Government 2.0 Club

[Room 205] Strategies for Deep Citizen Participation

Posted on 29. Mar, 2009 by macurakcloseAuthor: macurak Name: Andrew Macurak
Email: macurak@rhizalabs.com
Site: http://www.rhizalabs.com
About: Andrew is passionate about using communication and management to connect the resources of the private sector with the community interest of the public sector. As Marketing Assistant, he does just that, combining his skills in planning, facilitation, and writing with his acuity for program design, implementation, and management to help build awareness of Rhiza Labs’ mission, products, and impact. Prior to joining Rhiza, Andrew consulted with a private firm specializing in communications design and strategic planning for government agencies and nonprofit organizations, where he supported cross-sector energy efficiency and renewable energy initiatives. Before that, he served as program coordinator for a coalition of community organizations focusing on Community Reinvestment Act compliance and urban economic development. There, he was instrumental in the design, development, management and promotion of several innovative programs, including the group’s first Web 2.0 implementation and an inter-organization public safety collaborative. Andrew will graduate this spring from the University of Pittsbugh with dual majors in Urban Studies and History and a minor in Public Service. In his spare time, he blogs for a magazine of urban affairs and sits on the board of a local community development corporation, as well as several nonprofit committees. He enjoys low-budget travel, policy wonkery, and roaming the East End of Pittsburgh with his rescued beagle, Donnie.See Authors Posts (1) in 2:15 Sat, Blog, Government 2.0 Camp Day 2

Jeff Christensen, Rhiza Labs

Deep Citizen Participation goes beyond 142-character messages – deep civic engagement is when citizens, armed with data, can translate data into action and use it in interacting with elected officials

Three easy steps:
FIRST: Distribute something. Do this first or there’s nothing to talk about.
SECOND: Then, create tools that allow the community to MAKE something. Can be meetings, maps, whitepapers, whatever.
THIRD: Then make it so those tools can allow them to DO something, to get what they’ve created into their lives and into action.

Solutions before problems
We say we want all public data accessible to us immediately – once we have it, what do we do with it? Understanding this requires understanding your audience – not just who consumes data, but who makes it.

Define your problem, then use the audience to determine its solution. (A website with mapping tools? Web service API? Depends on community – there is a laundry list of technologies, determine the audience to figure out which.)

One scientist creates coveted dataset – now what happens with it? Are people going to use it?

To address this, implement built-in feedback loops directly within the tool. Link an artifact to every single time that data has been used by someone else – allow users to comment, leave ratings – build in the conversation between different parts of audience

Rhiza’s examples: Insight.3rc.org; insight.rhizalabs.com; humanservices.net; Southwestern PA After School

If we’re talking about Deep Engagement, we want to inform a group of people to give them a specific action to take – if you give everyone all the information after they digest it they have no time to take a position

So, design tools that enable people to make sense of that data – figure out how users can actually use the data and how it can influence others to take action – can create a cascading effect

Data.octo.dc.gov (DC OCTO)
Apps for Democracy

Can issue-oriented groups mash up the tools and data to communicate across constituencies, make the data available and people who are interested will make things happen?

Gov’t also has a responsibility to provide info in plain language ways that is direct and unbiased to get people who aren’t going to be affected by NGOs or where there is no NGO ecosystem around the topic or where NGO ecosystem is too polarized to be able to use it.

Other problems:
Most people interact with local government over federal government.
Twitter is not deep engagement.
In rural areas no one is building mashups.

If you’re interested in deeper engagement, making data available so people can play with it is great but not enough – and how long will it take until all of gov’t data is available ? – but you have to start making inroads.

Deep engagement is more than just having information available. Gov’t produces so much information and groups are overwhelmed by their content and have no knowledge of correlating activity or how it relates to them

Local governments vs. federal government
Federal has variety of information – business not accessible to average citizen – than you would see on the local level.

All these social networking tools out there, and people can comment on all different things, supposed to be used to engage the public to action – but when simple public meetings aren’t online for them to access, what are they going to use it for?

Current social tools we have access to are just about as effective for this as Web 1.0 “Click to email your congressman your comment” forms – i.e., not effective.

How do you take what’s online and interact in the community with people, with agencies, with whoever your audience is?

Depends on where you’re at in the process – if you’re at gov’t level impact is how open is your data, at advocacy group level how many people are you mobilizing, how are you impacting your legislators?

Citizen-initiated data-driven action
One city neighborhood used public data to prevent a park being clseod for re-routing the tracks – citizen engagement through info gathering and dissemination also engaged legislators, railroad officials.

Bird counts and bucket brigades – citizen-contributed data to large-scale research products

Tags: #deepdata, #gov20camp, civic engagement