People powered decisions for smarter cities
“We believe that the time has come to disperse power more widely in Britain today; to recognise that we will only make progress if we help people to come together to make life better.” HM Government, May 2010
The launch of the Changify pilot in Plymouth can’t have come at a better time.
Earlier this month the UK government announced a brand-new ‘pothole fund’ aimed in particular at the South West of England. You can read about it here and here. Of the £50 million promised for the financial year 2016/17, almost £2 million has been allocated to Devon. But given the coalition’s statement from May 2010 (above), who should have the power to see this money spent most effectively?
The Changify app provides a platform for residents of cities to report on problems directly to their service provider, and in Plymouth that is our partner Amey. The app empowers citizens to take ownership of their environment by:
Reporting on problems they see on the road (as well as successes)
Being given information from service providers about costs
Supporting issues through voting
Being notified when an issue is resolved
The app should also prove a useful tool for Amey in deciding which road improvements are most worthwhile and will have the most positive impact on the community. By balancing their expert engineering and maintenance knowledge with public opinion, they can achieve what is best for the city overall.
This idea of participatory budgeting (PB) was born in Brazil in the 1980s for politicians to regain the trust of their people. Unlike other bottom-up approaches, participatory budgeting allows for a dialogue to open up between citizens and government institutions.
“The sustained participation in Brazilian PB processes demonstrates that citizens enjoy having direct control over how and why tax money gets spent, especially if their involvement can be customized to fit their needs.” Paolo Spada and Hollie Russon Gilman, March 2015
Andrew Travers of the London Borough of Barnet created the so-called Graph of Doom for a presentation he did in 2012 to promote the new citizen-oriented ‘One Barnet’ cost-cutting programme. It showed that, given predicted population trends, in 20 years the borough’s net budget would only cover the costs of children’s services and adult social care.
Looking beyond the catchy name, the graph is a stark reminder that budget cuts and demographic factors can mean a significant re-allocation of money towards essential services areas, in this case looking after our children and elderly. Over time, this reduces the money spent on supposedly non-essential things such as road maintenance, street cleaning, parks and cycling paths.
In this time of austerity we as citizens are, by and large, realistic and understand the need for cuts to these less essential amenities. However, it is imperative that the money does eventually get set-aside for such services, and that it is spent effectively and in accordance with what we as a whole consider most important.
City councillor Mark Coker is proud that Plymouth is taking a fresh approach to citizen involvement:
“The city… is being more inclusive in making sure that all the citizens have a say… in the way the city is governed and managed.”
Chris King, the store manager at Rockets & Rascals is keen for the authorities to recognise the cycling community in Plymouth and target investment accordingly:
“In a city where popularity in cycling is constantly on the up, it’s always going to be a challenge to invest in infrastructure in the most efficient way as possible. [Changify] is so easy for everyone to become a part of it, and it’s certainly going to have a positive impact on the local cycling community”
Collective decision-making requires participation that brings together two disparate groups of people: those with less time and/or limited digital access, and those with more of both. The need for an online and offline conversation is key to helping bring people together to facilitate change, and enables them to convert this energy into action that gives them a sense of ownership and agency to make an impact in their neighbourhood. Recently there has been a global trend for citizen led initiatives creating new forms of participative democracy. In all of these efforts, there is a common thread: A growing need for self-organised collectives increasingly acting with agency, to help address or improve an urban socio-economic issue. We can be pro-active and address this need, by creating cross-platform solutions that enable better collaboration and co-creation. By bringing together different stakeholders in real-time to support decision making and prioritisation of limited resources for cities. Using traditional social media (e.g. Facebook) and messaging platforms like WhatsApp, this generation of communities is platform agnostic as long it helps them achieve their goal and the platform has the lowest barrier to entry. Service providers need to learn from this growing trend and see how we can tap or harness it to help improve our future cities. As we have seen in the Barnet example, urban challenges cannot be resolved just by local government or third sector alone - they need a new approach powered by people to create new smarter more connected cities.
But there is an issue of data and privacy that also needs addressing. Government and service providers are under pressure to improve citizen participation in public services design and to increase the use of big data to create smart cities. At the same time, public fear of ‘big data’ is increasing, as is the reluctance to share it. A House of Commons, Science and Technology Committee report from November 2014 on the responsible use of data warns that the government,
“…should be seeking to provide a platform for UK citizens to engage [government and commercial online] services without unnecessarily risking their personal data…”, so they can “…make informed choices about what data to share.”
Figure - BBC Participate Research (2007) Smart cities are often designed using concepts of ‘intelligence’ that rely on smart meters, wireless sensors and smart phones, filtered through huge data centres that analyse and interpret information (e.g.,Rio’s ‘Command Centre’). But cities designed using purely big, sensor-generated data can result in services and systems that are not trusted by people to meet their real needs, or worse, are oppressive in nature. Indeed, smart city pilots have a high failure rate due to this lack of public trust, according to a BIS study.
There is a need for a data model (much like the one Changify hopes to develop) that allows government and service providers to de-risk smart city projects by:
Increasing trust & active people participation
Rewarding people for participation & data sharing
Improving the public’s ability to generate ‘little data’ that can be aggregated and collected anonymously, through new innovations, such as wearable tech
Our mission is to humanise smart cities by increasing people participation in city and service design.
Citizens, service providers, businesses and local authorities will be able to interact with the Changify platform on two levels. At the moment people can use Changify to report civic issues (such as potholes, curbs, dog fouling or graffiti), or to harness the power of their local community via the pilot prototype, to prioritise issues they think need a quick fix. Communities can also use the system to attract support from local businesses for popular issues or projects by getting their backing and earning points on the local business loyalty programs. This is being accomplished by establishing relationships between Changify and local businesses. So if you are a local business in Plymouth – get in touch.
For the pilot, trialists will be able to use the system to log issues experienced when using roads - such as potholes or even air quality. We call these ‘field reports’, and the aim is that the users (and in the future, city planners) will then be able to compare these reports with bigger data sets. This data will help identify ways the city can make cycling safer and healthier along with other uses of the road – such as walking, running, and wheelchair access.
For this pilot, the platform aims to enable:
Identify infrastructure problems (e.g., potholes) via active field reports
Categorise and prioritise reports through the platform (e.g. number of votes/likes)
Complete the feedback/ status loop of the report between service provider and trialists
Get people and service providers to connect via online-offline meetups
As you can see, we’re incredibly excited to see what the future holds for Changify. We are at a point in time when technology is doing more than giving the people a voice. It’s giving them a chance to start a conversation.
In Plymouth, the revolution will be hand-held.
Join us next week to see what we aim to do for the next level of the platform development. Don’t forget to invite a friend or register for our second user test on 12th may.