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Civic Engagement New York Open Government

OPEN GOV’T PLATFORM FOR CITIES NOW IN NYC

OPEN GOV’T PLATFORM FOR CITIES NOW IN NYC

An open government platform launches in the city, with new features designed to increase civic engagement and participation in City Council meetings.

In 2011, Philadelphia was roiling over proposed changes to a retirement program for city employees that had cost the city $258 million in the decade after it was implemented in 1999. Mayor Michael Nutter wanted to cut the program all together, whereas Council members (some of whom benefited from the plan) wanted to merely scale it back. Mjumbe Poe, then a Code for America fellow, recalls that “with the way it was being covered, I wasn’t really getting what was going on.” So he started digging for primary source material, trying to get at the root of the issue. That’s where he ran into trouble.

“My options were limited,” Poe tells Civicist. “Generally pretty poor.” The city’s legislative portal, Legistar, was even less user-friendly then than it is now.

In addition to looking for background information, Poe wanted to be notified when things he was interested in came up in City Council meetings. That February, at one of the weekly hacknights he organized as a Code for America fellow, Poe led an introduction to scraping and, as an example, scraped the council minutes and agenda from Legistar. At another hacknight later that month, a team took his idea and built the first subscription service, an RSS feed that would send items with your search terms to an RSS reader. It was the earliest iteration of Councilmatic, an open government tool that was implemented in Chicago in 2013 and New York City just this year.

NYC Councilmatic, which launched earlier this fall at the Code for America Summit, is a project by the nonprofit Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) in partnership with the civic technology company DataMade, and supported by Rita Allen Foundation. Like the original Councilmatic in Philadelphia, people can use NYC Councilmatic to find and track laws, resolutions, and other City Council activities on a more user-friendly platform than the official Legistar portal. In addition, David Moore, the executive director of PPF, is adding or boosting features meant to increase public participation, for example: highlighting legislation on the home page to draw visitors in; reaching out to local community groups to invite them to use the comment forum; and partnering with a text-messaging service to make the platform more accessible.

Improving on a city’s official legislative portal is a relatively easy task, but NYC Councilmatic aspires to a higher bar: to “demystify” the New York City Council.

“Pure legislative transparency alone isn’t going to give a site as much impact as we want it to have,” Moore tells Civicist. (Full disclosure: David Moore is a Civic Hall member.) “Open data alone isn’t enough.”

But, Moore adds, “if you provide official information in a shareable format with participation tools, you can see communities organically coming together to take action.” To illustrate his point, Moore points to a 2010 techPresident article by Civic Hall’s Micah Sifry about how the unemployed were coming together on platforms like OpenCongress—an open government platform at the federal level that PPF developed and operated until it was acquired by the Sunlight Foundation in 2013—in “de facto, organizing networks and self-help communities.” In the same piece, Sifry noted that three bills about unemployment benefits had garnered more than 130,000 comments on OpenCongress.

“It’s been proven that on sites like OpenCongress and OpenGovernment.org [like OpenCongress but for states], people come together around their interests, to share information,” says Moore. “This is the model that we’ve been working to bring to city governments for the past four years and with Councilmatic it’s finally happening.”

Councilmatic started as an off-the-cuff project during a hacknight, so the blocks to make it easily replicable weren’t in place.

“I didn’t put a lot of effort into making it easy to deploy in other places,” Mjumbe Poe tells Civicist. “It was always a desire, but it was a side project from the beginning.”

“It took longer than expected,” says Derek Eder, of repurposing the platform in Chicago. Derek Eder co-founded the civic hacking group Open City, which got Chicago Councilmatic up and running, and founded DataMade, which is a partner on NYC Councilmatic.

In addition to not being familiar with the code base, Eder points out that significant differences in the way Chicago and Philadelphia’s city councils work necessitated extra features. Eder says the Chicago City Council can go through 1,000 pieces of legislation per meeting. He and Forest Gregg, a colleague at both Open City and DataMade, decided to automatically tag items as routine or non-routine, to make it easier for visitors to find their way to things of interest.

Eder and Gregg launched the platform in Chicago in June 2013, on the National Day of Civic Hacking. That month, Eder wrote a guest post for the Sunlight Foundation inviting hackers from other cities interested in doing something similar to get in touch. It was also on a list of suggested projects to tackle during a replication marathon that took place earlier this year.

It still took two years to get it up and running in New York City. This is not to slight the work that Eder, Gregg, Moore, and others have put into the NYC Councilmatic platform—and as mentioned before, it does include new features and an updated user-experience—but to draw attention to the challenge of putting out high-quality replications, even when the creators and developers along the way have the best, open-source intentions. Moore says the project would have moved faster, and that Councilmatic would have more features, if they had had more financial support.

NYC Councilmatic now runs on the Open Civic Data (OCD) standard. The Open Civic Data project, an initiative to make open data sets more consistent across organizations, didn’t even exist until late last year. Now that it does, Moore says getting Councilmatic up and running in other cities will be much easier.

“If a city started publishing in OCD tomorrow,” he tells Civicist, “we could have them up on Councilmatic…in under a month.”

Would Councilmatic be easier to replicate in other cities if it scooted a bit further into govtech territory? If, for example, Moore and co. sold the platform to governments instead of hosting it as a nonprofit organization?

“A nonprofit aura makes people participate in ways,” says Moore. “So we’re willing to host those conversations on our pages whereas on government websites, that might get too risky or controversial.”

But, Moore points out, the influence of sites like Councilmatic can be seen in government technology. For example, the bill status bar that Moore designed for OpenCongress is now a feature of Congress.gov. Moore says they were also the first site to highlight most-viewed bills, and Congress.gov now does the same.

Examples of communities organically congregating around issues of shared concern are harder to find on Councilmatic than on OpenCongress, perhaps because they haven’t been marketed or presented as engagement tools. Moore points out that NYC Councilmatic is the first to spend resources on filling out a public comment program: reaching out to local groups and inviting them to comment on legislation; partnering with the text-messaging platform HeartGov to further spread the word; etc.

And if the platforms are driving civic engagement offline—increased attendance at City Council meetings, for example—it’s hard to prove.

As for what’s next, Mjumbe Poe and Derek Eder are planning on updating Philadelphia and Chicago Councilmatic respectively to include the changes in NYC Councilmatic, which Poe reiterated is a “major departure” from what came before.

Moore has ambitious goals for getting the platform into more cities around the country. He says he’s looking for funders to help fortify the public comment program in New York City and looking for national open data funders to help spread Councilmatic nationwide. Lucky for him, there’s no shortage of fields to plow: “There’s 20,000 municipalities in the U.S.,” he tells Civicist, “and right now nearly all of their legislative portals are a pain point.”

Categories
Digital Divide New York

LENDING WI-FI PROGRAM CHIPS AWAY AT DIGITAL DIVIDE, BUT FOR HOW LONG?

LENDING WI-FI PROGRAM CHIPS AWAY AT DIGITAL DIVIDE, BUT FOR HOW LONG?

The hotspot lending program means that, for a lucky few, going online no longer requires signing up to use a library computer a day in advance, lurking on the steps of public libraries after hours, or spending money at a coffee shop or fast food joint just to get a Wi-Fi password.

(Arnoldius via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The New Yorkers trickling into the basement reference room of the Fort Washington branch library on the Thursday before Independence Day were among the 730,000 New York City households without broadband internet in the home—but not for much longer. After a brief orientation they each walked out with a pocket-size Wi-Fi hotspot, theirs for the next six months—a full year if they choose to renew. The New York Public Library (NYPL), which serves Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx, first received a $500,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge last year to run a year-long, 10,000-unit hotspot lending program. Since then, the library has received $1 million from Google, with additional support from Open Society Foundations and the Robin Hood Foundation, and has partnered with the Brooklyn and Queens public libraries to expand the program across all five New York boroughs.

Since being made available to the general population, demand for the hotspots has been high: advance registration is required to attend orientations in the NYPL and the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) systems and slots are said to fill up within a day or two of being announced. Program coordinators in all three systems as well as the New Yorkers lining up to borrow the devices have almost entirely positive things to say about the program, but how the libraries could afford to keep the project going beyond the one-year pilot period is a question nobody can answer yet. It also remains to be seen how the libraries will determine if this program is the best way to leverage limited resources towards closing the digital divide.

“The patron response has been really positive,” Jesse Montero, the Director of Information Services at BPL, tells Civicist. “People are just really excited to get home wireless access. It’s really empowering for people. As far as getting measurable outcomes, that’s something we’re all looking forward to through surveys.”

Charity Kittler, the Library Hotspot Program Manager at NYPL, tells Civicist that the surveys include questions about patron demographics, device usage, and the lending program itself, but it remains unclear how the results of the survey will be used to determine success.

The hotspot, technically the Sprint Netgear Zing mobile hotspot, is small enough to fit in a pocket and can travel and connect anywhere in the continental U.S. Although data usage is “unlimited,” the device allows for 6GB of data a month at LTE speeds before getting downgraded to a slower 3G speed. This throttling is put in place to curb “excessive usage”—basically gaming or streaming videos. Up to nine devices (phones, tablets, or computers) can be connected to the signal at once.

The devices are activated before being shipped to the libraries and so, although the program is described as year-long, the internet could actually stop two to three weeks before the full 12 months are up. Nearly half of the 10,000 devices are already in circulation; the remaining half will be lent out through this fall.

Each library system designed their own programming and lending rules for the hotspots, so when they do start thinking about ways to move forward, they will have three models to compare and contrast.

—New York Public Library (Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx)

The NYPL initially began lending the hotspots out last year to participants in the library’s educational programs, like their English or literacy classes, but this April it expanded the program to any individual without home internet service. (Although recipients must sign something that says as much, this is on the honor system.) Patrons can take out the device for six months with the option of one renewal, for a total lending period of a year.

At the July orientation in upper Manhattan, library staff bustled about the basement reference room trying to make sure they let in people on the waiting list in the proper order. Before starting the orientation, one of the women leading it explained to a concerned patron that no, that woman (meaning me) was not cutting the line—she’s just a reporter sitting in.

The library staffer handed out user agreements, stapled hotspot information packets, and basic internet safety guides. She delivered the orientation in both English and Spanish, and did her best to answer questions about illegal downloading (“Honey, big brother watches everything. They’ll know.”) and data quotas.

Charity Kittler tells Civicist that most orientations have between 20 and 30 participants. The advantage of small orientations, she says, is that it allows for a little extra time for patrons to hang around and test out the device on their phone or tablet, and get assistance from library staff if necessary.

—Brooklyn Public Library

The BPL is lending the devices out for a full year, but without the option to renew. Like the NYPL program, anyone over the age of 17 is eligible to borrow, as long as they attest they have no home internet access.

There were only five people in the room when I arrived at a Crown Heights orientation in late June, just before the scheduled start time of 11 a.m. The two orientation leaders began the presentation by reading aloud from Powerpoint slides that explained the device and the borrowing rules. Three or four more people trickled in over the next half hour and some of the material had to be repeated.

A quick poll of the room while patrons went one by one to fill out the paperwork and receive their hotspot revealed that most of the attendees had heard about the hotspot program from friends or coworkers.

One woman, who had not registered for the class but had shown up at 8 a.m. hoping to get in off of an unofficial waiting list, said her friend told her it was “seventh heaven.” Unfortunately, the orientation leaders told me that Brooklyn Public Library policy is to lend only to patrons who have pre-registered for the hotspots, and that the woman would be leaving—that day at least—empty handed.

—Queens Library

The Queens Library system modeled their hotspot lending program after their tablet lending program. After Hurricane Sandy, Google donated 5,000 tablets to the Queens Library. Patrons can check out the a tablet for a month, with the possibility of renewing three times. The same terms now apply to the Sprint hotspots.

“We decided that we would not make them initially part of a program but lend them out like we do any other material,” Kelvin Watson, Vice President of Digital Services and Strategy at Queens Library, tells Civicist.

Until the library began the hotspot lending program, many patrons used the tablets—which come loaded with a custom library app—exclusively offline while at home. Although the app was designed to work online or offline, Watson says being able to get online makes for a richer experience.

“What we found was that we could now lend out a tablet and a mobile hotspot to the same patron. That allowed us to couple the devices or decouple the device,” Watson adds. “Now we ha[ve] an opportunity to come full circle in closing the digital divide, providing both the device and the connection.”

Watson has asked his team to pull information about data usage from each device, so that he can show the precise value of the hotspot to library patrons. “Data costs money, so this is how we can say—in dollars—what we’ve provided to the community,” he says.

Queens Library has 2,500 hotspot units to lend. When we spoke in mid-summer, Watson said that total circulation had already passed 4,000 (that includes initial checkouts as well as renewals).

THE BORROWERS

The orientations in Brooklyn and Manhattan were attended by a diverse crowd. Fort Washington, which serves a large Spanish-speaking population, was prepared with print material in both English and Spanish, and the orientation leader was bilingual as well. At the Crown Heights branch, one man told me he came with his friend to help translate the English-language material for him (this man had already received a hotspot of his own and reported being very pleased with it, in spite of speed and data limitations).

Most of the people at the Crown Heights orientation I attended said the device would be used in their single-person households, but two of the women I spoke with at the Fort Washington branch said they had a recent high school graduate at home with whom they would share. Patrons said that they planned to use it to look for work, check email, and to keep in touch with family and friends. One of the orientation leaders said they keep one in their car and use it to listen to Pandora.

“The essential reason why I got it was to travel and that way if I hear about a job I can apply right away,” one of the women with a teenage son told me. “In the past I had to find a Starbucks and now with this hotspot I’m a different person.” She added that her brother-in-law, a Vietnam veteran, already has one and uses it to keep in touch with Veterans Affairs.

When and if the library systems decide to make the results of the surveys public, we might learn more about the make-up of hotspot users.

BPL set aside a number of devices for special populations, including the elderly and homeless. “We look for innovative ways to engage our patrons,” Nick Higgins, the Director of Outreach Services, tells Civicist. “The people we work with…don’t have traditional access to libraries.”

As part of their immigrant services, BPL lends the devices to students in their three-month-long citizenship classes so that they can study outside of class.

They also set aside 10 hotspots for older adults. BPL already has an established “books by mail” program for older adults, who can call and request books to be delivered to them. Higgins says they have reached out to a handful of the 350 registered books-by-mail users to see if they want internet access. If a patron says yes then a library staff member will stop by, set up the hotspot, and show them how to use it. Higgins says all 10 have been deployed. If the patron doesn’t have a device to get online (as is common, says Higgins) they will also loan a tablet.

Higgins also told Civicist about a new partnership with the NYC Department of Homeless Services to open outpost libraries in eight family centers in Brooklyn, and his plans to start lending hotspots out of those sites.

ONE YEAR AND COUNTING

Although the first few devices were lent out last December, the last devices have yet to even arrive in the city. This is a one-year pilot program stretched out over two years (or more—there was an even smaller 100-unit pilot in early 2014). Challenges, I’m told, are few.

There’s just the small problem of figuring out where to get the next influx of financial support for the program. Kittler told Civicist that NYPL does not expect to get more funding from the same partners. The devices are paid for, but more money will be needed to keep the data flowing, to replace damaged or lost hotspots, and to expand the program.

Other states and cities are dealing with these same issues. Kittler collaborates with libraries in Kansas and Maine that have similar Wi-Fi lending programs (some of their lending periods are as short as two weeks). The Knight Foundation awarded $400,000 to the Chicago Public Library for a hotspot lending program at the same time as the NYPL grant. And a program in Seattle launched earlier this year to astronomically high demand—175 holds on 126 devices on the first day of circulation, according to James Risley, who reviewed the device for GeekWire. By the time Risley got his hands on one the waiting list was almost 1,300 people strong.

“I haven’t really talked to another library system that has a long term sustainability solution,” the Seattle Public Library’s IT director, Jim Loter, told Risley. “We’re certainly interested in continuing the program as long as there’s high demand for it, and at this point we have a number of options that we’re exploring in order to do that.”

“What the best way to tackle the digital divide in New York? I feel like I have this conversation every week,” Charity Kittler tells Civicist. “There are lots of different ideas being batted about internally.”

In the meantime, the hotspot lending program means that, for a lucky few, going online no longer requires signing up to use a library computer a day in advance, lurking on the steps of public libraries after hours, or spending money at a coffee shop or fast food joint just to get a Wi-Fi password. It might not be the always-on, Google-Fiber-fast connection many Americans want or even expect, but, if the sustainability problem is sorted out, hotspot lending programs could be an important part of a connectivity web, bringing underserved populations online, more often.

Full disclosure: Civic Hall co-founder Andrew Rasiej helped conceive and secure funding for this pilot program.

Read next: An Xiao Mina and Julia Ticona on why we should stop thinking of the digital divide as an issue of the haves and the have nots.

Categories
Civic Engagement New York Participatory Budgeting

NEW YORK CITY TESTS DIGITAL BALLOT IN PARTICIPATORY BUDGET VOTE

NEW YORK CITY TESTS DIGITAL BALLOT IN PARTICIPATORY BUDGET VOTE

In New York City’s fourth year of participatory budgeting, five city council districts pilot a digital ballot and experimental voting interfaces designed to make “the best decision possible.”

On a warm Saturday afternoon in April, a mother perched on the steps of a public library with her two children, holding an iPad. “I want to do the last one,” one of the kids said. “Wait,” the woman replied, “I’ll tell you what to push.” On the sidewalk in front of the library stood the local city council member, Brad Lander, pitching people as they walked by: “Want to help decide how to spend one million dollars?” It was one of the last days to vote in New York City’s fourth year running participatory budgeting, but for the first time people could vote on a laptop or iPad.

Participatory budgeting is the practice, originating in Brazil, of letting community residents decide how municipal funds should be allocated in their neighborhood. In New York City, it is an almost year-long process, beginning with the development of proposals in the fall, followed by a consultation with city agencies on budget and feasibility in the winter, and finally voting on projects in the spring. The participatory budgeting vote is a far more inclusive process than local elections: Immigration status is of no import, as long as the person is a resident of the council district in which they vote, and, depending on the district, residents as young as 14 or 16 can participate. This year, New York’s fourth, more than 51,000 people voted on how to spend $32 million dollars on capital projects.

“The level of engagement and enthusiasm in this year’s Participatory Budgeting process was unprecedented and deeply democratic,” Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in a public statement. “Across the city, thousands of residents of all ages and backgrounds came together to make their neighborhoods a better place to call home. Participatory Budgeting breaks down barriers that New Yorkers may face at the polls—including youth, income status, English-language proficiency and citizenship status—resulting in a civic dialogue that is truly inclusive and representative of the diversity of this community and this city.”

There is also more space for innovation in the participatory budgeting process than in regular elections, which made it possible to test digital ballots and experimental interfaces in five of the 24 city council districts that ran a participatory budgeting vote this year (of 51 total districts). To make the digital ballot a reality, the city partnered with Stanford University’s Crowdsourced Democracy Team and Democracy 2.1, an international project to change community decision-making. The Stanford team led the development of the digital ballot, consulting with Democracy 2.1 and the city on the user interface, and Democracy 2.1 led the ballot implementation during the vote in April. (Full disclosure: Democracy 2.1 is an organizational member of Civic Hall.)

“Make it as easy as an ATM—that was our goal,” says Lex Paulson, a professor of political theory at Sciences Po-Paris and an international counselor at Democracy 2.1. At the core of the Democracy 2.1 project is a voting algorithm developed by a mathematician and anti-corruption activist, Karel Janecek, that privileges consensus over majority-wins.

Deploying the digital ballot in New York City this spring was an opportunity to test some of the alternative ways of voting developed by Janecek and the Stanford team. In each of the five districts where the digital ballot was piloted, participants were asked to vote on an experimental ballot after their real vote had been cast.

On the actual ballot, voters were asked to select five projects, regardless of size or cost, no more, no less. In contrast:

One of the experimental ballots tried to solve the knapsack problem, a mathematical problem of combinatorial optimization. In layman’s terms, that means getting the most bang for your buck. This experimental ballot allowed voters to choose up to one million dollars worth of projects. Unlike the actual ballot, which restricted voters to no more than five projects, this allows voters to choose many more projects, because they find they have space for smaller budget items left over after choosing big ticket items.

Lex Paulson says this can give arts projects an edge, since they usually have small budgetary needs but, because they are seen as inessential (as opposed to installing air conditioning in a school cafeteria), are less likely to be among a pick of just five projects.

“When people vote they should see the same trade-off that a city planner sees,” says Ashish Goel, who leads the Crowdsourced Democracy Team. We spoke in April at a voting site on the Upper East Side.

“Our design principle,” Goel said, “[is] how to build for people so they can make the best decision possible.”

A second variation of that ballot allowed people to choose up to two million dollars worth of projects, even though the budget was less than that. Giving people more options raises the likelihood that someone will pick a winning project, a key factor in Democracy 2.1’s “satisfaction index,” a metric that they developed to assess the success and impact of democratic processes.

“Our premise is that the higher the percentage of voters who end up supporting a winner, the greater the level of consensus and satisfaction with the process will be,” Paulson explains. “Our argument—which our pilot data from 2015 is continuing to strengthen—is that the D21 voting system, through the effect of more votes per voter, is the most efficient way to maximize overall satisfaction with any democratic process.”

One of the other experimental ballots gave voters “down” votes in addition to “up” votes, which allows the city to see which projects are the most divisive or controversial. Another ballot showed voters randomized pairs of projects, and the voter had to decide which of the two projects they would prefer to fund.

During a brown bag lunch at Civic Hall last week, Paulson explained the many benefits of using a digital ballot, in addition to increased opportunities for experimentation and innovation.

To start, digital is mobile. Staff and volunteers were able to take iPads into parks, to go where the people are instead of expecting them to come to the voting site.

Digital ballots can also be more information-rich than paper. It’s easier to add visual elements, and the ballot this year could be translated into Chinese and Spanish. The New York Times reported that in one district last year, two-thirds of the ballots were cast in Spanish and Chinese. While printing foreign language ballots is possible, going digital means that you don’t have to guess at how many to print and risk having too many or too few in a particular language.

While we’re on the subject, digital ballots save trees and ink. Fewer paper ballots also means fewer votes need to be hand-processed; digital means getting real-time results.

Digital ballots also allow for project order randomization. Studies have shown that the placement of a proposal at the top of the ballot improves the likelihood that the proposal will be funded. Although printed ballots are all identical, digital ballots, when randomized, can eliminate that small placement bias.

This year, Democracy 2.1 and Crowdsourced Democracy Team only got involved in the final stage of the participatory budgeting process, the vote. However, they will be involved from the beginning in next year’s process, which will begin in the fall.

Lex Paulson hopes to experiment using the Democracy 2.1 platform as a deliberative tool in the proposal stage of the process, not just a decision-making tool.

Sondra Youdelman, the executive director of Community Voices Heard, a community organization dedicated to making civic processes more inclusive, tells Civicist that she would like to take a look at the statistics gathered from the voter survey to identify areas with underrepresented communities. Community Voices Heard has been integral to developing New York’s participatory budgeting process since it launched three years ago.

“I mentioned to Lex and the group that I actually like the idea of having iPads and having people go out in the community and get people to vote if it’s targeted properly,” Youdelman explains. Her concern is that digital ballots, without additional outreach in underrepresented communities, could further increase the civic engagement divide in the city.

This year, in advance of the idea-generating phase of participatory budgeting, Community Voices Heard sent canvassers to knock on 4,000 doors in public housing buildings to poll people on the projects they would like to see proposed, and ask if anyone would want to be a delegate in the participatory budgeting process. The cards that those polled filled out had to be entered in by hand. A digital ballot, deployed properly, could make this process faster and more information-rich.

It’s one of many possible engagement processes that the city could “upgrade,” so to speak, with a digital ballot.

“We’ll have a longer runway to experiment this year,” Lex Paulson tells Civicist. “And council members say they want to do more.”

 
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