Jain calls a knowledge gap solution. Infrastructure problems are very difficult to address and require lots of physical resources to solve - physical resources that many cities have in short supply. Lowering emergency response times can mean an infrastructure problem that requires adding expensive personnel, vehicles, and other costly physical resources.

The Pulse Point app transforms a potentially intractable infrastructure problem into a massively scalable knowledge solution by connecting CPR-trained Pulse Point users to those in need of assistance through the existing 911 framework. Through this system Pulse Point multiplies the potential number of first responders. In the traditional 911 situation, there are only a limited number of designated first responders (fire, police, EMS) that can provide assistance. Pulse Point magnifies that number to every CPR-trained individual in the area that uses the application. According to Pulse Point’s website, 57% of adults say they have undergone CPR training, and 11% say they have used CPR in an actual emergency.

By maximizing the number of potential first responders, you also maximize the probability that someone will get there in the crucial amount of time to save a life. Pulse Point is a great example of how civic technology can provide knowledge solutions by connecting civic problems, which are traditionally thought of as the government’s responsibility, to locally available resources in the citizen realm. This app also makes good use of the MARI (monitor, analyze, report, improve) toolset. It allows citizens to see a problem and be able to offer solutions, therefore connecting citizens to improve civic welfare and empowering them to help their community.

While Pulse Point is an amazing tool, a tool is useless without dedicated people to wield it. At the writing of this article Pulse Point has only been deployed in the City of San Jose and the San Ramon Valley in Northern California and has a mere 76 Twitter followers. Pulse Point needs dedicated individuals to lead outreach efforts to deploy the app in their cities and get it in the hands of CPR trained individuals. Pulse Point is provided and maintained free of charge by the Pulse Point Foundation and they will provide support in getting the app up and running in your city. The Pulse Point API is available here and activations of Pulse Point are broadcasted in real time on Twitter under #PulsePointSaves. Since part of the Pulse Point app is directing citizen responders to the nearest defibrillator unit, timely and accurate data on all AEDs in the area also needs to be made available.

Pulse Point illustrates how transformative civic technology can be when used to connect civic problems to locally available resources, and is definitely a worthy cause to champion.

When Bad Data Happens to Good Hackers

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:49:07 -0400

Open government data (OGD) is the main platform for emerging civic technology applications developed to facilitate civic improvement. Josh Tauberer, one of the founders of civic tech company PopVox, wrote that OGD “is a sort of civic capital, a raw material that can be transformed like a diamond in the rough into something far different and much more powerful.”Civic Commons provides an entire “marketplace” of applications built on OGD and this data is absolutely vital to projects like the Civic Data Challenge, which seeks to turn “the raw data of ‘civic health’ into beautiful, useful applications and visualizations, enabling communities to be better understood and made to thrive.”

Applications built on OGD are perhaps the most exciting and potentially transformative elements of the Gov 2.0 movement, allowing government to directly utilize untapped citizen resources. But since these applications are built on top of government datasets, the quality of those datasets is vital to current and future generations of civic applications. Good data ensures the continued health of the entire Gov 2.0 movement.

The Current State of US OGD Quality

Josh Taberer, in his book, defined data quality as “whether the data has an acceptable level of precision and accuracy for a particular purpose within an acceptable cost.” Precision is “the depth of knowledge encoded by the data” and accuracy is “the likelihood that the information extracted from the data is correct.”

Tom Lee, the Director of Sunlight Labs, said in a Skype interview that data quality varies greatly across government agencies and pointed to Sunlight’s own Clearspending project, which tracks the accuracy of the federal websiteUSASpending.Gov, which includes numbers more than a trillion dollars off of Sunlight’s calculations. Clearspending measures data “usefulness” by “consistency, completeness, and timeliness.” While timeliness has improved over years past, consistency, and completeness are still lacking.

While there have been a number of amazing civic apps built from OGD, not everyone recognizes the utility of publishing government data, and there are several large challenges to greater quality and availability. One problem is government’s mindset about sharing “their” data. Information is power and many government departments are reluctant to relinquish power by releasing datasets that are locked up under their control. This fear of letting data out is echoed by a fear of letting citizens in by allowing them to access data on government performance. It is almost if as some feel that government transparency equals a sort of audit that is meant to catch government in the act, when even those who actually audit government departments contend that analyzing government performance is about improving performance and not about punishment.

In a Transparency Camp session, Javaun Moradi and Alex Howard pointed out that governments may not release data when doing so might have negative political implications for them, such as Japan’s reluctance to releaseradiation data during the Fukushima disaster. In that example the government did not want to release the data without knowing if it would make them vulnerable to criticism, so they just held onto it and risked the lives of citizens trying to evacuate in the proper direction.

Another obstacle is a lack of resources in creating datasets and publishing them in usable electronic formats. In his paper examining transit data openness, Roland Cole points out “the agency itself may not have the in-house capacity in terms of technological expertise and assistance to maintain their data in open formats, and may not have the budget to outsource for such services.” Cole adds that agencies may also be reluctant to provide their data for free when they are “receiving revenue from providing its data on a less than open basis.”

There is a risk that a focus on accuracy can erode timeliness. In many cases departments have multiple layers of quality controls that are, in theory, designed to make data as accurate as possible but, in practice, can slow down the publication process so much that the data is unusable. But as demonstrated with the Fukushima disaster cited by Moradi and Howard, transparency as well as timeliness is often absolutely vital to the usefulness of data.

The Outlook for OGD

Despite serious challenges, the road ahead for OGD looks positive. Lee said government data is improving as a whole, as increasing number of people entering government realize that releasing data can save time and money for their department. According to Lee, agencies mandated to gather and publish data, like the Congressional Budget Office, Census, and Bureau of Labor Statistics, are very good about ensuring that they release accurate data and work with developers to educate and update their practices. Agencies where releasing data is not part of their chief mission sometimes fail to put in the same type of dedicated effort to ensure that their data is accurate and accessible.

In a Skype interview, Code for America Fellow Jim Craner said that data quality is improving rapidly and has “moved light years” beyond where it was in years past. He points to Data.gov, a federal data portal, as a key reason for OGD improvement. When the federal government took “a strong lead” on OGD, it produced a trickle-down effect to local and state governments, according to Craner. Josh Tauberer echoed these sentiments in an email and added that:

“The cause of these improvements is a cultural change that comes with leadership — especially the federal Open Government Directive — and also to an extent with personnel change. For instance, Chicago has an amazing new-ish CTO, John Tolva, who sees open gov data as a part of the core mission of the city to spur innovation and to foster trust in government. Another factor is simply the maturation of technology and processes for sharing data. And the community in the private and nonprofit sectors are getting a better understanding of how government works so that we can work as more effective partners with governments on promoting open gov data.”

Hope for continued change can be seen in NYC’s new open data law, which co-founder of Civic Commons Phil Ashlock named the “best open data law in the world” at a Transparency Camp session. Ashlock mentioned that one reason New York was able to pass such an effective law was because it was carried forth by New York City Transparency Working Group, a strong coalition of well-established civil society organizations and newer civic technology groups. He explained that connecting the civic tech groups with well-established CSOs provided the political connections and knowledge vital to navigating the legislative process. Perhaps this hybrid coalition could be a model for crafting further open data legislation in other governments.

I asked Lee if he had a message for those interested in the outlook for OGD and he responded that, at Sunlight “we believe that transparency makes government better” across the board and benefits citizens. “It is true that there are limitations out there but there is nothing better than diving in and showing people that this is useful.”

how does one follow your tumblr? the standard top right tumblr buttons are missing!

Thu, 17 May 2012 23:45:27 -0400

Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll get on that right away.

I Want…on WashAve Check out what people wrote and post...

Sat, 12 May 2012 23:00:00 -0400

I Want…on WashAve

Check out what people wrote and post your own ideas

(Taken with instagram)

WashAve (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 12 May 2012 22:58:00 -0400

WashAve (Taken with instagram)

BetterBlock (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 12 May 2012 22:57:00 -0400

BetterBlock (Taken with instagram)

Interactive Budgeting TCamp2012 Session Notes

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:03:00 -0400

There were so many wonderful sessions at Transparency Camp this year that I wish I could have been in multiple places at once. Unfortunately, tough decisions had to be made and we all may have missed something we wanted to chat about. So in the spirit of sharing ideas and promoting conversation, here are my presentation notes on:

How can municipal spending data be made interactive and uniquely relevant to users, so that it engages them to continuously monitor and use it to improve their communities?

I hope others will post their notes and slides so we can go back and see some of the things we might have missed in person. Sunlight Foundation also posted session notes here if you would like to take a look.

Presenters:

Matthew Hall, Research Intern at OpenPlans @hallm13 Collaborative Study Lab
James McKinney, Executive Director at OpenNorth @mckinneyjames

*Disclaimer* These are the outline notes from a presentation and are therefore missing some explanation without the context of participating in the conversation. I’m posting these notes for those who could not attend but may still be interested in the topic.

Why should we promote greater citizen participation in budgeting processes?

I believe that we should promote participation because, if done properly, it can improve upon the current processes and make municipal service delivery more effective.
Each city has massive numbers of citizens using city services everyday. Each citizen has a detailed view of how they interact with city services and when combined with other citizens detailed view you get a very detailed picture of government services across the entire city. If even a fraction of a city’s population could report on the quality and availability of services that they use on a daily basis then government, CSOs, and others would have a tremendous resource for civic improvement.
I call this form of collective citizen reporting the MARI Toolset: Monitor, Analyze, Report, and Improve.
MARI transforms government services into a type of anti-rival good, meaning something that improves the more people use it. Anti-rivals goods are consumer tech like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which improve the more they are used.
While government services do not seem like they can be anti-rival goods because Google and Facebook are dealing with information (knowledge) and government services are dealing with physical infrastructures, it depends on what you classify as knowledge and infrastructure. Naveen Jain, Co-chair of X-Prize, said in a recent article that “…a lot of problems that look like infrastructure problems actually are knowledge gap problems, and if you can turn an infrastructure problem into a knowledge problem, then you can scale it.”
Adopt-A-Hydrant turns what may seem like an infrastructure problem into a knowledge solution by connecting nearby citizen resources to community problems. In the City of Boston there are something like 4,000 fire hydrants. Those 4,000 hydrants get buried in snow whenever there is a blizzard and firefighters have to find and uncover them before they can use them to respond to a fire. This seems very much like an infrastructure problem, since city workers, shovels, trucks, gas, and other physical city resources would need to be allocated to solving this “infrastructure problem.” But Adopt-A-Hydrant turns an infrastructure problem into a scalable knowledge solution by enabling citizen volunteers to clean off their nearby hydrant.
Businesses are already leveraging location based services, like Foursquare, to deliver better services (sell stuff to people better) by allowing consumers to indirectly report on their service preferences.
Livehoods and OpenPaths are examples of using location based data for civic research.

How do we design apps that inspire continuous monitoring, analyzing, reporting, and improving?

For developers and researchers, having complete fiscal datasets is important to providing context but that may not be the best way to present information to citizens.
Filtering data by interest is critical to giving users personally relevant information. If you look at Facebook, Twitter, or Mint these services are useful because they only present information from sources users have chosen for themselves. So, the individual choices who to follow or friend and data is displayed based on those choices. For spending data, to look at what the entire city is spending on something is not uniquely relevant to users and, therefore, does not engage them.
A spending visualization like Look At Cook is great at charting budgets in a graphically pleasing way but without data for comparable counties there is no contextualization of information, so users cannot see what those spending numbers mean. Users need to have uniquely relevant and contextualized data in order to be continuously engaged.
Sunlight Foundation’s Upwardly Mobile and Scout are examples of providing data that is responsive to users interests and situations.

Location Based Fiscal Data

This is something that is not readily available but should be on developers wish lists if they want to engage citizens with fiscal data.
If users could “check in” to a public space or service the way they can with Foursquare but see if that service was over or under budget and how that budget ranked by comparable localities then they could have relevance and contextualization.
Providing users instant “knowledge” is also key to motivating them to repeatedly come back and learn more. Something that inspires people to continuously check Twitter or Facebook is that new nugget of information that is instantly understandable. If users are presented with overall spending numbers then it may take them hours to figure out what the fiscal health is of their local school or library and that is far too frustrating to continuously engage users to monitor the their city services.

Resource List:

Matthew “Michael” Hall’s interview with Chris...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:03:13 -0400

Matthew “Michael” Hall’s interview with Chris “Dora the Gov Explorer” Dorobek on the Dorobek Insider radio program. We talk about budgeting transparency at about the 30:56 mark.

What Gov 2.0 Can Learn from Participatory Budgeting

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:30:24 -0400

What Gov 2.0 Can Learn from Participatory Budgeting:

Shareable reposted my article on participatory budgeting’s lessons for the Gov 2.0 movement.