Exploring Civic Innovation

Last Tuesday I co-hosted an event at New America with the Open Technology Institute and the Asset Building Program that explored civic innovations in policy, community organizing, technology, and government. “Civic Innovation, Can It Save Our Democracy?” was the first of a series of events focusing on ways that civic innovation changes how people relate to one another and to government.

This event was really the jumping off point for a broader conversation about civic innovation. To support our thinking about the field, last year CCIP interviewed twenty practitioners and put them in a virtual conversation to tease out the expanse of the field. The report, The 2050 City: What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today -- and Tomorrow, shaped our thinking of civic innovation less as a concept or thing, and more as a process with multiple actors and enablers. This ecosystem, which is how we began to talk about it, is made up of government, civic groups, residents, foundations, academics, and civic hackers.

Civic innovation is more than just a compilation of projects; it can be a process as well, inspiring institutional change. This is an important point to consider because the spread of civic innovation throughout communities and government will require a culture shift that reframes current processes.

The panel of speakers, which I should note was an entirely female panel, represented various actors and enablers in the civic innovation ecosystem. These roles are important to consider because they maintain the catalytic feature of the field: building and supporting a community of people, organizations, and governments in the innovation process. Each panelist shared a story of civic innovation as a way of illustrating for the audience what civic innovation looks like in practice.

Short descriptions of the speakers and their stories follows:

Rachel Black, senior policy analyst in New America’s Asset Building Program, spoke about SaveNYC, a program designed to experiment with creating saving programs for low-income tax filers that opt-in to contributing a portion of their income tax returns to savings accounts. The program was created to test the assumption that low-income individuals would be willing to save money, if given an opportunity, and that government needed to design a savings program that expanded beyond retirement and school savings to support people dealing with emergencies, like a car breaking down or a past due electric bill. SaveNYC, which has been replicated in four cities, is an excellent example of cities functioning as laboratories where experiments can be tested and findings can then be incorporated into broader federal policy making.

Kathy Pettit, senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, shared the story of a doctor in Camden, New Jersey who used health care data to identify “hot spots” on a map, indicating high health care utilizers. Focusing on the hot spots revealed that residents living in two buildings in Camden accounted for over $30 million in health care costs. The team of researchers then launched a program that provided collaboratives services, including home visits from a nurse, for those high health care utilizers. The program ultimately reduced health care expenses while also improving the quality of life for those individuals receiving collaborative care. Kathy’s example highlighted the power of data and the importance of connecting open data to support the development of community solutions.

Hillary Hartley, Presidential Innovation Fellow at the General Services Agency, described the work she’s been doing on the MyUSA project over the past six months. Hillary’s project, and the Presidential Fellowship program, demonstrate how civic innovation can take root within government and the potential for lasting change in large institutions as a result of experimentation, human centered design, and iterative development processes.

Michelle Koeth, Code for America Brigade co-captain for North Virginia, shared her experience as a civic hacktivist and described a community indicators project that her brigade is working on in Arlington, Virginia. The process of developing apps, and other types of projects, within the community requires the volunteer hackers to collaborate with the local government, other community groups, and residents. Michelle emphasized the value that the relationships are creating over the tools that are being built. This type of collaboration is necessary for civic innovation to thrive and support existing community efforts.

Ryan Gerety, Senior Field Analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, shared a story from fieldwork in Tunisia where the community came together to redefine models of governance, self-governance and innovations in self-governance. Her story started in Detroit, describing the Digital Stewards, a program where people plan, organize, build, and maintain community owned communications infrastructure. The Digital Stewards program was then carried forward to Sayada, a small town in Tunisia where the community has come together to advance participatory governance through developing wireless communications infrastructure.

Before jumping into the meat of the event I thought it would be a fun exercise to experiment with new ways of engaging the participants. To get everyone thinking about how they define “civic innovation”, I used an activity called a “spectogram,” which I’ve done with Allen Gunn from Aspiration several times. The idea is to get the participants on their feet, actively engaged, thinking about how they define civic innovation and getting a sense of how others in the room define it as well. The exercise unfolds as participants respond to polarizing statements like “The Occupy Movement is a civic innovation” and then listen to others share why they stood in a specific position along the spectogram (one end being Totally Agree and the other end being Totally Disagree). Overall, I am happy to report that the activity was received well and I think people generally liked engaging with other participants, which is something I’ve noted for future events.

As we had hoped, the event raised additional questions:

• What should the role of foundations be in supporting civic innovation? Could/should they fund replicability or scaling of projects?
• How is technology best integrated into civic innovation?
• Who is the “community” and what are ways to meet them where they are as opposed to requiring them to come to gatherings/meetings at city hall or other places outside their neighborhoods?
• What role can civic innovation play in well established democracies?
• What support mechanisms does government need to sustain civic innovations? In the end, the event was a success. It presented the foundation of the civic innovation ecosystem rather than define the term for the audience, told stories from practitioners that are advancing civic innovations every day, and allowed the attendees an opportunity to participate and engage in an innovative way. With a space that is still very new to many people, it’s important that we take opportunities like this event to begin to create a shared understanding of the language and terms in the field. I hope with future events that we will continue to explore the ecosystem of actors, as well as address some of the questions raised during the first event.