Anthea Watson Strong

The organizing challenges the technology, the technology inspires the organizing.

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This day, man.

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Agreed

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What's the Goal of Civic Engagement Work?

Is the goal of our civic engagement work a higher rate of participation?  

It seems not.  The goal is to create a representative government that is more representative of the interests of the people.  We want to decrease the influence of power and money in politics.  

Is increasing the number of people who are voting, contacting their representatives, commenting at civic meetings and participating in the decision-making process the best way to get to a more representative government?  Are there are other ways, and if so, how do we analyze the effectiveness of those ways?

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Harriet Tubman on the left and her family including her husband and adopted daughter.

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Control Theory and Government Inefficiency

When talking about "government inefficiency" I am always brought back to my college control theory classes. In control theory you learn that for a system to be stable, you must to decrease performance. Likewise if you want a performance system, you have to narrow the conditions in which it will be stable (race car needs dedicated track). Government is intended to be more stable so if the control theory model fits, government is not going to be as efficient but it is also a lot less likely to fail when disturbances vary or increase.

Reddit

h/t Jon Henke

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The Nation's First Electoral Map via Mapping the Nation

The map is particularly interesting given that it does not simply identify the returns at the state level, but involves much more finely grained data. Moreover it not only marks the victory of the Republican or Democratic (or Greenback) Party, but also measures the strength of that victory.

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As part of our campaign finance reporting, mapping out connections between 501c4s. 

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Yes, there is a Tumblr called nprwhiteboards.

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Campaign Finance Geekery

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Civic Innovation and Behavioral Science

I'm obsessed with the design principles Deena Rosen wrote in her capacity as UX director for Opower.  The principles describe how Deena uses design and behavior science to build tools that encourage people to make choices that reduce their impact on the environment.  

Civic Innovation needs to learn from these kinds of efforts and adopt behavioral science based practices.  The internet and most of the consumer facing technology industry is optimized for entertainment and commerce.  People seek out and want to engage with products that supply a need or entertain them in some fashion.  Conversely, it's not actually a rational behavior to engage in civic activity.  The likelihood that one person's actions will change the outcome of a governmental decision is so small, it might as well be zero.  

Our users have busy lives.  The kids need to be picked up from day care.  Someone needs to get the car's oil changed.  Great Aunt Gertrude is back in the hospital, and it would be nice to go visit her.  If a user's question to her representative or comment on a budgeting plan is very unlikely to impact the outcome, why would she take the time to ask the question or submit the comment?

Be honest, if civic innovation wasn't your profession, how engaged would you be in the day-to-day activities of your local government?

In the collective, we are all better off if we participate in our communities and provide oversight and feedback to those who represent us.  The challenge of relevancy is one Deena faces at Opower as well.  Individually, turning down my thermostat won't reduce the damage caused by global climate change, but collectively a reduction in the amount of energy we use to heat our houses can make a big difference.  

At Opower, Deena's team uses normative comparison, social proof, loss language, defaults, and user commitment to encourage user behavior that's good for us as a community. The Civic Engagement community could do this as well!  There are well-known tactics we could adopt to encourage users to do the right thing.

Except, there's a big problem.  The Civic Innovation ecosystem doesn't actually agree on the desired outcomes.  We don't agree on the metrics for success.  Are we trying to increase the amount of interaction between residents and their elected representatives?  Are we trying to increase the flexibility of opinions tolerated by the electorate?  Are we trying to maximize the amount of information users consume before they form an opinion and take an action?

Without agreement on these metrics, we'll be blocked from using the kinds of techniques that will help us overcome the problems associated with getting users to care about civic issues in the collective.  It's time to get real about forming a theory of change.

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Fixing to die

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Measuring the Heartbeat of Civic Health

Last night, I got a chance to hang out with Christina Hollenback, an amazingly talented community organizer in New York.  A year ago she left her job in DC as the director of the Generational Alliance and moved to Harlem where she's focused on organizing at the hyper-local, block level.  For example, she's currently focused on helping musicians organize CSA type projects that allow the neighborhood to support the artists in their area by paying in advance for musical performances and recordings.

My gut tells me that the work she's doing in Harlem is fantastically important and more impactful than all of her electoral and issue organizing, the many meetings she attended in DC, and the events she planned for Congressman and Senators.  By creating ways for community members to come together and support each other, she’s building the social fabric upon which people fall back when hard times hit.  She’s also building the kinds of relationships between people who have different socio-economic and political backgrounds that allow us to better understand each other.  I would hypothesize that her work is the what we need if we want to see a depolarized government.  But I have no way to prove that.  

What community metrics are correlated with a healthy government?  Does the strength of a community's social fabric, its interconnectedness, impact the effectiveness of the decision making bodies that set policy for that community?

The crisis response ecosystem looks to resilience as a measurement of whether a community can bounce back from a disaster.  Practitioners and researchers in this field recognize that disaster resilient communities use personal and community strengths to recover from calamity and have strong social networks.  They spend a lot of time looking at the connection between the strength of the social fabric and better outcomes for individuals post-disaster.  One of the core elements of social capital - trust- is seen as vital to preparedness efforts.

I think in terms of data-- and the different kinds and qualities of connections between residents is the base layer of all civic innovation.  These shifting currents of trust influence and underpin all the public and charitable work in a place flowing from the doorstep all the way up to the Federal government.  This particular dataset is particularly hard to collect and validate.  After spending time with Christina, I’m even more sure that the tools we build to make collaborative decisions or change the way we govern ourselves need to be designed with a firm understanding and data-driven approach to  the kind of offline community strength Christina builds.  We need to pay attention to civic resilience and start to effectively measure what it takes to increase it.

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Continued-- Following the Conversation: Can Silicon Valley Change the World

Over the weekend, Steve Johnson wrote an article that continued the discussion of the political belief systems dominating Silicon Valley and what that does and doesn't mean for the rest of the world.  

"Learning from Los Gatos."  

"Yes, people who work in the tech sector today (particularly around the web and social media) believe in the power of decentralized systems and less hierarchical forms of organization. But that does not mean they are greed-is-good market fundamentalists."

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Following the Conversation: Can Silicon Valley Change the World?

Recently, the chattering class has turned it's attention to Silicon Valley's efforts to impact the political and civic worlds in which it exists.  As someone who works at a company founded in Silicon Valley, on a team which is working to improve civic discourse, I find the conversation absolutely fascinating.  

I've compiled a list of the pieces I find most interesting.  

George Packer has a long story (pay-walled) out this week in the New Yorker about Silicon Valley and the impact it is (and isn't) having on the American civic and political discourse.

"The industry's splendid isolation inspires cognitive dissonance, for it's an article of faith in Silicon Valley that the technology industry represents something more utopian, and democratic, than mere special-interest groups."

Catherine Bracy wrote about the issue months ago, and I think she has a better handle on the issues involved.  She explores "the tension between Silicon Valley’s impact on democracy and its utter lack of interest in or understanding of the institutions and systems of government its companies do business in."

Hamish Mckenzie responded to George Packer in PandoDaily calling his piece "kind of unfair."

Today, the New York Times printed a piece, Lessons for Silicon Valley from Capitol Hill. 

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Operational excellence is not a sustainable competitive advantage. In a business context this means it is foolhardy to believe that your company will maintain a superior position vis a vis your competitors, because you are “excellent” (e.g. competent, efficient, smart) at doing what you do. There are a lot of smart people in the world. If you make enough money off being excellent, other smart, competent people will come along and copy what you are doing, and whoops, there goes your advantage.

Hallie Montoya Tansey: What I learned in my MBA Strategy class, as applied to campaigns. 

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The impact of Everyblock goes far beyond the traffic to the site itself. Everyblock is one of those ideas that bent the world in a new way when it came around. One of those ideas that felt both so obvious and so ingenious simultaneously, that it looked *easy* when it was anything but. Back when it launched in 2008, the idea of arcane civic data being of use to regular citizens didn’t really exist. The idea of geolocation-based information gathering didn’t really exist. The idea of (shudder) “hyperlocal” information at the street-level didn’t really exist. And yet today, five years later, these ideas are commonplace thanks in large part to Everyblock proving that they were possible and vital.

daniel sinker: We're all living in an Everyblock world 

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Some Thoughts on Investing in Data Infrastructure for Civic Technology

Any civic technology project is made up of two parts. 

  The application that surfaces data and contextual information to the user and perhaps allows the user to interact with that data in different ways.

The dataset, often published by the government or sourced through scraping, hand collection and crowdsourcing, which the application queries.

  The application piece is important.  It’s the public face of civic technology and already receives quite a bit of attention.    The work of developing healthy data infrastructure, however, can be overlooked, and requires just as much thought and attention.   As a community, we should concentrate on new ways to develop access to the data sets users need, and acknowledge that the costs to government to publish data may require trade offs.

 In order to publish high-quality data, government officials must change the way data is stored, collected and audited—often a costly endeavor.   Public servants have a duty to spend resources only on projects that advance the public interest.   While there is real value in making almost any data set publicly available, and the presumption should always be to publish public data sets, we often depend on the argument “transparency is better” without spending the time and energy to flesh out the case that a particular dataset is worth the cost to the public of publishing it.  

As the cost of publishing data trends towards zero, it will become harder and harder to plausibly argue that the associated costs are higher than the value to the public of an accessible dataset, but for now, we must recognize the trade-offs involved.  Developing sharper arguments will require us to better recognize what data sets will be valuable to users, and build stronger relationships with civil servants, helping them to reduce the costs associated with publishing data.

There’s a lot of excitement in the civic technology community.  2013 promises to bring a flood of investment and attention to this space.  As we work towards building tools that help citizens access government information and access the pathways for influencing their communities, let’s keep in mind the importance of the data infrastructure and ensure we’re being as thoughtful about building interoperable, user-centric datasets as we are about the applications resting on top.

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Political Innovation vs. Civic Innovation - Let's Not Hate on the Campaigns

On Friday, Google, the Knight Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies brought together a small group of practitioners, funders and academics to talk and think about the technological lessons from the 2012 cycle and how they can be applied to civic engagement as a whole. I am so grateful to the attendees for their willingness to participate honestly and openly in thoughtful reasoned debate.  

  Joining us were Democrats and Republicans, journalists and academics, but one of the most interesting ways the attendees divided was between civic technologists and campaign practitioners.  Attendees from the civic space worried about the effect campaign technology has on civic engagement, and at times seemed openly hostile to the methods campaigns have developed to win elections.    

  However, as pointed out late in the day, campaigns are not tasked with increasing civic engagement— they are tasked with winning.  Campaign operatives have an ethical duty to a candidate and must invest resources to win the race.  It would be wrong for them to focus resources anywhere other than on winning an advantage over the opponent.  

  I do not share my colleagues worries about the impact political technology is having on participatory dialogue.  I worry instead that structural and resource problems will prevent government from leveraging new technologies as effectively as campaigns have done.  But mostly, I worry that the civic tech space is so wary of political technology that the smartest analysts, strategists, organizers and technologists are being left out of the conversation.  If we are going to build a robust, healthy civic discourse, we need to include these folks in building a solution.   

  Instead of criticizing political practitioners for failing to achieve full civic engagement, I would like to see the practitioner community engaged around the larger questions.  If Dan Wagner (the Director of Analytics for the Obama campaign) took his next job not at a campaign, but instead at an organization working with Alex Lundry (the Director of Data Science at Romney for President) to build consensus around a policy agenda supported by a large majority of the country, how would they use their skills in data science in support of that objective?  Could you use analytics to bring people together around policy instead of dividing them into the small number of persuadable voters and communicating only with those voters?    

  How about asking Betsy Hoover and Mat Lira to work together to build communities that tolerate compromise and technology tools that encourage Americans to weigh in on civic discussions but preserve space for our elected representatives to deliberate and explore issues honestly?

  The political community is full of talented, smart, knowledgeable individuals who care not only about winning campaigns, but also about the common good.  Let’s welcome them to the civic engagement space as full partners.

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Above all, he embodied what is best and hopeful about the Internet: its endless information, its ethos of sharing, its joy in connecting friends and strangers, its unflinching transparency about its own limitations, its promise -- by no means yet delivered -- of a world that is more open, more knowledgeable, and, above all, more fair ... a world that reflects the values of the Internet at its best. That is why the Internet is so wracked with sadness. That is why we will never forget Aaron Swartz.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/15/opinion/weinberger-aaron-swartz/index.html