Category Archives: open gov

Open Gov’t Action Plan Holds Promise for D&D, Civic Tech

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Just over a month ago, the White House released the third version of its Open Government National Action Plan that includes upwards of 40 initiatives to advance its commitment to “an open and citizen-centered government,” and we encourage NCDD members to take a look at it. While the plan covers a lot of ground, some of that ground is in our field, and that could mean opportunities to grow and deepen our work that we won’t want to miss.

The Open Government Action Plan is part of the White House’s involvement in the international Open Government Partnership (OGP), in which 66 countries participate as a way to “increase public integrity, enhance public access to information, improve management of public resources, and give the public a more active voice in government processes.” All of the goals of the OGP can be a boon to both the field of dialogue & deliberation as well as civic tech, so we encourage folks to take notice of the parts of the Open Government Action Plan that may pertain to your specific niche or even create new funding streams or partnerships that you can take advantage of.

For example, the White House’s plan includes a promise that it “will work with communities, non-profits, civic technologists, and foundation partners to develop new commitments that will expand the use of participatory budgeting in the United States,” so if you are thinking about trying PB as a part of your D&D work, now is the time!

For some more of an idea of what’s in the plan, read this snippet from the White House’s recent blog post on its release:

In the third Open Government National Action Plan, the Administration both broadens and deepens efforts to help government become more open and more citizen-centered. The plan includes new and impactful steps the Administration is taking to openly and collaboratively deliver government services and to support open government efforts across the country. These efforts prioritize a citizen-centric approach to government, including improved access to publicly available data to provide everyday Americans with the knowledge and tools necessary to make informed decisions.

We see this commitment to open and “citizen-centered” government as a direct result of the years of our field’s work and as a sign that now is the time to keep stepping up our contributions to better, more democratic governance at all levels. We encourage our members and others in the D&D and civic tech field to use this White House plan as a platform to continue moving forward in bigger and better ways!

You can find all the specifics of what’s in the report by downloading the PDF version of it at www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/final_us_open_government_national_action_plan_3_0.pdf.

We also encourage you to read the full version of the White House blog post on the report’s release at www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/10/27/advancing-open-and-citizen-centered-government.

$2.5M Grant Will Support Participedia & Democratic Innovation Research

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NCDD is proud to be part of an international partnership of researchers and organizations that was recently awarded a $2.5 million grant that will be used to support Participedia – a democracy research project which is headed by two NCDD members – and the international coordination of research on global democratic governance innovations. Our own director Sandy Heierbacher has been advising the project, and this is great news for our field! We encourage you to learn more in the Participedia announcement below or to find the original here.

Global Research Partnership Awarded Significant Grant to Support Participedia

participedia-logoWe are in the midst of a transformation of democracy – one possibly as revolutionary as the development of the representative, party-based form of democracy that evolved out of the universal franchise. This transformation involves hundreds of thousands of new channels of citizen involvement in government, often outside the more visible politics of electoral representation, and occurring in most countries of the world.

In light of these fast-moving changes, a new global partnership has been awarded a significant grant to support the work of the Participedia Project. The Participedia Project’s primary goals are to map the developing sphere of participatory democratic innovations; explain why they are developing as they are; assess their contributions to democracy and good governance; and transfer this knowledge back into practice.

The 5-year, $2.5M Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) was awarded to the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. The SSHRC Partnership Grant will support the collaborative work of an extensive community of academic researchers, students, practitioners of democratic innovations, design and technology professionals, and others.

The project partners include eight Canadian universities and seventeen additional universities and non-governmental organizations representing every continent on the globe. (Please see below for a list of the project partners. Full lists of the project’s collaborators and co-investigators can be found here.) More than $1M of the Partnership Grant funds will be split among project partners to support student research and travel that will further the students’ learning, while also advancing Participedia’s mission. For their part, the project partners have collectively pledged an additional $2M in cash and in-kind contributions to the initiative.

Professor Mark E. Warren, the Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy in UBC’s Department of Political Science, co-founded Participedia in 2009 together with Professor Archon Fung, Academic Dean and Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Warren serves as Participedia’s project director and as principal investigator for the SSHRC Partnership Grant.

Shared online research platforms will make it easy for both experts and non-experts to gather information. The current beta platform at www.participedia.net has already facilitated the collection of close to 1,000 entries cataloging case examples of participatory politics; the organizations that design, implement, or support the cases; and the variety of methods used to guide democratic innovations.

Warren emphasizes the project’s ambitious goals, noting that “By organizing hundreds of researchers, the Participedia Project will not only anchor and strengthen the emerging field of democratic innovations, but also develop a new model for global collaboration in the social sciences.” Expectations for the Participedia Project’s outcomes include:

  • Innovative research platforms to enable extensive, decentralized, co-production of knowledge;
  • A deep and voluminous common pool of knowledge about participatory democratic innovations that will support a new generation of research and practice; and
  • Global and diverse communities of research and practice focused on participatory democratic innovations.

Partner organizations include the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, InterPARES Trust, McGill University, McMaster University, Université de Montreal,  Simon Fraser University, University of Toronto, University of Toronto-Scarborough, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Harvard University, the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy, Nanyang Technological University, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, Peking University, Pennsylvania State University, Research College / University of Duisburg-Essen, Syracuse University, Tsinghua University, Universidade de Coimbra, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais,  University of Bologna, University of Canberra, University of the Western Cape, University of Westminster, and the World Bank Institute.

You can find the original version of this Participedia announcement at www.participedia.net/en/news/2015/10/01/global-research-partnership-awarded-significant-grant-support-participedia.

The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing

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The 22-page research paper, The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing (2015), was published by John Prpic, Araz Taetihagh, and James Melton, and can be found via the Davenport Institute on their Gov 2.0 Watch blog. This paper is one of the first of its kind to provide research that dives deep into how crowdsourcing is being utilized for policymaking. Read the abstract below and download the paper here.

From the abstract…

What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policymaking? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative tradeoffs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature.

Find the full paper here.

About the Davenport InstituteDavenport_Institute
Since our founding as a multi-partisan and non-profit organization in 2005, The Davenport Institute (formerly Common Sense California) has worked to engage the citizens of this state in the policy decisions that affect our everyday lives. It is our firm belief that, in today’s world of easy access to information, and easy connectivity to others, California’s municipal and education leaders are seeking ways to involve the residents of their communities in the important issues they confront. Done legitimately, this new kind of leadership produces better, more creative policy solutions and better, more engaged citizens committed to the hard work of self-governance.

Resource Link: http://gov20watch.pepperdine.edu/2015/08/research-policy-crowdsourcing/

New Research on Making Policy through Crowdsourcing

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For those interested in democratizing more of the policymaking process, check out this recent post below from NCDD organizational member Davenport Institute and their Gov 2.0 Watch blog that highlights recent research into policy crowdsourcing. You can read the post below or find the original here.

DavenportInst-logo

Research: Policy Crowdsourcing

For anyone really interested in diving deep into the question of crowdsourcing for public policy, various techniques and available research regarding their relative benefits, challenges, and effectiveness, a recent paper by John Prpic of the Lulea University of Technology (Sweden), Araz Taeihagh of the Singapore Management University, and James Melton of the Michigan University, College of Business Administration may be right up your alley.

From the abstract:

What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policymaking? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative tradeoffs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature.

You can download the paper here.

You can find the original version of this Gov 2.0 Watch blog post at http://gov20watch.pepperdine.edu/2015/08/research-policy-crowdsourcing.

DeKalb, IL Plans for Future with Conversation Cafe Model

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We recently heard the story of an exciting project that the City of DeKalb undertook to engage citizens in its strategic planning process that we wanted to share here. With a few of our NCDD members’ help, DeKalb held a series of Conversation Cafe-style public meetings and will turn the input they gathered into a 10-year vision for the city. We encourage you to read more about the process in NCDD member Tracy Rogers-Tryba‘s write up of the project below.

The City of DeKalb enlisted the assistance of the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University to embark upon a multi-year, collaborative, grassroots strategic planning effort. Utilizing a modified Conversation Cafe model, the City has turned to city residents, students, workers and employers to share their ideas about DeKalb’s future. Responses to these questions will help shape a vision for the City of DeKalb.

The goal is to provide an understanding of the City’s assets and improvement opportunities, suggestions for change strategies, and ways for the City to maintain ongoing dialogue and communication with people who live, work or attend school in DeKalb.

“These meetings have been excellent opportunities for us to hear first-hand the hopes and aspirations that DeKalb residents, students, and workers have for our city,” said Mayor John Rey. “We want a vision of DeKalb that is meaningful to everyone, and we also want to hear the ideas people have for realizing that vision.”

Eight open Conversation Cafes, entitled Community Conversations, were held throughout July. All community conversations were open to anyone from the public. Conversations were held at facilities located on public transit routes and transportation was made available for those individuals needing assistance. Interpreters were also made available for non-English speaking participants. Prior to the Conversation Cafes that were open to anyone from the public, the Center held smaller targeted meetings for homeless populations, international and high school student populations, as well as for various sectors of leadership throughout the community.

Results of the outreach efforts, and information collected by the Center for Governmental Studies will be transmitted to the City. Resident populations have expressed appreciation and encouragement for the City to continue this form of collaborative engagement as it reflects efforts of a more open collaborative community dialogue.

dekalb process photo

City Administrator Anne Marie Gaura opens an citizen input session in DeKalb

Following up on the dialogue efforts, Janice Thomson and Hubert Morgan – both of whom are experts in D&D and NCDD members – provided an introductory workshop entitled Conversation for Vibrant Communities on the four streams of engagement in D&D practice on August 5, 2015.

All the data has since been collected, and the Center continues to work with the City’s administration and senior elected leaders on drafting new mission, vision, values, and strategic initiatives for the 10 year visioning plan. This work product has been handed over to the City’s administration and employees so that they can also provide their input. The Center will then take this information and look to connect it to work done by residents, leadership, and employees to build out a plan that has community input.

The final 10-year plan and results of the process will be presented back to the Council and residents in October.

Thanks so much to Tracy Rogers-Tryba for writing this piece and for sharing it with us!

Guide to Choosing Tools for Digital Engagement

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Choosing the right methods for digital engagement can be disorienting, and that’s why we were happy to find this helpful guide to picking appropriate e-democracy tools that Geoff Mulgan of Nesta recently published at www.nesta.org.uk. The guide is aimed at supporting public officials, but can be helpful for anyone looking to engage stakeholders in decision making. We encourage you to check out Geoff’s piece below or find the original Nesta post here.

Designing Digital Democracy: A Short Guide

I’ve written quite a few blogs and pieces on digital technology and democracy – most recently on the relevance of new-style political parties.

Here I look at the practical question of how parliaments, assemblies and governments should choose the right methods for greater public engagement in decisions.

One prompt is the Nesta-led D-CENT project which is testing out new tools in several countries, and there’s an extraordinary range of engagement experiments underway around the world, from Brazil’s parliament to the Mayor of Paris. Tools like Loomio for smallish groups, and Your Priorities and DemocracyOS for larger ones, are well ahead of their equivalents a few years ago.

A crucial question is whether the same tools work well for different types of issue or context. The short answer is ‘no’. Here I suggest some simple formulae to ensure that the right tools are used for the right issues; I show why hybrid forms of online and offline are the future for parliaments and parties; and why the new tools emphasise conversation rather than only votes.

Clarity on purpose

First, it’s important to be clear what wider engagement is for. Engagement is rarely a good in itself. More passionate engagement in issues can be a powerful force for progress. But it can be the opposite, entrenching conflicts and generating heat rather than light. The goals of engagement can include some or all of the following: legitimation, or public trust; better quality decisions and outcomes; or a public which better understands the key issues and choices. These goals can often coincide. But there will be many times when they directly clash with each other.

A related question is how direct democratic engagement relates to representative democracy. Sometimes these align – when a political leader or party creates new forums to complement the paraphernalia of elections and manifestos. But sometimes they conflict – with Iceland’s attempt to involve the public in writing a new constitution an important recent test case (the new constitution was drafted by a broad based commission with online inputs from the public, and endorsed by public referendum, but then rejected by a newly elected parliament). One lesson is that it’s wise to involve elected politicians as directly as possible – since they continue to hold ultimate authority.

Clarity on who you want to reach

Second, who do you want to reach? Even in the most developed nations and cities there are still very practical barriers of reach – despite the huge spread of broadband, mobiles and smart phones. Recent experience suggests that engagements which only use digital tools rather than print, radio, TV and face to face, can get very skewed inputs.  That’s fine for some kinds of engagement – 1% involvement can greatly improve the quality of decisions. But it’s vital to keep checking that the participant groups aren’t unrepresentative. Even very tech savvy cities like New York and Los Angeles have repeatedly found that participants in purely digital consultations are much more male, young, well-educated, affluent and metropolitan than the population as a whole.

Clarity on what tools for what issues – navigating ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’

Third, even if there were strong habits of digital engagement for the whole population it would not follow that all issues should be opened up for the maximum direct participation. A useful approach is to distinguish issues according to two dimensions.

The first dimension differentiates issues where the public has expertise and experience from ones where the knowledge needed to make decisions is very specialised. There are many issues on which crowds simply don’t have much information let alone wisdom, and any political leader who opened up decision making too far would quickly lose the confidence of the public.

The second dimension differentiates issues which are practical and pragmatic from ones where there are strongly held and polarised opinions, mainly determined by underlying moral beliefs rather than argument and evidence. Putting these together gives us a two dimensional space on which to map any public policy issue, which could be described as the ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’.

Diagram: Belief and Knowledge spaces

Public engagement, and the use of digital tools to widen engagement, is possible on all points. But different types of issue need very different tools, depending on how open or closed public views are likely to be, and how inclusive or exclusive the knowledge needed for participation is.

For example, an issue on which there is widely shared knowledge but strongly contested values (like gay marriage) requires different methods to one which is both more technical in nature and dependent on highly specialised knowledge (like monetary policy). A contested issue – in the top left quadrant – will bring in highly motivated groups who are very unlikely to change their views as a result of participation. New fora for debate give added oxygen to pre-existing views rather than encouraging deliberation.

With very specialised issues, by contrast, wide participation in debate may risk encouraging unwise decisions – which will subsequently be rejected by voters (how much would you want the details of monetary policy, or responses to a threatened epidemic, to be determined by your fellow citizens?). So in this, bottom right, quadrant some of the most useful tools are ones which mobilise broader bodies of expertise than the ones immediately accessible to government, but try to filter out inputs based on opinion rather than knowledge or experience.

Another interesting category, however, falls roughly in the middle to top right of the table above. These are issues involving scientific choices that include ethics, some highly specialised knowledge, but also significant public interest. For issues of this kind, open public deliberation may be important both to educate the public and to legitimise decisions. Stem cell research, genomics, privacy and personal data are all issues of this kind. The issues surrounding mitochondrial research are a good recent example.

But the formats need to involve smaller groups in more intensive deliberation and engagement with the facts, before the process is opened up. The challenge then is how to use these exercises to influence a wider public, which in most cases must involve mass media as well as the internet.

I’m sure there are other issues and dimensions to consider and would welcome suggestions on improvements to the model I’ve set out here.

Clarity on requisite scale

Fourth, engagement looks and feels very different at different scales. A small city like Reykjavik can run a fantastic online tool for citizens to propose ideas and comment. There’s a directness and authenticity about the points made. At the other end of the spectrum a nation of 300 million like the US, or 1300 million like India, is bound to struggle with online engagement, since well-funded lobby groups are likely to be much more adept at playing the system. More systematic rules; more governance of governance; and a bigger role for intermediaries and representatives is unavoidable on these larger scales. Democracy isn’t fractal – instead it’s a phenomenon, like much biology, where larger scale requires different forms, not just a scaled up version of what works in a town or neighbourhood.

Clarity on identity and anonymity

Modern democracy allows people a secret ballot (though we sometimes forget that this is a relatively recent idea, sometimes attributed to the Australians, though I think France got there first). But we usually make votes in parliaments visible. The modern internet allows for anonymity which has fuelled some its worst features – abuse, extreme views etc. So any designer of democratic engagement tools has to decide what levels of anonymity should apply at each stage. We might choose to allow anonymity at early stages of consultations, but require people to show and validate identities at later stages (eg. to confirm they actually live in the neighbourhood or city involved), certainly as any issue comes closer to decisions. The diagram below summarises these different steps, and the block chain tools being used in the D-CENT pilots bring these issues to the fore.

The 2010s are turning out to be a golden age of democratic innovation. That’s bringing creativity and excitement but also challenges, in particular around how to relate the new forms to the old ones, online communities to offline ones, the democracy of voice and numbers and the democracy of formal representation.

Crowds can help with many tasks. But they are particularly badly suited to the job of designing new institutions, or crafting radical strategies, or combining discrete policies into coherent programmes. This still tends to be the preserve of quite small groups, in intense face to face conversation.

As a result my guess is that the most successful models in the next few years will fuse representative and direct elements. They will be honest that the buck still stops with elected representatives – and that the online tools are inputs and supplements rather than replacements. They will present conversation and deliberation as preferable to relying on occasional elections, and the odd binary petition. But they will also be clear that the 21st century parliament or city council has to be a hybrid too – physical and digital.

You can find the original version of this Nesta blog piece at www.nesta.org.uk/blog/designing-digital-democracy-short-guide#sthash.qXW93aMa.dpuf.

Davenport Offers CA Cities $50,000 for Public Engagement

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We encourage our NCDD members in California to check out an exciting grant opportunity being offered by NCDD organizational member the Davenport Institute. Davenport is offering $50,000 worth of training and support for public engagement work, and the deadline to apply is Sept. 14th, but don’t wait to apply. You can learn more in the announcement they recently made below or by clicking here.

2015 Davenport Institute Public Engagement Grant Program Application Period Now Open!

DavenportInst-logoIf you have a public engagement project that could use some financial support, now is the time to apply for the eighth annual Davenport Institute Public Engagement Grant Program! This year we will be awarding up to $50,000 in funded consulting services to California cities, counties, special districts, and civic organizations looking to conduct legitimate public processes on issues ranging from budgets to land use to public safety to water policy.

The Grants are made possible through funding from the James Irvine Foundation’s California Democracy Program. We anticipate awarding 2 – 4 grants with a minimum individual grant amount of $5,000 and a maximum individual grant amount of $20,000. Prior to beginning their public engagement campaign, grantees will receive training and consultation from the Davenport Institute to build understanding and support for the civic engagement effort amongst administrative and elected officials.

The deadline for the 2015 Public Engagement Grant is Monday, September 14.

Here are some FAQs:

Q1: Does the proposed public process need to occur immediately?

A: No. Most of our granted projects have taken place within one year of the application date.

Q2: Can we recommend a facilitator or web platform to receive support from the Grant Program?

A: Yes. Again, the purpose of our grants is to fund participatory (as opposed to “PR”) projects. Of course, we’d like to interview your recommended facilitator, but we’ve worked with designated consultants before. This actually helps us build our own “rolodex” of consultants!

Q3: Is the Davenport training an added expense?

A: No. Training for the grant recipient is now an integral part of the Grant Program, and is offered as part of the grant. All expenses – including travel – are assumed by Davenport.

Q4: How many grantees do you anticipate this year?

A: We tend to support between 2-4  grantees each year with the Grant Program.

Q5: Do you support “capacity building” efforts like “block captain”, “neighborhood watch”, “citizen academy”?

A: No. As a practice, the grants are intended to support actual public projects around “live” issues – from budgets to land use. We find with the training added, these grants build “civic capacity” through actual engagement.

The criteria are straightforward and the online application form is easy.

After reviewed by members of our Advisory Council, our 2015 grantees will be announced by early October. Please feel free to contact Ashley Trim at ashley[dot]trim[at]pepperdine[dot]edu or 310-506-6878 with any questions.

Participate in the National Day of Civic Hacking, June 6th

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We want to make sure that our more tech-savvy NCDD members know the National Day of Civic Hacking, a cool event being organized by the good people with Code for America this Friday, June 6th with help from Second Muse and NASA.

All across the country on this day, people will be gathering to develop tech solutions that address a number of community and civic challenges that have been identified.

Here’s how Code for America describes the day:

On June 6, 2015, thousands of people from across the United States will come together for National Day of Civic Hacking. The event will bring together urbanists, civic hackers, government staff, developers, designers, community organizers and anyone with the passion to make their city better. They will collaboratively build new solutions using publicly-released data, technology, and design processes to improve our communities and the governments that serve them. Anyone can participate; you don’t have to be an expert in technology, you just have to care about your neighborhood and community.

Folks who are interested in participating are encouraged to join an event close to them, which can be found through the map on www.hackforchange.org, or register to host their own event.

We hope some of our NCDD members will participate!

Recap of the NCDD Confab Call with Pete Peterson

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We had another great Confab Call event last week with NCDD member Pete Peterson of the Davenport Institute. Pete shared some very interesting insights and lessons that he learned from his recent run for Confab bubble imageCalifornia Secretary of State last year in a bid to become, as he calls it, the state’s “Chief Engagement Officer.”

It was an inspiring conversation in many ways, and after listening to Pete, there very well may be a few more NCDD members thinking about using their public engagement backgrounds to run for office!

In case you missed it, you can watch the recording of the call by clicking here (we used join.me, so there is screensharing plus audio). We also encourage you to check out some of our past Confab Calls for more great conversations and ideas.

The Future of Civic Tech: Open Data and Open Gov’ts

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We recently saw a fascinating interview that NCDD supporting member Della Rucker recently published on her website EngagingCities that we wanted to share. Della interviewed the head of a key civic tech company, Accela, on the results of a recent paper on trends in civic technology, and the conversation is quite educational. We encourage you to read the interview below or find the original here.

How big is Civic Tech and where is it going? One on one with Mark Headd of Accela

engaging cities logoIn late 2014, Accela released a white paper with the International Data Corporation that quantifies the potential scope, value, and growth potential of the Civic Technology field.  Accela’s Developer Evangelist, Mark Headd, appears frequently at EngagingCities through his thought-provoking personal blog, civic.io.

I caught up with Mark a couple of weeks ago to talk about the present and future of civic technology.  We touched on the message that open data sends about a city, the unique challenges that smaller cities face in opening data, and the role of technology vendors in helping make that happen.

My thanks to Mark for the great conversation and to Accela for the white paper, which you can access here.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Della Rucker, Managing Editor, EngagingCities:  First of all, tell me a little bit, in your own words, about Accela and why it is that Accela commissioned the study that IDC did?

Mark Headd, Developer Evangelists, Accela:  Well, Accela is a company that provides software to governments in support of their business licensing, land management, permitting, food safety inspection, service requests, and so on, so we have a whole suite of software that helps government do the job of governing,

Our flagship product is the Accela Civic Platform. It’s used by hundreds of governments around the world. Several years ago, the decision was made to engineer it so that there was an API that would provide access to the platform so you could connect third party applications to it.

I think Accela very rightly could be described as a company that saw the potential of civic technology before it was cool. Before it was widely accepted as being cool.

We very much bet our hand on the fact that third parties, that civic software developers, civic startups, and others would want to build things on top of our platform. Because of the things that governments use Accela’s platform for, our platform is chock full of really valuable information. The transactions that our platform supports – business licensing, permitting, all of these things – are critical functions of government.

One of the things that attracted me to Accela was that the fact that we can open up this kind of data and support transactional interactions on our platform through an API and through publishing open data. It’s been really exciting.

The report is a complement to that earlier investment in the platform around civic technology. It looks at, where are we going? What does the future of civic technology look like?

We’re not the only ones who do this. The Knight Foundation did recently, too. The reason we did it was because we wanted to articulate one of the reasons why, several years ago, we started to position ourselves to be ready for this trend in civic technology. I think universally, the outlook for the development of civic technology is pretty bright.

Della: Was there anything in there that surprised you, that confirmed something that you were already sort of aware of but hadn’t fully seen documented? Was there anything in there that particularly was revelatory for you?

Mark:  Well, certainly the size of the impact, which is in the billions, to quantify that impact, I think that’s a good thing. I think that’s a really good outcome of the report.

Like anything else, predicting the future is difficult. To me, that’s the primary takeaway, that this is something we’re going to continue to see. Governments are going to start investing heavily in this area. It’s an area that’s going to start to mature.  To me, that’s something that I think will resonate with the people, that I think most of them innately had this sense that it was going to mature and going to really start to solidify.

Even to folks that aren’t in the civic technology field, I think this would probably wake some folks up and really help to shine a light on what civic technology is and how it’s changing what governments do and the potential future benefit for that.

Della: The report does a good job at a high level of identifying a lot of the broad factors that are driving governments’ need, their impetus to be investing in civic technology. That ranges all the way from demands on their own budgets and the need to increase internal efficiency, to how citizens increasingly prefer, and assume that they should be able, to interact with a government of any kind, whether local or state or larger.

What do you see as the current and near future barriers? What’s keeping this from being a full‑blown thing already, for lack of a better word?

Mark:  Well, I talked about this a little bit at the Code for America Summit last year. Open data is a really critical part of all this because it’s usually one of the core ingredients that we see in civic technology solutions. But, even where it’s not directly used, when governments publish even simple open data, the government is essentially saying, “We’re ready. We’re ready to collaborate.”

That kind of an expression is critical, because what’s unique about civil technology is that it’s something that’s not wholly in a government. It requires people outside of a government. It requires citizen engagement. It requires a new way of partnering.

Governments are able to articulate that they are ready to collaborate and willing to collaborate through opening data.  Open data is sort of the expression of that intent; without that you have a big impediment to the technology. The ability of government to collaborate in a new way, that’s what makes civic technology special.

If we look at who’s doing open data right now, it tends to be larger cities. More and more of the larger cities are doing it and fewer of the small‑to‑mid‑sized cities are doing it.

If you just look at the city level, there’s a stark contrast between big cities, the biggest cities in the country. If you look at the 20 biggest cities in the country, the 10 biggest cities in the country, I think nine out of 10 are doing open data.

If you look at the cities that have populations between 100,000 and 500,000, and there are a lot more of those cities in this country than big cities, the minority of them are doing any sort of work on open data. We need more governments, particularly municipal and local governments, to embrace open data, even if they’re not releasing vast troves of data because they may not have them.

If you’re a city of 75,000, you may not have a vast trove of data. But by starting down the road of open data, you have expressed a willingness to work with people. You’ve expressed a willingness to collaborate in a new way and that’s an essential ingredient to civic technology. In my mind, that’s one of the biggest impediments.

Della: That’s intriguing because there’s a technical component or maybe a functional component to that. First of all, a smaller city typically has relatively minimal internal staff. And often they’ve got less exposure to broader trends in the world because they’re trying to manage the issues of their community with a very shoestring budget.

But there’s also the issue of, do they have the technology? Can they find the technologists or the technology‑savvy people within their communities, or that they can access in one form or another, to help make that happen? Do you have any thoughts on how these smaller communities where this need is so prevalent may be able to start overcoming some of those barriers?

Mark: I think one of the things these smaller governments can and should do is they need to start insisting that their vendors are building open data – or the ability to support civic technology, if you want to think about it more generically – into their products. One of the things we do at Accela, we try and educate our customers on civic technology, what it is, and how they can publish data, how they can leverage our platform to support civic technology.

I think that’s critical that the vendor community start to do this more, but to some extent they’re not willing to do it unless their customers demand it. I think that’s something we’ll start to see.

Whether they’ll work with groups like ICMA and National League of Cities and others who pool their influence, I think we’ll probably start to see that as well.  But, that’s something they need to do.

Smaller governments, more than others perhaps, rely on outside vendors for technology expertise. It’s critical that vendors, and we’re one of them, start to walk the walk on civic technology.

Della:  But it’s not in the vendor’s self‑interest typically to push the clients to take on something that the client doesn’t have any clue how to do yet, and I’m overstating that obviously.

Mark:  Well, if we’re right that the market for government civic technology is north of $6 billion in spending, then even self‑interested vendors are going to see the benefit of that. They’re going to want to get with the program because it is in their interest to do it. I don’t think vendors who do that are acting in a particularly self‑interested way.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing, right? Companies have shareholders and their responsibility is to maximize the return for their shareholders. Also the government is getting the benefit. I don’t think those two things need to be at odds.

I think we’re approaching the place where vendors are acting in a predictable self‑interested way, also providing a benefit to their customers. It’s in vendors’ interest to make their customers look good and be successful.

Certainly it’s in our interest to do that. I don’t think that’s at cross purposes with governments wanting to make their jobs easier by being able to leverage civic technology more efficiently.

I think we’re coming to a point here, where it is beneficial for governments to get involved with civic technology and support it more. I think it will actually be profitable for companies to do as well.

Della:  I appreciate you articulating that so clearly. Let me ask one more question and that is, we have here in this report a pretty concise picture of the existing and near‑term state of the broader market.

When we’re having a conversation like this two years from now, whether it’s at a Code for America summit, whether it’s a conversation like this, if you try to put on your prognosticator hat here, what do you think we might be talking about at that point, a couple of years from now?

Mark:  Well, I don’t know if I can give you an accurate prediction two years from now. I think we’ll still be talking about open data. I think we’ll be talking more and more about open standards, standards for data. I’m optimistic that we’ll have many more of them in two years because they actually make it easier for governments to adopt civic technology.

I don’t know all of the things we’ll be talking about, but I guarantee you in two years we’re still talking about open data and, increasingly, we’re talking about standards for open data that make it easier for vendors, civic start‑ups, and even civic hackers to build things for one government that can be easily ported to another government without a lot of difficulties.

Della:  That’s such a critical component. First of all, with the multi‑pronged ecosystem around this issue, there has to be a common language amongst them. Certainly, that’s starting to develop, but that’s something that, I think, is going to become more and more crucial.

That’s also, I suspect, going to take away some of the fear. Essentially, there’s a little bit of a fear of the unknown for a lot of governments and, probably, vendors for whom this is new territory.

I think that’s so insightful of you to put your finger on standards, which sounds boring, but that’s such a crucial piece for making this something that people from wherever within this system can transition into and make it effective. There’s a functional side, but there’s also a cultural side that

Mark:  I don’t know that I can emphasize it more strongly than to say that the standards are what are going to take civic technology to the next level. The recognition that open data is more than just this raw material, even though it’s that, it’s more than that.

It’s a way for a government to advertise that they are ready to collaborate in new ways. To me, that’s one of those foundational agreements for civic technology. You can’t do this without governments making that articulation.  Especially smaller governments.

Cities like New York and Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston – they’re big cities, so the data that they release, all on its own, is compelling because it involves so many people. Smaller governments don’t have that same kind of data. It’s more than just the data itself.

It’s a government’s way of advertising to the world that they’re ready to collaborate in a new way. If you don’t have that, I don’t think you can do civic technology correctly.

Della:  At some point, it would be interesting to have a follow‑on conversation with you, maybe we can pull in some other folks, to talk about what is starting to emerge in the smaller markets. We’ve all heard a lot about Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, et cetera. That might be a really interesting follow‑up conversation.

Mark:  Sure. Absolutely.

Della:  Thank you so much, Mark, for taking the time to talk.

Mark:   I look forward to chatting with you again soon.

You can find the original version of this EngagingCities interview at www.engagingcities.com/article/how-big-civic-tech-and-where-it-going-one-one-mark-headd-accela.