Author: sally

Two foundations in California are priming their communities for open government initiatives by teaching them how the local government budget works and that they can have a hand in influencing it.

The California Endowment has hired the nonprofit consultant, Participatory Budgeting Project, to launch participatory budgeting initiatives in 14 low-income areas across the state. And Liberty Hill Foundation is training the community at the grass roots level about what the budget means in preparation for Los Angeles’ open data Websites.

Participatory budgeting, PB, is a process that any institution with a publicly oriented budget can try. Even though it is new in the United States, it has a long track record, says Josh Lerner, Executive Director of the Participatory Budgeting Project.

Participatory budgeting started in Brazil about 25 years ago and since then has spread throughout Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia and now the United States. “It’s as much about learning about the government for community groups as it is a way to organize,” he says.

The process is not about consulting the public; it is about giving them real power to make real decisions about a real pot of money, Lerner says. It’s not usually for the whole budget but rather for that part of the budget that is discretionary. And it’s not a one-off event. It usually lasts for several months so that people have the time as well as the power to make decisions.

In the work for the California Endowment, “We’re trying to bring groups together to collaboratively build healthier communities.” That entails going out into the neighborhoods and holding community workshops and strategy sessions at the places where people gather.

Launched in Chicago

In 2009, Alderman Joe Moore of the 49th Ward in Chicago was the first U.S. politician to sign on and use the principles. When members of his ward successfully used it to choose neighborhood improvements, the PB process caught on and was quickly adopted by three other wards. It spread to New York in 2011, where 8,000 people decided how to spend $6 million across four city districts.  And in 2012, Vallejo, Calif., in the midst of its bankruptcy launched the first citywide project. At least eight U.S. cities — now including St. Louis, Boston and San Francisco— have used participatory budgeting, and around 20 more are planning new processes, Lerner says.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is said to be very close to hiring a director of participatory budgeting.

Participatory budgeting replaces that city budget meeting that often turns into a shouting match with a more orderly structured process that encourages people to engage more effectively.

“It is really a laboratory for uncovering how government works and how it could work differently,” Lerner says.

Lerner says community foundations or other civic leaders interested in participatory budgeting should consider three main factors in making a decision whether to pursue it.

Community support: Participatory budgeting works best when there is strong community interest in having input into the budget.

Political support: Elected officials must be invested in the idea and understand the commitment to going along with the process.

Funding support: Participatory budgeting is primarily an engagement process and as such it takes time and resources.

“Democracy takes time and takes a lot of work,” Lerner says.

One you’ve made the decision to go with participatory budgeting, the process looks like this, with some variations depending on local needs.

Brainstorm, bring people together to brainstorm either in large meetings or online.

Recruit volunteers to act as community liaisons.

Turn the ideas into proposals for funding.

Present proposals to the city for vetting and cost estimates.

Assess feasibility, the city determine whether it can be technically done and how much it will cost.

Put the projects that are technically feasible on the ballot.

Vote. Community members vote for their top projects, and the projects with the most votes get funded.

“The vote is not just to have people fill out a ballot,” Lerner says. ”Often people will spend a half an hour reading through the project and learning about their neighborhood or their city and talking about it with neighbors.”

It is key to have a concrete vote at the end on the actual project. But unlike votes for public office that are held in a polling place, PB voting can be held in a supermarket, at a school, in the subway — wherever people gather.  As to who is eligible to vote, that is decided by each locality. In many cases, local steering committees have put that age at 16.

In addition to the on-the-ground votes, some localities are using online platforms. And Lerner says that SMS and mobile tools are being developed that can be useful. Boston is developing some tools to be used in a youth development project.

Preparing Los Angeles’ community for OpenGov 

In Los Angeles, Liberty Hill Foundation is providing training about the Los Angeles Budget and energizing youth to get involved in spending new discretionary funding on programs tailored for them.

Liberty Hill’s motto is ‘Change, not Charity’,” says Chief Operating Officer Preeti Kulkarni. “One way we foster change for the better is by encouraging civic engagement, not only through get-out-the-vote efforts, but through improving access for grassroots community members to develop the skills and knowledge to participate in the decision-making process.”

To that end, the Advancement Project, one of Liberty Hill’s grantees, has been meeting with the Mayor’s Office of Budget and Innovation as well as the Controller’s Office as open data rolls out in Los Angeles. The Controller’s office recently launched Controller Data and the Mayor’s office will soon be launching its open data site.

“Currently we have created training curriculum and materials to increase access and make the Los Angeles City budget understandable and useable for community advocates,” says Lori Thompson Holmes, Manager of Online and Digital Initiatives for Advancement Project. That project is funded in part by a $50,000 grant from Knight Foundation.

Open data, community priorities a force for change

Through its training, the Advancement Project shares the government Websites with the community and helps them understand how the information on the sites, combined with community’s clear view of priorities, can be a force for change. To that end, early this year, the social justice group started sharing information online through a Tumblr WeBudgetLA.org

Teaching the public about the budget is essential, because as we have learned from the open government world, “Start with a problem. Use data as a resource.” Not the other way around.

In addition to the City of L.A. budget training, Liberty Hill is also focusing on its youth-activist program — Brothers Sons Selves. Through that Liberty Hill is bringing the voices of boys and young men of color to the discussion of how L.A. will spend the billions in education funding that will soon be coming to the city through Local Control Funding Formula—a new school funding system.

Smart Chicago Collaborative is a new institution charged with bringing the one partner to the civic innovation table that truly matters – community.

Established by the City of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation and The Chicago Community Trust, Smart Chicago Collaborative connects the dots between technology and community to improve lives in Chicago through technology.

“The idea was to create a sort of  center of gravity where you would have  staff and founders and others  thinking about how you can actually transform the climate in the city so it is taking advantage of technology and access,” says Julia Stasch, Vice President of U.S. Programs for the MacArthur Foundation.

Community is the only partner that matters in a civic information ecosystem, because without it, hackers, coders and government activists are operating with incomplete knowledge of real problems that need to be solved.

With an agile touch, Smart Chicago leverages deep local knowledge and expertise so grant funds can be used strategically to achieve maximum impact.

“We seek to be useful in the smallest possible way for the greatest possible gain,” says Dan X. O’Neil, executive director of Smart Chicago Collaborative and former people person for open data pioneer Everyblock. “I see value in building the civic innovation infrastructure, to help underserved people live better lives in their areas. And improve lives in Chicago through technology.”

Initially financed by federal broadband money, Smart Chicago Collaborative is a pivot from creating a citywide wifi network to instead creating an agency that could engender a climate of digital inclusion and innovation in Chicago to bridge the digital divide.

“We think of Smart Chicago Collaborative as civic infrastructure,” says Alaina Harkness, Program Officer, Community and  Economic Development for the MacArthur Foundation.

“In response to a competition for federal dollars for broadband projects, the City of Chicago and LISC/Chicago built a really smart set of programs for reaching deeply into neighborhoods that did not have great access to the internet,” says Harkness. “They leveraged existing training programs and organizations with strong connections to community, and built on the city’s existing network of places where people have access to public computers, from libraries to City Colleges.”

“The Collaborative was able to help bring all that together,” she says. Upon evaluation, Internet access increased between 11% and 19% in those low-income neighborhoods that had access to this program and this will likely mean a further commitment of matching funds to the program by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, she says.

Why community?

An important way to better understand the work of Smart Chicago Collaborative is to look at its Knight-funded Civic Works Projects.

In a recent project on the Southwest side of Chicago, staff and leaders of the Southwest Organizing Project are walking the streets of a three mile area, block by block, recording the locations of abandoned buildings and other blight. What’s different about SWOP’s work is that instead of clipboards and pencils, neighbors are armed with a mobile app — LocalData — that allows them to collect information about vacant buildings with lightning fast speed and real time accuracy. (Learn more.)

By connecting community organizers and community development consultants with new technology, and adding some funding, Smart Chicago Collaborative was able to help the community address a vexing problem.

The SWOP project is one of six Civic Works projects run as part of a Knight Community Information Challenge grant awarded to the Collaborative and the Chicago Community Trust. These six projects are just a few of dozens under way in Chicago creating what O’Neil calls “a civic innovation infrastructure.”

“I was able to — in an extremely light way — do my job, to take other funding from Knight, to take decade long leaders in this space and in this city and take this new energy with civic hacking and put it all together,” says O’Neil. “This is a far more strategic, far more organized and specialized effort. They had conditions at SWOP that were ripe for engagement.”

Role in Open Government

Smart Chicago Collaborative is also highly visible in Chicago’s open government movement. O’Neil was a co-founder of Chicago’s OpenGovmeetup before he joined Smart Chicago Collaborative. He continues his leadership role in it today and there is considerable overlap.

If data is the lifeblood of bureaucracy, it is also the lifeblood of making government work for people. Data collected by a local government is used internally to record, benchmark and evaluate delivery of public programs and services and to record and report legislative actions. More important, it is also extremely useful for the public when quantifying problems and identifying solutions.

Arguably, government data does not become useful information until the public starts using the data to solve a problem.  For that to happen, the community has to more closely participate in the process of identifying problems to be solved.

To date, this realm of problem solving has largely been occupied by foundations and small groups of activists and coders. For instance, the Pew Center on States has been working with Google and other partners to solve problems with antiquated election systems and make it easier for voters to find their polling places and ballots. In Chicago last spring, activists created a tool to help communities understand school cuts proposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

One could view civic information as the product of a shift in understanding that takes OpenGov from “data” driven to  “knowledge” driven.  The people who live in the place – the community — are holders of the knowledge and can identify the problems of a place that can benefit from government attention.

As part of  fostering an open and welcoming environment to community, Smart Chicago Collaborative often hosts meet-ups of Chicago’s Open Government world at The Chicago Community Trust, where it is housed. In attendance are hackers, government activists, researchers, academics and community members all trying to understand current events and determine next steps. Action may be taken collectively, but most of the time work groups form and head off on their own to devise solutions.

“We are trying to foster a culture of shared learning that is more open and more effective for residents,” O’Neil says.

In service of that, O’Neil develops programing, bringing in speakers on special topics. Smart Chicago Collaborative staff serve as a newsroom, broadcasting events, and reporting out using the tools of the social Web. O’Neil takes photos and encourages conversation in person and online about everything that is going on. If it’s a Smart Chicago Collaborative meeting look for photos, blogs, twitter feeds, live streams and conversation. A partnership with local public radio station WBEZ reports regularly on developments in Chicago’s Open Data world.

“I give all credit to Dan for putting a human face on all these Smart Chicago Collaborative inititives,” say MacArthur’s Harkness.

At a Smart Chicago Collaborative event, what happens is the data and it is full of information that can be processed and distributed. Everyone is welcome and nothing is wasted. Including the food. There’s always lots of it, with O’Neil encouraging everyone to take home leftovers.

“Smart Chicago Collaborative has promise to do leading edge work for at least the next decade,” says Terry Mazany, President and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust. “Our entire modus operandi is to do all of this with an eye toward creating availability – not that Smart Chicago is replicable, rather, that the products of it is. Its products are the approaches to accessibility, to skills training —  then,  to leveraging that to increase information access and opening up civic data for everyday uses.”

Civic Insight and LocalData are bookends for making information about the built environment of a place accessible to the public and easy to use. The major difference is one start-up collects data from inside the municipal bureaucracy and the other collects it from the outside, from the sidewalks of neighborhoods.

Civic Insight’s tool makes existing hard-to-find government data sets easier to access and understand.  LocalData’s makes it efficient for residents to collect data and create new datasets useful to both residents and government.

Both start-ups got their beginnings during 2012 Code for America Fellows projects and both are funded in part by the Knight foundation.

Both Civic Insight and LocalAccess are being used to help municipalities and residents address blight and vacancy that remains in the aftermath of the disastrous housing bubble. Both products improve the quality of municipal data and make it visually more intuitive and seamlessly interactive. They are flexible enough that they can be used for a range of projects and they are open source.

Civic Insight was born from a CFA project in New Orleans called “Blight Status,” says Alex Pandel, a CFA Fellow and co-founder. (Watch a PBS video about Civic Insight.)

With the mission of co-creating technologies that would help their host municipality, the CFA team took a deep dive into the New Orleans civic landscape. The Fellows met with city employees, community groups, residents  and non-profits to understand the information needs of residents and how the team could help. In addition, they tapped into the expertise of The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center which does mapping and Who Data at the University of New Orleans run by Michelle Thompson.

“We were able to identify that there was this information gap between what citizens knew was going on with abandoned properties and what the city was doing, “ Pandel says. “We asked, ‘What do citizens know ?’ and ‘Why are they not getting the whole picture?’”

What the team discovered is that in New Orleans – as in most municipalities — the data was managed by multiple agencies.

“It was a case of decentralized information that made it difficult for everyone to be on the same page,” Pandel says. “I thought, we can do something about that.”

The team took on a role that in the past might have been contracted out to a team of blue-suit IT or management consultants.

“We went from department to department and found where all the data was living and brought it all together so we could have a “live” connection with it,” she said.

Data is the lifeblood of decision-making in many government agencies, but the problem is that data constantly changes so it is “dead” almost as soon as it is collected. The “live” connection was essential. Although the ideal way to capture data live is through APIs, they also wrote custom importers for some data sources that didn’t have APIs. “Whatever our city customers have, we try to accommodate,” she says.

A designer by training, Pandel worked on user interface. “I was working from the heart of the community to understand how the community understands the process and how does that match up to what the process is really like and how do we communicate that process out,” she says.

Civic Insight has found its next customer in Palo Alto.

Since the company’s core offering is accessing opaque city data sets and making them easy to understand, their product can work with any data. Palo Alto has hired them to simplify permit data so construction companies and architects can have a better feed back loop with the city on their projects.

Pandel and her colleagues thought their product would resonate only with the community and have been surprised by the numbers of inquiries they’ve had.

“We did not want to charge users for access and we want it to be equally accessible for everybody,” Pandel says. “Cities pay a small subscrition fee annually for access to the site. It is publicly available to the residents.”

“We’re different from LocalData because we  need to have an established relationship with whomever is holding data” she says. “Our goal is to reduce duplicate work. Our goal is to go to the source so that we are saving everybody else time.”

Pandel says she doesn’t view this work as journalism exactly.

“I like to think of it as promoting government transparency,” she says. “We take it from being data to being information  that could be understood by a regular person an dthat coiuld be a journalist.”

“The Code for America position is this is a public data. It should be public data. It should be easy to access.  Keep it public. Keep it free,” she says.

The biggest pushback they felt on the project was from city worker who feared that making the data available would make the municipality look bad, but it actually worked in the reverse.

“There was an increase in empathy once residents were able to understand the magnitude of the problem,” Pandel says.

The Greater New Orleans Foundation helped pay for the team’s initial work. The Knight Foundation made a program related investment of $220,000 — technically a convertible note —  through the Knight News Challenge to support Civic Insight’s launch as a company.

In Detroit, a different group of CFA Fellows created the tool LocalData to be used on smartphones and tablets.

“LocalData believes better data helps cities and organizations make better decisions,” says Matt Hampel, a former CFA Fellow who co-founded LocalData.

“The City of Detroit had a huge problem of foreclosure and blight,” Hampel says. “We talked to a number of groups doing important work, walking their streets with printed maps and clipboards, trying to figure out where the abandoned buildings were.“

The Fellows partnered with the City of Detroit and Wayne State University to do a survey of all the commercial corridors in Detroit in record time. The CLICS survey as it is called, was the first comprehensive survey of Detroit’s commercial properties in 28 years.  Using the LocalData tool on Smart Phones, they surveyed 9,538 commercial properties, recording a range of information about their occupation and condition.

“With support from the Knight Founation we expanded nationwide and are providing the toolsets for cities and organizations around the country,” Hampel says.

LocalData builds off the city’s existing geodata. They have a record of where every property is.   “If you have geocodes you can see what has been covered so far, unlike when you drop points on a map,” he says.

“Cities are increasingly seeing the value of opening up their data,” Hampel says. “That leads to support for the goals they want to achieve.”

LocalData has projects under way nationwide – one of the latest is with the SouthWest Organizing Project on Chicago’s SouthWest side. “Residents will be able to collect the data to rehab dozens of properties in their neighborhood,” he says.

Knight is supporting LocalData with $300,000 from the Knight News Challenge.

Hampel says  organizations will pay a fee to use LocalData and they own the data that is collected.“You can have 100 people or 1 person out collecting data,” using the LocalData tools. “You can do your entire neighborhood or just a few blocks,” he says.

To understand Open Government in Chicago, start by visiting Schoolcuts.org and pick a school. Any school.

More than 38,000 children will be affected by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposed school closings in Chicago. Angry parents are marching in the streets and debate is heated about whether the process for deciding which schools to close was fair and open.

Although, the Chicago school system makes public nearly all of its data, the data lacks context that would make it useful for making arguments pro or con any specific school closing. Making sense of it is too big a job for the parents that are so passionate about the school closings themselves, and no newsroom had the technical capacity to tackle the data on its own.

Enter a group of volunteers, including a grassroots parents group, web developers, data scientists and coders passionate about open government and education. They created the Schoolcuts.org site to provide information to the public in a visual form that would be useful for understanding the problems —  or not —  with each school closing and how it might affect the children and the neighborhoods.

“The very day that CPS announced the school closing list, that evening a group of software coders put up the site Schoolcuts.org,” says Terry Mazany, President and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust, who had also served as interim CEO of the Chicago Public Schools in 2010.

“They had aggregated all the datasets about school performance. And geomapped the schools that are on the list for closing …. That’s the sort of service you would hope that government might provide but these groups did it out of a sense of community service,” he says.

“They had this site up and running — and it is masterful.”

Coming full circle

Development of SchoolCuts to solve a problem for the public, means conversations and research begun 4 years earlier by the Chicago Community Trust have come full circle.

In 2009, executives at  the Chicago Community Trust were confronting two frightening possibilities.

The first was the fact of significantly weakened news operations with both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times in bankruptcy. For the first time, it appeared likely that Chicago could become a one newspaper city. With decimated coverage and reporting, the Trust was worried about the loss of watchdog and accountability journalism.

The second was heightened awareness of the increasing digital divide, where in some neighborhoods on the South and West side only 30% to 50% of households had Internet access. With the Internet fast becoming the primary source for news and information, these Chicagoans would be left out of any emerging digital information streams.

Given shrinking news holes, the digital divide, and conditions created by the deep recession, civic leaders had gathered a working group to understand the problems and develop solutions.

“Here in Chicago we had not really had to be attentive to the news ecosystem, because the 4th estate was doing just fine and taking care of business.  So we could take it for granted,” Mazany says. “I repeatedly say how grateful I am for Alberto Ibargüen and the Knight Foundation for bringing it to our attention in a way that engaged community foundations as authentic partners.”

The Trust as a platform

Those talks in 2009 were the beginning of the evolution of the Chicago Community Trust’s news and information programs into something new.  With funding from Knight, the Trust began to view itself as a platform, a place that could host unexpected partnerships and encourage new ideas, experimentation and innovative solutions. Since then the Chicago Community Trust has led projects mapping the local new ecosystem, and made grants to online news start-ups.

But the most influential spin-off from the Chicago Community Trust platform to date is the Smart Chicago Collaborative, whch is also a leader in the Open Government movement.

“That was our game changer,” says Mazany.

Funded by the City of Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust, Smart Chicago says it is a funding collaborative:

 We help bring together municipal, philanthropic, and corporate investments in civic innovation.

By most measures, Smart Chicago’s line items at the Chicago Community Trust add up to a powerhouse with $3.8 million in funding from MacArthur, and $10.8 million from the City of Chicago. Totaled together with Trust matches and other funding, Smart Chicago has a total budget of $14.7 million.

With Dan X. O’Neil, former people person and co-founder of EveryBlock as Executive Director, Smart Chicago became the intermediary working with a number of existing and new initiatives related to digital media and learning funded by the MacArthur Foundation, as well as the agency overseeing implementation of the City of Chicago’s broad band initiative bridging the digital divide.

Smart Chicago’s role

Smart Chicago is where the circle becomes full. Through its 15 projects, Smart Chicago strategically combats news deserts in neighborhoods, extends broad band access through out the city and hosts the open government community. By creating new ways to quantify problems and identify fixes, current open government projects are the beginning of a new kind of accountability journalism.

“It’s about community, its about digital,” says Mazany. “Then we have the Knight Foundation– it’s about digital media. Then it’s about government and all of these come together.

“What Smart Chicago gives us is the brain power, the brain trust around the coding community, understanding better big data….” Mazany says.“We continue to serve as that connective platform here at the community foundation.

“The confluence of all of these elements is just mind blowing! It is redefining the future …on a digital plane,” Mazany says.

Over the past five years, the Chicago Community Trust has been awarded $704,000 in Community News Matters and Civic Innovation Challenge grants from the Knight Foundation. They’ve also won a $350,000 commitment from the John D. and Catherine T.  MacArthur Foundation and provided matching funds bringing their total for the Knight Information Challenge to more than $2.0 million.

For most of the past four years, Chicago’s OpenGov meetings were small gatherings of a dozen or so data scientists, software architects and coders who would meet at various offices and talk about data sets they were interested in “liberating” and mapping out.  One of those early projects was Chicagolobbyists.org.

Today, OpenGovChi convenes in the main meeting room at the Chicago Community Trust. Now, the circle has expanded to include members of the public and several partners. Joe Germuska, a co-founder of OpenGovChi, who now runs software development at Northwestern University’s Knight News Lab runs the meeting with O’Neil. The room is often filled to capacity with 100 or more and there is a waiting list.

Public radio takes a seat

One partner who attends regularly is Matthew Green, who runs the data news team at local public radio station WBEZ.

“We are supported by Chicago Community Trust and the Smart Chicago Collaborative,” says Green. “We are the first partner that they have that is a loudspeaker to the movement. This movement itself has lots of stories. The movement is unearthing stories in a new way.” The team from WBEZ develops ideas that stretch the capacity of the public radio’s newsroom to use data to report on problems that the public wants solved.

At a recent meeting Thoughtful Critiques of the Open Government Movement, Mike Stringer, a managing partner at Chicago’s Datascope Analytics, talked through a simple history of the Open Government movement.

It used to be “We have this Data, what can we do with it?” Today it is “Start with a problem.  Use data as a resource, “ Stringer says.

Exactly.

Thoughts for getting started with Open Gov

• Learn about the importance of government data in shaping policy and accountability journalism. Develop insight, because that’s where it begins, with the CEO having an understanding that data and Open Government matters.
• Understand the news ecosystem in your locality and the role of the community foundation as a hub of that ecosystem.
• Do a needs assessment and identify the contours of your own news ecosystem.
• Devise strategies, convenings and funding unique to your locality.
• Connect with technologists perhaps by hosting Open Government events. You don’t have to employ a software coder, a digital expert , an app or web developer, but you do need to connect with the coders and technologists.
• Be prepared. As in the SchoolCuts.org example, have a loosely structured network where the people know each other interact.
• Allow self organization.
• Become a platform. Media consultant Steve Yelvington wrote this in 2008.

“When you choose to (become) a platform, you make a trade. You give up some control. But in exchange, you allow someone else to make your platform more valuable, more important, more essential.”