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.¹

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.

I’ve worked for such companies – back when phrases like “social entrepreneurship” 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 hold up the mirror and ask hard questions about myself and about what we were really doing:

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?

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 blog post 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:

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.²

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?³ 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?

There’s some great writing 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.

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.

I’ve even attempted my first flowchart ever:⁴

1. Is this a problem?

Or is this a symptom of a bigger problem? Or neither? Is the problem that there is no way to apply for affordable housing online in your city, or is the problem that there is a 10 year waiting list for affordable housing for seniors, or that there simply aren’t enough affordable units? Or, that our approach to affordable housing needs more holistic reform to address systemic race and class oppression?

2. Is this your problem?

If you’re not part of the community you’re purportedly trying to help, stop and consider whether you’re suffering from the “white savior complex” (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.

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.

3. Will you profit from this endeavor?

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 driving any profit for the owners of solution should be the ones deriving that value and therefore that profit.⁵ When that’s not the case, it is literally exploitation.

4. Is the community you’re trying to help powerless in the status quo?

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?⁶ 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?

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.

5. Does your solution shift power to the powerless?

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.

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.⁷ 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.⁸

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.

Since my last post, 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?

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.

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.

Measuring Civic Tech Impact

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.

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 recently wrote some of his observations on often unrecognized wins of the open data movement, but still notes the difficulty in truly understanding all the impacts:

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.¹

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.

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 recently wrote 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 10 problems with impact measurement, 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.”²

Take the the annual Code for America Impact Report 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 research article 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.

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.

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.

In a separate article, 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?”

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?

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.

Measuring Open Source Software Health (and Impact)

If civic tech is a tween (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.

In this analogy, the FitBit is the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software, known as CHAOSS. There are other tools and metrics, such as Netflix’s OSSTracker or PayPal’s Gander, 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.

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 open source report, and Google intermittently publishes one 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 detailed guide on approaches to measuring open source program success.

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 here, but I’ve pulled out some of the ones I suspect will be interesting to observe while studying civic tech OSS:

• Age of Community: Time since repository/organization was registered; or time since first release
• All Licenses: List of licenses
• Average Issue Resolution Time: The average amount of time it takes for issues to be closed.
• Blogposts: Number of blogposts that mention the project.
• Bus Factor: The number of developers/organizations it would need to lose to destroy its progress.
• Community Activity: Contribution Frequency. Contribution = commit, issue, comment, etc).
• Contributor Demographics: Gender, age, location, education, and skills.
• Decision Distribution: Central vs. distributed decision making. Governance model, scalability of community.
• Followers: Number of followers.
• Forks: Number of forks.
• Installs: Number of software installations of the project.
• Open Issues New Contributors: What is the number of persons opening an issue for the first time?

On with the Research

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?

These are the questions I want to explore with my research. I’ll be using GrimoireLab 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!

In my last post, 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 nonprofit entity and a community-owned open standards project 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.

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?

What’s the difference between publicly owned and community-owned?

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.

Publicly owned infrastructure

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:

• Streets
• 311
• Policies, law
• Regulation of private industry
• Open data and city developer portals like NYC’s developer portal

If you’re in the US or another country with a functioning government,¹ 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.² Sometimes private companies own and run infrastructure: utilities like energy and telecom 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.

When it comes to publicly owned digital infrastructure, things resemble the Wild West. The groundwork for the internet 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 GDPR in Europe and the internal transformation of government through digital services agencies that are trying to bring tech talent and expertise into the government tech development and procurement processes.

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.

Community-owned infrastructure

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:

• Open standards
• Community internet networks
• Open source technology
• Local civic hacking groups

Honestly, it was difficult defining this and finding examples, not because there aren’t lots of great community initiatives, but because it’s hard to say which are truly community-owned.

A critical part of community ownership is that the community actually owns the thing in question. 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 the wealthy (and often passionate!), not with those with lived experience of the community the nonprofit seeks to serve.³ Nonprofits and the infrastructure they run, therefore, can still be valuable and good, but they are not community-owned.

Still, the distinction can be fuzzy. Take NYC Mesh 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.⁴

Where community-owned meets publicly owned

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. You could even say government is us, with more formalized systems.

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.⁵ This is especially true in the US, where voter turnout during presidential election years never goes over 70% and during midterm years has yet to reach 50%.

As a result, people have been looking for ways to take ownership in their communities, alongside, instead of, or in spite of government.

Community ownership through civic tech

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 Wikipedia was in Ukraine in 1991, but the movement really started to pick up steam in the 2000’s.⁶ In the US, a national nonprofit called Code for America 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.

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.⁷ At Code for Denver, for example, we often partnered with nonprofit initiatives like Fresh Food Connect or the Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute because the organizers felt this was one of the most effective approaches to helping the community and also engaging community members. Independent groups like Progressive HackNight have also emerged, and these groups as well as brigades also offer attendees the chance to pitch their own projects.

I could see only two requirements any of these groups have for projects:

1. Your project must be for the public good.
2. Your project must be open source.

Open source as community-owned infrastructure

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,⁸ 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.

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.

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.

There are problems with open source, such as inclusivity in participation and in code itself. 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.

Transforming publicly owned into community-owned

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.⁹ The first Code for America Github repository was created in October of 2010, and now the organization 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.

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.

To put it frankly, it’s the doing that matters.

We’re already seeing incredible changes to government to become more participatory.¹⁰ Take Washington, D.C., which publishes all of its laws on Github. That made it possible for GovTrack.us founder Joshua Tauberer to change a law in classic open source style: by submitting a contribution in the form of a Github pull request.

For an example of more radical transformation, take vTaiwan. 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 this post from Liz Barry describing the process and evolution of vTaiwan in more detail.

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.

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,¹ how should they work together for public good?

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.

The tl;dr: Services that are necessary to protect and enable human rights, and the infrastructure to deliver those services, should be publicly owned.

The Three Sectors

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:

1. Public: 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.
2. Private: These are owned by private individuals or fang-toothed venture capital funds.² 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.
3. Third: 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).³ They’re the ones always taken for granted: they are supposed to be motivated by mission, not moolah,⁴ 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.

When I was young and bright-eyed and just getting into tech, I didn’t know much about the Three Sectors.⁵ 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.

The productization of social services delivery

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.⁶ 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.

Healthify 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.

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.

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.

The social services data

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:

This is local data. 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.

This is public data. 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.

This data is necessary to uphold human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights decrees that

• “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in [their] country” and
• “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.”⁷

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, they need to have basic information about those services and resources. This data is that very information.

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.

The social services infrastructure landscape

This may sound somewhat familiar to you. If so, you may be thinking about 2-1-1, 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.

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.

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.

Private (or third) sector innovation can start as a response to inadequate public infrastructure, and that’s okay.

Today, the landscape for human and social services data currently looks consists of these major players:

• 2-1-1s
• Other community nonprofits addressing social service delivery
• Vendors
• Google (or other search engines)
• Build-Your-Own by health systems seeking to address the social determinants of health

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, they’re all doing redundant work. 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.

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.

Possible versions of the world

All of this can play out in different scenarios. I’ll illustrate three of them:

The world we want:

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.

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) should be publicly owned, and publicly owned usually means integrated into government.

The world we don’t want:

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 they’re not very good at that – and nonprofits have to pick up that mantle without viable motive or means to do so well.

The world we should all be afraid of:

The world we should all be afraid of is one where Google/Alphabet or Amazon or another massive company replaces 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 with dollars, usually at the expense of those worth 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.⁸

Getting to the world we want

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 the Bill of Rights, and in the world we have this thing called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We agree on human rights, so let’s focus more energy on figuring out how to uphold them.

Once we’ve done that and identified what services are necessary for human rights, we need to build public infrastructure that the public owns.

Public infrastructure tech

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.

In the social services landscape, Open Referral has been spearheading infrastructure innovation for years, and is increasingly gaining traction. They organize a working group and maintain the open Human Services Data Specification and related API spec.

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.

Public infrastructure sustainability

A key part of all this is making public infrastructure not only viable but sustainable. To do this, we need to change our approach to public/private partnerships with that focus on building accessible infrastructure, and we need to help the public (and third) sector develop business models of their own to make providing those services to commercial entities sustainable.

Public infrastructure policy

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.⁹ 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.

Look, I know you’re ready to talk about data.¹ 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:

Upper West Side, NYC: 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.

You arrived ten minutes late and the November meeting of Community Board 7 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.

Okay, okay: by now you’ve probably realized we’re talking about me here. I 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.

How did I find out about Community Boards and their role in my community? Through civic tech, of course. That summer I had attended the NYC School of Data, an event hosted by BetaNYC, 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.² So, I looked up mine and finally a meeting happened on a night I could attend.

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.³ If you’re having trouble finding your local council or board meeting info, reach out 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:

1. Context is everything and, for some reason, nothing.

“The Civic Engagement Commission is a ‘1984’ concept.”
– Community member during the Community Session

The agenda 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.

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 just been approved 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?

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.⁴ 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.

2. Community and Community Board members alike don’t fully understand meeting procedures.

“Are we voting for swapping the two items or moving item 12 to the second position and shifting everything down?”
“We should do the latter!”
“But the former motion was proposed first!”
“All in favor, raise your hands.”
“But what are we voting on?”
– My memory of some of the procedural mishaps during the meeting

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 parliamentary procedure, 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.

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 end 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.

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. When we do explain, the information should be clear, accessible (including multilingual), and discoverable.

3. “Our priorities should reflect our values.”

– Sheldon Fine, board member

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.

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 take action on those disparities, was awesome and worth every minute of those 3 hours I spent in that basement.⁵

What’s next

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.

Atlanta: Training ground of Outkast, boaster of the 10th largest GDP in the nation,¹ 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 Code for America brigade for the first time.

I won’t go into the reasons I went to that city, but I will share what I learned.

In 2014, and still to this day, the brigade was under the fine co-leadership of Luigi Ray-Montanez and other wonderful folks, and it hosted dozens of people, high energy, and free pizza.² On my first night, I joined a project in partnership with the the city and the Atlanta Community Food Bank: we wanted to map food deserts using business records from the city.

That project 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.

The first thing I learned was what a food desert is. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which, coincidentally, is headquartered in Atlanta, defines food deserts thus:

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.³

The second thing I learned was what a food bank is. 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.

The third thing I learned was how the city was involved. 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:

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.

My introduction to civic hacking was actually an introduction to my city.

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.

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?

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? Tweet at me.

When you quit your job and launch your passion project, how do you begin? With a flare for the dramatic, of course:

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.

Scratch that.

{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.

Geez. I’ve been reading too much N.K. Jemisin. Let’s try this again:

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}:¹ the place for all my musings, studies, observations, and, most importantly, questions about the civic tech movement.

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.² 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.

{CIVIC:UNREST} is my attempt to ask those questions.

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.³

My work will be guided by the following pair of questions:

• What is the role of technology in public infrastructure?

• What is the role of public infrastructure in technology?

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,⁴ “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.

Alright – now, to get to work. Interested in following along? Check back here, or follow my lovely new Twitter handle,⁵ or subscribe to email updates below.