Civic UnrestJekyll2023-04-01T10:11:26-04:00https://civicunrest.com/Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.com/shelby@civicunrest.comhttps://civicunrest.com/2022/08/10/model-for-participatory-tech2022-08-10T12:15:00-04:002022-08-10T12:15:00-04:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>I hear “participatory” being thrown around a lot these days, including by myself. <a href="https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/" target="_blank">Participatory budgeting</a>. <a href="https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/participatory-democracy/" target="_blank">Participatory democracy</a>. <a href="https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ParticipatoryModelingWhatWhyHow.AVoinov.March2010.pdf" target="_blank">Participatory modeling</a>. <a href="https://www.unm.edu/~soc101/participate.htm" target="_blank">Participatory development</a>. It’s an idea I wholeheartedly strive for in my own work with governments and communities, with varying degrees of success and frustration. But what does this actually look like, for public digital infrastructure and the policies/programs that technology supports?</p>
<p>“Participatory” fundamentally means “affording the opportunity for individual participation.”<a href="#footnote1-20220810" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20220810"><sup>1</sup></a> I’ll let you dive into the links above for other examples of how to apply “participatory” to important public policy programs, but for tech, I’ve summarized how we can think about levels of participatory engagement in a maturity model, illustrated by this pyramid chart with a deliciously default blue gradient.</p>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/Participatory-Maturity-Model.png" alt="Participatory Maturity Model" /></p>
<h2 id="level-1-observable">Level 1: Observable</h2>
<p>As a foundation for any sort of more interesting or more meaningful participatory interaction, your tech has to be observable. That means the public can see it. To be clear, I don’t mean that the public can see and access every system the government makes from a user interface perspective – plenty of systems reasonably require users to create accounts and be authorized for access to data or pages. What I mean is that the code is observable, and it shows what was built and how.</p>
<p>For example, CDC’s PRIME <a href="https://www.simplereport.gov/" target="_blank">SimpleReport</a> app helps schools and other organizations report COVID tests to the proper authorities. Anybody can’t just open the app and see the live data being entered, BUT anybody can go see how the app was built by looking at its <a href="https://github.com/CDCgov/prime-simplereport" target="_blank">open source code</a>.</p>
<h2 id="level-2-commentable">Level 2: Commentable</h2>
<p>The next level is commentable. This means the public has avenues for giving feedback on the product/tech/system. This could be a survey on the product’s website. It could be the <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/">Federal Register</a>.<a href="#footnote2-20220810" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20220810"><sup>2</sup></a> It could be an email inbox or a public google group that people join and submit comments to. It could also be a code repository on a social coding platform like Github or GitLab, where the public can create issues (topics for discussion that may correspond to work to be done, such as bug reports or feature requests) and comment on issues or pull requests (a new chunk of code representing a new feature or bug fix, for example, that a contributor has requested to add to the code base that is now going through a review process).</p>
<p>It could also be a combination of some or all of the above, as is with the example of the <a href="https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow/issues/16060" target="_blank">Caseflow project</a> from the Department of Veterans Affairs. There is a user support system that apparently gets channeled to the tech team, who created an issue on Github reporting the bug and opening discussion round the topic. Arguably, this gets into the next level, but I’m using this to show that you can include comments from other sources, not just your code publishing platform.</p>
<h2 id="level-3-accountable">Level 3: Accountable</h2>
<p>To get to level 3, you have to close the feedback loop and become accountable. Respond to public comments. Be able to point to precise changes that were made from feedback, such as adding a new feature, changing some text to plain language, fixing a bug, etc. If you can’t make the change requested, explain why. Nobody wants to speak into a black box – and nobody will take the time to do so if they don’t have reason to believe it will make a difference.</p>
<p>CMS’s open source <a href="https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide" target="_blank">Price Transparency Guide</a> offers good examples of accountability using public discussion and linking questions and comments to pull requests representing work being done, such as this <a href="https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide/discussions/538" target="_blank">discussion</a>, which coincidentally also discusses the (in)feasiability of open sourcing CMS’s 7 million lines of claims code, as well this <a href="https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide/issues/243" target="_blank">issue</a>, which links to pull requests addressing the problem.</p>
<h2 id="level-4-contributable">Level 4: Contributable</h2>
<p>Finally, you’ve hit peak participatory maturity when you’re able to and are actively accepting public contributions to your product. This is really the holy grail of participatory tech, and it’s what open source advocates have been dreaming about for decades. It’s incredibly difficult to achieve. To be able to even just accept contributions, you have to have the capacity to educate new contributors about the contribution process and conventions of your project to make sure their contributions are of high quality, and then to review requests to change code, content, or design, working with the contributor through any changes you want to see before you accept their request.</p>
<p>But even if you’re able to accept contributions, that doesn’t mean you will have people clamoring to submit them. A project I’ve helped lead, the <a href="https://screeningtool.geoplatform.gov" target="_blank">Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool</a>, has been designed for Level 4 since the beginning, but even though we’ve had 75+ individuals attend meetings and participate in discussion at any given time, we’ve had only 4 people outside of the US Digital Service contribute <a href="https://github.com/usds/justice40-tool" target="_blank">code</a>. We’ve had more people contribute research and analysis, as discussion on <a href="https://github.com/usds/justice40-tool/issues/552" target="_blank">Github issues</a>, in our <a href="https://groups.google.com/u/0/g/justice40-open-source" target="_blank">Google Group</a>, and in our <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14Zwja62gbrZErhf70lo-I2ode85O-XZC1NKA7bEV6Bk/edit#gid=742302133" target="_blank">ongoing catalog</a> of the environmental justice data landscape – and these contributions are just as valuable as code.</p>
<h2 id="caveats">Caveats</h2>
<p><em>This model really only applies to singular products/projects/systems that have already been conceived of; it does not include considerations for a participatory process of originating a digital product/project/system.</em> Multidisciplinary teams of program specialists and tech, product, and design staff should use iterative, human-centered design to work with users (i.e. members of the public) to identify what should be built and what that thing should do. User research, however, is not the same as a participatory process enabling members of a given community to identify what problems should be prioritized – this is more in the vein of participatory development, and worth more exploration later.</p>
<p><em>This model also doesn’t address the complexity of how to integrate participatory policy with participatory tech.</em> In my experience, this is one of the hardest things to do.</p>
<p>Let’s say you have a system that hosts an algorithm identifying communities that are eligible for a specific grant, for example. If someone from the public can see this code and comment on a part of the algorithm they disagree with, who should respond? The tech product team building the system, or the policy makers deciding what the algorithm does? If someone identifies a bug in the algorithm and submits a fix, but that fix removes 20% of the communities identified, does the tech team decide to accept the fix, or does the policy stakeholder need to approve or reject it first? How is that communicated?</p>
<p>What this indicates is that you can’t separate the tech from the programs or policies it is designed to support, and teams need to be working closely together towards the same outcome goals and with a shared understanding of how participatory engagement should shape the program and its delivery. The example of CMS’s <a href="https://github.com/CMSgov/price-transparency-guide" target="_blank">Price Transparency Guide</a> and attempts to codify rules as (open source) code are efforts that directly tackle this bridge, but in many cases we’re still far from it.</p>
<p><em>Finally, public digital infrastructure can only be as participatory as the public has capacity to participate in it.</em> To achieve real equity and quality in engagement, we have to invest in communities, especially overburdened and underserved ones, to build capacity, tech/data literacy, and policy literacy.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20220810" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20220810" name="footnote1sym-20220810">1</a>
From an online dictionary. As a side note, it’s annoyingly difficult to make a noun out of – do we really want to say “participatoriness?” Ah well.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20220810" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20220810" name="footnote2sym-20220810">2</a>
No offense, but whenever I look at the density of text and comments on the Federal Register, my brain shuts down. I'd love a more public friendly UI for a public comment system. Also, I don't think a government staff member can give responses to comments on the Federal Register, which is a blocker to reaching level 3.
</div>
<div class="footnote-item">
Header image attribution: "Warrant Officer Candidates’ community project brightens up Blackstone" by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/35101671@N06" target="_blank">Virginia Guard Public Affairs</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" target="_blank">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0</a>.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2022/08/10/model-for-participatory-tech">A Model for Participatory Public Digital Infrastructure</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on August 10, 2022.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2022/06/14/the-shift-to-servant-leadership2022-06-14T09:30:00-04:002022-06-14T09:30:00-04:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>In the spring of 2020, I started working on pandemic response projects as part of my tour of service with the <a href="https://www.usds.gov/" target="_blank">US Digital Service</a>. When we tried to solve the problem of getting better public health data faster to folks who needed it for the response, we traveled to multiple states to speak with local and state public health officials and understand what their concrete technological, organizational, and regulatory barriers were to collecting and sharing pandemic data amongst themselves and with federal teams.</p>
<p><em>We heard a common refrain: “We are over capacity, and we need help. Not just money, or rules, or requests for data. Help.”</em></p>
<p>What I began to realize over the subsequent two years was that I was witnessing the beginning of what I believe—and hope—to be a seismic shift in the relationship between the federal government and constituent governments such as states, territories, tribes, and localities. I describe this shift as one to <strong>servant leadership.</strong></p>
<p>A few years ago, I worked in a company where <a href="https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/servant-leadership" target="_blank">“servant leadership”</a> was all the rage. The idea was that managers should seek to serve their team, and not the other way around: they should help their employees do their jobs to the best of their ability, not just set goals and performance metrics and walk away. This resulted in teams being more effective and employees being happier, because we were all working together to set goals that were achievable, with managers having a clearer understanding of what went into achieving them. Managers also started being proactive about helping with small or mundane things, or removing blockers, so that employees could focus on what they did best, the skills that were the value they were bringing to the team, and thus to the company.</p>
<p>This does not describe the historical dynamic between the federal government and states/territories. Some might even balk at my implication that the feds are “managers” of states. However, I think the analogy stands: the federal government acts (or should act) as leaders amongst the constituent governments, by setting nationwide policy goals, funding programs that further those aims, and holding states accountable to meeting important goals, standards, and regulations, such as accessibility or equity requirements, typically through monetary penalties. In other words, the feds say, “Here’s what we want you to do, here’s a pile of money, and here are the rules. Now, go.”</p>
<p><em>What would it look like if the federal government took on a servant leadership philosophy in working with states/territories implementing federally funded policy and programs?</em></p>
<p>Instead of simply adding strings and a vague direction to the purses they hand out, what if they worked with these smaller governments to set achievable goals and proactively provide support to achieve them, in the form of useful resources, shared services, and, simply, help?</p>
<p>Now, I understand this question of the relationship between federal and state/territorial governments is a fundamental one that Americans have been debating for centuries. Is there federal government there for national defense and maintaining a really old, rarely refactored document that’s supposed to enshrine civil rights? Or is it there to help people and actively protect (and maybe even advance) those rights? I am not a constitutional lawyer nor do I hold a PhD in American history or public policy. I can only speak from my own experience working in and around government and community organizing for ten years.</p>
<p>What I have seen is this: the federal government has left a huge gap in digital public infrastructure (including software but also knowledge, best practices, user research, etc), and states are realizing the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/deloitte-ey-contracts-covid-response-states-kentucky-california-colorado-illinois-2020-10?op=1" target="_blank">gross inefficiencies</a> of going it alone and outsourcing all of that individually to vendors who are incentivized by profit, not public interest. As a result. people in the real world are getting the short end of the stick with poorly designed public services and even more poorly built technology supporting those services. This is especially problematic in this increasingly mobile and online world where people might live, work, travel, or care for family in multiple states all at once, but where there is poor interstate digital infrastructure.</p>
<p><em>It’s time we invested in our federation and the infrastructure we need to hold it together–and servant leadership from the federal level is a critical part of that.</em></p>
<p>While this idea is not yet common, fortunately it’s not new, and it’s gaining ever more momentum with federally funded programs since the pandemic started. In the nondigital space, the classic example of centrally designed and supported infrastructure is the national <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/testimony/celebrating-50-years-eisenhower-interstate-highway-system" target="_blank">Eisenhower Interstate System</a>. Another example someone in the open source policy space recently shared is that of the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/" target="_blank">National Archives</a>: while the Archives’ mission is the preservation of federal records, it also embodies servant leadership by supporting state archival efforts through <a href="https://github.com/usnationalarchives" target="_blank">open source software</a>, resources, events, and programs, in addition to the more typical <a href="https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/announcement/partnership.html" target="_blank">grants</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the <a href="https://www.healthit.gov/" target="_blank">Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT</a>, originally created in 2004 by the Bush administration and legislatively mandated in 2009 as part of the <a href="https://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/health-it-legislation" target="_blank">HITECH Act</a>, serves in an even more explicit servant leader role in the digital space. Part of the Department of Health and Human Services, ONC’s job is to advise, coordinate, and support with health information technology across all levels of government, including the creation of state health information exchanges (HIE) – not to mandate or regulate how states spend money. ONC helps states who want to create an HIE with strategy, technology, and interoperability, and they have good relationships with these states and their HIEs because of this type of partnership.</p>
<p><strong>ONC is an example of how the federal government has invested in an entire department that exists to help states create infrastructure,</strong> and provides strategy, policy, standards, and tech (things I would also include in the umbrella of “infrastructure”) as part of this support. This isn’t common. Federal agencies often tend to outsource support, knowledge, and interstate digital infrastructure to the private sector, typically in the form of major national nonprofits or associations of state/territorial governments. For example, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (<a href="https://www.naswa.org/" target="_blank">NASWA</a>) receives federal funding to provide <a href="http://www.itsc.org/Pages/default.aspx" target="_blank">IT support</a> and products for state unemployment insurance technology.</p>
<p>Federal government also provides support to states through “technical assistance,” whereby a federal program dedicates a pot of money or a host of contractor teams reserved for helping states with some aspect of implementation, either by running the contractor teams themselves or paying private organizations like the ones mentioned above to run them. From what I’ve seen (and I’ve by no means seen them all!), these programs have a variety of results and implementation details, but they tend to be one-off efforts or grants and unfortunately too often any learnings gleaned from an effort stays within the recipient state or within the minds of the contractors deployed there. There is a huge opportunity for technical assistance to also act as user research and feed into a broader program strategy that reuses lessons learned, processes or software developed, informs the development of a shared service or infrastructure component, and even influences program policy based on findings from the reality of implementation.</p>
<p><strong>The momentum is building for the feds to take more ownership of the support and shared infrastructure (including knowledge, software, and services) they provide to constituent governments.</strong> The <a href="https://www.dol.gov" target="_blank">Department of Labor</a>, for example, is piloting an initiative for <a href="https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/ui-modernization" target="_blank">unemployment insurance technology</a> that embodies this perfectly. Their program includes deploying new software in Arkansas and New Jersey, sharing best practices and lessons learned from those and other states, and publishing open source reference implementations to inform better UI tech.<a href="#footnote1-20220614" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20220614"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in partnership with the US Digital Service has also launched new public health infrastructure and support projects over the past two years, under the <a href="https://github.com/CDCgov/prime-public-health-data-infrastructure" target="_blank">Pandemic-Ready Interoperability Modernization Effort (PRIME)</a> initiative.<a href="#footnote2-20220614" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20220614"><sup>2</sup></a> This effort has included trying new tactics for technical assistance as well as helping states set up critical public health infrastructure that is interoperable with other states’ and federal systems, so that states can not only meet federal requirements for COVID (or other infectious disease) reporting but also help states meet their own reporting needs and achieve their own public health goals.</p>
<p>I’m excited that DOL and CDC–and I’m sure other federal agencies I haven’t noted here–are taking on more of a servant leadership role with states, territories, tribes, and other governments and communities. I want to see folks at all levels of government working together to understand user needs and priorities (where users are the public as well as public servants), set goals collaboratively, and then create and share knowledge, best practices, code, and other services and infrastructure to help those governments reach those goals, save time and money, and ultimately improve the lives of the people.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20220615" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20220615" name="footnote1sym-20220615">1</a>
Want to read some more of my ideas for improving unemployment insurance technology? Check out my recent white paper, <a href="https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/report/collaborating-to-improve-ui/" target="_blank">Collaborating to Improve Unemployment Insurance</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20220614" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20220615" name="footnote2sym-20220615">2</a>
Full disclaimer: I was on the founding team so I'm maybe a little biased!
</div>
<div class="footnote-item">
Header image attribution: "help-wanted-sign-1" by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/23445357@N06" target="_blank">kpmcguire</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" target="_blank">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0</a>.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2022/06/14/the-shift-to-servant-leadership">The Shift to Servant Leadership: How federal agencies can support states, territories, and communities after the pandemic</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on June 14, 2022.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2022/06/11/what-we-mean-do-open-source2022-06-11T11:30:00-04:002022-06-11T11:30:00-04:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>I’m guilty of telling people, especially in government, to “do open source.” I know, I know, I’m sorry. It’s good advice, obviously, but it’s also vague and broad. It means something different to everyone.</p>
<p>Plenty has been written on the <a href="https://elgl.org/benefits-of-open-source-software-during-covid-19-response/" target="_blank">boons</a> of open source in government, and I’m sure we’ll be writing plenty more. But first, it’s time to unpack the verb “do” and clarify what this encompasses. When we talk about “doing open source,” we generally mean one or more of these three verbs: USE, MAKE, and CONTRIBUTE.</p>
<h2 id="use-open-source-software">USE open source software</h2>
<p>Anyone can use open source software. Most people already do. Use the internet? You’re almost certainly using open source software – your browser itself might be open source (<a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/" target="_blank">Firefox</a>) or built on open source (<a href="https://www.google.com/chrome/">Chrome</a>, built on <a href="https://www.chromium.org/chromium-projects/" target="_blank">Chromium</a>), or you’re looking at a web page that uses open standards such as <a href="https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/" target="_blank">HTML</a> or <a href="https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html">CSS</a>. I know open standards aren’t technically open source software, in the sense there isn’t source code to be open, but I typically lump them together in the same boat because they are open for anyone to use and they are built with similar practices and processes as open source software (e.g. you can contribute to HTML on <a href="https://github.com/whatwg/html" target="_blank">Github</a>).</p>
<p>In addition to relying on open standards to be useable, chances are, any webpage you’re on was built with open source software as well. So many languages used to build web applications are open source: Wordpress (which is used by <a href="https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management" target="_blank">64.5% of websites</a> using a content management system), JavaScript libraries such as jQuery or Node.js, Ruby or RubyOnRails, Rust – to name a few you may have heard of.</p>
<p>When we talk about using open source in government, sometimes we mean using an end application with a user interface (e.g. an open source map tool) but usually we mean using code libraries or languages that are open source by incorporating them into another software project. You can make a website that is not open source but uses many open source libraries, because they are utilities or tools rather than the end product. Almost everyone does this, unless they’ve been locked in to a vendor situation and can’t get out. It isn’t controversial anymore, since open source software (and open standards and programming languages) now pretty much powers the digital world. <strong>Open source software is a utility, and it’s <a href="https://rajko-rad.medium.com/the-rise-of-open-source-challengers-4a3d93932425" target="_blank">ubiquitous</a>.</strong></p>
<h2 id="make-open-source-software">MAKE open source software</h2>
<p>Technically, to make open source software, you don’t have to do anything but slap one of <a href="https://opensource.org/licenses" target="_blank">these licenses</a> on your code that allow your software to be freely used, modified, and shared. Does anyone else need to be able to find or see your code? Nope. Example? I can think of tons from government (I won’t name names), where I’ve been told something is “open source” and when I ask to see the code, either no one can find it or someone emails me three weeks later with a zip file full of millions of lines of Java. If you can’t tell, I am not a fan of this meaning.</p>
<p>To make open source software in a functional sense and not just a technical sense, you have to license your code appropriately and make your code publicly available and discoverable. I believe that software paid for by the public should (except in certain circumstances) live in the public domain, but if the public can’t find it or view it, is it in their domain? Furthermore, some of the benefits of making open source code such as enabling reuse, providing transparency and accountability to algorithms, and facilitating contributions from the public (more on contributing below), are nigh on impossible without the code being available publicly online.</p>
<p>People sometimes make their code publicly available on the internet and don’t use an open source license, either intentionally, like <a href="https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/blob/main/LICENSE.txt" target="_blank">Mapbox</a>, or because they forget (totally guilty here!), so always be sure to look for the license is you’re about to use code you’ve found online, and don’t forget the license on your own projects.</p>
<h2 id="contribute-to-open-source-software">CONTRIBUTE to open source software</h2>
<p>Contributing to open source software, while not a necessary part of using or making it, is a key way to unleash the value of open source software. For government, this could mean that your team contributes back to the open source software it uses, and/or that your team allows the public to contribute to the open source project that it makes.</p>
<p>Contributions don’t have to be code: they can be reporting bugs, adding or fixing documentation, answering questions on Github issues, translating content, or even providing money to the open source maintainer team or governing body to support continued development.</p>
<p>Individuals working on government teams should be encouraged to contribute back to open source software that the team uses, because it helps make the software better and ultimately makes that team’s end product better – and even more secure. One example of government already doing this is <a href="https://www.qgis.org/en/site/" target="_blank">QGIS</a>, a popular free and open source geographic information system. Although QGIS is not a government-created or -maintained tool, the <a href="https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/blob/master/ChangeLog" target="_blank">changelog</a> shows new features that were developed by or funded by local and national governments over time.</p>
<p>The recent <a href="https://industrialcyber.co/news/log4j-vulnerability-now-hits-industrial-sector-as-cisa-calls-upon-users-to-%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8Bidentify-mitigate-patch-affected-products/" target="_blank">log4j vulnerability</a> highlighted the value of contributing back to open source: maintainers of this critical open source library that used by many federal agencies are <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/17/1042692/log4j-internet-open-source-hacking/" target="_blank">volunteers</a>, and if the government were to invest resources into supporting this project or others that it uses, then they could help identify and mitigate vulnerabilities more quickly. <strong>Contributing to open source is investing in digital infrastructure.</strong></p>
<p>Likewise, government teams can realize a huge amount of value by supporting public contributions. The US Web Design System, an open source project includes design components, tools, and guides for government agencies to use in the design of their websites, has <a href="https://github.com/uswds/uswds/graphs/contributors" target="_blank">over 150 contributors</a> – way more than the number of staff actually on the project. This sort of value isn’t realized overnight, and empowering external contributors takes substantial work in the form of good documentation and a responsive team, but it’s a worthwhile goal for many government projects.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div class="footnote-item">
Header image attribution: "Dictionary" by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/29598412@N00" target="_blank">greeblie</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse" target="_blank">CC BY 2.0</a>.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2022/06/11/what-we-mean-do-open-source">What We Mean When We Tell Government to 'Do Open Source'</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on June 11, 2022.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2022/06/06/collaborating-to-improve-ui2022-06-06T15:45:00-04:002022-06-06T15:45:00-04:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>Unemployment insurance (UI) modernization has been a hot topic since millions of Americans had to apply for unemployment benefits—many for the first time—using largely archaic, complex, and unstable state systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many states and the federal government have known for years that these systems were vulnerable and needed a refresh: 24 states began or completed modernization projects for their UI benefits and tax systems between 2000 and 2021, with varying levels of success, and federal money has been going out the door specifically for such projects since 2009, when Congress passed the UI Modernization Act.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, even “modernized” systems completely fell over during the pandemic. Expert organizations have <a href="https://tcf.org/content/report/centering-workers-how-to-modernize-unemployment-insurance-technology/?agreed=1" target="_blank">published</a> valuable <a href="https://improveunemployment.com/">playbooks</a> and <a href="https://usdr.gitbook.io/unemployment-insurance-modernization/" target="_blank">resources</a> to help address key problems with these systems (e.g. lack of human centered design, no user testing before launch, etc), and I encourage folks to check those out if you want to get into the weeds of better UI tech or learn from UI as a case study in how federal programs are implemented at the state/territory level.</p>
<p>As part of my work with the <a href="https://softwarecollaborative.org/" target="_blank">Intergovernmental Software Collaborative</a> at the <a href="https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/" target="_blank">Beeck Center</a>, I wanted to look at improving UI tech through the lens of collaboration between jurisdictions – between peer (state/territorial) governments as well as between the federal Department of Labor and states/territories. I found three promising pathways for collaboration that already have some precedent to learn from and build on: consortia, federal shared services, and communities of practice.</p>
<p><em>Read the <a href="https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/report/collaborating-to-improve-ui/" target="_blank">white paper</a> to learn more about each of these approaches.</em></p>
<p>Tl;dr? Here are some key takeaways:</p>
<ul>
<li>Let outcomes and user research drive the collaborative project/product (duh)</li>
<li>Feds should invest in open shared services <strong>and</strong> shared knowledge</li>
<li>Communities of practice of state practitioners are incredibly valuable when <strong>invested in and proactively managed</strong></li>
</ul>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div class="footnote-item">
Header image attribution: "Compass: Collaboration 03/27/2015" by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/62092852@N07" target="_blank"> Carolyn Hall Young</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/2.0/jp/?ref=openverse" target="_blank">CC BY-NC-ND 2.0</a>.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2022/06/06/collaborating-to-improve-ui">Collaborating to Improve Unemployment Insurance</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on June 06, 2022.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2020/03/04/scary-words-i-hear-in-govtech-maintenance2020-03-04T22:29:00-05:002020-03-04T22:29:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>I hear people in government talk about software maintenance a lot. What they usually mean<a href="#footnote1-20200304" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20200304"><sup>1</sup></a> is they have paid for a software application to be built by a contractor and now they want to put it on a shelf and pay someone (possibly a different contractor) to dust it off every now and then. Maybe they’ll even pay someone (very possibly yet another contractor) to be on hand should that application fall off the shelf and break – but only if this happens during business hours (9-12pm and 2-5 ET, Mon-Fri).</p>
<p>Now, if you’re in the private tech sector, you’re probably confused. That doesn’t sound like product development, you might be thinking, and you’d be right. This isn’t product development, and unfortunately, it’s often not even what you might consider product support.</p>
<p><strong>When companies in the private sector treat their products like this – as something to be built once and then “maintained” – these products eventually lose all their users.</strong> Sometimes companies put legacy products on life support because they intend to deprecate the product and ask their users to move on by a specific sunset date. For the rest of them, however, they lose users because their users find a better alternative that meets their evolving needs.</p>
<p>The government rarely sunsets products or processes. Let’s be real: we’re talking about an organization that still requires employees to fax HR paperwork.<a href="#footnote2-20200304" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20200304"><sup>2</sup></a> Users also rarely have alternatives, except for when private industry comes along and convinces them that they should pay for basic services (e.g. filing taxes) or when nonprofits emerge to help with basic social needs (e.g. protecting against housing discrimination).</p>
<p><strong>But just because users can’t really leave doesn’t mean they don’t matter.</strong> With government products, the users are the public, are the customers, are the tax payers. Government loses money and trust when it doesn’t solve real problems, respond to user needs, and demonstrate value. And spending a lot on software that sits around gathering dust and losing users or causing more frustrated users is rather expensive and doesn’t serve the public.</p>
<p>So, rather than think of software as something static to be maintained, let’s think of software as a product – in govtech, usually a product whose users are either the public or government users facilitating service delivery. The key product idea to keep in mind is that <strong>the technology isn’t the end goal: solving a problem is the end goal.</strong><a href="#footnote3-20200304" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20200304"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>When you’ve built a software application, you don’t measure its success by how often it doesn’t fall over – a.k.a. how well it is “maintained” – but by how well it solves the problem you built it to solve.<a href="#footnote4-20200304" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20200304"><sup>4</sup></a> This involves understanding users and their problems, setting goals, and building towards those goals. It involves constantly monitoring and assessing the product and its performance towards those user-centric goals. That involves continuing to stay in touch with and understanding users.</p>
<h3 id="example-applying-for-a-drivers-license">Example: Applying for a driver’s license</h3>
<p>The problems related to this process vary from state to state, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert. But I have been in many a DMV (Dept. of Motor Vehicles) and applied for a driver’s license in 3 states, and, as a user myself, I’ve experienced some problems. One big one I’ve faced across all three states is that it takes quite a long time to apply for and receive a driver’s license. Most recently it required multiple trips to the DMV, and at the last one, I filled out a form in person and then watched the person behind the desk type it up for me before having me double check that it was correct.</p>
<p>If you were the product manager for the DMV,<a href="#footnote5-20200304" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote5anc-20200304"><sup>5</sup></a> you’ve got multiple users to think about (driver’s license applicants, DMV staff, DMV executives, etc), but in this case let’s just focus on the public user, the driver’s license applicant.</p>
<p>For this problem, you’ve also got multiple metrics you can look at, but for simplicity, you could identify one key metric and set an objective for it: the time it takes an applicant to get a drivers license from start of application to receiving the license. You want to decrease this time.</p>
<p>You’ve identified the users, problem, and measurable objective, so now you follow <a href="https://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design" target="_blank">human-centered design</a> principles and determine that most of the time is taken during compiling the right documents, filling out forms, and visiting the DMV. So you build an online application product that allows for complete online submission of the paperwork so users can make a trip to the DMV for just their signature and photo. Lo, after user testing and deploying the product, you find that you hit your objective. You conclude that your product successfully addresses the problem for driver’s license applicants applicants.</p>
<p>But you can’t stop there. And you can’t just think of future work on this product as maintenance in the form of bug fixes, security, and system uptime.</p>
<p><strong>Users change.</strong> They change in demographic makeup and how they use technology. Half of users may use this product on mobile today but next year? Maybe that’s up to 75%. If users change, their problems probably change too. In this case, hell, with the promise of autonomous cars, users are probably going to change how they use cars in the not too distant future – and what will that mean for driver’s license applications and this product you’ve built?</p>
<p><strong>Technology changes.</strong> What worked on Internet Explorer 6 may not work on the latest version of Firefox. What worked on desktop may not work on mobile. What is the most efficient and secure programming language or framework today won’t be in 2-5 years, much less 10 or 20 years from now.</p>
<p><strong>Policy changes.</strong> Requirements might be added or removed from the application process. Policy might even come down that mandates how quickly the DMV must process applications, which might affect how you think of product success.</p>
<p><em>Maintaining software isn’t good enough.</em> From the time of design, development, and launch, the software you’ve built is a living part of how you deliver services, and should be constantly evaluated and evolved alongside the evaluation and evolution of your agency’s service delivery as a whole – which should include assessing customer satisfaction, impact, efficiency, and other metrics and goals.</p>
<p>You might even find that your technology solution no longer helps your agency’s overall goals or solves your customers’ problems – in which case, don’t be afraid to sunset the product, document your learnings, and iterate on a new solution.<a href="#footnote6-20200304" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote6anc-20200304"><sup>6</sup></a></p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20200304" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20200304" name="footnote1sym-20200304">1</a>
Usually, but not always! There are amazing people in govtech implementing more effective product development approaches. #NotAllGovTechies
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20200304" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20200127" name="footnote2sym-20200304">2</a>
True story: I sent my first ever fax last month.
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20200304" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20200304" name="footnote3sym-20200304">3</a>
This is usually true in the private sector too, except in cases like the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/whats-happened-to-7-million-app-yo-now-that-the-hype-has-died-2014-9?op=1" target="_blank">Yo app</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20200304" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20200304" name="footnote4sym-20200304">4</a>
Although, yes, system performance and hitting metrics defined in service-level agreements (SLAs) are both important.
</div>
<div id="footnote5-20200304" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote5anc-20200304" name="footnote5sym-20200304">5</a>
Wouldn't it be cool if DMVs had product managers?
</div>
<div id="footnote6-20200304" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote6anc-20200304" name="footnote6sym-20200304">6</a>
In government and looking for something to sunset? I vote starting with the fax. And sending user passwords by physical mail. And websites that only work in Internet Explorer. See, there are so many things ripe for deprecation!
</div>
<p style="font-size: 0.9rem;font-style: italic;"><a href="https://flic.kr/p/a4DB5k">"Expect delays"</a><span> by <a href="https://flic.kr/p/a4DB5k">Tom Woodward</a></span> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" style="margin-right: 5px;">CC BY-SA 2.0</a></p>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2020/03/04/scary-words-i-hear-in-govtech-maintenance">Scary Words I Hear in GovTech: Maintenance</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on March 04, 2020.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2020/01/27/where-are-government-api-directories2020-01-27T00:10:00-05:002020-01-27T00:10:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>I’ve been working on organizing some departmental knowledge at CMS, and our <a href="https://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design" target="_blank">human-centered design</a> team – the crew that promotes design thinking and helps other teams build better, more user-focused products and processes<a href="#footnote1-20200127" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20200127"><sup>1</sup></a> – recommended that my first step be to get teams to make directories. It’s a huge task to get everyone to use <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence" target="_blank">Confluence</a> or to use it consistently. Instead, make sure each team has one Confluence page that links out to everything someone might need, and keep a central directory linking out to those team’s directory pages.</p>
<p>Directories aren’t just useful to collect resources in a collaborative team setting. Google found success in being the biggest, baddest directory<a href="#footnote2-20200127" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20200127"><sup>2</sup></a> of the World Wide Web in the whole wide world. Its premier product is essentially a list of links to other pages on the internet. The web wouldn’t be what it is today without lists of links, and without people or programs making lists of links.<a href="#footnote3-20200127" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20200127"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>This isn’t a new concept: tables of contents and indices in the backs of books have been providing lists of links for millennia.<a href="#footnote4-20200127" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20200127"><sup>4</sup></a> Tables of contents, indices, directories, catalogues, registries, etc – these are all about empowering the user. Do you think you know what people are looking for? You don’t. That’s why you have to empower people to find it themselves and access what they find. In other words: You need to give them a list of links – and maybe a decent search function.<a href="#footnote5-20200127" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote5anc-20200127"><sup>5</sup></a></p>
<p>In the context of government, it may seem like a no-brainer that a government website should have directories: a directory of all the services offered by that agency, or a directory (a.k.a. sitemap) of all the pages you can find on that website. Indeed, most government websites have these things. In fact, this may seem so obvious you’re probably wondering why I’m writing about it.</p>
<p><em>The thing is, when it comes to APIs and specifically government APIs, we don’t see a lot of directories.</em></p>
<p>Right now there is no complete (or even partially complete) authoritative list of US federal APIs. Here’s what does exist (that I could find this weekend):</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="https://18f.gsa.gov/" target="_blank">18F</a> used to maintain a <a href="http://18f.github.io/API-All-the-X/pages/developer_hubs/" target="_blank">list of federal developer hubs</a>, which is a pretty decent substitute for a list of federal APIs. An organization’s developer hub would typically list all of that organization’s APIs; however, this isn’t always the case. Furthermore, the Github repository for the website’s code has been archived, and the <a href="https://github.com/18F/API-All-the-X/blob/master/_data/developer_hubs.yml" target="_blank">last update</a> was made in September, 2018.<a href="#footnote6-20200127" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote6anc-20200127"><sup>6</sup></a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Programmable Web’s <a href="https://www.programmableweb.com/category/government/api" target="_blank">Government category</a> in their API directory currently contains 772 APIs. However, these include APIs from governments across the world (e.g. Singapore and New Zealand) as far as I can tell, there’s no way to filter these by country. Furthermore, some of these APIs are not published by governments but by private companies or other organizations.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The next closest thing I could find is <a href="https://data.gov" target="_blank">data.gov</a>. Notably, data.gov is the US federal directory for open datasets, and datasets are not the same thing as APIs. APIs are complete software products: they have a full lifecycle from strategy and design, to testing and deployment, to marketing and change management. Plus, they can be transactional, allow you to send data back (a.k.a. “write” APIs), or provide services (e.g. enabling you to <a href="https://www.foia.gov/developer/">submit a FOIA request via API</a>). Some of the datasets linked to from data.gov are available via APIs, in addition to being available as flat file downloads. You can <a href="https://catalog.data.gov/dataset?q=-aapi+api+OR++res_format%3Aapi#topic=developers_navigation" target="_blank">specify “API”</a> in the data directory to find these.<a href="#footnote7-20200127" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote7anc-20200127"><sup>7</sup></a></p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>I’ve done some research into other government API directories as well, and haven’t come up with a whole lot. Here are a couple:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>New Zealand has an <a href="https://api.business.govt.nz/api/explore-apis/by-category?tag=Companies-group&" target="_blank">API catalogue</a> that you can search, and when you select any API, you are directed to a page with both documentation and an API console rendered from the API’s OpenAPI definition.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) <a href="https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/gds-launches-government-api-catalogue/" target="_blank">recently started</a> an <a href="https://alphagov.github.io/api-catalogue/#uk-government-apis" target="_blank">API catalogue initiative</a>.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="why-bother-with-government-api-directories">Why bother with government API directories?</h2>
<p>API directories are important because APIs are products. An API directory is a product directory: you can think of it as both an inventory for the business owner and a catalogue of available products for the customer. Governments should have directories of their API products so that they themselves know what they have across different silos (a.k.a. agencies and departments) and can begin to collaborate and share knowledge (and eventually infrastructure), and so that the public can discover and use services and products offered as APIs.</p>
<p>You know that feeling when you go to an ice cream shop and want mint chocolate chip but it’s not on the menu, so you settle for chocolate chip cookie dough, only to find out after you’re halfway through that the shop had mint chocolate ship all along? Or you find out the shop had extra rich, dairy-free dark chocolate sorbet, which you’d never heard of before but definitely would’ve ordered if you’d seen it on the menu? Yeah, you feel a bit cheated, but in a way where no one wins.</p>
<p>That’s how I felt when I discovered the <a href="https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/registry/help-api">NPPES API</a>, CMS’s provider lookup API: I had already seen <a href="https://developer.cms.gov/">CMS’s developer portal</a> and thought I knew what was on CMS’s menu, only to discover this other API weeks later in a meeting. Needless to say, the dev portal does not list the NPPES API.<a href="#footnote8-20200127" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote8anc-20200127"><sup>8</sup></a></p>
<h2 id="why-are-api-directories-so-hard">Why are API directories so hard?</h2>
<p>People have been trying to build API directories for years. <a href="https://www.programmableweb.com/category/all/apis" target="_blank">Programmable Web</a>, <a href="https://rapidapi.com/" target="_blank">RapidAPI</a>, and others have API directories of varying levels of freshness and accuracy. It’s hard – especially when you’re relying on humans to create and maintain these directories. There are so many APIs, and they change: they get new versions, or they get deprecated, or their documentation moves to a different URL. It’s a lot to keep track of.</p>
<p>Wouldn’t it be great if we could automate creating and maintaining API directories somehow?</p>
<p>Luckily, people have been working on ways to do just that!</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="http://apisjson.org/" target="_blank">APIs.json</a>: This project, started by the <a href="http://apievangelist.com/" target="_blank">API Evangelist</a> and <a href="https://www.3scale.net/" target="_blank">3scale</a>, aims to create a standard, machine-readable way for API providers to describe and share their API operations, similar to how web sites are described using sitemap.xml (which is a pretty standard part of websites now). You can search APIs that are described by apis.json files at the related search engine project: <a href="https://apis.io/" target="_blank">apis.io</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-json-home-06" target="_blank">JSON Home</a>: Similar to the above, this project aims to provide a standard for machine-readable “homepages” for JSON APIs.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The goal with both of these standards is that you can figure out what APIs are offered by a given company or organization simply going to the API homepage. That homepage is essentially a directory of the APIs available with links to the documentation of each API.</p>
<h2 id="how-can-we-get-to-maintainable-sustainable-government-api-directories">How can we get to maintainable, sustainable government API directories?</h2>
<p>Many governments already have API standards and guidelines that they publish and – hopefully – adhere to. I would like to see each of these documents include a requirement that agencies keep an up-to-date machine-readable directory of their API offerings that link to the OpenAPI (or other standardized) definition for each API. One way they could do this is having an APIs.json file life at agency.gov/apis.json – or, they could use JSON Home or other emerging standards for machine-readable API directories.</p>
<p>The idea is, if you are a central government and you have some agencies publishing APIs, they could list their APIs as data in a machine-readable format on a URL that they’ve given you that doesn’t change, and then you can have a website that grabs that data from those URLs in real-time. Then, you can display the data however you like – maybe you jam all these lists into one list and display the list with pretty styling and let users search by keyword or filter by agency. Then, BAM, you have a centralized API directory that gives a coherent and accurate picture of all the APIs provided across your agencies, and all you had to do was add the agencies’ directory URLs to your website’s list of URLs to get data from.</p>
<p>Some governments and agencies already require API providers to register their APIs, though this isn’t currently requird to be in machine-readable formats:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://apiguide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/build_and_publish/advertise.html" target="_blank">Government of Australia</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/GSA/api-standards#1-add-your-api-to-the-gsa-api-directory" target="_blank">General Services Administration (GSA), USA</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I was excited to read that data.gov is already pushing a <a href="https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/" target="_blank">similar initiative</a> for open datasets: All agencies <a href="https://strategy.data.gov/action-plan/#action-3-assess-data-and-related-infrastructure-maturity" target="_blank">by the end of 2020</a> have to publish catalogues of their datasets at agency.gov/data and each dataset or data API offered by an agency must be described by a standardized data.json file that contains metadata. This makes automated discoverability and maintenance of the federal data directory not only possible, but easy. Let’s work towards making this same principle a reality for government APIs as well.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20200127" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20200127" name="footnote1sym-20200127">1</a>
Interested in how we use human centered design at CMS? Read about it on the <a href="https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/injecting-human-centered-design-into-government-policymaking-848d092fc568" target="_blank">USDS blog</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20200127" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20200127" name="footnote1sym-20200127">2</a>
Other superlatives we could add: Creepiest, greediest, megalomaniacalest, etc.
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20200127" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20200127" name="footnote3sym-20200127">3</a>
Unfortunately, Google's dominance as The Directory of the Internet is often a big deterrent from people making their own.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20200127" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20200127" name="footnote4sym-20200127">4</a>
According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_contents" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>. Wikipedia is another great example of a product using links to help people find what they’re looking for -- and things they weren't. Alas, the many hours lost to Wikipedia rabbit holes.
</div>
<div id="footnote5-20200127" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote5anc-20200127" name="footnote5sym-20200127">5</a>
Wondering what to get me for my birthday? That’s right - give me a list of links, maybe one with links to cool things to do in DC, because damn is it hard to find non-museum or non-institution events in this city.
</div>
<div id="footnote6-20200127" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote6anc-20200127" name="footnote6sym-20200127">6</a>
Interestingly, it looks like they'd had other ideas for creating a canonical list before, based on this <a href="https://github.com/18F/federal-apis" target="_blank">old, never completed Github repo</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote7-20200127" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote7anc-20200127" name="footnote7sym-20200127">7</a>
But this isn’t really a directory of the sort I’m looking for, and it appears only two departments publish APIs to this catalogue. These APIs are open data APIs and some of these APIs use HTML as a content type, so can these even be called APIs?
</div>
<div id="footnote8-20200127" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote8anc-20200127" name="footnote8sym-20200127">8</a>
To be fair, the NPPES API replaces a data download, so the providers may be thinking of it more as an open data offering than an API product, but still -- this is an API I'd like to use in a real-time manner, and if I hadn't been in the room to hear someone mention it, I would not even have known about it.
</div>
<p style="font-size: 0.9rem;font-style: italic;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/35401416@N08/6829856365">"Table of contents in Benedictus de Nursia: De conservatione sanitatis"</a><span> by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/35401416@N08">University of Glasgow Library</a></span> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=ccsearch&atype=html" style="margin-right: 5px;">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0</a></p>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2020/01/27/where-are-government-api-directories">Where are the Government API Directories?</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on January 27, 2020.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2020/01/21/the-sound-of-20202020-01-21T00:05:00-05:002020-01-21T00:05:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>Hello, internet, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again. Not about visions softly creeping, leaving seeds while I was sleeping. No, I haven’t been sleeping – I’ve barely had time to, between all the work I was doing in 2019 and the number of times I listened to this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounds_of_Silence" target="_blank">Simon and Garfunkel album</a> on repeat.<a href="#footnote1-20200121" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20200121"><sup>1</sup></a> It turns out I have a hard time saying no to interesting projects – and I’ve been focused more on doing than on writing about what I’ve been doing. Now, it’s time to reverse that trend, and disturb the sound of silence.<a href="#footnote2-20200121" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20200121"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<h2 id="2019-phew">2019, phew</h2>
<p>I’ll start with my biggest news of all: <em>In the fall, I moved to Washington, DC, to start a “tour of civic service” with the <a href="https://www.usds.gov/" target="_blank">United States Digital Service</a> (USDS).</em> I’m working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to help fix some small part of the healthcare system through thoughtful interoperability and better, more “modern” gov tech. I’ll write more about this later, but in the meantime, check out one of the products I’m working on: <a href="https://dpc.cms.gov/" target="_blank">Data at the Point of Care</a>.</p>
<p>But what else was I up to in 2019? In roughly chronological order:</p>
<p>Early in the year, <em>Programmable Web commissioned me</em> to <a href="https://www.programmableweb.com/news/i-tried-getting-my-data-out-facebook-quitting-i-even-wrote-code-it-didnt-go-well/analysis/2019/07/02" target="_blank">investigate the technical feasibility</a> of turning away from that neon god we’ve made,<a href="#footnote3-20200121" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20200121"><sup>3</sup></a> Facebook, and taking your data with you– and then to figure out <a href="https://www.programmableweb.com/news/self-hosted-personal-data-key-to-four-promising-facebook-alternatives/analysis/2019/07/02" target="_blank">what your options are</a> if you do manage to do that. I dove into the delightful, difficult world of the decentralized web and specifically standards and projects around decentralizing social networks.<a href="#footnote4-20200121" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20200121"><sup>4</sup></a></p>
<p>Around that time, the <em>European Commission’s <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/new-study-digital-government-apis-apis4dgov-project" target="_blank">APIs4Dgov project</a></em> brought together a group of researchers and writers, including myself, to prepare a report making recommendations to EU member states on developing their API strategies. I worked on the technical framework recommendations, and in June contributed to a day-long workshop at <a href="https://www.apidays.fi/2019" target="_blank">APIdays Helsinki</a> for folks in gov tech to share knowledge and best practices for implementing government API products. Report to be published this year.</p>
<p>In May, we launched our first <em><a href="https://www.restfest.org/">REST Fest</a> in <a href="https://2019.restfest.org/eu/" target="_blank">Poland</a></em>, and in September we kicked off our tenth year of REST Fest in <a href="https://2019.restfest.org/east/" target="_blank">Greenville, SC</a>. REST Fest is an unconference dedicated to APIs, hypermedia, and web architecture, and I’ve been involved in organizing it for the past few years. The core principle is that everyone talks, everyone listens, and the goal is to help foster a collaborative, non-intimidating environment to discuss and hack on tools for APIs.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://openreferral.org/" target="_blank">Open Referral</a></em>, an initiative pushing forward interoperability of health and human services data, has been gaining adoption and over 2019 launched multiple partnerships to implement their Human Services Data Specification (HSDS) and open source tools in different cities. Building on some work I started while mentoring students at <a href="https://www.hackillinois.org/" target="_blank">HackIllinois</a> (a 2 day college hackathon) in February, I helped <a href="https://openreferral.org/introducing-open-referrals-data-transformation-toolkit/" target="_blank">code and deploy open source MVPs</a> (minimum viable products) of tools to convert data from unstructured or miscellaneous formats to HSDS-compliant datasets.</p>
<h2 id="so-2020">So, 2020</h2>
<p>I’m tempted to start this section with “Ain’t no rest for the wicked” but alas, that’s not within the song scope of this post. The sentiment, however, still applies.</p>
<p>While I continue full-time at USDS, I’m going to get back into writing here and speaking at conferences. Over my career I’ve done a lot of work adjacent to government – like volunteering with Code for America brigades, consulting for municipalities, and building products for government users – and now that I’m on the inside, I’ll have a lot to share about what I observe and learn.</p>
<p>Questions I’m thinking about right now:</p>
<ul>
<li>What does “modernization” mean for government technology?</li>
<li>How do we build digital public infrastructure that lasts years or decades that is flexible, adaptive, and user-centered?</li>
<li>How does open source meet or not meet the needs of gov/civic tech?</li>
<li>How can we learn from decentralization to build more effective or more resilient public infrastructure?</li>
</ul>
<p>I’d love to hear what questions you have too – reach out on Twitter or respond to my newsletter (sign up in the footer at the bottom of this page) to talk.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20200121" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20200121" name="footnote1sym-20200121">1</a>
Yes, I got this album on vinyl, because I'm that cool.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20200121" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20200121" name="footnote2sym-20200121">2</a>
I wish I could say that this is the last time I use a Simon and Garfunkel song as metaphorical fodder.
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20200121" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20200121" name="footnote3sym-20200121">3</a>
Okay, okay, I <strong>think</strong> this is the last Simon and Garfunkel reference in this post.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20200121" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20200121" name="footnote4sym-20200121">4</a>
What is decentralization, you ask? Check out this article: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle</a>
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2020/01/21/the-sound-of-2020">The Sound of 2020</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on January 21, 2020.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/06/25/white-house-api-standards-api-ancestry2019-06-25T04:20:00-04:002019-06-25T04:20:00-04:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p><strong>Note: This is somewhat technical and focused on APIs, but may also be of interest to anyone who cares about how conventions and trends for digital government spread.</strong></p>
<p>I’m in the middle of a research project on government APIs, and as I’ve read more and more examples of API guidelines from governments across the world, it’s struck me how so many of them can trace their roots back to the <a href="https://github.com/WhiteHouse/api-standards" target="_blank">White House API Standards</a>. Even if I haven’t found evidence of direct lineage from the White House standards to a given API playbook, that playbook usually at least cites the White House repo as a resource or example for further reading.</p>
<h2 id="origins-of-the-white-house-api-standards">Origins of the White House API Standards</h2>
<p>In 2011, President Obama issued an <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2011-05-02/pdf/2011-10732.pdf" target="_blank">executive order</a> mandating that US federal agencies had to make web APIs. I can imagine that things got chaotic pretty quickly, with competing conventions struggling for dominance like tortoises crawling on top each other for the sunniest spot on the rock, because the following year someone had the good idea of creating a document of API standards for at least the White House APIs to adhere to.</p>
<p>The White House API Standards repository on GitHub was created on Dec 19, 2012, with a <a href="https://github.com/WhiteHouse/api-standards/commit/493637c457bf8ac3439feff6d4a391f4f6a9a9dd" target="_blank">first commit</a> whose message and content was some pretty impressive ASCII art:</p>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/wh-ascii-art.png" alt="White House ASCII Art" /></p>
<p>The committer is <a href="https://github.com/bryanhirsch" target="_blank">Bryan Hirsch</a>, tech lead at New Media Technologies at the White House at the time. I found this <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/sitesusa/wp-content/uploads/sites/212/2014/01/api-standards-white-house.pdf" target="_blank">sweet slide deck</a> that he and Leigh Heyman, Director of New Media Technologies at the White House, used to explain the thinking behind their new standards, plus an article about and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bJo6zii7lw&w=600" target="_blank">video</a> of the talk.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-bJo6zii7lw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>The tl;dr is that they created the API standards after working on the “We the People” petition website and related API, in order to make the underlying data concepts easier for non-developers to understand as well as maintain and encourage API best practices over time at the White House and maybe beyond. That beyond definitely happened.</p>
<p>Before I get into that, I think it’s worth documenting here the influences on the White House API Standards:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEyg0TnieLg" target="_blank">Designing HTTP Interfaces and RESTful Web Services</a></li>
<li><a href="http://apigee.com/about/resources/ebooks/api-fa%C3%A7ade-pattern" target="_blank">API Facade Pattern</a>, by Brian Mulloy, Apigee</li>
<li><a href="http://pages.apigee.com/web-api-design-ebook.html" target="_blank">Web API Design</a>, by Brian Mulloy, Apigee</li>
<li><a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm" target="_blank">Fielding’s Dissertation on REST</a></li>
</ul>
<p>It’s also worth noting that the White House petition project was built in Drupal, and these standards include Drupal-specific resources and one of the main influences is a talk from a Drupal conference. The standards also still include JSONP examples, although that technology is outdated, insecure, and not generally recommended anymore.</p>
<h2 id="the-offspring-and-third-cousins-twice-removed-of-the-white-house-api-standards">The offspring and third cousins twice removed of the White House API Standards</h2>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/wh-api-standards-github-repo.png" alt="White House API Standards GitHub Repo" /></p>
<p>To trace the family tree that sprung from the White House API guidelines, I started with the GitHub repository’s forks. There are 654 forks, which means that the repo has been copied and potentially extended or used as a base for other projects 654 times. It has 2,621 stars, meaning that many unique users on Github wanted to register their interest in the project. 215 users are watching it, even though the last activity was 4 years ago.</p>
<p>The following governments have made direct forks of the repo:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/CityOfPhiladelphia/api-standards" target="_blank">City of Philadelphia</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/massdotgov/api-standards" target="_blank">State of Massachussetts</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/USDepartmentofLabor/api-standards" target="_blank">US Dept of Labor</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/alphagov/api-standards" target="_blank">UK Gov Digital Service</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Admittedly, a fork doesn’t automatically mean use, but in some of these cases the forking organization has clearly used and updated the standards.</p>
<p>Other government agencies cite these guidelines as their origin, although I can’t find a direct GitHub fork or commit trail:</p>
<ul>
<li>18F: <a href="https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/blob/5362d3e7cdcd5781995faef634ad4ca84c1d1920/content/posts/2014/07/2014-07-16-hot-off-the-press-18fs-api-standards.md" target="_blank">Source</a> by forking the White House’s repo.</li>
<li>Australian Digital Transformation Office: <a href="https://github.com/AusDTO/apiguide/blob/e75f82e81565203aa20773347e2d479499dbef9d/build_and_publish/index.rst" target="_blank">Source</a></li>
<li>Finland: <a href="https://github.com/6aika/development_guide/blob/b099cf86e509c4ffeab6eaacbb765702763f15ad/README.md" target="_blank">Source</a></li>
<li>El salvador: <a href="https://github.com/egobsv/EstandaresInteroperabilidad/blob/097b378c43fd2858590c9b33878e6cf35fe49388/Desarrollo.md" target="_blank">Source</a></li>
</ul>
<p>The fact that 18F (and subsequently the General Services Administration), the Australian Digital Transformation Office, and the UK Government Digital Service all have API guidelines that either directly originate from the WH standards or were influenced by them is pretty significant, because all three of these organizations have been hugely influential in digital government and government API strategy and implementation.</p>
<p>And the influence of this repo don’t stop with the public sector. Plenty of private sector and nonprofit organizations such as Code for America brigades have forked the repo or cited it as an example or influence, including <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/blob/21106db06fefc734b5827008bada6b4ff6aa6bb8/CONTRIBUTING.md" target="_blank">Microsoft</a> and <a href="https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/api-guidelines/blob/f25639b1063803d5b1fc3a74a4d94b905cc73301/README.md" target="_blank">IBM Watson</a></p>
<p>Most of this was uncovered through browsing and text searching on Github as well as on DuckDuckGo. You could explore this more rigorously with some comparative textual analysis of government API guidelines out there that may not reference the White House repo, but I’m not sure if it’s worth going that far. APIs have gotten more ubiquitous and as more and more governments (and companies) have started implementing API programs, their API conventions have matured and evolved past the White House API standards to include things like design thinking for API product strategy and more detailed recommendations on other aspects of API lifecycle such as security and discovery.</p>
<p>Despite that, it’s interesting to see how much impact these standards have had. As I continue with my research, I’ll probably be able to further trace lines back to 18F, UK Government Digital Service, and Australia, showing the impact that any single organization can have on this tightknit landscape.</p>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/06/25/white-house-api-standards-api-ancestry">The White House API Standards and the Ancestry of Government API Guidelines</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on June 25, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/06/18/public-data-as-public-history2019-06-18T13:45:00-04:002019-06-18T13:45:00-04:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<blockquote>
<p>“It is a supreme gift to realize that the past is a burden you don’t need to carry with you.”<a href="#footnote1-20190618" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20190618"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In our current digital world, this advice feels both relevant and out of reach. As tech companies follow your every click, view, like, and search across the web, they build profiles of you and assign you a shadow identity even if you “opt out” of tracking, and they effectively make it impossible for you to let the past go.<a href="#footnote2-20190618" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20190618"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>Not only is it unclear whether you can ever erase this past, but it’s also incredibly difficult to escape it — both within a single product and across the internet via advertisements. For example: A friend recently searched for “swallow” on eBay in order to find back issues of a food <a href="http://swallowmagazine.com/" target="_blank">magazine</a> of the same name, and after getting results that were pornographic rather than useful, she continued to see recommendations for the sex-related products for days after. She spent hours scouring the internet and finally talking to eBay support for ways to delete her search history or change recommendations, all to find out that the only path forward was to delete her account and make a new one, a process which could take days or weeks. There are numerous product issues here, but to me one of the most shocking things that even within a single product, users do not have the ability to control what’s saved and used about them.</p>
<p>For another example, take this <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/12/12/dear-tech-companies-i-dont-want-see-pregnancy-ads-after-my-child-was-stillborn/" target="_blank">powerful article</a> from last year in which the author describes how after she suffered a stillbirth, she continued seeing ads targeted at pregnant women. When she reported them as not relevant, she was then shown ads for products for newborns, as though the ad algorithm had assumed that because she was no longer pregnant, she must’ve given birth happily. Facebook responded to this article with instructions on how to opt out of entire ad topics, but that’s just for their platform. How can someone possibly reshape their preferences, history, and identity across the internet when their data is being consumed, analyzed, and used for targeted ads (or other purposes) without their knowledge or consent by companies they may or may not even know about?<a href="#footnote3-20190618" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20190618"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<h2 id="cities-and-the-burden-of-their-past">Cities and the burden of their past</h2>
<p>A lot has been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/privacy-congress-facebook-google.html" target="_blank">written</a> about the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/google-purchases.html" target="_blank">loss of agency</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/opinion/sunday/google-privacy.html" target="_blank">data ownership</a> of individuals on the internet, and there are projects and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/06/11/us/politics/ap-us-congress-big-tech.html" target="_blank">legislation</a> underway seeking to address these issues. But what does this mean for communities? For cities?</p>
<p><em>How does the current state of technology enable or prohibit cities and the people living in them from making their own history, re-making it, owning it, and disowning it?</em></p>
<p>Note: I’m focusing on cities here rather than communities or other levels of government, because they are a nice little unit with formal governance and plenty of examples to draw on.</p>
<p>Obviously, cities are a bit different than individuals. For one, cities are very much built on the past: they survive for centuries if not millennia, and they evolve and are constantly shaped by past decisions as well as the desires and needs of current inhabitants or stakeholders, whether they are locals or live in Silicon Valley. We see the past all around us: physical infrastructure like buildings, streets, and water systems, and cultural infrastructure, like <a href="https://medium.com/@BloombergCities/how-cities-are-taking-a-more-strategic-view-toward-public-art-ecbec0aade14" target="_blank">public art</a>, outdoor spaces, and memorials. We also see different versions of or remembrances of the past coexisting, like statues of Martin Luther King, Jr, <a href="https://atlanta.curbed.com/2017/8/28/16212490/georgia-state-capitol-mlk-statue-unveiling" target="_blank">sharing space</a> with memorials to confederate soldiers or white supremacists.</p>
<p>And there are many pasts we don’t see: the villages, cities, trade routes, and culture of indigenous peoples erased or displaced by settlers. There are the voices and stories that have historically in this society not been heard or recorded: those of women, indiginous groups, minorities, lower classes, the disabled, and immigrant communities.</p>
<p>This past of a city not something we can or should easily discard, even if it’s a burden we don’t want to carry with us. It is is important to recognize and to seek to understand, because those past decisions impact the present. The construction of highways through historically black or blue-collar neighborhoods not only displaced communities and ensured the future difficulty of revitalizing those neighborhoods, but also led people and money out of cities and into suburbs, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/role-of-highways-in-american-poverty/474282/" target="_blank">shaping American poverty</a> today.</p>
<p>But a city’s past is constantly being reshaped: we reshape it when we uncover the untold stories, when we understand the influences shaping our present, when we make new decisions for our city’s present or future.</p>
<h2 id="the-digital-history-of-cities-is-public-data">The digital history of cities is public data</h2>
<p><em>With tech, we have the opportunity – or misfortune – of having another medium on and with which to write our cities’ and our communities’ histories.</em></p>
<p>We’re writing the digital history of cities in the same way our personal histories are being written for us online: through data. For individuals, digital history is the personal data that accumulates from our digital activity - the data we intentionally input and collect as well as the data collected about us.</p>
<p>For cities, that digital history is public data, by which I mean data that is generated by the public, though it may not necessarily be publicly accessible. Public data can take a few different forms – and if I’m missing any below, please let me know!</p>
<h3 id="surveys-and-observational-analysis">Surveys and observational analysis</h3>
<p>For ages cities have been using public surveys to collect data to understand the stories of their communities and inform policies, zoning rules, etc. There are known issues with this, such as sample size, self-selection, truthfulness, and replicability.<a href="#footnote4-20190618" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20190618"><sup>4</sup></a> People have to opt in to taking the survey, so surveys are missing the voices of people who opt out, and even when taking surveys, people may not answer truthfully or consistently with what they’ve said in the past. Other tactics involve in-person <a href="https://issuu.com/gehlarchitects/docs/gehl_publiclifediversitytoolkit_pag" target="_blank">observational analysis</a>, but that’s only useful when not used in isolation, which I am told is unfortunately often the practice.</p>
<h3 id="operational-data">Operational data</h3>
<p>Operational data is data the city agencies collect in the process of its daily operations. More governments are starting to understand the power of the data they generate simply by doing their jobs, and the stories they can tell with that data.</p>
<p>For example, New York City established the <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/site/analytics/index.page" target="_blank">Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA)</a> to start treating its operational data as a true asset that can help the city improve services, address issues, share data across the city, and implement NYC’s open data law. They are starting to tell the stories of this data and the people involved in its creation, such as those of <a href="https://nycanalytics.gitbook.io/nyc-data-at-work-2018/nyc-data-at-work-cases/what-taxi-trip-data-tells-us-about-mobility-and-driver-welfare" target="_blank">drivers of for-hire-vehicles and their welfare</a>.</p>
<h3 id="open-data">Open data</h3>
<p>Public data can be open data. It can be the data that’s available for citizens and companies and other organizations to download and browse or access with an API key. Not all public data that governments collect is actually – or should be – public in the sense of open and freely accessible. That same ride-hailing data that NYC has used to understand and inform policy <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/nyc-uber-lyft-ride-hail-data/" target="_blank">was shown</a> at one point to contain personally identifiable information which the public would surely not want to actually be public. The balance of privacy and transparency isn’t a problem that’s been solved, but that shouldn’t keep us from trying and promoting open when possible.</p>
<p>While I have heard government tech folks lament at the underutilization of open data portals, open data is critical in the effort for cities to own their narrative and be accountable to residents and themselves.</p>
<h3 id="social-data">Social data</h3>
<p>Social data can also be public data. An Australian start-up called Neighboulytics has recognized this and is using social data to help cities understand their communities and inform the city decisions. I saw their Head of Analytics, Gala Camacho Ferrari, give a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-9LQjQF1xU&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">talk</a> at <a href="https://csvconf.com/" target="_blank">CSV,conf</a> last month,<a href="#footnote5-20190618" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote5anc-20190618"><sup>5</sup></a> and I’m equally cautious and excited about this.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g-9LQjQF1xU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>This is an example of people in the community creating their own data and cities being able to read and incorporate that into the city’s story and use it to have a voice in shaping the city. I have a few concerns though:</p>
<ol>
<li>People post on social media or review sites for a different purpose than city planning, and that context needs to be taken into account when trying to glean insights.</li>
<li>Furthermore, those people may not consent to their data being used that way. They are posting publicly, though, so they have at least dubiously consented to public use (whether they understand that or not is a different question).</li>
<li>Not everyone in the city engages with social media in a way that can be accessed and used, so their voices may not be represented.</li>
<li>That data lives on notoriously closed platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (owned by Facebook), so we don’t necessarily know what’s being filtered out or pushed to the top, and those algorithms might impact the way data is presented and read.</li>
</ol>
<p>Their founder does a good job addressing the some of these concerns in a <a href="https://idealog.co.nz/urban/2019/01/neighbourlytics-could-social-data-democratise-city-planning" target="_blank">recent interview</a>, and the last is deeply related to the issue of personal data ownership that we’ve already talked about above. Regardless, I think social data is a valuable piece of the puzzle because it rethinks how cities find and incorporate the voices of their residents.</p>
<h3 id="311-data">311 data</h3>
<p>Technically 311 data is a subset of operational data and in some cases open data, but it’s worth calling out specifically because it is so important. 311 is the service that can be a hotline or other communication mechanism through which residents in a city can report issues or complaints with city services or neighbors, e.g. noise complaints, tenants rights issues, etc. More than 200 cities in the US have 311, though I’m not sure if cities in other countries have equivalent services.<a href="#footnote6-20190618" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote6anc-20190618"><sup>6</sup></a></p>
<p>I’ve heard NYC government employees call 311 open data the single most important dataset in the city. It is the feedback loop between the city and residents.</p>
<h3 id="physical-data">Physical data</h3>
<p>Cities are physical places, and they generate physical data. There’s been a lot of hype in the past few years about “Smart Cities” and the potential of unlocking the value of this data for cities through smart or wifi-connected devices placed around the city. For example, Syracuse <a href="https://www.govtech.com/smart-cities/Smarter-Streetlights-Are-Just-the-Beginning-in-Syracuse-NY.html" target="_blank">recently announced</a> a $32 million project to upgrade its streetlights to have smart controllers, and these new lights will be the foundation for future projects like sensors to collect traffic data.</p>
<p>At what point does this data collection for public good become privacy-violating surveillance? I don’t want to dive into that too much now, but what I find promising are the emergence of sensor companies like <a href="http://www.numina.co/" target="_blank">Numina</a> that build devices that do “onboard computing” or “edge processing” – basically meaning that images and other identifying information are processed on the device and sent to the cloud in an anoymized form, and then that identifying information is deleted on the device. To me, this is the only acceptable and responsible way to do public Internet of Things data collection that I know of.</p>
<h3 id="geographic-data">Geographic data</h3>
<p>Another type of public physical data is geographic data. Also known as map data or geospatial data, this type of data is public because it describes the world that we all share. This may not necessarily include geospatial data describing private property, but it does include data describing streets, parks, locations of public institutions, etc. Cities and governments typically have departments responsible for a geographic information system (GIS) with detailed geographic data of their jurisdiction, though that data has historically been difficult or costly for the public to access.</p>
<p>Maps are an important part of the public data conversation because they are a “tool of both recognition and oppression.” I dive into this a bit more below, but for some positive news and a historical look at the social impact of maps, check out <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/this-alternative-to-google-maps-aims-to-protect-indigenous-land-62e2e414eb04" target="_blank">this article</a> about a new mapping project called LandMark that aims to map and therefore help protect indigenous land.</p>
<h2 id="shaping-public-data-with-an-eye-towards-equity">Shaping public data with an eye towards equity</h2>
<p><em>Data itself isn’t objective, and the act of collecting data isn’t enough.</em> The stories we can tell from data are shaped by the way we collect the data, and what data we choose to collect. For example, if we collect data about medical service use and only collect binary gender options (male and female, rather than additional options such as trans-male and trans-female), then we are missing insight into the medical needs of the trans community.</p>
<p>Taking the same approach with 311 data, if we don’t overlay service request data with socioeconomic, demographic, or location data, we may miss valuable insights into why certain requests seem more prevalent than others. Studies like <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.02452" target="_blank">this one</a> have shown that socio-economic and demographic factors do play a role in who is more likely to make service requests, meaning that we cannot use 311 data on its own to tell a definitive and unbiased story of all city service issues. From a practical perspective, this is important because the city uses this data to determine things like resource allocation and maintenance, and therefore needs to make sure additional data and analsysis are used alongside the raw data to provide context.</p>
<h2 id="the-hand-that-holds-the-pen">The hand that holds the pen</h2>
<p>As the characters of the recent film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5437928/" target="_blank">Colette</a>, like to say, the hand that holds the pen writes history. If public data is the history being written, we have to make sure that the public is the one holding the pen (and the paper). We already see the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/opinion/data-privacy.html" target="_blank">disturbing consequences</a> of individuals not owning their data or rights to their data in the current tech landscape. This has sobering implications for cities and communities that we can’t ignore.</p>
<p>We’ve already seen <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/google-maps-neighborhood-names.html">multiple instances</a> of communities’s identities being shaped against their knowledge or will because of the power of tech companies like Google in owning and controlling the data that people use. Take for example the <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/how-googles-bad-data-wiped-a-neighborhood-off-the-map-80c4c13f1c2b" target="_blank">recent story</a> about Google erasing a neighborhood and the aftereffects. A community in Buffalo that had referred to itself as the Fruit Belt for generations, suddenly found itself being referred to as “Medical Park” on Google Maps. The source of the name change is complex (read the article - it’s a good one!), but a local geographer and data scientist named Aaron Krolikowski quoted in the article summarizes a key point:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We’ve historically tended to self-identify our communities…. If suddenly we become disconnected from that process, I think there’s a lot of questions that emerge about the ability of a community to determine its future, in some cases.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The ability for a for-profit company, which is not accountable to the community (except perhaps when there is bad enough press), to issue an entirely new identity to that community without its consent and with clear economic and social consequences on that community’s shape and future, is a demonstrative and alarming example of the wrong person holding the pen.</p>
<p>We also have to be cognizant of who is <strong>making</strong> the pen. If the tools being used for civic planning and data collection are built by people who are not representative of the communities in which these tools are being deployed, they will not even be aware of the variations and types of data they need to be able to collect.</p>
<p>This is why many people are reasonably wary of “Smart Cities” programs, especially Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs <a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/12/bianca-wylie-interview-toronto-quayside-protest-criticism/574477/" target="_blank">project in Toronto</a>. Alphabet is the parent company of Google, and this project involves huge quantities of data being collected. For this project and all the other tech projects involving public data generation, collection, and analysis, we have to keep asking:</p>
<p>Who will truly own that data? Who will decide what types of data get collected, and who is collecting the data? Who is making the tools for this data collection? What policy decisions will this data influence, and what stories will be told from it? How will individuals’ privacy be protected? How will cities ensure this data doesn’t get passed to undisclosed companies to further target ads or seek profit or be used against the will of the public? Perhaps most importantly, how will city residents be able to control and shape that data, delete it when they choose to, and use it for their own self-determination?</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20190618" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20190618" name="footnote1sym-20190618">1</a>
I saw this quote on a little bronze plaque in a Budapest coffee house called <a href="http://madalcafe.hu" target="_blank">Cafe Madal</a>, though, full disclosure, the wording might have been slightly different. I didn’t take a picture and I haven’t found this in the online archives of Sri Chinmoy, to whom the cafe attributed these words.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20190618" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20190618" name="footnote2sym-20190618">2</a>
You can read more about that <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-profiles-zuckerberg-congress-data-privacy" target="_blank">here</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20190618" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20190618" name="footnote3sym-20190618">3</a>
For a look at data brokering, but in the location/geospatial industry, check out <a href="https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/the-tradeoff-between-the-utility-and-risk-of-location-data-and-implications-for-public-good/" target="_blank">this report</a> from MIT.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20190618" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20190618" name="footnote4sym-20190618">4</a>
Admittedly my <a href="https://www.neighbourlytics.com/blog/reasons-trust-community-surveys" target="_blank">source</a> is a company trying to sell an alternative to surveys.
</div>
<div id="footnote5-20190618" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote5anc-20190618" name="footnote5sym-20190618">5</a>
Also, thanks to Gala for pointing me to some of the articles linked in this post!
</div>
<div id="footnote6-20190618" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote6anc-20190618" name="footnote6sym-20190618">6</a>
Check out this fun <a href="https://www.citylab.com/city-makers-connections/311/" target="_blank">timeline</a> for a history on 311.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/06/18/public-data-as-public-history">Public Data as Public History – and Future</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on June 18, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/04/30/trust-is-digital-infrastructure2019-04-30T12:00:00-04:002019-04-30T12:00:00-04:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>“What does digital infrastructure mean to you?” someone asked me last week on a late night walk through DC.</p>
<p>We’d just left federal government grounds, where a cross-organizational, tech-in-gov family games night was hosted in the ceremonial Secretary of War suite. I was buzzing from pizza and non-stop conversation about improving government for the American public.</p>
<p>“APIs,” I said – which, you might already know, is my default answer to any tech question. API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s how you exchange data between software systems or servers.</p>
<p>“I’m thinking at a lower level,” he responded. “To me, it’s NPM (a tool for managing JavaScript libraries), or other libraries we use to build software.”</p>
<p>In other words, he meant code, open source or otherwise.</p>
<h2 id="hardware-and-the-cloud-as-digital-infrastructure">Hardware and the cloud as digital infrastructure</h2>
<p>Code is digital infrastructure, and I’ve already written on why I think <a href="/2019/02/07/public-vs-community-ownership-open-source-civic-tech" target="_blank">public infrastructure code should be open source</a>. But there are other layers of digital infrastructure as well: the lowest level of all, technologically speaking, is hardware. APIs help you get data and value out of a system: they enable new workflows and products and unlock value for other parties. But to have APIs, you have to have software and data that can be exposed and used by others. That software lives as code, and that code has to live somewhere.</p>
<p>Traditionally, in government and enterprise industries – from finance to healthcare – that “somewhere” was and often still is a locked-down warehouse, basement, or closet, housing one or many servers that can be accessed through secure networks on-site (e.g. an “intranet”) or, when allowed, by external users via the internet.</p>
<p>Compare that to the “cloud”: The cloud is a bunch of servers that run somewhere else, in a dedicated server farm or data center, and if you want to host your code and data somewhere, you can purchase space in that data center. You no longer have to worry about the physical safety of your servers, like protecting them from natural disasters or making sure they don’t overheat. You also don’t have to worry about scaling: if you need the servers to do more or hold more data, or you need more users to be able to make requests to your servers, you don’t have to buy the new hardware (or physical space) and provision it yourself. You can simply click a button, pay a little more, and voila! You’ve got more server space and capability almost instantly.</p>
<p>The question of whether governments should self-host software that is public infrastructure or host it in the cloud, is complex. I see two main reasons why:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>Self-hosting is extraordinarily expensive, especially with the existing procurement process and government vendor landscape.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The existential threat to democracy that monopolistic private hosting companies pose, especially the elephants in every room: Amazon and Google.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Governments very often still “self-host,” but what this usually means is pissing away money to an endless number of contractors (including multiple layers of companies who simply re-sell the software or services of other companies) who manage and maybe sometimes own the data centers. It’s an expensive and inefficient byproduct of the bloated, spaghetti-like procurement process. I’m generally trying to be less uncouth (more couth?) but honestly this makes me so angry and the phrase “pissing away” feels right in my soul.</p>
<p>Governments can save millions or billions of dollars by moving their code to be hosted in the cloud. This would also give better service to the People through more reliable, faster, and sometimes more secure websites that provide public services.</p>
<p><strong>But, and this is a big but: if hardware is a necessary component of digital public infrastructure, should that hardware be publicly (i.e. government) owned?</strong></p>
<p>I think the answer is maybe, but it has to be done differently than it is now. Procurement is part of digital infrastructure too, and the existing processes need to be improved if not overhauled completely.</p>
<p><strong>And if that hardware is not publicly owned, is it okay for government software to be hosted on just one, maybe two, cloud hosting providers?</strong></p>
<p>The answer to this question is emphatically <strong>no</strong>.</p>
<p>This is a critical question to ask in this moment, because one cloud hosting provider is currently beating out all the others and is frequently cited as the best-in-class, de facto hosting platform: Amazon.<a href="#footnote1-20190430" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20190430"><sup>1</sup></a> Amazon Web Services (AWS) has over a 35% market share of the cloud,<a href="#footnote2-20190430" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20190430"><sup>2</sup></a> and there are only two significant competitors: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. An argument could even be made that the bigger a cloud provider is, the cheaper and more efficient its services are, which, some might argue, is better for everyone. Why have more than one big cloud, let alone three big clouds?</p>
<p>Right now I’m generally for government services to be moved to the cloud, but it cannot be to a single cloud. If all government services were hosted on AWS, this would pose an incredible risk to the People: If Amazon failed, then government might fail.<a href="#footnote3-20190430" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20190430"><sup>3</sup></a> And even scarier, if Amazon could influence or turn off government by increasing costs or shutting down services, they could hold government, and therefore the People, hostage.<a href="#footnote4-20190430" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20190430"><sup>4</sup></a></p>
<p>Government cannot rely on a single cloud that it does not own. We need clear guidelines and policy for diversifying the clouds that make up the hardware layer of digital public infrastructure.</p>
<p><strong>But it’s not just within the public realm that we have to be wary of clouds that are too big to fail or so big and closed that they can exert undue control without oversight.</strong> Our economy and society are increasingly run in digital or online spaces, and those spaces, while not physical, are public spaces. The digital infrastructure underlying them needs thoughtful oversight, regulation, and maintenance just as we would expect for roads, parks, and brick-and-mortar businesses. We need a plethora of digital options for hosting our businesses, accessing services, communicating with our social networks, and sharing photos from last week’s Corgi meetup in Central Park, and we need to be able to leave a platform if we don’t like what they’re doing with our data or the rules they impose on the types of software we can host.</p>
<p><em>We need policy and anti-trust regulation to protect the People (read: the consumers, the citizens, the residents, the people who just want to get on with their day) from privately held, monopolistic cloud infrastructure.</em></p>
<p>On a more technical note, this is why I’m also a proponent of Docker, containerization, and serverless technologies, which make it possible and, ideally, easy to move from one cloud provider to another. That way, even if you end up on AWS or Google Cloud, you can re-deploy your code to a different provider, or your own servers, in days or even hours if you need to. If these words don’t mean anything to you, just remember that portability of code and data is critical if we’re going to use cloud providers.</p>
<p>I’m also super excited about distributed and decentralized technologies to help solve this problem, which I’ll write about later.</p>
<h2 id="trust-is-digital-infrastructure">Trust is digital infrastructure</h2>
<p>So far I’ve talked about how hardware, the cloud, procurement, and anti-trust regulation are key components of digital (public) infrastructure. <strong>But underlying all public infrastructure, digital or otherwise, is trust.</strong></p>
<p>We trust that restaurants are being reviewed by the Department of Health to make sure they’re sanitary and safe, and we trust that, barring some cases of discrimination and minor corruption, these reviews are honest and in the best interest of the public. We trust that the bridge we drive over to get to work is being maintained and audited for safety on a regular basis by dependable civil servants (or contractors being managed by civil servants), so that it won’t collapse while we’re on it. We trust – maybe – that when we enter our social security number into a government website, that that number and accompanying sensitive information about us is safe from hackers.</p>
<p>It’s worrying to me that I have to insert the “maybe.” Government technology is so far behind private sector technology, from user, product, and tech perspectives, that it makes sense why people trust private companies more when it comes to technological sophistication and security. Tech companies got into people’s hands and onto people’s screens first. It makes sense to be a little cautious, or skeptical, but we should also have that skepticism when we interact with private companies’ tech too.</p>
<p>The key difference between private companies and government that somehow seems to be forgotten is that, in a democracy or republic at least, the People own the government and can influence and change how it’s run. When we don’t think gov tech is up to the task, we can vote for politicians and legislation to change that and we can meet with or become civil servants who tackle those problems. When we lose faith in Facebook or Google, we are powerless to change those companies, especially if/when there are no other options for us to turn to to conduct business or online social activity.</p>
<p>It’s therefore also worrying to me when governments choose to trust private companies rather than build trust directly with citizens; for example, when a government website asks you to sign in using your Facebook login. While whoever made the decision to have that authentication feature probably had good intentions (such as attract a younger demographic or make it easier for users by not adding to account credentials they have to remember), <strong>this is a failure of gov tech because the government is abdicating the privilege and responsibility of trust.</strong> It outsources identity management, which is surely a key function of government, an indicator of authority, and a requirement for trust in any transaction, to a private-sector company. Not only a private-sector company, but Facebook, the company that is increasingly perceived (rightfully, in my opinion) as not only creepy, but unethical and certainly untrustworthy.</p>
<p><em>When we build civic or gov tech, we cannot give up trust. We cannot build tools or companies that ask the People to trust those tools and companies over or instead of the government. As democratic institutions, we have to actively build trust, ask for it, and earn it. It’s the most critical piece of infrastructure, and we cannot lose it to private companies instead.</em></p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20190430" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20190430" name="footnote1sym-20190430">1</a>
For some examples of Amazon's cloud reach even four years ago, see <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/the-unbelievable-power-of-amazon-web-services/391281/" target="_blank">this Atlantic article</a>
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20190430" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20190430" name="footnote2sym-20190430">2</a>
You can read more <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/30/aws-continues-to-rule-the-cloud-infrastructure-market/" target="_blank">here</a> about the research behind that number.
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20190430" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20190430" name="footnote3sym-20190430">3</a>
And we’ve already seen the pain caused by political goverment shutdowns.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20190430" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20190430" name="footnote4sym-20190430">4</a>
One could argue that vendors currently hold the government hostage through the procurement system, but I’m not going to dive into that right now.
</div>
<p style="font-size: 0.9rem;font-style: italic;">Post header image <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/60723528@N00/38298422">"DC2"</a><span>by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/60723528@N00">Tim Dorr</a></span> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=ccsearch&atype=html" style="margin-right: 5px;">CC BY-SA 2.0</a><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=ccsearch&atype=html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="display: inline-block;white-space: none;opacity: .7;margin-top: 2px;margin-left: 3px;height: 22px !important;"></a></p>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/04/30/trust-is-digital-infrastructure">(Anti-)Trust is Digital Public Infrastructure</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on April 30, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/04/10/questions-to-ask-before-civic-tech-project2019-04-10T14:00:00-04:002019-04-10T14:00:00-04:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>I’m fortunate to be surrounded by people who want to do good in the world. “Civic tech” is – perhaps obviously – full of such people, but so is tech generally: many people building tech genuinely believe that their product helps improves people’s lives. And yes, the Todoist app does help me organize my to-dos more easily, and I have heard busy parents laud food delivery apps which take the major burden of meal management off of their plates.<a href="#footnote1-20190410" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20190410"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>Then there is tech explicitly geared toward “social good”: these are usually companies that have a mission to reduce inequality or increase safety or security measures for a given community such as access to food or housing. These are companies that believe they can be sustainable in – which is code for derive profit from – the pursuit of helping society, usually vulnerable or typically underserved segments of society.</p>
<p>I’ve worked for such companies – back when phrases like “<a href="https://entrepreneurship.duke.edu/news-item/the-meaning-of-social-entrepreneurship/" target="_blank">social entrepreneurship</a>” were cool and even more recently – and participated in Code for America brigades filled with people who wanted to work at or start such companies. I’ve had to <a href="https://medium.com/mama-hope/holding-up-the-mirror-recognizing-and-dismantling-the-white-savior-complex-61c04bfd6f38" target="_blank">hold up the mirror</a> and ask hard questions about myself and about what we were really doing:</p>
<p>Can you truly be motivated by what’s good for a community while being motivated by profit? Will profit always win out? Do you know enough about the problem to help build viable solutions? Can you truly achieve societal change without changing the system itself?</p>
<p>This latter question is a huge topic that usually boils down to the debate between gradualism versus revolution, which I don’t want to get into now. Check out Jessica McKenzie’s <a href="https://civichall.org/civicist/good-tech-bad-tech/" target="_blank">blog post</a> for a great discussion on when civic tech can be bad, illustrated by different gradualist vs. revolutionary, for-profit and not-for-profit approaches to the US welfare system. Her concluding proposition is one that I think we should be using as a value measure for all civic or social good tech:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Civic tech should strive to empower the powerless—not as a byproduct, but as a foundational premise. If it shifts power away from the powerful, so much the better.<a href="#footnote2-20190410" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20190410"><sup>2</sup></a></em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, how do we use this measure – how much did we empower the powerless and how much did we shift power from the powerful – when critiquing civic tech projects?<a href="#footnote3-20190410" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20190410"><sup>3</sup></a> How do we help people embarking on these projects, who are often from privileged backgrounds or do not have lived experience of the problems they want to tackle – use this as a guiding principle from the outset, before they ever lay hand to keyboard?</p>
<p>There’s <a href="https://designobserver.com/feature/its-time-to-define-what-good-means-in-our-industry/40021/" target="_blank">some great writing</a> on this topic, and in my opinion we really need more of a revolutionary approach to most problems. However, it may be the gradualist in me that recognizes that right now, people who want to do social good in the world are starting their own projects and often their own companies, and many of them won’t know how or want to tackle real systemic change.</p>
<p>The following are questions I’ve started to use to break this down for myself when I consider joining a civic tech endeavor, as well as for well-meaning people when we talk about their ideas to help others.</p>
<p>I’ve even attempted my first flowchart ever:<a href="#footnote4-20190410" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20190410"><sup>4</sup></a></p>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/questions-to-ask-transparent.png" alt="Is your civic tech project actually civic tech?" /></p>
<h2 id="1-is-this-a-problem">1. Is this a problem?</h2>
<p>Or is this a symptom of a bigger problem? Or neither? Is the problem that there is no way to apply for affordable housing <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2017/5/17/15649294/new-york-city-housing-lottery-affordable-apartments" target="_blank">online</a> in your city, or is the problem that there is a <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/manhattan/senior-citizens-wait-long-time-affordable-housing-article-1.3653569" target="_blank">10 year waiting list</a> for affordable housing for seniors, or that there simply <a href="http://gothamist.com/2018/09/26/report_affordable_apartments_nyc.php" target="_blank">aren’t enough</a> affordable units? Or, that our approach to affordable housing needs more <a href="https://www.brownpoliticalreview.org/2017/05/construction-conundrum-affordable-housing-future-american-city/" target="_blank">holistic reform</a> to address systemic race and class oppression?</p>
<h2 id="2-is-this-your-problem">2. Is this <strong>your</strong> problem?</h2>
<p>If you’re not part of the community you’re purportedly trying to help, stop and consider whether you’re suffering from the “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/" target="_blank">white savior complex</a>” (even if you’re not white). That’s not to say you can’t help, but if you’re in this situation, the most important thing you can do in your attempt to help is listen. The next most important thing to do is learn as much as possible about the status quo and how it got here, and keep an open mind.</p>
<p>This question extends not only to you personally but to your founding team. Does anyone in this team have meaningful, lived experience of the problem? It’s critical that the people who will hopefully benefit from your solution have a voice in the solution (through user feedback or being on the product team), and ideally, that they actually have a seat at the table.</p>
<h2 id="3-will-you-profit-from-this-endeavor">3. Will you profit from this endeavor?</h2>
<p>This is primarily relevant if the answer to #2 is No. Profit isn’t necessarily exclusive from civic tech, but it is if you are trying to profit from an already vulnerable community and will not share those profits with that community. For real change and empowerment, the community being served by the solution and <strong>driving</strong> any profit for the owners of solution should be the ones <strong>deriving</strong> that value and therefore that profit.<a href="#footnote5-20190410" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote5anc-20190410"><sup>5</sup></a> When that’s not the case, it is literally <a href="https://www.wordnik.com/words/exploitation" target="_blank">exploitation</a>.</p>
<h2 id="4-is-the-community-youre-trying-to-help-powerless-in-the-status-quo">4. Is the community you’re trying to help powerless in the status quo?</h2>
<p>It’s very possible that you are part of the community you’re trying to help but that that community isn’t the one who needs help. For example, if you believe your problem is that the school board doesn’t know what parents want, and you want to build an app so that parents like you in your neighborhood can be more vocal to the school board, you should ask, who are these parents?<a href="#footnote6-20190410" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote6anc-20190410"><sup>6</sup></a> Are they middle or upper class white folks? Do they already have outlets for voicing their opinions or exerting power and influence? If you believe this is an app for all parents, ask who would even be likely to use such an app and who might take up the most space on it. Are there parents in different neighborhoods or from different demographics who might be adversely affected by such a product? Would the parents in your neighborhood be vocal about policies that would hurt parents (and students) in another neighborhood, not out of malice but simply through lack of representation and space?</p>
<p>Ultimately, this means that you have to know who all the stakeholders are. You can’t look at a problem in a vacuum. You have to seek to understand why the status quo exists and who currently benefits from it – because someone always benefits.</p>
<h2 id="5-does-your-solution-shift-power-to-the-powerless">5. Does your solution shift power to the powerless?</h2>
<p>Once you understand the stakeholders and the factors at play, you can start to ask whether your solution or project idea will actually change the status quo, and whether it will change the status quo to empower the powerless. If it doesn’t, go back to the drawing board and the community you’re in, learn more about social work and grassroots activism, and be humble enough to recognize when you may not have a good solution. This is the hardest thing for me and I’m guessing for most people: you believe so much in your idea – and you want to help so much – that it’s hard to acknowledge when it won’t have the impact you want it to.</p>
<p>I’m not saying all this to be discouraging. We need more people caring about and thinking about these problems, and we need people with the energy, drive, and skills to help. But, we don’t need many new ideas.<a href="#footnote7-20190410" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote7anc-20190410"><sup>7</sup></a> We don’t need people trying to solve problems on their own without deep thought and research about the problem and without hard consideration of their own biases. We don’t need tech people with buzz words, or people coming into cities telling civil servants that they need design thinking. We don’t need people riding in like knights in shiny user-centered armor.<a href="#footnote8-20190410" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote8anc-20190410"><sup>8</sup></a></p>
<p>So, I hope these questions are helpful for anyone thinking about how they can get involved or start civic tech (or social good) projects. Listen, keep listening, and don’t profit from the vulnerable. Make your goal be changing the status quo to empower the powerless – whether in big or gradualistic ways – and keep measuring your impact by that as you go.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20190410" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20190410" name="footnote1sym-20190410">1</a>
Ha, ha! It's been a month since I've posted but I haven't lost my pun game!
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20190410" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20190410" name="footnote2sym-20190410">2</a>
McKenzie, Jessica. https://civichall.org/civicist/good-tech-bad-tech/
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20190410" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20190410" name="footnote3sym-20190410">3</a>
It’s hard to talk about this because I don’t want to sound discouraging. As Sara Watson <a href="https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/constructive_technology_criticism.php" target="_blank">writes</a>, it’s hard to do tech criticism at all, much less civic tech criticism, because the critic is immediately branded as anti-technology, a luddite, or, to put it bluntly, an idiot. When you do civic tech criticism, you’re seen as unsupportive, even anti public good, and potentially anti-capitalist (which is a hard sell in the US)-- and therefore naive. We need criticism though, to improve the work that thousands of people across the country and many more across the world are doing.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20190410" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20190410" name="footnote4sym-20190410">4</a>
You can interchange "social good" with "civic tech" in this diagram and probably in this article as a whole. I'm trying to stay focused here though!
</div>
<div id="footnote5-20190410" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote5anc-20190410" name="footnote5sym-20190410">5</a>
In this context of "driving" and "deriving" profit, it's amazing how much of a difference once letter can make.
</div>
<div id="footnote6-20190410" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote6anc-20190410" name="footnote6sym-20190410">6</a>
Also, ask how they’re already hearing from parents, what factors come into play when they make decisions, etc. Going back to #1, this may not actually be a problem.
</div>
<div id="footnote7-20190410" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote7anc-20190410" name="footnote7sym-20190410">7</a>
Harrell, Cyd. https://medium.com/@cydharrell/civic-tech-as-a-tween-4cd780b971bb
</div>
<div id="footnote8-20190410" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote8anc-20190410" name="footnote8sym-20190410">8</a>
I don't have time to dive into this here, but check this out: Iskander, Natasha. https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-conservative-and-preserves-the-status-quo
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/04/10/questions-to-ask-before-civic-tech-project">5 Questions You Should Ask (and Answer) Before You Start Your Civic Tech Project</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on April 10, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/02/28/measuring-impact-open-source-civic-tech-part-12019-02-28T16:00:00-05:002019-02-28T16:00:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>Since my <a href="(/2019/02/07/public-vs-community-ownership-open-source-civic-tech)" target="_blank">last post</a>, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of measuring impact. How do we know that doing any of this helps, and how do we make it more valuable? This topic has more facets than my neighborhood has feral cats, even if we’re scoping this to just civic tech. Given that open source software (OSS) is – and should be – such a major part of civic tech, I want to start there. How can we measure the health of the OSS component of civic tech projects and can that tell us anything of value about the impact of a given civic tech project or the overall movement?</p>
<p>In this post, I’ll cover how people are currently thinking about civic tech impact, how other people are currently measuring OSS health and impact metrics, and how we might be able to approach looking at the intersection of those two things in the context of open source civic tech. This is just the first post of a series in which I do boatloads of research, data collection, probably some coding, and ultimately analysis on this intersection.</p>
<p>My hypothesis driving this research: by applying OSS health metrics to civic tech projects published as OSS online, we will see that the most healthy and longest living projects are reusable infrastructure tools or components rather than community-specific projects, and that community-specific OSS projects have healthy metrics only when they’ve been adopted by a government or nonprofit entity.</p>
<h2 id="measuring-civic-tech-impact">Measuring Civic Tech Impact</h2>
<p>There’s been lots of conversation over the past year about the success of the open data and civic tech movements – and lack thereof. The word “success” suggests that there were goals from the beginning that the movements are measured against, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. There was vision, undoubtedly, but I haven’t found evidence yet that anyone set forth quantifiable measures of success 10 years ago that could be tracked through today.</p>
<p>Therefore, let’s talk about “impact” instead of “success.” Impact can be had even when success is undefined. Even then, impact is hard to measure. David Eaves at the Harvard Kennedy School <a href="https://apolitical.co/solution_article/the-first-decade-of-open-data-has-been-a-win-but-not-for-the-reasons-you-think/" target="_blank">recently wrote</a> some of his observations on often unrecognized wins of the open data movement, but still notes the difficulty in truly understanding all the impacts:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Identifying and collecting [aggregate impacts] into something that is coherent and recognisable as public value is frustratingly difficult. Open data advocates are left with the Sisyphean task of chronicling disparate successes.<a href="#footnote1-20190228" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20190228"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In civic tech as well, the conversation around impact tends to focus on stories and individual projects. To some extent this makes sense: the communities trying to use open data and civic tech are all different with diverse needs, and impact in one community may look different than in another. Before we can identify how to apply impact measurement methodology across all projects, we should first figure out how to quantifiably measure the impact of individual projects themselves.</p>
<p>This is where it gets messy. Community groups and even larger, formal nonprofits in this space haven’t quite figured out how to measure outcomes. Grace O’Hara at Code for Australia <a href="https://apolitical.co/solution_article/civic-tech-movement-teenage-years/" target="_blank">recently wrote</a> about the lack of and need for long-term impact research, and the importance of capturing measures like sustainability and inclusion in addition to “traditional measures of technological success: user numbers, reach, impressions and spread.” Likewise, Matt Stempeck has bemoaned <a href="https://civichall.org/civicist/10-problems-with-impact-measurement-in-civic-tech/" target="_blank">10 problems with impact measurement</a>, including “We’re all using different metrics,” “Sharing is irregular,” “Most projects don’t reach most people”, and “We don’t evaluate relative to the macro environment.”<a href="#footnote2-20190228" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20190228"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>Take the the annual <a href="https://www.codeforamerica.org/impact/2018" target="_blank">Code for America Impact Report</a> as an example. This report highlights the work of distinct projects and partnerships and uses metrics specific to those examples to show impact. Another example is this <a href="https://techfails.transparencee.org/" target="_blank">research article</a> published by TransparenCEE, an organization that works towards government transparency and accountability using tech in Central and Eastern Europe: it too showcases specific examples, which the authors gathered from interviews with six civic tech organizations.</p>
<p>These reports show the importance of measuring impact within a given problem space and community, and they also show that success is often measured in terms of the civic problem the project is trying to solve.</p>
<p>What isn’t measured? Desipite TransparenCEE’s finding that sustainability is an ongoing issue with civic tech success, I don’t see that being consistently measured or reported on. I also haven’t found measurement of of the success or impact of the technology component of a given project, or the project’s impact on other communities.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://peoplebeforetech.transparencee.org/" target="_blank">separate article</a>, TranspranCEE proposes that we look at impact not just within the community the project was built for, but also it’s outward effect: “The main question we should all ask ourselves is how many communities did we manage to inspire to take action based on our project?”</p>
<p><em>We should ask not only how many communities did we inspire, but also how many communities did we empower to take action based on our project?</em></p>
<p>This to me is the real opportunity for the tech aspect of civic tech, and the reason we should look at the impact and health of the tech used in civic tech projects. Tech projects that provide infrastructure or tools that can be applied to other projects are incredibly important to civic tech, and their existence as open source software is necessary to their reusability and thus their impact.</p>
<h2 id="measuring-open-source-software-health-and-impact">Measuring Open Source Software Health (and Impact)</h2>
<p>If civic tech is a <a href="https://medium.com/@cydharrell/civic-tech-as-a-tween-4cd780b971bb" target="_blank">tween</a> (or an unruly teenager, as O’Hara posited), then open source is its 20-something older sibling who experimented a ton in college, graduated, and now, after a couple of fun start-up jobs, is looking to find the meaning of life – and stability. It suddenly cares about its health, wears a FitBit, even goes to the doctor once a year, and wants to become a lasting part of the world.</p>
<p>In this analogy, the FitBit is the <a href="https://chaoss.community/about/" target="_blank">Community Health Analytics Open Source Software</a>, known as CHAOSS. There are other tools and metrics, such as Netflix’s <a href="https://github.com/Netflix/osstracker" target="_blank">OSSTracker</a> or PayPal’s <a href="https://github.com/paypal/gander" target="_blank">Gander</a>, but CHAOSS is the big one run by the Linux Foundation and includes both methodology and tooling. It also has working groups, pleasant diagrams, and, naturally, open source projects to help you run your own analysis and make sense of the findings.</p>
<p>Big companies use and build OSS as major parts of their business, and they care about measuring the impact of this work. Facebook publishes a yearly <a href="https://code.fb.com/open-source/open-source-2018/" target="_blank">open source report</a>, and Google intermittently <a href="https://opensource.googleblog.com/2016/10/google-open-source-report-card.html" target="_blank">publishes one</a> as well. Companies and non-profits alike are interested in understanding the impact that OSS has on their business (like efficiency, scalability, and bottom line, but also things like recruitment and marketing) as well as on the larger ecosystem. Check out the Linux Foundation’s <a href="https://www.linuxfoundation.org/resources/open-source-guides/measuring-your-open-source-program-success/" target="_blank">detailed guide</a> on approaches to measuring open source program success.</p>
<p>Some of the metrics people collect are qualitative or from surveys, but many are from the OSS projects themselves as they exist on code hosting platforms like Github or Gitlab. A full list of such metrics that CHAOSS has identified lives <a href="https://github.com/chaoss/metrics#full-list-of-activity-metrics" target="_blank">here</a>, but I’ve pulled out some of the ones I suspect will be interesting to observe while studying civic tech OSS:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Age of Community:</strong> Time since repository/organization was registered; or time since first release</li>
<li><strong>All Licenses:</strong> List of licenses</li>
<li><strong>Average Issue Resolution Time:</strong> The average amount of time it takes for issues to be closed.</li>
<li><strong>Blogposts:</strong> Number of blogposts that mention the project.</li>
<li><strong>Bus Factor:</strong> The number of developers/organizations it would need to lose to destroy its progress.</li>
<li><strong>Community Activity:</strong> Contribution Frequency. Contribution = commit, issue, comment, etc).</li>
<li><strong>Contributor Demographics:</strong> Gender, age, location, education, and skills.</li>
<li><strong>Decision Distribution:</strong> Central vs. distributed decision making. Governance model, scalability of community.</li>
<li><strong>Followers:</strong> Number of followers.</li>
<li><strong>Forks:</strong> Number of forks.</li>
<li><strong>Installs:</strong> Number of software installations of the project.</li>
<li><strong>Open Issues New Contributors:</strong> What is the number of persons opening an issue for the first time?</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="on-with-the-research">On with the Research</h2>
<p>Can these OSS health metrics be indicators of the impact of the tech part of civic tech? Can these indicators help us build more impactful, reusable, and scalable open source software? What governance or funding scenarios lead to “healthier” open source tech? Can “healthier” open source tech have positive impact on the outcomes of individual civic tech projects? Which metrics, if any, should we focus our efforts on to make sure our civic tech projects have impact in our communities and beyond?</p>
<p>These are the questions I want to explore with my research. I’ll be using <a href="https://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab/" target="_blank">GrimoireLab</a> to collect the data, and I’ll post the data in an accessible way when I have it. Please reach out if you have any data or feedback to share!</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20190228" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20190228" name="footnote1sym-20190228">1</a>
Eaves, David, https://apolitical.co/solution_article/the-first-decade-of-open-data-has-been-a-win-but-not-for-the-reasons-you-think/
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20190228" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20190228" name="footnote2sym-20190228">2</a>
You can find a rebuttal of his article here: https://civichall.org/civicist/10opportunities-for-impact-measurement-in-civic-tech/
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/02/28/measuring-impact-open-source-civic-tech-part-1">Measuring the Impact of Open Source Civic Tech, Part 1: The Hypothesis</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on February 28, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/02/07/public-vs-community-ownership-open-source-civic-tech2019-02-07T16:00:00-05:002019-02-07T16:00:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>In my <a href="/2019/01/25/human-rights-open-standards-venture-capital-public-infrastructure" target="_blank">last post</a>, I said that services and service delivery infrastructure which are necessary for human rights need to be publicly owned. In that same post, I gave an example of a <a href="http://www.211.org" target="_blank">nonprofit entity</a> and a community-owned <a href="https://openreferral.org/" target="_blank">open standards project</a> that have the opportunity to be publicly owned. I realized then that I wasn’t quite sure about the difference between public and community ownership, and whether one was better than the other.</p>
<p>I’ve always played sports, and hey, I was raised in a capitalistic society, so the words I initially reached for were the competitive “better” and “versus,” but as with most things, the question isn’t about what’s better. Both are real and necessary parts of how our society works, and the question is about their relationship with each other. Furthermore, how is that relationship changing due to open source software and the civic tech movement?</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-difference-between-publicly-owned-and-community-owned">What’s the difference between publicly owned and community-owned?</h3>
<p>Publicly owned and community-owned are often used interchangeably. Community-owned and nonprofit are too, probably even more so. But publicly owned is not the same thing as community-owned, and community-owned is not a synonym of nonprofit or community-based. However, the differences aren’t cut-and-dried, and I think that trying to define and understand them is important for advancing public infrastructure, be it publicly or community owned.</p>
<h4 id="publicly-owned-infrastructure">Publicly owned infrastructure</h4>
<p>Publicly owned infrastructure is infrastructure that is primarily funded by taxes or a government agency, and whose governance is owned by a government agency. Examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>Streets</li>
<li>311</li>
<li>Policies, law</li>
<li>Regulation of private industry</li>
<li>Open data and city developer portals like <a href="https://developer.cityofnewyork.us/" target="_blank">NYC’s developer portal</a></li>
</ul>
<p>If you’re in the US or another country with a functioning government,<a href="#footnote1-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20190207"><sup>1</sup></a> you’ve experienced publicly owned infrastructure. It’s roads and sanitation and public school buildings. When it’s not physical, it’s regulation, policy, people, and funding systems that uphold human rights, provide a framework for order and safety, and in many cases, make our lives as residents and as humans better.<a href="#footnote2-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20190207"><sup>2</sup></a> Sometimes private companies own and run infrastructure: utilities like energy and <a href="https://www.nap.edu/read/11711/chapter/4" target="_blank">telecom</a> are classic examples. In these cases public infrastructure still exists, largely in the form of regulation to ensure that the companies in question, which usually have a geographic monopoly, can’t be too greedy or too incompetent at the expense of residents’ rights.</p>
<p>When it comes to publicly owned <strong>digital infrastructure</strong>, things resemble the Wild West. The <a href="https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/" target="_blank">groundwork for the internet</a> was laid by government and by international government partnership, and since then tech industry has exploded but public infrastructure has not kept up. People are starting to realize this, and now we’re seeing policy like <a href="https://eugdpr.org/" target="_blank">GDPR</a> in Europe and the internal transformation of government through <a href="https://govfresh.com/2019/01/for-and-with-the-people-an-introduction-to-government-digital-service/" target="_blank">digital services agencies</a> that are trying to bring tech talent and expertise into the government tech development and procurement processes.</p>
<p>We still have a long way to go, both in terms of policy and digital infrastructure (e.g. software used by government bodies, open government APIs, etc). In the meantime, and for over a decade, community-owned infrastructure initiatives have risen to fill this gap.</p>
<h4 id="community-owned-infrastructure">Community-owned infrastructure</h4>
<p>Community-owned infrastructure is infrastructure that is not solely funded by taxes or a government agency, and whose governance is not owned by a government agency. Furthermore, community members who use or benefit from the infrastructure are involved in its governance. Examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>Open standards</li>
<li><a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x4y8a/net-neutrality-fcc-community-networks" target="_blank">Community internet networks</a></li>
<li>Open source technology</li>
<li>Local civic hacking groups</li>
</ul>
<p>Honestly, it was difficult defining this and finding examples, not because there aren’t lots of great <strong>community</strong> initiatives, but because it’s hard to say which are truly <strong>community-owned</strong>.</p>
<p><em>A critical part of community ownership is that the community actually owns the thing in question.</em> This is not the case with many nonprofits or community-based organizations. From international NGOs like CERN to small nonprofit-run programs like 2-1-1, the third sector has been involved in infrastructure projects for years, sometimes decades, but structured organizations like these can be or seem exclusive. The community at large often has no real way to participate in the projects themselves, much less in the governance of those projects. The boards of directors of nonprofits are filled with <a href="https://www.philanthropy.com/article/How-Much-Should-Charity-Board/193131" target="_blank">the wealthy</a> (and often passionate!), not with those with lived experience of the community the nonprofit seeks to serve.<a href="#footnote3-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20190207"><sup>3</sup></a> Nonprofits and the infrastructure they run, therefore, can still be valuable and good, but they are not community-owned.</p>
<p>Still, the distinction can be fuzzy. Take <a href="https://www.nycmesh.net/" target="_blank">NYC Mesh</a> for example: this group is building a community owned internet network to free people from the expensive and privacy-disregarding telecom agencies and to uphold what they see as the human right to communication. While they’re technically a project of the nonprofit Internet Society, I still consider the project to be community-owned because community members actually own the physical infrastructure that the mesh is built on, and because the governance of the project appears to be inclusive of that community.<a href="#footnote4-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20190207"><sup>4</sup></a></p>
<h3 id="where-community-owned-meets-publicly-owned">Where community-owned meets publicly owned</h3>
<p>Now, you may be thinking that this whole “community-owned” idea, where the community members themselves govern the infrastructure, sounds a lot like government, particularly democratic government. You might say that “publicly-owned” means community ownership through government, and in democracies citizens have direct ownership in government through elections. <em>You could even say government is <strong>us</strong>, with more formalized systems.</em></p>
<p>Unfortunately, like with nonprofits, the government doesn’t seem to be us. It seems inaccessible to, detached from, and sometimes even at odds with our community.<a href="#footnote5-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote5anc-20190207"><sup>5</sup></a> This is especially true in the US, where <a href="https://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101" target="_blank">voter turnout</a> during presidential election years never goes over 70% and during midterm years has yet to reach 50%.</p>
<p>As a result, people have been looking for ways to take ownership in their communities, alongside, instead of, or in spite of government.</p>
<h4 id="community-ownership-through-civic-tech">Community ownership through civic tech</h4>
<p>The origins of the civic tech movement – at least as documented on the web – are somewhat murky: the earliest formal civic tech org according to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_technology#Ukraine" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> was in Ukraine in 1991, but the movement really started to pick up steam in the 2000’s.<a href="#footnote6-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote6anc-20190207"><sup>6</sup></a> In the US, a national nonprofit called <a href="https://www.codeforamerica.org" target="_blank">Code for America</a> launched in 2009, and their mission is to make “government work for the people, by the people, in the digital age.” Around the world, similar organizations have popped up, like Code for Australia, and many of them focus on improving government through citizen engagement in building infrastructure.</p>
<p>Despite that focus on government, in my experience the local initiatives that followed often had very little or even nothing to do with government. Brigades – the name for local chapters of Code for America – have a good degree of autonomy and are locally run, and every community has a different relationship with its government.<a href="#footnote7-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote7anc-20190207"><sup>7</sup></a> At <a href="https://www.codefordenver.org/" target="_blank">Code for Denver</a>, for example, we often partnered with nonprofit initiatives like <a href="http://www.freshfoodconnect.org/" target="_blank">Fresh Food Connect</a> or the <a href="http://www.rmmfi.org/" target="_blank">Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute</a> because the organizers felt this was one of the most effective approaches to helping the community and also engaging community members. Independent groups like <a href="http://www.progressivehacknight.org/" target="_blank">Progressive HackNight</a> have also emerged, and these groups as well as brigades also offer attendees the chance to pitch their own projects.</p>
<p>I could see only two requirements any of these groups have for projects:</p>
<ol>
<li>Your project must be for the public good.</li>
<li>Your project must be open source.</li>
</ol>
<h4 id="open-source-as-community-owned-infrastructure">Open source as community-owned infrastructure</h4>
<p>While the civic tech movement was taking off, so was the open source movement. While open source technology existed in the 1990’s and before,<a href="#footnote8-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote8anc-20190207"><sup>8</sup></a> providers of free hosting for open source code like SourceForge (launched 1999) and Github (launched 2008) paved the way for open source to be successful and widely adopted.</p>
<p>Open source is infrastructure because it provides a methodology for code to be shared, collaborated on, and built on top of. Open source is community-owned because anyone can participate in a project by contributing code, comments, or questions. This is especially the case on a platform like Github, which has features for conversation about code, including reporting issues.</p>
<p>Governance for open source projects is a huge topic that I want to dive more into later, but because anyone can see and contribute to code and voice their opinions on decisions about code development, governance is at least transparent and typically has avenues for community members to participate. If you don’t like the way an open source project is being governed – or it’s a dead project that no longer has a group of maintainers approving contributions – then you can simply copy the code and start your own project.</p>
<p>There are problems with open source, such as inclusivity <a href="https://sdtimes.com/bias/red-hats-marina-zhurakhinskaya-fights-inclusivity-diversity-open-source-community/" target="_blank">in participation</a> and <a href="https://opensource.com/article/18/8/inclusivity-bugs-open-source-software" target="_blank">in code itself</a>. Frankly, it needs to be more inclusive to be truly community-owned in practice rather than just theory. Regardless of these issues, open source software is a key manifestation of community-owned infrastructure that powers so much of technology, and by extension, our society.</p>
<h4 id="transforming-publicly-owned-into-community-owned">Transforming publicly owned into community-owned</h4>
<p>I don’t think it’s purely coincidence that Code for America started just a year after Github launched its platform, which enabled not only open source code hosting but also better collaboration on and engagement with open source projects.<a href="#footnote9-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote9anc-20190207"><sup>9</sup></a> The first Code for America Github repository was created in October of 2010, and now the <a href="https://github.com/codeforamerica/" target="_blank">organization</a> has 682, with many more than that existing under brigades’ Github organizations. I’m working on a deeper analysis of Github use and open source sustainability models in civic tech, but even without that being finished, I’m not sure if the civic tech movement could’ve taken off so much if there hadn’t been a tool like Github, and I’m confident that it definitely couldn’t have worked without open source as its bedrock.</p>
<p>The greatest impact of these open source civic tech projects isn’t the projects themselves. Those often don’t actually last very long: of the 682 open source Code for America repos on Github, 450 haven’t been updated in over 2 years, and 576 haven’t had code pushed to them in over 2 years. I’ll dive more into this later, but the point is that these projects in the form of Github repos maintained by volunteer groups aren’t what’s going to change the world. It’s the practice of making and collaborating on these projects, the education of individuals about their community and of government about open source and modern best technology practices, and the increased engagement of all parties with each other that will change the world.</p>
<p><em>To put it frankly, it’s the <strong>doing</strong> that matters.</em></p>
<p>We’re already seeing incredible changes to government to become more participatory.<a href="#footnote10-20190207" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote10anc-20190207"><sup>10</sup></a> Take Washington, D.C., which publishes all of its laws <a href="https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-law-xml" target="_blank">on Github</a>. That made it possible for <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/" target="_blank">GovTrack.us</a> founder <a href="https://razor.occams.info/" target="_blank">Joshua Tauberer</a> to <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/how-i-changed-the-law-with-a-github-pull-request/" target="_blank">change a law</a> in classic open source style: by submitting a contribution in the form of a Github pull request.</p>
<p>For an example of more radical transformation, take <a href="https://info.vtaiwan.tw/" target="_blank">vTaiwan</a>. The “v” stands for virtual, and the goal of this new system for government is to increase the public’s participation in policy through technology and practices largely modeled on open source collaboration. Through vTaiwan, citizens engage in policy and legislation discussion from the comfort of their homes in a structured and surprisingly unchaotic way, scholars and public officials respond transparently, meetings about the policy are broadcast online, and outcomes have to be tied to the public discourse. Check out <a href="https://civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/" target="_blank">this post</a> from <a href="https://twitter.com/lizbarry" target="_blank">Liz Barry</a> describing the process and evolution of vTaiwan in more detail.</p>
<p>There are so many more examples of progress being made in open and participatory government, with so much due to both the open source and civic tech movements, especially those two working in tandem. Open source software created an infrastructure model for civic tech and by extension government tech that is making publicly owned infrastructure more collaborative, transparent, and truly community-owned.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20190207" name="footnote1sym-20190207">1</a>
The jokes are just too easy here – I’m going to resist.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20190207" name="footnote2sym-20190207">2</a>
Italy's first Digital Commissioner <a href="https://govinsider.asia/innovation/exclusive-italys-first-digital-commissioner-on-leading-change/" target="_blank">recently said</a> that governments are here to make our lives better, but IMO they’re not: governments are here to uphold rights and anything else is a bonus.
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20190207" name="footnote3sym-20190207">3</a>
Curious what boards do? Check out <a href="https://www.nonprofnetwork.org/Resources/Documents/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20Dividing%20Duties%20Between%20Board%20and%20Staff.pdf" target="_blank">this handy doc</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20190207" name="footnote4sym-20190207">4</a>
It's hard to say for sure though about their governance -- everyone must agree to the <a href="https://www.nycmesh.net/ncl.pdf" target="_blank">Network Commons License</a> and there are <a href="https://www.meetup.com/nycmesh/events/" target="_blank">meetups</a> for people to come and discuss, but otherwise there’s no information on the formal governance structure.
</div>
<div id="footnote5-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote5anc-20190207" name="footnote5sym-20190207">5</a>
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/28/citizens-feel-disconnected-from-government-if-they-knew-what-government-did-for-them-they-wouldnt/" target="_blank">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/28/citizens-feel-disconnected-from-government-if-they-knew-what-government-did-for-them-they-wouldnt/</a>
</div>
<div id="footnote6-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote6anc-20190207" name="footnote6sym-20190207">6</a>
I think this history warrants more investigation and ana;ysis, but I’ve already gotten too bogged down in research this week.
</div>
<div id="footnote7-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote7anc-20190207" name="footnote7sym-20190207">7</a>
I’ve <a href="/2019/01/09/the-first-lesson-of-civic-hacking" target="_blank">posted previously</a> about how in my early experiences of civic tech, the tech part was less important than the civic education I received. Wherever I joined a civic hacking group or a local brigade in the Code for America network, I learned about how that community functioned before I could learn how I could help it function better.
</div>
<div id="footnote8-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote8anc-20190207" name="footnote8sym-20190207">8</a>
Linux, the poster child of open source, was released in 1991. The term "open source software" wasn't <a href="https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software" target="_blank">coined until 1998</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote9-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote9anc-20190207" name="footnote9sym-20190207">9</a>
I'm not saying they planned it or there was necessarily direct causality, more that it was all part of the same Zeitgeist.
</div>
<div id="footnote10-20190207" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote10anc-20190207" name="footnote10sym-20190207">10</a>
"<a href="https://yppactionframe.fas.harvard.edu/blog/what-participatory-politics-0" target="_blank">Participatory government</a>" (or variations thereof) is a major buzzword in civic circles these days.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/02/07/public-vs-community-ownership-open-source-civic-tech">Public vs. Community Ownership in the Age of Open Source Civic Tech</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on February 07, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/01/25/human-rights-open-standards-venture-capital-public-infrastructure2019-01-25T11:00:00-05:002019-01-25T11:00:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>What so much of the conversation around civic tech boils down to is the question of public/private partnerships. What is the role of companies, specifically tech companies, in our communities, and what is the role of government? And, assuming we will always have both,<a href="#footnote1-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20190125"><sup>1</sup></a> how should they work together for public good?</p>
<p>I’m not going to wax lyrical on all the many economic, poltiical, and moral facets of this question, but I did recently spend three years in a position that put me face to face with this question on a daily basis. This is some of what I’ve learned.</p>
<p><em>The tl;dr: Services that are necessary to protect and enable human rights, and the infrastructure to deliver those services, should be publicly owned.</em></p>
<h2 id="the-three-sectors">The Three Sectors</h2>
<p>Many of you reading this probably work in the private sector. “Private sector” is a fancy term that basically means for-profit companies. Just to make sure we’re all using the same lingo, there are three sectors:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Public:</strong> These are organizations or institutions owned by the public. This sector often goes by the colloquial term “government.” I’m putting this one first because it’s the most important.</li>
<li><strong>Private:</strong> These are owned by private individuals or fang-toothed venture capital funds.<a href="#footnote2-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20190125"><sup>2</sup></a> While in the US people often use “private sector” to include privately held non-profits, I think it’s clearer to think of private as for-profit, and that’s how I’m going to use it in this post. If a for-profit company is publicly traded, technically members of the public can own it, but you must have the qualification of money, not humanity, to do so.</li>
<li><strong>Third:</strong> While I see this term mostly used outside of the US, I think it’s a good way of describing nonprofits or non-governmental organizations (NGOs).<a href="#footnote3-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20190125"><sup>3</sup></a> They’re the ones always taken for granted: they are supposed to be motivated by mission, not moolah,<a href="#footnote4-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20190125"><sup>4</sup></a> and I’ve heard self-described “libertarians” cite them as the people who will pick up the pieces of society out of philanthropic kindness in place of government. Indeed, in many places, they often already do this.</li>
</ol>
<p>When I was young and bright-eyed and just getting into tech, I didn’t know much about the Three Sectors.<a href="#footnote5-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote5anc-20190125"><sup>5</sup></a> After working at nonprofits and getting more involved in civic tech, I learned even more about it, especially the relationship between the public and third sectors. It wasn’t until the past few years that I experienced first-hand how the private sector does, can, and should play into this.</p>
<h2 id="the-productization-of-social-services-delivery">The productization of social services delivery</h2>
<p>This case study is about social services with a focus on Healthify because I recently spent three intense, often very fulfilling years in that space with that company.<a href="#footnote6-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote6anc-20190125"><sup>6</sup></a> However, in this section heading you could easily replace “social services” with any other public service or function of government, and you’ll probably be able to find examples of this happening in that area.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.healthify.us" target="_blank">Healthify</a> is a for-profit software and services company whose mission is to “build a world where no one’s health is hindered by their need.” They want to do this by building community health infrastructure (systems, technology, relationships) to connect underserved populations with the social services they need to thrive and ultimately improve health outcomes. Tangibly, their long-term goal is to flip the ratio of spending on healthcare vs social services in the US based on percentage of GDP.</p>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/oecd-chart-gdp-spending.png" alt="OECD Chart of Gov Healthcare Spending" /></p>
<p>As you can see, the US spends proportionally much more on healthcare than on social services, unlike comparable countries. Healthify believes that doing the opposite will reduce spending overall and produce better outcomes for people. They’re out to prove that and to make it happen.</p>
<p>There’s a lot that goes into this – including need identification and referral coordination software and client services that help health systems build networks with community-based organizations – but it all started with data. Data about social services.</p>
<h2 id="the-social-services-data">The social services data</h2>
<p>Healthify’s product started as a search database for social services. Most (if not all) of the other vendors out there have something similar. There are three notable things about this data:</p>
<p><em>This is local data.</em> A single large national call center isn’t very useful in collecting and maintaining this data, because the people curating the data need to be well-versed in local issues. The housing issue and housing-related services in San Francisco, for example, are way different than their counterparts in Ann Arbor – and the data reflects that.</p>
<p><em>This is public data.</em> You’re probably paying for the maintenance of this data in some way via tax-funded grants to 2-1-1s (more on them below) or nonprofits, and even if you’re not, you’re certainly paying for the actual upkeep of some of these services, and those services are the creators of the data in the first place.</p>
<p><em>This data is necessary to uphold human rights.</em> The <a href="https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html" target="_blank">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</a> decrees that</p>
<ul>
<li>“Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in [their] country” and</li>
<li>“Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization…of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for [their] dignity and the free development of [their] personality.”<a href="#footnote7-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote7anc-20190125"><sup>7</sup></a></li>
</ul>
<p>I think we can all agree that for someone to be able to access public service and resources for their social security and realization of rights, <strong>they need to have basic information about those services and resources.</strong> This data is that very information.</p>
<p>But it’s not just about the data itself. It’s about making the data discoverable and accessible, by which I mean understandable and useable by all people. To do that, we need more than CSVs on a thumbdrive or a call center that verbally gives this information out on the phone. We need infrastructure.</p>
<h2 id="the-social-services-infrastructure-landscape">The social services infrastructure landscape</h2>
<p>This may sound somewhat familiar to you. If so, you may be thinking about <a href="http://www.211.org" target="_blank">2-1-1</a>, which is a nationally-reserved hotline for people seeking human and social services assistance. 2-1-1s may have a national brand, but they are all locally or regionally managed, with over 70% run or funded by UnitedWay.</p>
<p>Being decentralized and run by nonprofits, 2-1-1 is usually at least indirectly funded by taxpayers depending on local circumstances. They’re typically underfunded, and the quality of their services and data available to the public varies dramatically.</p>
<p>Six years ago, Healthify founders working in community clinics felt that neither 2-1-1 resources nor the physical binders being manually maintained by fellow community health workers were good enough, so they set out to create their own database that could do it better. This story is pretty similar to how other vendors, such as UniteUS, got into this space: through personal experience with outdated, nonexistent, or poorly performing public infrastructure.</p>
<p><em>Private (or third) sector innovation can start as a response to inadequate public infrastructure, and that’s okay.</em></p>
<p>Today, the landscape for human and social services data currently looks consists of these major players:</p>
<ul>
<li>2-1-1s</li>
<li>Other community nonprofits addressing social service delivery</li>
<li>Vendors</li>
<li>Google (or other search engines)</li>
<li>Build-Your-Own by health systems seeking to address the social determinants of health</li>
</ul>
<p>It’s pretty competitive, which in some ways is a good thing for social workers and their clients. The competition pushes actors to have better data and build useful, usable software on top of it. However, because there’s no real shared infrastructure, <em>they’re all doing redundant work.</em> The amount of human and machine data verification and improvement that goes into maintaining a good community resource database is immense, and every actor here is doing it in a silo.</p>
<p>Furthermore, because this data is necessary to uphold human rights, then the infrastructure supporting its delivery is also necessary to uphld human rights. This means that we can’t just rely on private actors, and ideally not on third sector actors either. Private actors shouldn’t be able to decide who gets access to this data and how. The people who produce or rely on the data – in other words, all of us – should own the data and its infrastructure; ergo, there needs to be a publicly owned actor.</p>
<h2 id="possible-versions-of-the-world">Possible versions of the world</h2>
<p>All of this can play out in different scenarios. I’ll illustrate three of them:</p>
<h3 id="the-world-we-want">The world we want:</h3>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/world-we-want.png" alt="World We Want" /></p>
<p>We should have a world where there is robust publicly owned infrastructure that community members and vendors alike can use, participate in, and benefit from. I don’t think the private sector should have a blank slate to using public services for profit; there are business and partnership models that are economical for businesses and ensure that public services are being paid for their business value.</p>
<p>Note: In this diagram, I put a nice icon of a Greek-inspired building – what I’ve been told is the universally recognized symbol for government – next to 2-1-1 to illustrate that, while it isn’t currently, 2-1-1 (or infrastructure like it) <strong>should be</strong> publicly owned, and publicly owned usually means integrated into government.</p>
<h3 id="the-world-we-dont-want">The world we don’t want:</h3>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/world-we-dont-want.png" alt="World We Don't Want" /></p>
<p>We shouldn’t have a world without publicly owned infrastructure. Without publicly owned infrastructure like this, for-profit companies take on the ethical burden of upholding human rights – and come on, we know <a href="https://laborrights.org/in-the-news/14-worst-corporate-evildoers" target="_blank">they’re not very good at that</a> – and nonprofits have to pick up that mantle without viable motive or means to do so well.</p>
<h3 id="the-world-we-should-all-be-afraid-of">The world we should all be afraid of:</h3>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/world-we-should-all-be-afraid-of.png" alt="World We Should All Be Afraid Of" /></p>
<p>The world we should all be afraid of is one where Google/Alphabet or Amazon or another massive company <strong>replaces</strong> public infrastructure. For-profit companies are motivated by profit, not public good, and are certainly not motivated to serve all a community’s residents but rather only the ones <strong>with</strong> dollars, usually at the expense of those <strong>worth</strong> dollars. Furthermore, when a single for-profit company holds a monopoly on infrastructure, they are more likely to hold a monopoly (or at least a choke-collar) on innovation that uses that infrastructure, unless there is policy enforced to prevent this.<a href="#footnote8-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote8anc-20190125"><sup>8</sup></a></p>
<h2 id="getting-to-the-world-we-want">Getting to the world we want</h2>
<p>It starts by agreeing on what services and service infrastructure is necessary to uphold human rights. That itself starts with us agreeing on what human rights are, but luckily in the US we have this thing called <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript" target="_blank">the Bill of Rights</a>, and in the world we have this thing called the <a href="https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html" target="_blank">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</a>. We agree on human rights, so let’s focus more energy on figuring out how to uphold them.</p>
<p>Once we’ve done that and identified what services are necessary for human rights, we need to build public infrastructure that the public owns.</p>
<h3 id="public-infrastructure-tech">Public infrastructure tech</h3>
<p>On the technical side, our public infrastructure needs to use open standards for data exchange so tools are easier to build to use public services and underlying data. This increases access and innovation because it enables any actor, public or private or third-sector, to participate and get value out of the data. We also need to empower public service agencies to be digitally literate and maintain good quality levels of service with their infrastructure.</p>
<p>In the social services landscape, <a href="https://openreferral.org/" target="_blank">Open Referral</a> has been spearheading infrastructure innovation for years, and is increasingly <a href="https://openreferral.org/airs-recommends-open-referral-for-resource-database-interoperability/" target="_blank">gaining traction</a>. They organize a working group and maintain the open Human Services Data Specification and related API spec.</p>
<p>Open Referral’s innovation isn’t just technical, but also about people and business. They help 2-1-1s and public entities understand and test out business models and the tech that can support them – which leads me to my next point.</p>
<h3 id="public-infrastructure-sustainability">Public infrastructure sustainability</h3>
<p>A key part of all this is making public infrastructure not only viable but sustainable. To do this, we need to <a href="http://thegovlab.org/reimagining-public-private-partnerships/" target="_blank">change our approach to public/private partnerships</a> with that focus on building accessible infrastructure, and we need to help the public (and third) sector develop <a href="https://hbr.org/2011/04/business-models-arent-just-for" target="_blank">business models</a> of their own to make providing those services to commercial entities sustainable.</p>
<h3 id="public-infrastructure-policy">Public infrastructure policy</h3>
<p>We also need policy to prevent the actors in the private sector from becoming integral yet still profit-driven and privately held pieces of that public infrastructure.<a href="#footnote9-20190125" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote9anc-20190125"><sup>9</sup></a> I’m not saying we need to remove the private sector or profit motives from the equation, but we have to empower the public sector to innovate, to build or buy infrastructure thoughtfully and ethically, and to create partnerships with the private sector that are advantageous for the public, not just the private.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20190125" name="footnote1sym-20190125">1</a>
Unless the shutdown continues much longer.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20190125" name="footnote2sym-20190125">2</a>
Jokes! Some of y’all have molars!
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20190125" name="footnote3sym-20190125">3</a>
The difference is explained <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/industry-guides/NGOs%20and%20NPOs.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20190125" name="footnote4sym-20190125">4</a>
I’m not going to argue this point here, although I recognize that at the end of the day these orgs are always thinking about funding
</div>
<div id="footnote5-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote5anc-20190125" name="footnote5sym-20190125">5</a>
Geez, I feel like I’m talking about the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The fourth horseman in this case is the B-corp. WTF even is that.
</div>
<div id="footnote6-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote6anc-20190125" name="footnote6sym-20190125">6</a>
To be clear, I really like Healthify and think they're doing awesome work.
</div>
<div id="footnote7-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote7anc-20190125" name="footnote7sym-20190125">7</a>
I replaced "his" with the gender neutral "their."
</div>
<div id="footnote8-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote8anc-20190125" name="footnote8sym-20190125">8</a>
Net Neutrality is a great recent example of this debate. I recommend <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/does-net-neutrality-help-or-harm-innovation" target="_blank">this article</a>on it from IEEE.
</div>
<div id="footnote9-20190125" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote9anc-20190125" name="footnote9sym-20190125">9</a>
The phrase "too big to fail" comes to mind here.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/01/25/human-rights-open-standards-venture-capital-public-infrastructure">What do human rights, open standards, and venture capital have to do with public infrastructure?</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on January 25, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/01/13/local-gov-needs-are-more-than-technical2019-01-13T21:00:00-05:002019-01-13T21:00:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>Look, I know you’re ready to talk about data.<a href="#footnote1-20190113" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20190113"><sup>1</sup></a> About APIs. About open standards, tech policy, RFCs, PDFs, and all the other juicy stuff that goes into the technology part of public infrastructure. Heck, I’m ready to talk about it too, but first, I have one more place to take you:</p>
<p><strong>Upper West Side, NYC:</strong> You are in the dingy, fluorescently lit basement of a community senior center. It was perhaps a school at one point, the type of place where motivational posters thrive and multiply, and despite the pair of belly-up cockroaches in the hallway and the age of the paint on the walls, that inspirational vibe and thrum of purpose still linger.</p>
<p>You arrived ten minutes late and the November meeting of <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/site/manhattancb7/index.page" target="_blank">Community Board 7</a> is just getting underway. Fifty or so people wait in the audience, aging from early 20s to early 90s, mostly white but including almost a dozen people of color. Many are browsing through the paper agendas and leaflets about housing rights workshops and neighborhood events they collected from the table at the entrance. The twenty-six board members currently present sit at tables at the front and sides of the room, while someone you can’t see calls roll. That person finally calls the meeting to order at 6:33pm, and you sit up taller in your straight-backed chair, eager to witness local government in action.</p>
<p>Okay, okay: by now you’ve probably realized we’re talking about me here. <strong>I</strong> was eager to witness local government in action that Wednesday evening, and to learn what community participation looks like in New York City. I had moved to the Upper West Side (UWS) from Colorado less than a year before, and while I’d gotten city-sponsored flyers from my landlord with beautiful illustrations on what and how to recycle, I had received zero information on my new neighborhood’s civic governance.</p>
<p>How did I find out about <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/site/manhattancb7/about/about-community-boards.page" target="_blank">Community Boards</a> and their role in my community? Through civic tech, of course. That summer I had attended the <a href="https://schoolofdata.nyc/">NYC School of Data</a>, an event hosted by <a href="https://beta.nyc/" target="_blank">BetaNYC</a>, the city’s major civic tech organization, where I listened to an impassioned talk about technology by Manhattan’s Borough President, met amazing people working on open data projects in the city, and learned about community boards.<a href="#footnote2-20190113" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20190113"><sup>2</sup></a> So, I looked up mine and finally a meeting happened on a night I could attend.</p>
<p>If you want to understand the riveting nature of municipal agency meetings – or you care about issues affecting your community – you should go experience it first-hand.<a href="#footnote3-20190113" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20190113"><sup>3</sup></a> If you’re having trouble finding your local council or board meeting info, <a href="https://twitter.com/civic_unrest" target="_blank">reach out</a> and I’ll do my best to help. If you want a taste of what you might encounter at these events, here are my three major takeaways from the November 7, 2018, meeting, including my favorite quotes from the night:</p>
<h2 id="1-context-is-everything-and-for-some-reason-nothing">1. Context is everything and, for some reason, nothing.</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“The Civic Engagement Commission is a ‘1984’ concept.”</em>
<br />
– Community member during the Community Session</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/manhattancb7/downloads/pdf/full_board_agendas/2018_full_board_agendas/fbagenda11_18.pdf" target="_blank">agenda</a> for the meeting had been posted a few days in advance, but the items either have zero context or a single sentence description. If you suspected that any of these items have been discussed in a previous meeting, or you wanted to understand better what those items entail, you were responsible for either digging through previous meeting minutes to find more information (and there are no links to the relevant sections) or searching the internet for more explanation. Understandably, there was no time during the meeting to offer more context behind each and every item, but there was also no help that I could see for community members to more easily discover that context on their own.</p>
<p>The conundrum is especially true for the Community Session, the first period in the meeting when community members are invited to speak about issues affecting them. That session spanned almost an hour, yet none of that time really included summaries or basic context for the issues covered. Luckily, the day before was Election Day and I’d done my research on my ballot and local issues before I came, so I wasn’t as lost as I would’ve been otherwise. I knew, for example, what the speaker was referring to in the above quote: the creation of a Civic Engagement Commission to promote civic participation had <a href="https://www.nyccfb.info/nyc-votes/vgwelcome/state-general-2018/ballot-proposals/proposal-2/?languageType=English" target="_blank">just been approved</a> by NYC voters. I don’t agree that this initiative is something out of an Orwellian dystopia, but it is a gem of a quote, isn’t it?</p>
<p><strong>I’d love to see more context and cross-referencing between agendas, meeting minutes, and other documents from the community board so that at future meetings (and outside of meetings), I can better follow and understand long-running issues or topics new to me.</strong><a href="#footnote4-20190113" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc-20190113"><sup>4</sup></a> I know this is more logistically difficult, but it would also be great to have some mechanism to share context about updates brought to the meetings. Unfortunately a lot of people who give updates also leave afterwards, and there aren’t any breaks, making it difficult to ask for more details from these folks directly.</p>
<h2 id="2-community-and-community-board-members-alike-dont-fully-understand-meeting-procedures">2. Community and Community Board members alike don’t fully understand meeting procedures.</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Are we voting for swapping the two items or moving item 12 to the second position and shifting everything down?”</em> <br />
<em>“We should do the latter!”</em> <br />
<em>“But the former motion was proposed first!”</em> <br />
<em>“All in favor, raise your hands.”</em> <br />
<em>“But what are we voting on?”</em>
<br />
– My memory of some of the procedural mishaps during the meeting</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I wish I’d captured the exact dialogue, but you get the gist. At this point, I couldn’t tell if board member were raising their hands to vote or throwing up their hands in exasperation. The most heated parts of the night were fueled by a lack of understanding or clear adherence to the process. I did Model UN in high school, so I’m familiar with <a href="http://octsa.ua.edu/uploads/1/6/6/9/16699238/basics-of-parliamentary-procedures.pdf" target="_blank">parliamentary procedure</a>, but I still can’t tell you if this board meeting was following (or attempting to follow) that set of rules or another. I also haven’t been able to find any information about meeting procedures on my Community Board’s website.</p>
<p>Another tense moment came when the board was about to decide to deny a business’s request to change their license to include outdoor seating and music, because the business owner hadn’t attended the “pre-meeting,” thirty minutes before the full board meeting. The business owner was in the audience by this point and made himself known; apparently, he had not known about the “pre-meeting.” It seemed like an honest mistake, especially if you saw how the agenda was laid out. The pre-meeting info and agenda was in the same document as the main agenda, but it was at the <strong>end</strong> of the agenda, not at the beginning as the prefix “pre” would suggest. The board ultimately denied the business owner’s request, after an argument in which some of the board members sided with the business. I understand both sides here, and I can’t help but think the confusion could’ve been mitigated by better information design and education for both the public and the board about how the meetings are run and why.</p>
<p><strong>Like with links, I’m generally a proponent of well-established, well-designed protocols, but we can’t have rules of engagement and not explain them to anyone.</strong> When we do explain, the information should be clear, accessible (including multilingual), and discoverable.</p>
<h2 id="3-our-priorities-should-reflect-our-values">3. <em>“Our priorities should reflect our values.”</em></h2>
<blockquote>
<p>– Sheldon Fine, board member</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don’t have a better section heading than that quote itself, which was one of the most inspiring and validating moments of the night. It came during the discussion on 2020 fiscal priorities, and the proposed priority list originally had repairing the UWS kayak dock as the second highest priority. Many board members felt this placement didn’t represent the entire community’s needs, and it became clear that the board members, including the chairperson, didn’t feel they had had the opportunity to review and give input on the suggested priorities before that night.</p>
<p>After some heated debate, much of which was over procedure (see above) rather than the topic itself, the board finally voted to move the kayak dock repair item down in priorities and move the refurbishment of the Frederick Douglass playground up in the list. Listening to this self-admittedly mostly white community board not only address disparities within their own community, including acknowledging the need to advocate for the residents who are don’t attend these meetings and are not appointed to the board, but also <strong>take action on those disparities,</strong> was awesome and worth every minute of those 3 hours I spent in that basement.<a href="#footnote5-20190113" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote5anc-20190113"><sup>5</sup></a></p>
<h2 id="whats-next">What’s next</h2>
<p>I wanted to talk about this recent experience because it illustrates how so much of the work to be done isn’t technological. It’s about community education and outreach, information design, and clear and understandable processes. It’s about focusing on community values and, ultimately, people. In future posts I’m going to dive more into open data and standards, tech policy, digital infrastructure, and civic-focused software – and while those things are important, they’re only one layer of the stack.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20190113" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20190113" name="footnote1sym-20190113">1</a>
Then again, I know nothing about you, internet.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20190113" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20190113" name="footnote2sym-20190113">2</a>
BetaNYC published a <a href="https://beta.nyc/publications/betanycs-civic-innovation-fellows-community-board-technology-needs-report-2018/" target="_blank">report</a> about the community boards’ technology needs. I encourage you to check it out and see what might be helpful for your own local governments. But also, notice how so much of what's identified isn't about advanced technology. Needs include lots of training, faster WiFi at meeting locations, adequate temperature control in offices (!), basic email software, and modern computer setups.
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20190113" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20190113" name="footnote3sym-20190113">3</a>
Seriously, attending one can be like watching a mashup of the Great British Bake-off, C-Span, and your high school yearbook committee meeting. It makes you feel good, gives you insight into the civic process and your community, and reminds you that we’re really all overgrown children trying to figure out how to play nice with each other.
</div>
<div id="footnote4-20190113" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc-20190113" name="footnote4sym-20190113">4</a>
In other words, I want more links. Those of you who know me know that I love links. Link all the things, please.
</div>
<div id="footnote5-20190113" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote5anc-20190113" name="footnote5sym-20190113">5</a>
Full board meeting minutes are available <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/manhattancb7/downloads/pdf/minutes/2018/min11_18.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/01/13/local-gov-needs-are-more-than-technical">Local Government Needs are More Than Technological</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on January 13, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/01/09/the-first-lesson-of-civic-hacking2019-01-09T11:30:00-05:002019-01-09T11:30:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p><strong>Atlanta:</strong> Training ground of Outkast, boaster of the 10th largest GDP in the nation,<a href="#footnote1-20190109" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc-20190109"><sup>1</sup></a> early bastion of hipster coffee shops in the South, and eccentric, concrete star of the eponymous FX show made by Donald Glover. Also: where I joined a <a href="https://www.codeforamerica.org/" target="_blank">Code for America</a> brigade for the first time.</p>
<p>I won’t go into the reasons I went to that city, but I will share what I learned.</p>
<p>In 2014, and still to this day, the <a href="https://www.codeforatlanta.org/" target="_blank">brigade</a> was under the fine co-leadership of <a href="https://twitter.com/1uigi" target="_blank">Luigi Ray-Montanez</a> and other wonderful folks, and it hosted dozens of people, high energy, and free pizza.<a href="#footnote2-20190109" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc-20190109"><sup>2</sup></a> On my first night, I joined a project in partnership with the the city and the <a href="https://www.acfb.org/" target="_blank">Atlanta Community Food Bank</a>: we wanted to map food deserts using business records from the city.</p>
<p>That <a href="https://github.com/codeforatlanta/show-me-the-food" target="_blank">project</a> could be the foundation for more innovation, such as overlaying data from Google or other sources to better understand the areas, or building a canvassing tool to empower folks to add data about those areas, including what fresh food was available at businesses or locations not traditionally categorized as grocery stores (e.g. convenience stores or street vendors). Maybe we could even add food price or spending data to the map, hopefully with findings that could convince major grocery chains that moving into one of these food deserts would not only better serve those communities but be profitable.</p>
<p><strong>The first thing I learned was what a food desert is.</strong> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which, coincidentally, is headquartered in Atlanta, defines food deserts thus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Food deserts are areas that lack access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up the full range of a healthy diet.<a href="#footnote3-20190109" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc-20190109"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>The second thing I learned was what a food bank is.</strong> It’s not a place where people in need go to get food; it’s the distributor of food to those places. The Atlanta Community Food Bank works with over 600 non-profits in the region to serve over 755,000 people in need.</p>
<p><strong>The third thing I learned was how the city was involved.</strong> A staff member had volunteered to spend an evening every week with us to share data and answer questions. I’m guessing the city already had some sort of relationship with the food bank (probably financial), but, as I’ve witnessed in other cities since then, it appeared to take the Code for Atlanta group to convene them on this extracurricular, data-centered project. I learned that city staff really do care about the city, enough so to volunteer time outside of work to try new ways of doing things, and I also learned about the city’s status quo of sharing data:</p>
<p><img src="https://civicunrest.com/images/local-gov-api-thumbdrive.png" alt="Local Government API" /></p>
<p>But more on the technology in a later post. In fact, it should tell you something that the first things I learned on my first brigade project weren’t really about technology at all. My first real lesson in civic hacking was that I still had a lot to learn about my community and how it worked.</p>
<p><em>My introduction to civic hacking was actually an introduction to my city.</em></p>
<p>I didn’t know anything about food systems in my own community before that night, and I didn’t know about the infrastructure (government, nonprofit, or otherwise) that supported it. I also started to realize how much I still didn’t know.</p>
<p>Now I wonder, how would I have learned these new things if I hadn’t shown up that weeknight after work? One could argue that the best infrastructure is infrastructure you don’t ever think about: you only think about roads when you drive over a pothole. There may be some truth to the value of unobtrusive, practically invisible public infrastructure, but we also need infrastructure that people are aware of, understand the fundamental mechanics of, and are engaged in. How can we make basic information about our local governments and our communities as common knowledge as the day your trash gets picked up?</p>
<p>In my next post, I’ll dive into a recent experience in my NYC neighborhood and explore some ideas for improving community education. Until then, I’d love to hear about your first introduction to your city. How did you start to learn how your community works? <a href="https://twitter.com/civic_unrest" target="_blank">Tweet at me</a>.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1-20190109" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc-20190109" name="footnote1sym-20190109">1</a>
According to <a href="https://www.bea.gov/system/files/2018-09/gdp_metro0918_0.pdf" target="_blank">this report</a>.
</div>
<div id="footnote2-20190109" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc-20190109" name="footnote2sym-20190109">2</a>
Full disclosure: one of the reasons I got into tech at all was the abundance of free food at meetups. It feels weird to say that given the topic of this post.
</div>
<div id="footnote3-20190109" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc-20190109" name="footnote3sym-20190109">3</a>
Quoted from <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/index.html" target="_blank">their website</a>. Want to learn more about access to food in your area? Check out the <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/" target="_blank">Food Atlas</a>. I also want to note here that I've been learning more about the debate around the term "food desert", versus other terms like "food apartheid" which more explicitly convey the intentionality of systematic food scarcity, but this post isn't the best place to explore that.
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/01/09/the-first-lesson-of-civic-hacking">The First Lesson of Civic Hacking</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on January 09, 2019.</p>https://civicunrest.com/2019/01/07/launching-civic-rest2019-01-07T08:15:00-05:002019-01-07T08:15:00-05:00Shelby Switzerhttps://civicunrest.comshelby@civicunrest.com<p>When you quit your job and launch your passion project, how do you begin? With a flare for the dramatic, of course:</p>
<p><em>At long last, {CIVIC:UNREST} has raised its scaly head from the ashes of an empire where it has been developing like a fire-breathing fetus in the amniotic fluid of civic technology.</em></p>
<p>Scratch that.</p>
<p><em>{CIVIC:UNREST} shakes itself from the jowls of the earth like a shining obelisk after a decade of tremors and quakes that is the civic hacktivism movement.</em></p>
<p>Geez. I’ve been reading too much N.K. Jemisin. Let’s try this again:</p>
<p><em>After 7 years in civic technology, from collaborating with volunteer groups, Code for America brigades, and local governments, to working in the private sector for “social entrepreneurship” start-ups, I’m launching {CIVIC:UNREST}:<a href="#footnote1" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a> the place for all my musings, studies, observations, and, most importantly, questions about the civic tech movement.</em></p>
<p>That intro is much less riveting in terms of adventure and sci-fi realms, but I’m serious when I say this stuff is shaking me – and this whole “civic tech” thing keeps me in its grasp no matter how much I pursue other endeavors.<a href="#footnote2" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote2anc"><sup>2</sup></a> As the years and the things I think I know increase, so do my questions: they multiply and clamber on top of one another like hamsters in a kindergarten classroom’s cage. I don’t know if I’m one of the hamsters or one of the five-year-olds poking and prodding them. I’m definitely not the teacher, although I know enough teachers by now to understand that they don’t have more answers than the rest of us – teachers are there to help us ask the right questions.</p>
<p><strong>{CIVIC:UNREST} is my attempt to ask those questions.</strong></p>
<p>In these pixelated pages, I will document and observe, seek clarity and, if possible, truth, and try to understand and amplify the sounds, syllables, and shapes of the civic tech movement and its communities across the globe.<a href="#footnote3" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote3anc"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>My work will be guided by the following pair of questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>What is the role of technology in public infrastructure?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What is the role of public infrastructure in technology?</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>I checked Merriam-Webster for definitions, but I’m not going to use them. To be clear, by “technology” I mean things to do with computers: software, hardware, data,<a href="#footnote4" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote4anc"><sup>4</sup></a> “smart” devices, etc. By “public infrastructure,” I mean policies, systems, structures, and governments that communities create and own themselves. By “policies,” I mean legislation, management, or processes. I hope my definitions aren’t too fuzzy; I will refine as needed as I learn more.</p>
<p>Alright – now, to get to work. Interested in following along? Check back here, or follow <a href="https://twitter.com/civic_unrest" target="_blank">my lovely new Twitter handle</a>,<a href="#footnote5" class="body-footnote-link" name="footnote5anc"><sup>5</sup></a> or subscribe to email updates below.</p>
<div class="footnote-block">
<div id="footnote1" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote1anc" name="footnote1sym">1</a>
Yes, I’m going to write it like this until it feels too tedious to do so!
</div>
<div id="footnote2" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote2anc" name="footnote2sym">2</a>
Such as playing the accordion. I haven’t progressed past "Row, row, row your boat."
</div>
<div id="footnote3" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote3anc" name="footnote3sym">3</a>
Admittedly, I will likely give more attention to happenings closer to me. Lucky for you, internet, I change locations often.
</div>
<div id="footnote4" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote4anc" name="footnote4sym">4</a>
I realize you don’t need computers for data, but come on, you know what I mean.
</div>
<div id="footnote5" class="footnote-item">
<a href="#footnote5anc" name="footnote5sym">5</a>
Not to be confused with <a href="https://twitter.com/civicunrest" target="_blank">this cool kid</a>. Remember the underscore!
</div>
</div>
<p><a href="https://civicunrest.com/2019/01/07/launching-civic-rest">Launching Civic Unrest</a> was originally published by Shelby Switzer at <a href="https://civicunrest.com">Civic Unrest</a> on January 07, 2019.</p>