Tag: FutureGov

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Where’s Your Mind-Time Spent?

A few years ago, when my son was a high school teenager, he was totally absorbed in online multi-player games.  One day, I heard him talking to his friends during the game (using a form of voice over IP, like Skype).  So thinking these might be high school buddies, I asked who he was talking to.  He said there was one boy from Korea, another from Mexico and a fourth from Russia.

As I told the chief elected executive of our county at the time, my son’s body was there all day long, but his mind was spending lots of time outside of the county (even the country).  

This phenomenon is not limited to teenage boys.   People of all ages are generally more attentive to life online than they have ever been before.  In the US alone, three quarters of the people use social media

Think about where you spend your “mind-time”.

Not the old philosophical debate about a mind-body problem, but a new digital age version has emerged: a new kind of problem where body and mind are in different places.

Moreover, we are actually in the early days of the Internet because our communications with each other generally are not visual.  Without conversational videoconferencing, a major means of communicating fully and building trust is absent from online communities.  We’ll really see the impact when those visual tools are more widely used.

This situation poses an increasing challenge for public officials.  

With their attention focused in all kinds of places around the globe, people are virtually living in multiple jurisdictions.  To which jurisdiction does that person have primary loyalty or interest in? Could they be good citizens of more than jurisdiction? In any case, if their attention is divided, doesn’t that have an impact?  What if they just don’t care about local officials and their government?

Some cynical political advisers might well like a situation that reduces citizen attention and engagement since it makes the outcome of elections and lawmaking more predictable.  But smarter elected officials realize that eventually a lack of public engagement stands in the way of getting things done.  In other countries, lack of engagement, knowledge and trust for the government has led to failure to pay taxes or even physically leaving a jurisdiction forever.

Over the last few decades we’ve seen an erosion of trust in this country as well as the Pew Studies, among others, have shown.

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Some people attribute the lower trust to the time people spend online, which they view as another form of Bowling Alone, as Professor Robert Putnam titled his most famous book.  If anything, the causality may be the reverse – it might be the case that people seek to be engaged in online communities because their physical communities are no longer as inviting to them as a result of the overall decrease in social capital that Putnam portrayed.  But that’s a separate story.

Although this may strike many public officials as something new, the study of virtual communities and their implications go back at least as far as Howard Rheingold’s seminal book on the subject in 1993.  

Much of the research that has been done so far would indicate that online communities and physical communities have many characteristics in common – both positive and negative.  

Size is a good example.  Does a person have a greater sense of belonging to an online community of a few hundred or a physical, offline city of a million?

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much research or data collection about where people are spending their mind-time and what its implications are, especially for government.  For that reason, the Algorithmic Citizenship measure is interesting to follow. 

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Please let me know if you’re aware of other attempts.  And I’ll keep track of the work of the Citizen Ex project.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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Libraries And Open Government

Last spring I wrote about my participation in a workshop on the role of libraries in open government, led by the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University of Albany and funded by the Institute for Museums and Library Services. 

Last month, CTG released their final project report.  You can get the report from their website, but I want to provide a summary here.

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Overall, CTG’s key finding is straightforward:

“The traditional and important role of public libraries as trusted information intermediaries provides a powerful platform for public libraries to be key facilitators in opening government … Libraries need to work with government partners and other key stakeholders to develop portfolios of programs and services geared toward helping community members access and use information and engage with their governments.”

As someone who has been involved in open government, public technology and libraries, the role of libraries seems obvious to me in at least three ways.

First, libraries are places that almost everyone recognizes as neutral, objective and fair purveyors of information.  The trust in this role of libraries is a valuable asset for any government leader who wants constituents to take seriously his/her pledges of openness.

Second, librarians have the training and experience to help the average person make sense of vast volumes of information.  And the open government initiatives around the US have certainly provided a vast amount of information.  Just making this information available is a bit like trying to open a library by buying a million books and dumping them all into the middle of the floor.  Without the assistance of librarians in these initiatives, the ideals of openness and transparency will not be achieved.

Third, following on the previous point, librarians can do even more than help to organize and make accessible all of this new open government data.  Librarians can also help train the average person to know how to make sense of the information.  They can provide the space and the platform for citizens to collaborate on their use of open data.  For example, John Szabo, the head of the Los Angeles Public Library, has provided a digital forum for people in south Los Angeles to use public land and building data as they consider and debate a major new development project in their neighborhood.

Of course, while giving libraries a key role in open government initiatives can make those initiatives much more successful, library resources are limited.  So it would be useful if part of the budget for open government be devoted to funding the role of librarians.

CTG elaborated on these six recommendations:

“1. Clearly define the role of public libraries in community-focused open government activities.

2. Adopt a focus on the demand side of open government.

3. Adopt a community-wide perspective on open government.

4. Build capability to create and sustain new kinds of partnerships with a wider range of community actors.

5. Build a knowledge base of public library open government initiatives.

6. Fund and carry out a set of pilot projects focused on building new understanding of preferred and best public library open government practices.”

If you’re involved in government, open data/information, public sector transparency or libraries, it will be worth it for you to read CTG’s report for the rest of the story.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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The Experience Economy In The Public Sector?

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, the authors of a groundbreaking article in the Harvard Business Review in 1998, followed up in 1999 with their influential book – “The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business A Stage”.  (The book was later updated with a 2011 edition.)

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The original article and book were widely credited with establishing the field of customer experience management and the idea that a successful business relationship involves more than just delivering the goods or services promised. 

As the summary of the original article says:

“In this article, co-authors B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore … preview the likely characteristics of the experience economy and the kinds of changes it will force companies to make. First there was agriculture, then manufactured goods, and eventually services. Each change represented a step up in economic value – a way for producers to distinguish their products from increasingly undifferentiated competitive offerings. Now, as services are in their turn becoming commoditized, companies are looking for the next higher value in an economic offering. Leading-edge companies are finding that it lies in staging experiences.

“An experience occurs when a company uses services as the stage – and goods as props – for engaging individuals in a way that creates a memorable event. And while experiences have always been at the heart of the entertainment business, any company stages an experience when it engages customers in a personal, memorable way.”

These memorable moments stick with people and cause them to comment favorably to others.  To help them remember, many companies even provide souvenirs – another form of experience.  When business people think of souvenirs, it is not necessarily something elaborate.  For example, what one business would hand out as a simple receipt a smarter, more experience-oriented business would provide as an elaborate document, perhaps even on thicker parchment-like paper.

The books go into great detail and elaborate these ideas beyond the simple summary I’ve provided here.  It’s worth the time to read.

And the kind of thinking presented by Pine and Gilmore has had a big impact in the business world.  Many of the modern heroes of the economy, such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple, were known for the way they built their success on customer experiences.

Yet, the ideas in the Experience Economy have had only a small impact on the public sector and few pubic officials are sensitive to the experience their constituents are having.  This is somewhat surprising for several reasons.

First, as a matter of electoral survival, incumbent office holders want the residents of their community (i.e., the voters) to have favorable memories of the experience of being a citizen.  Indeed, professional campaign consultants have heard stories of public officials who “did everything right” – these politicians did what the public wanted – but were rejected anyway because people were unhappy with the experience of being a citizen in that jurisdiction.

In the broadest sense, this is about making a difference in the lives of citizens – something that drew many officials to public service in the first place.

Second, in a world where people have increasing choices about where they might live or travel to, the experience of being in a city or state will have a big impact on the economy there.  If it’s a positive, memorable experience, more people will want to be there and the economy will grow – as will funding for the government.  If not, bad experiences will lead to worse experiences for those trying to lead a community with declining population and declining revenues.

Although great experiences are not everyday events even in the business world, it is not necessarily that difficult to create these experiences.  Think about the typical interaction between a citizen and the government.  What would it take to turn that into a positive, memorable experience?  Not a lot of money; just an increased sensitivity to the experience from the citizen’s side. 

And public officials might also find that their staff, rather than resisting the changing to make the workplace more fun and memorable, would become more motivated.

I’d like to continue this conversation by elaborating on how the ideas of the Experience Economy can be applied in the public sector.  Let me know if you want to see this and, of course, please share any examples you have of memorable public sector experiences.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Keeping Citizen Engagement Engaging

Starting at the national level with the Obama Administration’s open government initiative in 2009, there have been many attempts at crowdsourcing in various governments and public agencies.  

From his campaign, President Obama realized that we can now scale up collaboration and participation – and create a 21st century version of the old New England Town Meetings that, while not perfect, did a pretty good job of engaging residents.

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Unfortunately many of these efforts have been disappointing in various ways:

  • Fewer people participated than expected.
  • The forum was “hijacked by fringe groups” – this was one criticism of the early Obama open government efforts because decriminalizing Marijuana turned out to be one of the more popular proposals.  (But see my earlier post “Do Good Ideas Bubble Up From The Crowd?”)
  • The site went stale, with early excitement evaporating and participation going to zero.  As an example, see the Texas Red Tape Challenge.
  • Citizens were encouraged to participate and did so, only to find that their ideas were disregarded by public officials, which only increased the frustration among both citizen and officials.

Nevertheless, when they succeed, citizen engagements can satisfy several public purposes.  They are a great way to get help and new ideas, test proposals, understand priorities of voters and educate citizens about the complexities and realities of governing.  Moreover, in response to the general decline in respect for major public, nonprofit and private institutions, crowdsourcing is a way of earning back respect and trust – and convincing a skeptical public that public officials really care.  All of these benefits make it easier for public officials to govern better.

And the successes have provided important lessons.  Most important, like lots of other things, crowdsourcing requires some thought before implementation.  

You won’t get the best results if you take a “just build it and they will come” approach.  At the other extreme, you can bury any government initiative in “analysis paralysis”.   A reasonable balance is to plan how public officials will:

  • Set realistic expectations within their own organization as well as with the public;
  • Target the appropriate audience for the discussion;
  • Set up the topic/question in a clear, unbiased way;
  • Start the conversation with citizens;
  • Figure out how to manage the conversation and keep citizens engaged; and last but not least,  
  • End the engagement in a way that provides a positive experience for citizens and the government.

When these engagements actually engage citizens, they help redefine the relationship between public officials and the people they serve.  And they can provide a core of solid support from the public that any public official would desire – the kind of support that will carry officials through those bad times when they also make mistakes.

More later.

[photo credit: http://community.weber.edu/WeberReads/meeting_21922_md.gif]

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Accelerating Internet Activism?

Last week I was at the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), the annual gathering of technologists, political activists, entrepreneurs and many others focused on the ways that the Internet is playing a role in government and society.  As it does every year, PDF had an interesting and thought provoking range of speakers and panels.  The event was inspiring both in the activities of many of these individuals and the sheer creative ambition that drives them.

With more than 140 speakers in both plenary sessions and breakouts, it is not physically possible to hear everyone.  But something was bothering me in many of these sessions I did attend.

It was brought home by Anthea Watson Strong’s reference to the Calculus of Voting written many years ago by the political scientists William Riker and Peter Ordeshook.  This was a relatively rare moment in which someone explicitly or implicitly referred back to previous research and analysis of political behavior.

And in a breakout session, Ben Berkowitz, the founder/CEO of the very useful and successful SeeClickFix, rightly expressed concerns about the focus of many activists on just the next election.  He asked for a new approach – a consistent effort, an organization, that helps people with the daily public issues and annoyances that bother them.  

I told him that there used to be organizations that did just that – the old urban political machines.  They were building long term supporters for a party, so their timeframe was more than just the next election campaign of one politician.  While they helped people with their problems, of course, the old machines were also corrupt.  A modern more ethical version may be what he’s looking for.  Not a new idea, just a better one.  (For a recent assessment of the political machines of the 19th and early 20th centuries, see Terry Golway’s book “Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics”.)

This was one of several examples in which more historical context would have been helpful.

Perhaps it was entrepreneurial enthusiasm to push ahead and not look back.  Perhaps it was a matter of being so convinced that what you’re doing is so new, no one before you could have something of value to contribute to your thought process.  (I have to admit that this is something I’ve also been guilty of myself in some of my entrepreneurial enthusiasms.)

Newton famously said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”   In the world of political technology this means understanding previous political thought and analysis, history and modern research on political behavior. 

Most people in the audience were excited by the possibilities for true democratic governance that the Internet and related tools make possible, including me.  But to accelerate this movement there needs to be more context and deeper knowledge on the part of the creators and activists. 

Otherwise, we end up becoming another example of the old story about reinventing the wheel.  Not only is that wasted effort, but, without learning, each new reinvention of the wheel seems to start out as immature as the last one.  In turn, that immaturity and lack of progress may dampen the potential engagement of the larger number of potential citizen activists which the PDF movement will need.

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© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Crowdsourcing For Legislators?

[This blog is a slightly early contribution to the dialog of the annual Personal Democracy Forum to be held tomorrow, June 5, 2014, in New York City.  See http://personaldemocracy.com/conferences/nyc/2014 .]

In a previous post, “Is The Voice A Model For Crowdsourcing?”, I noted that crowdsourcing can be a modern manifestation of the civic involvement that is the foundation of successful democracies – by providing public officials a good sense of the priorities of citizens, in addition to giving them new ideas.

When he took office in 2009, President Obama made crowdsourcing a key element of his open government initiative, using the IdeaScale platform.  So did other elected officials in national and sub-national governments around the world. 

In some respects, it is surprising that public officials with executive responsibilities have taken to crowdsourcing more than those in legislative positions.  Most legislative bodies in democracies have encouraged petitions and testimony from the public as they consider new laws.  The National Conference of State Legislatures of the USA prominently features the importance of citizen engagement, mostly focused on ways this has happened for decades.

So, in the Internet age, crowdsourcing would seem to be a natural extension of that traditional pattern.  But that’s happening slowly.

I would expect this to pick up as legislators realize it is in their professional interest to better engage with their constituents.  That engagement helps to even the playing field in the frequent contests between legislators and public executives – a situation where most voters have much less awareness of their legislators than of the executives and so can provide less support for the legislative side.

There are two interested examples of crowdsourcing in the legislative arena.

Last year, the Ministry of Environment in Finland used crowdsourcing to draft a new law on off-road traffic, a subject with conflicting public priorities so it was good to encourage wider involvement in the debate than would normally occur.

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A GovLab report, at the end of last year, noted these ways in which this was a positive experiment:

  • Almost all the comments were constructive, with a very small percentage weeded out.
  • Participants as a group were realistic about their expectations and the fact that their input would need to be refined.
  • The participants learned from each other which helped to elevate the level of the debate and presumably made it easier for the government to arrive at a reasonable compromise.
  • The “crowd preferred commonsensical and nuanced ideas, while rejecting vague and extreme ones”

Clearly the experience of the Finnish would indicate that some of the fears public officials have had about crowdsourcing haven’t come about.  The public is trying to participate as reasonable adults in a governmental process; they’re not attacking officials with their “virtual pitchforks”.

Earlier this year, in what he said was a first for the USA, California Assemblyman Mike Gatto of Los Angeles did the same for a proposed new probate law.  The number of people who took advantage of the opportunity was relatively small, not surprising considering that probate law is perhaps not the most exciting topic for most people.  Nevertheless, he plans to shepherd the ideas from the crowd through the legislative process as part of a larger effort to modernize the way that citizens interact with government.

As crowdsourcing in legislation – both big and small – continues to develop a good track record, I would expect to see many more legislators and legislative bodies begin to use the modern tools for gathering ideas and priorities from the public.

©2014 Norman Jacknis

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What Is The Role Of Libraries In Open Government?

Earlier this month, I was invited to participate in a workgroup that focused on and merged two of my strongest interests – libraries and open government.  This workgroup, made up of approximately two dozen leaders of the worlds of libraries, open government and the Internet, was pulled together by the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) of Albany University, as part of a project funded by the Federal Government’s Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS).

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CTG describes the rationale for the project this way:

“State and local governments are exploring new ways to open their governments using technology to engage citizens, increase transparency and accountability. Such efforts provide new opportunities and challenges for public libraries as citizens turn to them for both access to and assistance in their interactions with government … An open government initiative will impact and can be facilitated or impeded by a community’s information ecosystem. Libraries can have a critical influence on an ecosystem and the success of such an initiative.”

The CTG staff will summarize the day and a half of intensive work at a later point.  But I thought I’d share some of my observations from participating in it.

First, while open government, particularly the open data initiatives that have occurred all over the US and elsewhere, is clearly a step forward for transparency, it is not always very useful to the average citizen.  That’s why too often, the data has been used mostly for “gotcha” articles by local news media. 

Typically, the data is put out on the web.  This is akin to setting up a library by buying 10,000 books and dropping them all in a big pile in the middle of the floor.  Librarians have long developed skills in organizing knowledge and, as reference guides, in helping people find what they need.  So the most obvious first role of librarians is to help open data initiatives succeed by applying their professional skills to the data.

Second, libraries can be the place where open government occurs.  This role not only involves making available to citizens the printed and online forms they need to interact with government – or even extending that to enable citizens to have video conversations with government staff who are located many miles away from home.

Libraries can also encourage the discussion of public issues.  Traditionally, libraries have used their meeting spaces for open forums.  More recently and much more interesting is the role the Los Angeles Public Library has played in a community in south Los Angeles.  The local library branch there is hosting Betaville, open source software to enable people to collaborate together to propose urban design solutions for their community.  Betaville is being used for people to do exactly that with respect to a large proposed redevelopment of the Rancho Cienega facility.  The library was the only place where people could come together to do this work, which had the proper technology and also the trust of residents that it is an objective, open facility.

Third, Jamie LaRue, former director of the Douglas County library system, which has been a pioneer in libraries as creators of content, built on that experience to propose an additional role for libraries.  In the face of the demise of many local news outlets, he suggested that this creative role of libraries be extended to becoming the platform for local news.

Finally, while a number of state and local governments have encouraged their local software developers to create apps using open government data, this is clearly not enough.  There are many apps that are needed, but make no sense for private companies that ultimately require profits.  Government cannot abdicate its own technology role.  Recognizing that it can’t do everything, however, government can call on librarians to understand what gaps exist based on what they are asked for by library patrons.

For more information, see CTG’s website at http://www.ctg.albany.edu/projects/imls .  They have also posted a concept paper at http://imls.ctg.albany.edu/book/enabling-open-government-all-planning-framework-public-libraries .  If you’d like to participate in the discussion about libraries and open government, you can do that at http://imls.ctg.albany.edu/forums/online-discussion-concept-paper . 

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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New Soft Cities

Carl Skelton is my colleague and co-founder of the Gotham Innovation Greenhouse and former director of the Experimental Media Center at NYU/Polytechnic Institute.

He has written a book about the Betaville open source project that enables residents of a city to collaborate and participate in urban design and planning.  But it’s more than just about the history and role of the Betaville project.

The book provides context for urban design in an Internet-enabled era.  As the publisher’s (Springer) summary states:

“the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of the New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose public works must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure.”

Hence the title of Carl’s book: “Soft City Culture and Technology”, which will be officially published at the end of this month.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/61587029722/new-soft-cities]

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Visual Images And Text

Summer is always a good time to catch up on some off-the-usual-track reading.  For me, that means reading a couple of books that look beyond the superficial surface of the Internet and related digital media to the deeper ways that these phenomena have affected people and moved us all to a post-industrial way of thinking and acting.

The books both demonstrate and elaborate on the ways that visual images, rather than text, are the ascendant medium of human communications in this Internet age.

The best of these books is Stephen Apkon’s “The Age Of The Image: Redefining Literacy In A World Of Screens” (2013).  Apkon is the founder and head of the Jacob Burns Film Center, just north of New York City.  The film center has a wide variety of programs, including education of children in visual literacy.  

While just 263 pages, the book describes the history, the language, the business, the techniques and the social and educational impact of visual media.  Apkon’s overall theme is that the dominance of visual media in this century means that all of us (not just children or digital natives) need to become visually literate.

As he states in his introduction:

“The power of visual media has been with us from the beginning of our species … With today’s visual technology, our work lives will be changed forever, and soon it will be as unfathomable not to know how to make a video as it is not to know how to send an e-mail.  The vocabulary of Hollywood is becoming the vocabulary of Main Street.  We must embrace these powerful tools …
“After each revolution, political or cultural, we can look back and see the elements that came together to make it possible and even inevitable.  Those who understand and prepare for these revolutions thrive, and those who don’t are left behind.  We are at one of those moments with regard to the ways in which we participate in society, democracy and the global economy, and visual images and story are at the heart of this historic change.”

A few weeks ago, I was involved in a radio interview with the author that is available on iTunes and also at   

http://wowididntknowthat.com/2013/08/08/the-new-literacy-special-guest-steve-apkon-author-director-jacob-burns-film-center/

A somewhat related book is “The Art of Immersion: How The Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, And The Way We Tell Stories” (2011) by Frank Rose, contributing editor at WIRED Magazine.  The focus of this book is much more on millennials and on the business impact.

Together these books are thought provoking and provide a richly detailed image of the world we now live in.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Citizenville?

I’ve written a couple of times about Carl Skelton’s Betaville software for citizen engagement in urban planning and design, so my eye caught the title of a book that came out a few months ago – “Citizenville: How To Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government” by current California Lt. Governor and former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.  (Alas, Citizenville is a name based on the popular game, FarmVille, not Betaville.)

When the book came out, there was a little bit of publicity and reviews in a few newspapers.  Perhaps the largest audience Newsom had was an interview on the Colbert Report, which unfortunately was fairly cynical in tone.  Many people, even those who are interested in better government, haven’t read it.

Let’s first get the criticisms out of the way.  Some critics have dismissed Newsom as a lightweight and clearly he does not write in an academic style.  It’s more journalistic, even breezy.  (Many people might consider that a plus.).

The tone in places is somewhat clichéd and sometimes annoying to those of us who are much deeper into the role of the Internet in government.  For example, the implication that the private sector is almost always better than the public sector is too broad a view to be worth much as a guiding principle.

Some of it is too much about him.  And not all of it is correct or well thought through.  But then that would also be true of authors with more prestigious academic credentials.

Ok, now to the more important positive side.  The book is a reasonably good compendium of the various ways that the Internet is being used in the public sector.  It should be read. 

For me, the most significant thing about the book is that an incumbent, leading politician wrote it.  In a way, that’s also why the book is useful to other public leaders.  Newsom shares his experiences – both good and bad – and outlines at least some of the minefield facing other elected officials who wish to use digital technologies in public service.

In addition to writing a book that can help to educate public leaders, Newsom, along with Code for America, has created the Citizenville Challenge (http://citizenville.com/challenge/) that has enlisted cities such as Philadelphia and Austin.  

Over the last several years, I’ve seen more elected officials who understand the role of technology in better citizen engagement and better public sector outcomes.  My own experience has led me to realize that technologists, in and out of government, can really only succeed when the top elected official leads the way.  Ultimately, that’s why this book is important.

In a recent review, Pete Peterson summarizes this key to success:

Of course, technology can facilitate these opportunities — but not without public-sector officials who see governments as more than “service providers” and citizens who regard themselves as more than “customers.”

[Note: If you want to get a quick idea of what he’s been saying, take a look at this video from the Commonwealth Club of California.  http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/311166-1 ]

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Citizens Participating In Budgeting?

This week, the New York State Technology Leadership Academy will take place in Albany, New York.  As I posted two weeks ago, I’ll be speaking about deep citizen engagement – the ways that government leaders can get the benefit of citizen co-creation and co-delivery of public services.

Note: the new website for you to contribute to and assess ideas is at https://claritypresales-13df0e80fac.secure.force.com/ca_idea__ideahome .

A timely article by Governing magazine appeared Monday – Tax Day, appropriately enough – about a “Study: Citizen Budgeting Related To Better Outcomes”.  (http://www.governing.com/blogs/view/gov-study-citizen-budgeting-related-to-better-performance.html)

The study was published in The American Review of Public Administration and focused on the relationship between the degree of citizen participation in highway budgeting and outcomes, such as road fatalities and road surface quality.   The researchers found that the greater the citizen participation, the more positive the outcomes.  This effect was strengthened the earlier the citizens had a chance to participate.

While there have been increasing reports about participatory budgeting, this is the first study that shows that citizen participation is not merely a democratic ideal, but is also a way to get better government.

Go to http://arp.sagepub.com/content/43/3/331 , if you want to read the original article, “Citizen Input in the Budget Process: When Does It Matter Most?” by Hai (David) Guo and Milena I. Neshkova, The American Review of Public Administration, May 2013; vol. 43, 3: pp. 331-346. 

Some other reports about citizen participation in budgeting can be found here:

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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New York State Technology Leadership Academy

In two weeks, the New York State Technology Leadership Academy will take place in Albany, New York.  This event brings together hundreds of the technology executives who try to make technology serve, ever better, the needs of the people of New York.

I’m on a panel Thursday, April 18, talking about Deep Engagement with the citizens of New York, enabling them to co-create public policy and deliver public services.  

As befitting the topic of the panel, there is now an opportunity to direct the conversation.  You can share your ideas or participate in the live conversation on April 18 at 11 AM Eastern Time.  Go to http://bit.ly/11LSR5U 

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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When Will Citizens Be Able To Track Requests To The Government?

A little prelude that may seem obvious, except for the fact that it is widely ignored … 

The people that public officials call citizens or voters or residents are not single-minded civic machines.  Most of the time they are consumers and workers outside of the public sector and so what happens outside of the public sector affects the expectations of the public sector on the part of those same citizens, etc.  

So one of the more frequent parts of a consumer’s life these days is being able to track things.  Here are just a few of the many diverse examples, almost all of which have been around for at least a couple of years:

  • You can track your pizza order from Dominos from the oven to your front door.
  • You can track shipments, at all stages, through FedEx or UPS.
  • You can track the path of a taxi or “black car” that you ordered via Uber.
  • You can track airline flights so you know when to leave for the airport to pick up a relative.

However, in the public sector, this kind of tracking has been rare.  In addition to tracking mass transit in some big cities (perhaps imitating the airline services), there are few examples I could find, such as:

But clearly there are many more situations where people want to track their interaction with the government and cannot.

Why not enable citizens to track their government transactions in mid-stream?  While suggestions of this kind are often proposed to increase transparency of government, the tracking actually serves a much simpler goal – to reduce frustration on the part of the citizen.  If people can see where their request or application is, they will have a lower sense of frustration and a greater sense of control.

If the citizens could also get an estimate of how long it usually takes to go through each step of an approval process, all the better.  

When the Internet began getting much attention more than ten years ago, many governments decided to put applications on line, at least in the form of PDF documents that people could print and then fill out.  Eventually, people could apply online.  New York State government, for example, had a big project that was intended to put every citizen transaction on the Web.

Well, we’re past the point where citizens accept that as the best that can be done.  Now is the time to initiate a “big project” to enable citizens to track the status of each of those transactions.

Of course, the ultimate goal, in so far as possible, is to complete those transactions instantaneously online, like the fishing license app that Michigan makes available.  Then the tracking problem disappears, but that’s a subject for a future blog post.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Overdue Convenience of the Day: City Hall as Food Truck

Great story in American City & County and also the Atlantic  about Boston taking an old idea and using it in a new way.  Even in a time when it seems everyone has a phone that can get on the Internet to government websites, the reality is that many people can’t operate this way – some never and almost everyone at least part of the time.

So this City Hall on the go is a nice alternative.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/41866382718/overdue-convenience-of-the-day-city-hall-as-food-truck]

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Who Needs To Pay Attention To The Internet of Things?

There’s an increasing drum beat of news about the “Internet of Things”.   There’s even an acronym for it – IoT.   

IoT refers to the increasing number of devices on the Internet that report the status and location of physical things.  This covers everything from the location of your smart phone to where a package might be to the condition of your pulse to the condition of a highway.   (That’s why it is also sometimes referred to as the Internet of Everything.)

All this data has also led to people talking about “Big Data” and the need for analytical software to make sense of it all.

Less often noted is that things connected to the Internet can communicate with each other.  We’ve only begun to think about the practical and fundamental issues this phenomenon will raise.  

On a practical level, this machine-to-machine communications needs to be managed by people not through on-off switches or gauges, but through policies that can be operated at the same speed as the machines – not at the slow speed of human awareness and decision making.

The benefits can be striking.  For example, a bridge whose sensors are detecting potential cracks in load-bearing columns can ask the street light to turn red to stop traffic and also tell the police dispatch system to get a couple of police cars out to redirect that traffic.

Of course, the complexity of a global system that connects all these devices is mind boggling.  This global system has the potential for unpredictable and perhaps disastrous behavior.

That alone should get the attention of public leaders.

Now, most of the advertising and news from technology companies has focused on how corporations can use the Internet of Things.  Surely they can.  Just think of any company that ships things and needs to know the condition of the shipped items and there locations.

Companies are usually responsible for their own office and manufacturing space.  Even including shipments or goods, any individual company has to worry about at most millions of square feet.

However, governments are uniquely responsible for what goes on in a particular territory, which can be many tens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of square miles.  Eventually, all this territory will be covered by sensors, which will greatly outnumber everything else on the Internet. 

By the way, the Internet of Things is not something way off in the future.  Today, the number of physical devices connected to the Internet is already six times the number of people on the Internet, even though there are two billion of those people.  By 2020, just a few years away, there will be 50 billion connected devices.

It’s time for government leaders to start focusing on IoT as a policy concern and as a tool for managing their infrastructure and territory.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Gamification In The Public Sector?

Over the holidays, the New York Times had a story titled “All the World’s a Game, and Business Is a Player” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/technology/all-the-worlds-a-game-and-business-is-a-player.html)

Many of us are familiar with computer games.  If not a passion of ourselves as adults, the passion for games is observable among youth.  

The article is not about shooting adventure games, but instead what are called “serious games”.  In various ways, we’ve seen the private sector use gamification.  But the question here is: do even these serious games have a role in the public sector?

The interest in games is based on the observation that people are much more engaged, more motivated and learn quicker in game situations than in more traditional bureaucratic environments.  So there have been game designers and others who have tried to apply these “game mechanics” to the public sector.

Actually, this is not new.  The Annual Games for Change conference has been around since 2004.  At the conference last June, there was even a Federal government caucus.

In 2011, Jane McGonigal, one of the leaders of this movement, wrote the successful book, “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World”

But there has been increasing attention to the possibilities, even in the public sector.  The newspaper article mentions games for everything from reducing energy waste to the Israeli Defense Forces.  

In my own work, I have advised a big state government that was interested in the use of gamification to change the environment and re-motivate its work force.  

I’ve also been involved in a strategy to better engage customers of city transit services through gamification.  This provides two additional benefits: it establishes a relationship with riders who before were anonymous and motivates the more social of those riders to help build a community of riders who can help improve the overall urban experience.

There are clearly limits to the use of gamification and it is fairly easy to think of situations where even “serious” games would be considered inappropriate.  But there is much potential in these ideas that have not yet been realized.  

If these are to be used in valuable ways to achieve public goals, then public officials need to take the lead on this movement, rather than watch while this movement gets built without them.

Please pass along examples of such games you’ve observed in practice or your ideas of where games could be used in the public sector.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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