Tag: civic technology

The Leaders of California’s Most Tech-Friendly Cities Say Governments Need to Do These Three Things

Posted on by robbie

It takes more than just technology to join the government 2.0 movement that’s swept the country over the past few years. Beyond big data, it takes vision and leadership to create governmental strategies that will better serve communities through a multitude of tech-driven solutions.
Discussing those tools and policies at the California Leadership Forum last week were a panel of some of the state’s public-sector innovation leaders. Highlighting some of their discussion, here are three strategies to keep in mind as more municipalities take on the task of creating a more transparent and efficient government:
Foster a cultural change in the workplace.
Encouraging employees to experiment with new ideas while at work is essential in shifting government out of antiquated practices, according to Lea Deesing, chief innovation officer of Riverside, Calif. That task is a job belonging to the new mainstay in local governments: chief innovation officers.

Jeremy Goldberg, deputy chief of staff for San Jose, Calif. Mayor Chuck Reed and head of the city’s civic innovation efforts, agrees, adding that recognizing “internal champions” who can coordinate projects with third parties in short periods of time also helps.

Engage citizens to help spur ideas.
Rather than simply highlighting success stories, officials need to focus on what changes need to happen to continue fostering a more innovative environment, according to Robert White, chief innovation officer of Davis, Calif.

“I would love to see at the state level, some kind of recognition or awarding of folks who in their daily jobs, are just changing the way we think about delivering government services,” he says. “That would be a very meaningful way to get others to be engaged and see these best practices and opportunities.”

Emphasizing an open environment and inviting residents to share ideas on a technical level is another strategy to generate more local participation, Deesing adds. One example? Riverside’s transparency portal, Engage Riverside, links to the community share tool MindMixer, which prompted a program for free computer training for low-income families.
Keep a focus on cybersecurity. 
With more transparency and big data comes the concern about privacy. As governments continue to utilize data and develop online community tools, protecting it is paramount.

“It’s fun to talk about all the great things we’re about to do with technology, but if we’re not protecting our current assets, our department of justice data, our police data, our fire data, if we’re not doing that, I think we’re doing a disservice,” Deesing says.

MORE: 5 Ways to Strengthen Ties Between Cops and Citizens

How a Former Google Engineer Plans to Change the Government for Good

Posted on by robbie

Last fall, when the government stumbled launching the HealthCare.gov website last fall, Google engineer Mikey Dickerson stepped in to save the day.
Now, the White House is once again reaching out to Silicon Valley and carving out a permanent position for Dickerson, appointing him deputy chief information officer of the federal government and the administrator of the United States Digital Services Team.
Dickerson will helm a small team of digital experts aimed at repairing other government websites and computer systems, signaling a shift toward using technology to improve government efficiency. The goal is make these sites more accessible, user-friendly and as enjoyable as logging on to Facebook or Amazon, Dickerson told the New York Times.
Dickerson recalls walking into the storm that was the headquarters of of HealthCare.gov in Columbia, Md., in the winter of 2013.

“It was a very life-changing experience,” he says, adding his dismay over the lack of modern tools present to track data or better understand why the site was crashing.

“It’s easy just to order a bunch of machines and install them, and we’re doing all that stuff,” he says. “But you have to find exactly where is the choke point, and it’s a very compacted system.”

Dickerson likens his job to a traffic engineer, identifying where back-ups and bottlenecks exist. When the White House asked him to leave his job at Google for the new position, “there was really not any way I could say no to that,” he says.

In tandem with Dickerson’s hire, the White House also released a draft “playbook” to assist technology officers across federal agencies, using some of processes and tools enlisted in fixing the health care site last year.

The Digital Services Team plans to act as a sort of emergency responder to federal websites and systems temporarily stalled, but Dickerson also hopes to preemptively help agencies and anticipate potential problems on the horizon.

For now, the team will operate on a small scale, with only $3 million in the government’s technology budget. But the government has requested $13 million for next year and has plans to expand the team to as many as 25 people to help Dickerson revolutionize the next generation of government.

To us, that sounds like a goal that is certainly worth the cost.

MORE: Governmental Technology Difficulties Abound, Yet the Future Looks Bright

Breaking The Digital Divide: Online Tools Every Community Should Use

Posted on by robbie

We’ve all heard about the growing economic divide in this country. But now, there’s a technology divide occurring as well.
Larger cities like Chicago, San Francisco and New York continue to innovate civic technology and bridge the divide between citizens and government, while this progress is leaving small communities behind.
Without digital tools, staff or infrastructure in place to bring basic services online, small local governments and their citizens are suffering from a digital divide. But one Silicon Valley mind is determined to break that barrier and help smaller cities understand how they can join the digital movement.
All it took for Abhi Nemani to realize the vast difference between small and large cities was a visit to his hometown of Centralia, Illinois. The former acting co-executive director of civic tech nonprofit Code for America used to spend his days creating digital engagement tools and improving city websites across the country while living in San Francisco. But when he returned home to his rural town of 13,000, he realized that it was missing out on those same services.
“Our cities are more independent and muscular, number in the tens of thousands, and hold responsibility for core service delivery,” Nemani writes in a Medium piece. “Then there are our harsh fiscal realities: small towns, particularly ones with shrinking economic bases, struggle just to maintain current services levels, while citizen demands increase, let alone build out modern technology teams.”
Nemani has been working with the Open Government Foundation to become more familiar with government services like local bills and municipal code to better understand the process of transforming them digitally. He’s also created a Digital Services Center, a draft of a simple mapping component that he hopes to further develop for cities to use as basic infrastructure to house these digital tools.
Instead of thinking of creating the services from a developer’s vantage point, Nemani explains, we need to be thinking about it from a city’s perspective and present it in an easy-to-understand manner. To get started, Nemani contends that any civic technology should include the following eight tools:
Bullets: Crime-related data that give residents a sense of how safety is handled in the city.
Examples: CrimeAround.Us, Crime in Chicago, Oakland Crimespotting
Bills: Providing citizens with more transparency around legislative data.
Examples: OpenGov’s AmericaDecoded, MySociety’s SayIt, Councilmatic
Budget: Making public finances and city spending available online.
Examples: OpenGov.com, OpenSpending, Look at Cook
Buses: Transportation tools to help residents with schedules, planning, etc.
Examples: OpenTripPlanner, OneBusAway
Data: Open, organized, municipal information.
Examples: Socrata, NuData, CKAN, OpenDataCatalog, Junar
411: An online information hotline used in the same regard as the phone version.
Examples: CityAnswers, MindMixer, OSQA
311: Non-emergency online assistance including reporting things like road repairs.
Examples: SeeClickFix, PublicStuff, Connected Bits, Service Tracker, Open311Mobile
211:  A social services hotline for services including health, jobs training and housing.
Examples: Aunt Bertha, Purple Binder, Connect Chicago
“The opportunity is that we have the chance to take all of these components that are being built as open-source tools and turn them into companies that offer them to cities as hosted platforms,” Nemani told Next City. “Even a 10-person shop can put in a credit card number and pay a hundred dollars a month for one of these tools.”
While Nemani admits each city will be different — some places are too small for transportation components — working towards a template is critical to make civic technology accessible for everyone. But by focusing on these eight tools, any town is off to a great start.
“We as a civic technology ecosystem need to move towards building the technology we have in a way that lets it get to scale. And we have to put things out there in a way that makes sense to people.”
MORE: Can Big Data Reshape City Governments?