Archive for

Playful Civics

May 8, 2013 cities, civic_engagement, games, placeofmedia No comments

Last weekend, I had the honor of being on a plenary panel at MIT8 talking about publics and counterpublics in a networked context. My remarks focused on the idea of playful civics – or, how play can be an important conceptual frame for understanding contemporary civic actions. Too often, the value of a civic action is determined by how much work it is. If a task is tedious and time consuming it makes a valuable contribution (attending a town hall meeting or door-to-door canvasing for signatures), whereas if a task is fun or too easy (advocating for something on Facebook or making a personal video about an issue and sharing it), it is frivolous. There is a fundamental problem with this logic. It suggests that meaning from civic actions derives from sacrifice, not pleasure. Perhaps more troubling, it suggests that there are clear channels through which people take civic actions which have established methods of evaluation (getting signatures on paper is difficult, voting requires effort, etc.).

It is increasingly clear to me that what we might call civic actions are quite varied and many of them are not uniquely definable as “work” or “tedium.” Civic actions are playful, and they involve experimentation and exploration more than the rote completion of pre-defined tasks. In fact, play is a valuable conceptual framework through which to understand civic actions. Play is:

  1. self-chosen and self-directed (players can choose to quit);
  2. an activity in which means are more valuable than ends;
  3. guided by rules
  4. imaginative and somehow separated from everyday life
Now consider this definition of play in three broad and often interconnected frames that facilitate civic actions: art making, story and games.

The Laundromat Project involves dozens of sites around New York City where communities create and play together.

Art Making includes the individual or collective production of an object (digital or material) that references or connects to an issue context, community or public institution. The Laundromat Project, as an example, is facilitated community art in laundromats throughout Greater New York City. The organization engages people in making things where they are, and facilitates connections between local communities that would not exist otherwise. Making art in this case is a playful act that strengthens local ties and community bonds. The final product is not as important as engaging people in a process of making that is open-ended and playful.
Stories can be a playful way for communities or individuals to represent themselves. Communities are often grounded by stories – and people connect to their communities by inserting their personal narrative trajectory into them. Activists are mythologized to mobilize personal narratives, aspects of city histories are evoked, and sometimes external narratives are placed on top of a local narrative to motivate particular actions. The Harry Potter Alliance uses a movie narrative to inspire youth to take real actions in the world. Hundreds of thousands of youth from all over the world have been motivated to take action on issues such as getting Warner Bros to invest in free trade chocolate for its products. Harry Potter is the framework, and the Alliance simply provides permission for people to play within the narrative to connect to real world causes. And even the Tea Party uses myths of a particular event and historical figures to frame particular actions and justify political alliances. This demonstrates that play is not inherently progressive; it simply opens up possibilities to engage in the world.

Jane McGonigal's Urgent Evoke framed the process of engagement and connected thousands of players from around the world

Games are not the same thing as play. Games operationalize play – when well designed, they provide a meaningful frame from which to act. I am interested in the small but growing number of games that frame civic actions. My lab’s game Community PlanIt, for example, is designed to provide a playful context for urban planning. The game has demonstrated the ability to bring youth and adults together in common play experiences, which instead of devaluing the end product, actually serves to legitimize actions from the perspective of players. Other games, such as Jane McGonigal’s Evoke frame individual actions within larger campaigns and allow players to craft real world problem-solving within the fictional challenge of “saving the world.”
Playful civics is a way of thinking about civic engagement that is open-ended, creative, and meaningful. It moves beyond trying to motivate people to do what we already imagine needs to be done, and creates a sandbox where civic actions are liberated from traditional outcomes and civic leaders are drawn from where we least expect them.

What are civic actions?

May 1, 2013 civic_engagement, net-locality One comment

In 2000, the sociologist Robert Putnam was unambiguous in his concern that the new World Wide Web was leading to the decay of civic engagement. People were simply spending too much time online and becoming more comfortable with being disconnected from their physical space. Much has changed since the days of Alta Vista and personal homepages, but specifically the proliferation of social media and what I have elsewhere called net locality have led to a complex civic landscape where civic actions exist well beyond geographic communities and institutions. It is possible to advocate and to organize entirely online. Protesting Facebook’s newest privacy policy is a civic action, signing an online petition against the passage of SOPA and PIPA is a civic action, even joining a Kickstarter campaign to get a website funded can be a civic action. These “online” actions are civic insofar as they are taken to affect change in a community or institution outside of one’s private domain. In other words, the deliberate taking part in any social situation that extends beyond one’s immediate family and home can be considered civic.

 

While expansive, this definition can be troubling. One of the values associated with civic engagement is commitment and responsibility to an outside social situation. In an ideal case, voting in a presidential election demonstrates not simply participation, but a commitment to an external institution (government) and the responsibility that comes along with participating. Or in the Harry Potter Alliance, as an example, when young people advocate for changes in corporate policies by rallying together with other Harry Potter fans, there is responsibility to the fan community, beyond one’s personal reputation, represented by the Alliance. Whether these actions take place online or offline is not important; instead, the relative responsibility that the actor feels to the institution or community, indicates the “thickness” of the engagement.   When the action is taken towards an ephemeral issues without institutional or geographic grounding (liking a group on Facebook, for example), it is more difficult for the individual to feel a sense of commitment or responsibility. The civic action is qualitatively different, even though its basic mechanics are the same.

 

Responsibility is dependent on the relative presence of an institution in one’s life. If one feels little connection to the city in which they live, for example, they are less likely to feel responsible for interactions with their local government. But if one spends eight hours a day in World of Warcraft, then they are quite likely to act to better the community of players, perhaps even to improve the game world.

 

The reality is that people are spending a large amount of time online and they are accomplishing everyday tasks, from reading the news to chatting with friends, on their computers or phones. The institutions to which young people feel responsible are the ones that interface with everyday life, and not the ones that appear to represent distant structures outside of lived reality. And as government remains married to its original (read: authentic) modality of town halls and voting booths, than government becomes a distant institution, one that seems increasingly distant and irrelevant to civic life. So civic actions are not in decline, in fact there is good evidence to suggest that this generation is more civically minded than previous generations, only the target of their actions and the publics they cultivate are outside traditional government and institutions.

 

Civic actions are increasingly accessible, shareable and playful. They are accessible in so far as the institutions or communities with which people interact have a presence in their everyday lives with clear channels of communication. They are shareable in that actors tend to legitimize actions by sharing them with a clearly articulated community of actors. For example, when sharing something on Facebook, the user has an understanding of the audience for that post. When posting a comment on a newspaper website, for example, there is only a generalizable concept of audience. And they are playful in that there is room for interpretation and exploration in the act itself as opposed to it being prescribed with clear outcomes. Voting in a presidential election is not playful, but engaging in a participatory budgeting process is.

 

This is how people are engaging in the world and this is how individual actors are taking responsibility for institutions and communities. It is imperative that government understands what civic engagement looks like and work towards establishing points of connection that match these practices. Most governments are still working towards putting services online. That’s just not enough. If government as an institution is going to matter to young people, it needs to enable interactions that are accessible, shareable and playful.

Door-touching and civic virtue

March 26, 2013 boston, cities, civic_engagement, mobility, placeofmedia No comments

Recently I spent a lot of time watching people walk in and out of the doors of the Forest Hills subway station in Boston. As people rushed out of the station during the afternoon commute, motivated by a desire to catch a connecting bus or to simply get to the next thing, earbuds firmly positioned in ears, they had little opportunity to see the immediate environment and the people within it. That is, unless, they touched the door.  You see, the station doors served as an important conduit between people and their surroundings.

There are two ways in which people moved in and out of the station – with touching the door and without touching the door. The door, aided by hydraulics, closes slowly once opened, introducing the opportunity for people to slink through it after it is pushed. It is possible for five or six people to pass through from a single hearty push. If one can no longer fit through the closing door, they are forced to push the door open so that they might get through. But with that simple touch, the door-toucher becomes a very different kind of user. They now find themselves responsible for the environment, compelled to hold the door for the people behind them as they similarly stream out of the station. Simply touching the door makes the person complicit in the function of the door, and as such, invested in the environment that the door mediates. Conversely, the door-passer (one who does not touch the door) continues to walk through without the added responsibility for the people around them.

How is it that merely touching the door creates responsibility for the environment? The door-toucher can no longer pass through the environment with the absolution of social responsibility. They are now part of the socio-technical system (which includes human and non-human actors), partly responsible for its function. And they remain responsible until the next human actor enters the system.

As I watched people navigating the complexity of the hydraulic door closer, I was struck by the pro-social benefits of touching the door. The door-touchers were immediately made aware of their social obligation within a socio-technical system and were forced to contend with their responsibility for other human actors in the train station. The door is a pro-social technology that has significant implications for the design of civic media. As I consider the challenge of designing apps, online experiences, or games that cultivate civic engagement, it seems that the primary design goal is to create door-touchers. The goal is to make users aware of the socio-technical system in which they are operating and feel responsible for the human actors within it. The door accomplishes this in the train station – what would the technology look like that accomplishes this on the scale of the block, the neighborhood, or the city?

Can a mobile app transform users from door-passers to door-touchers? I, for one, am very eager to find out.

 

 

 

Design Action Research for Government (DARG) project (part 2 of 2)

February 3, 2013 citygovernment, civic_engagement No comments

In addition to research oriented around projects, DARG is also engaged in some context-setting research on the changing face of government.

 

Perceptions of new media amongst government officials 

The use of new media tools in government is shaped by the perceptions of government officials (elected and appointed). We have embarked on a national study that will consist of between 20 and 30 semi-structured interviews with officials from a variety of cities. The study will explore the following questions: How do city officials currently use social networking sites to connect with citizens? How could online platforms be designed to better meet the needs of city officials? What do elected officials envision as the challenges and opportunities for using social media to engage citizens?

 

New Approaches for Partnerships

Relationships between civic institutions and local organizations are most often hierarchical and entrenched. Requests for projects (RFPs) require jumping through bureaucratic hoops and knowledge of the system; dispensing fiscal aid to neighborhoods or advocacy groups often must be done without attention to micro-level conditions. In order to provide locally-productive solutions and open the civic process to new and different groups, innovation in technology must be accompanied by innovation in process.

In order to foster more collaborative relationships between government and stakeholders, the DARG project is experimenting with new kinds of partnerships.  These include partnerships with universities & community groups, residents, and private businesses.

 

Partnering on Problem Solving with Universities & Community Groups

The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics has connected with the Community Innovation Lab (CIL) at Harvard University to create a course-based model for sourcing ideas. The course, taught in two consecutive semesters (Spring 2012 and Fall 2012), produced over 12 ideas currently being considered for implementation. The CIL had students propose technological solutions for community problems in cooperation with the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, the Orchard Gardens Residents Association and Uphams Corner Main Streets.

The DARG project is evaluating this approach, evaluating its ability to serve as a source for creating original and effective solutions to long-standing community issues.  In order to measure this, we are gathering data regarding the communities’ perceptions of success of the projects through a series of in-depth interviews with relevant community groups. Perception is key in this undertaking, as community groups’ understanding of their relationship to the city, universities, their own efficacy, and the success of projects implemented under these plans are the main markers of successful restructuring of how ideas and interventions are sourced. Additionally, we will investigate the actual implementation of these plans by employing ethnographic observation of their use within the community. The long-term plan for assessing this area involves iterating and refining the CIL class and implementations of the ideas it generates. Best practices observed from the CIL will be used to develop new methods of restructuring relationships of service provision.

 

Partnering on Problem Solving with Residents

The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics has connected with IDEO, a leading design firm, to propose a new approach to handling residential trash in Boston.  Problems with trash and litter are routinely the most frequent resident complaint heard by the City.  Rather than addressing this problem by looking only at refining the City’s existing operations, this effort with IDEO, supported by the DARG project, is crafting a solution that stems from engagement with residents and an analysis of their interests and behaviors.

Through the evaluation and documentation of the pilot project, we will help record the efficacy of this more interactive approach to the improvement of municipal services.

 

Partnering on Problem Solving with the Private Sector

Traditionally, when government is looking for a private sector company to partner with, it issues a request for proposal.  For the reasons mentioned above, this process can exclude some potential respondents and the ideas they might have.  With support from the DARG project, the City of Boston was able to experiment with a different approach.

The City ran an open competition for companies that could help small & local businesses use social media to drive in-store sales.  Dozens of companies, from a range of sectors and of various sizes, responded, netting a wide array of potential approaches.  The selected winner of the competition is actively working with small businesses and already showing success.  We will document this competition process as an alternative to the traditional RFP approach to partnering with the private sector.

Across all of these projects, we will not only draw conclusions regarding best practices for engaging the public, but will create recommendations designed to scale across cities. By building a network of organizations and innovators within and between cities, the DARG project ultimately seeks to reduce the cost and risk of implementing new technologies in the civic space.

 

Design Action Research for Government (DARG) Project (part 1 of 2)

February 3, 2013 citygovernment, civic_engagement, community planit 2 comments

I’m excited to talk about a new project. This description was written with my colleague Jesse Baldwin-Philippi. The Design Action Research for Government (DARG) project is a partnership between the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston and the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College. The goal of the DARG project is to advance the capacity of local governments to foster civic engagement through technological innovations. Its mission is to provide a conceptual framework and evaluative capacity to guide city-level innovations that create opportunities for the public to meaningfully engage in the creation and study of public life.

The DARG project is a model for collaboration between governments and universities. The project employs techniques of action and design research to source, create, and study civic technology projects. It seeks to build strong collaborations with communities in order to increase the effectiveness of civic experimentation and to maximize learning opportunities. Undertaking a research program that goes beyond traditional measures of engagement, the DARG project also aims to improve the way research concerning civic media in governance takes place. Ultimately, the DARG project aims to transform common practices of government innovation from a model of top-down intervention and evaluation to one of participatory design and research.

What follows is a description of the current research that falls under the DARG project umbrella. Most research projects have a design component and include both traditional research outcomes and digital tools or new processes. Findings and process documentation will be disseminated in blogs, video summaries and academic publications.

PROJECTS

New Digital Tools

Government tends to think about civic participation as transactional—citizens receive information and provide feedback to decision-makers through town hall meetings or web portals. These transactions then become the primary indicators of successful civic engagement strategies; baseline numbers such as meeting attendance, unique hits on a government website, and number of online transactions are the primary markers of success. But online interactions such as deliberation and sharing information are foundational to local community and organizational outreach, and should be considered when evaluating how and why people engage in public life. Through the DARG project, we  seek to experiment with and evaluate tools that move civic engagement from a merely transactional process with government to one that is interactive.

Through a series of case studies, we evaluate civic engagement in a networked context. We assert that digital technologies do not simply increase government efficiency, but in the context of civic engagement, actually can create what we call meaningful inefficiencies. Month-long games around planning issues, social networks layered on top of service request apps, or social media competitions—can be both meaningful and productive. Through empirical, exploratory, and design-based research, the DARG project will provide a rigorous framework for conceptualizing and evaluating networked civic engagement. Below is a description of our active research projects focused on new tools.

Citizenship and Mobile Reporting

In an attempt to provide citizens with faster, more accessible, information and services, civic innovators in cities all over the world have produced a sizeable cache of open data and apps delivering fast and convenient services. While committed to these efforts, the DARG project seeks to expand upon them by understanding the affordances of making service delivery a social experience. More than just a process that can be productive on an individual level, service delivery in a networked context can also improves citizens’ feelings of connectedness to local community and levels of both personal and collective efficacy.

 

Reporting tool in the City of Boston

Citizens Connect is a mobile reporting tool developed by the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in 2009. We are conducting a study that looks at how the unique peer-to-peer qualities of the mobile app increase feelings of collective efficacy and neighborhood cohesion. We are currently surveying users and non-users (people who have reported via the city’s telephone hotline) to understand the specific affordances of the mobile application and whether or not digital and networked connectivity through Citizens Connect changes the quality of engagement.

Civic reputation systems and online relationships

Street Cred is a civic badging API being developed through the DARG project to test the value of reputation and social interactions within service delivery. Street Cred adds value to everyday civic transactions by allowing citizens to earn badges, compete with friends and neighbors and share civic accomplishments. The software is currently in development and will be piloted within Citizens Connect in June 2013. After the initial pilot study, which will include analysis of user data, online surveys and focus groups, we will iterate the design and expand the API to other apps used in Boston, including Community PlanIt and Street Bump, as well as offline engagements such as neighborhood meetings and public forums. A larger study of Street Cred is planned for September 2013.

Collective Efficacy and Planning Games

The problem of civic engagement is often understood as a lack of participation. People do not show up to meetings, they do not engage in their civic institutions or communicate with decision-makers.  Engagement strategies often involve a lot of bean counting, where the quantity of people participating is more important than the quality of participation created. Through the DARG project, we seek to change this discourse. We seek to deepen engagement by creating opportunities for what we call distracted engagement. Distracted engagement allows for small-scale civic activities that are short, but also ongoing, and which habituate citizens to civic practices. Reciprocal discussion and deliberation results in a system where citizens get feedback, rather than simply voicing their ideas. While encouraging these behaviors, and assessing their prevalence we also ask two larger research questions: Do civic habits lead to civic learning? Does going through the motions in one aspect of civic life lead to a more reflective engagement with another?

 

community planit is an online game for local planning

Community PlanIt (CPI) is an online mission-based game that connects local communities around planning issues. It was developed by the Engagement Game Lab and has so far been played in Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia. The goal of CPI is to earn coins that can be pledged to real life causes. The three causes with the most coins at the end of the game win real money. The general mechanics include individual questions that can be answered individually and visualized collectively. CPI encourages reciprocal, ongoing discussion and deliberation amongst players. Preliminary research on CPI has indicated that it successfully fosters ongoing deliberation that is viewed as directly beneficial to both institutions and citizens. Further research will focus on the game’s ability to produce civic learning, which we define as the effect of combining participation with the opportunity to reflect.

Social Media for Everyday Democracy

December 4, 2012 citygovernment, civic_engagement, net-locality, placeofmedia No comments

Social media does not democracy make. While there are extraordinary examples during the Arab Spring, for example, of Facebook and Twitter enabling mass assembly and connecting local movements to the globe, there are many more examples of everyday democracy where technology has fallen flat. In the United States, elected officials often use Facebook to connect with constituents and poll opinions. But there is a clear distinction between the mostly bottom-up use of social media for macro-coordination in the name of democratic protest, and the mostly top-down use of the media to collect opinions. While both serve some aspect of democratic participation, they are qualitatively unique phenomena.

Each has a unique assumption about the user/citizen. The activist model assumes a passionate user that, heated by the moment, will assemble or take action. The everyday democracy model assumes a dispassionate user who can, given only the channel to communicate, provide good, rational ideas. Of course, in practice, it’s never this clear cut. Protesters can be dispassionate, and those providing feedback to government can be quite passionate.

Governments are not interested in enabling mass protest. They typically want to take actions to avoid it. And, one reasonable action they can take would be to enable everyday democracy by providing good channels for feedback. Increasingly, governments and civic organizations, especially within the United States, are doing this. So, as they work social media into their outreach plans, they often employ models that assume dispassionate citizens that are simply waiting to communicate their brilliant, well-reasoned ideas.

Whenever I deploy a social media tool within a local context, the question I get more than any other is: “can you name an idea that someone posed in the system that was actually implemented?” The answer is typically “no.” But more to the point: why would it matter? It is hardly democratic for a single idea to cut through the fat and rise to the top. The hope, I would hope, would be for an idea to gain traction, to transform, and to meaningfully persuade others so that a wider conversation can take place. I typically don’t get questions about the context of dialogue, or the learning objectives of the process; only, did social media mine the one brilliant idea? Or, perhaps more accurately, did social media mine the one brilliant idea that we already knew we wanted to implement?

There is a simple lesson in all of this: social media for everyday democracy cannot be about discrete ideas from the dispassionate citizen. It has to establish context, opportunity for dialogue, modes of sharing and connecting, which go beyond the mechanisms currently in place. If we just build tools that open up decontextualized channels via text or SMS, we are no closer to meaningful democratic participation. We just have more people participating in a system that doesn’t work.

Imagined Publics in an Online Civic Game

September 14, 2012 civic_engagement, community planit No comments

In May 2012, we ran a Community PlanIt game in the City of Detroit. The game was designed to solicit public feedback on the city’s master planning process. The game lasted for three weeks and attracted more than 1000 players. What’s particularly interesting about this game is that 47% of the users were 18 and under. While that number would not be surprising for a typical game, this game is not at all typical. It is a game designed specifically to engage people in an urban planning process – not your typical after school activity for teenagers.

One of the most intriguing findings from this game is not what people said about Detroit (and they said quite a bit – over 8600 comments recorded in the system!), but how people felt about who they were talking to. Adults and youth, while rarely interacting directly with each other, yet they were very aware that the other was “in the system.” In post-game interviews, adult players often mentioned how important it was that youth were “present.” They mentioned guiding the tone of their remarks in order to perform appropriately for the youth audience. They felt they needed to model behavior, which made them pay closer attention to grammar and content.

Likewise, many of the youth commented that while they were speaking directly to their youth peers, the presence of adults in the game was important to them. They didn’t seem to censor the content of their comments because of this, they continued to speak and perform for each other. However, the presence of adults was often mentioned as something that legitimized the process. Because adults were part of their imagined public, the youth felt as though someone outside of their own peer circles was paying attention to what they had to say.

So, distinct publics coexisted in an online space, without direct interaction. But the nature of communication was altered by how each imagined the presence of the other. This is a fascinating design challenge. And especially as we continue to develop within the civic space, it points to a fundamental design challenge – building intergenerational online spaces that allow people to engage in multi-faceted, nuanced local communities.

Meaningful Inefficiencies in the “Smart City”

July 24, 2012 boston, cities, civic_engagement 2 comments

Information communication technologies (ICTs) hold considerable promise for cities. Sometimes framed as “smart cities,” technologically enhanced urban spaces create efficiencies through streamlined infrastructure (because complex systems can better coordinate) and access to services (because people can be more aware of systems, i.e. real-time transit data on mobile phones). But urban technologies do not always create efficiencies; they can also create meaningful inefficiencies in the form of social connections, and complex, nuanced understandings of place. This happens when people use technologies to achieve unpredictable outcomes: a process not typical of the “smart cities” paradigm. When information is contextualized and opportunities exist for data not simply to be transmitted, but for ideas to evolve through deliberative dialogue, there are meaningful inefficiencies. Social connections, deliberation, place-based story telling, and play, create nuance in how people understand local community and consequently influence how people construct meaning in an urban context.

Meaningful inefficiencies have typically been the jurisdiction of artists. Stemming from the articulated problem that cities create sameness and social alienation, the social theorist Guy Debord in the 1960s established a theoretical framework and methodology through which to interrupt these phenomena. Debord sought to create alternative logics through which to experience the city, where a pre-defined pattern would determine how one moved, or “randomness” would dictate how one drifted through the urban landscape. This sparked a genre of “new media” art loosely termed psychogeography, which employed technology as an intervention into existing urban patterns. Projects such as Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman’s The Familiar Stranger (2002), which foreshadowed contemporary location-based social networks such as Foursquare, used bluetooth technology on mobile phones to make people aware of those who shared geographic space. Or games such as Can You See Me Now? (2001) by the UK-based art collective Blast Theory, employed GPS devices to construct a kind of hybrid space where the urban environment was augmented by people and objects only findable within the virtual environment (de Souza e Silva, 2009; Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011). These projects, conceived as art not commerce, experiment not activism, have remained rhetorically distinct from the smart cities project.

IBM defines the “smarter city” as one that acts “efficiently and purposefully” (IBM Corporation Forward Thinking Cities Are Investing in Insight, 2012) – a definition that would seem to run counter to the interventionist impulse of much new media art. While there has been some room for issues such as education and media access and literacy in the smart city framework (Caragliu, Del Bo, & Nijkamp, 2009), for the most part, the qualitative experiences of social interactions, place-making and trust building have been excluded.  As intelligence and efficiency have the moral authority in policy debates, there is a danger that participation, especially as technologies are designed to “fix the problem,” is captured by the rhetoric of efficiency and treated only as a thing to streamline.

Technologies can and should create meaningful inefficiencies. As more technological solutions get proposed, funded, and implemented to solve urban problems, we need to safeguard against them becoming technocratic solutions.

Works Cited

Caragliu, A., Del Bo, C., & Nijkamp, P. (2009). Smart Cities in Europe. Serie Research Memoranda 0048, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics.

de Souza e Silva, A. (2009). Hybrid Reality and Location-Based Gaming: Redefining Mobility and Game Spaces in Urban Environments. Simulation and Gaming, 40(3), 404–424. doi:10.1177/1046878108314643

Gordon, E. and de Souza e Silva (2011) Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

IBM Corporation. Smarter, More Competitive Cities. (2012). Smarter, More Competitive Cities. Forward Thinking Cities Are Investing in Insight. IBM Corporation.

A Direct to Consumer Democracy?

June 27, 2012 cities, civic_engagement No comments

Getting involved in something takes trust. Whether it’s attending a neighborhood cleanup, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or showing up to a community meeting, people do these things not simply out of a sense of purpose, but often because some one or some trusted organization suggested they do it. Civic engagement is typically preceded by trust in an entity (i.e. a friend, a neighborhood association, or even a government) who can vouch for the system. To invest one’s personal identity, reputation and time in something requires a clarity of purpose and confidence in the return on one’s investment that does not typically come stock with a new system. If there is a new non-profit working on environmental justice issues, before one donates money or gets involved, they will look for who the organization is affiliated with and what they’ve already done. So why should civic-minded software (civic apps) be any different?

Civic apps are systems. And while they can solve some problems pertaining to ease of use and access, they cannot easily solve the lack of trust problem. This varies with specific purpose of the app, but in general, the direct to consumer model does not always yield the best engagement. Civic apps should represent a trusted entity and not seek, at least at the start, to be that trusted entity. Surely there are great examples of rapidly grown online social networks; but when it comes to the question of local civic engagement, the challenge is to enable online social networks to meaningfully interface with the organizations and institutions that shape everyday life. The civic app can amplify, clarify, and/or provide techniques for modification and transformation of existing systems. But it is only able to do this because the trust in how (and that) a system works is transferred to the civic app.

In short, technology for engagement does not mean a direct to consumer democracy. Groups and organizations are always going to be the foundation of democracy, and technology can and should bolster this foundation.

Exploring New Modalities of Public Engagement – a White Paper

June 11, 2012 boston, cities, civic_engagement, community planit No comments

Engagement_Game_Lab_CPI Eval_6.11.12

We’re proud to share the white paper about Community PlanIt with the Boston Public Schools.

« Older Entries