Live blogging session #4: How to elicit what people in communities care about the most

18 April 2013

SESSION #4 THEME: If Only We Knew…how to elicit what people in communities care about the most

CHANGE AGENT: Mark Headd, Chief Data Officer, Philadelphia
FACILITATORS: Neil Kleiman, Special advisor to the dean of New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

The following is a liveblog of one of six sessions at The GovLab Experiment: Making Engagement Work. It will be updated as the sessions progress from 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM. For the full schedule, please see: http://thegovlab.org/events/making-engagement-work/. For more, read the session description at the bottom of the post.

(Live blog updates provided by volunteers Inhwa Oh and Rohan Siddhanti)

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4:00 PM: The group is approaching a more tangible solution, modeling off of the existing 311. On a website or mobile interface, one can first submit a 311 – who, what, where. Upon finishing a 311 form, page will overview what you submitted. At the bottom will be a button that says “Find out more.” When you click, the landing page may look something like this: “Did you know…” as header, 1) registered to vote? 2) polling location? 3) community meetings? 4) similar complaints nearby? 5) box to check to opt in for more info 6) second box to check for neighbor alerts 7) box to opt to get information from your local city councilor. through this sort of registration process, we can gather and retrieve data. Citizen may be able to view an account history.

“Building an app like this is like discovering a dinosaur.” What should be the name of this app?

As we near the end of day, we reach a more tangible outcome with drawings and ideas on board–and more smiles–despite the long, robust discussion.

3:10 PM: So this is the 311 complaint form for a noisy neighbor –if he is consistently noisy. They ask what you’re reporting, where you are, and who you are. What if 311 told you “there is a community meeting about exactly that noisy neighbor in your neighborhood next week –attend it”…?We want to rethink the one-way transaction of government. If we could pass in the what, where, and who –what kind of services might 311 display or deliver for us, beyond simply addressing our immediate complaints in isolation?

2:53 PM: How do we tap into the 42% of Philadelphia that isn’t networked by the Internet so that they may participate in governance? More and more, we are talking about creating a “multifunctional” 311, which engages citizens through various channels.Sophisticated NGOs invite their members to share stories with them because stories have mobilizing power. Cool idea: open up 311 so that you can share your story and choose whether or not to publicize it. Reduce the barriers to its use. If your goal is to find out who cares about the city, and to what extent they participate in civic affairs, you want to look at comparable metrics –voter turnout, public meeting turnout, number of emails to government officials, etc.Clearly,we need to redefine what metrics are/mean, because we are talking about several different things here –individual vs. group statistics, qualitative vs quantitative data, high tech vs. low tech.

2:25 PM: So, we have come back together. The discussion of how we engage citizens for greater particpation is analyzed and broken down into four components:

The metrics: Voter turn-out
Causes of voter turnout (see below)
Solutions: Cross selling, feedback loop, reward program, standard ballot, etc.
Implementation

The second group, focused much more on the notions of meetings and defining what government could and couldn’t solve. What’s missing from 311 is the community element. If I have complaints about school or a neighborhood issue, 311 doesn’t help much. Community problems can be or should be solved by government. The end point of our discussion was to include the community element.

Another point is to create feedback loop. For example, in Philadelphia, where 42% of the public do not have internet access in home, a phone number other than 311 should be provided to report problems, where teams listen and tackle the issue. Ultimately, all of this is important, but some level of civic awareness is definitely important. Like Yelp or Foursquare, some kind of civic data with geolocation should be available.

2:20 PM: We want to focus more on the notion of meetings –getting people together. Although meetings are an archaic form of getting politics done, they do have representational value.If there are particular areas where governmentt is less able to help you, it should act as a router or as a “connector” between citizens and services. Currently, government is very transactional –you call when you have a noise complaint, or a pothole to get filled. Services like 311 should be redesigned so that we get the representational value of traditional community meetings, while being responsive to the granularity of public issues.Implications for a new kind of 311:

One where you can actually figure out what kinds of problems you can actually solve.
One where where complaints get aggregated into communities of affected stakeholders on a particular public issue.

1:52 PM: Great conversations happening from the #GovLab #Experiment. Innovate! A sample:

Participant A: How about we reward our citizens for engagement, like a ticket to a Phillies game…or a pilot program where you get out of a parking ticket for free.
Participant B: There are some cities where people get pulled over for doing good things, and they give people presents.
Participant C: So we should not only incentivize, but cross-sell…so they are more likely to come back and participate.
Participant D: This doesn’t necessarily have to be online…Person C: maybe it shouldn’t actually be online. Person D: how about a “I love Philly card”
Participant A: What if we allow people to receive a discount at certain participating retailers. So you get points for doing good things.
Participant C: How about you vote digitally in ways that are legislative. So, you vote for a bus stand that needs to get re-done, and then you are more likely to vote for thing like a representative; this is almost like “practice voting”, or “direct democracy”, or “habit voting”
Participant E: people are doing this every week with Kickstarter, etc
Participant F: in Buenos Aires, there is a “woofie coin”
Participant B: this would be thought of as micro-voting..and micro-voting linked to rewards

1:40 PM: From one of the breakout sessions, question of where citizens should go in order to touch base for their problems raised. Is it that we create some sort of app or create a front hand thing? It’s not going to be a phone number like 311. It could be an app, a variety of apps. People are discussing if it’ll be a redesign of the 311. If it’s not 311, a platform or center should be able to connect people with common problems. But other questions are raised. If it is a certain website we visit to report our problems, how do we know that our problems are not just being recorded, but being heard and solved? For example, with 311, citizens get a direct response.

It seems that the problem surrounding “making people’s voices heard”, once we get people’s attention, is, now, how and where the public can go to, make sure their problem is being heard, and in return, expect a response.

1:21 PM: Interesting chart created regarding the group’s thoughts on voter turnout in the U.S.:

Metric	Problem/Cause
Voter turnout	Making it personal and relevant Location (where to go, during what hours ~ bad user experience) Logistics/outreach Misinformation Lack of faith Civic awareness Lack of incentives Appropriate mediums for outreach Other priorities (we don’t get the day off in the US)

This group is discussing issues that everyone sees every single time the yearly polling routine ensues. We’ve all seen some of these before, but some are new. Would you feel more inclined to vote and participate if doing so was seen as cool? Think about it.
There is an idea bubbling, it’s been building for a while with this group…the idea of the cross-sell. When you buy something on Amazon, the website tells you other things might like to buy. How about when a citizen engages with government , the government reaches out and says, “Here are three other things you might be interested in taking action on”?

1:06 PM: As we move into the break-out sessions for groups, we’re seeing the group start to dive a level deeper. The group has decided to move forward in designing the prototype/project/policy on the following two pillars:

Communicate with people who wouldn’t be engaged to inform them of why they should be engage (need to tell a compelling story)
Give them the information necessary to show up (where to go, where to show up, etc)

The group would like to structure the conversation around problems, causes, and solutions. However, the lines really start to get blurred as we truly explore these issues. For example, is low voter turnout a problem or a cause?

11:26 AM: One participant asks “what does the perception of the citizen end up being?” If people want to be heard, how do they know they are being heard? Signaling effects…

Example of India – right to information act. India has a penalty for not giving information after a period of time. Individuals must give up jobs in government, if not obliged. This doesn’t create a postive incentive for people in government but it does for the public. One start-up tech company observes words that signal happiness vs. sad by location. (e.g., the Obama campaign).

11:15 AM: We continue to talk about framing issues and topics we must address. So far, some of the themes and goals we have crystalized are:

Addressing the information gap. People need information before making decisions. Are these being provided?
Adjusting expectations. What can the gov. do and not do? What are the expectations of public? How do we adjust these expectations?
Noting which platforms work in terms of structure and participation.

One participant raised the issue that government has lots of data, and that it can be meta-coordinator. No private sector organization can do this. Another participant wishes to address the protection of marginalized and powerless.

10:59 AM: The beginning of session has focused on framing the issues and topic.

Are there platforms where government and citizens effectively communicate?
How does government rapidly response to issues more profound aside from services (such as filling potholes)–i.e., problems like inequality?

One participant raised the issue that government does not have clear sense of what the priorities are.

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SESSION DESCRIPTION:
To restore faith in government, we need to provide citizens with the clear channels to communicate their issues with those who have the power to address them. If a person falls ill, he or she can find a doctor and begin the treatment process; if a customer buys a faulty product, they can quickly return it or find redress. But in the public sector, these modes of recourse are rare. Even where there are established mechanisms for citizen feedback, these channels often fail to elicit a meaningful response from policy-makers. Instead of meaningful engagement, there is a disconnect between what citizens care about and the issues their political representatives address.
To develop more effective modes of governance, we need to identify and create mechanisms that enable citizens to raise and frame issues directly. In recent years, organizations like Seeclickfix.com and Publicstuff.com have engaged citizens in identifying municipal issues like potholes and broken streetlights that need to be addressed quickly. Platforms like Causes.com and Change.org have leveraged social media networks to raise awareness and advocate around more substantive policy issues. What’s missing, however, is a way to enable individual citizens to raise the issues that matter to them, draw attention to those issues, and present them in a way that government can respond effectively.
The vast majority of citizens don’t engage with government because they don’t believe their efforts will lead to action. The vast majority of bureaucrats don’t engage citizens because they don’t know how to do so meaningfully. So we want to design a sustainable, robust and responsive process to solicit the issues of concern from citizens to improve the process of representation and problem-solving.
This session will focus on identifying successful models of engagement in the public and private sectors with an eye on how to design a robust platform that creates sustainable, two-way communication between citizens and policy-makers. We will discuss:

Examples of citizen engagement tools on the web: What’s working, what isn’t?
Successful examples of triaging mechanisms that exist in the private sector.
Ways to create a rapid response system for citizens to highlight policy issues of interest.

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