Digital Governing

Civic Tech for all of its impressive achievements is at a crossroads. The question raised by this article is really fundamental: can civic tech scale from the larger cities to the smaller;from cities to counties; from counties to entire regions.

The Smart Chicago Collaborative provides a unique model of organization that has proven effective in propelling Chicago into a leading position among the world's smart cities. At the same time, its dependence on philanthropic organizations and the city's willingness to provide open data may indicate potential weaknesses over the long term. Nevertheless, the collaborative has been successful and should at least be seen as one way that a city can build up civic tech.

Could an app of this kind and others streamline the permitting process in your city?

A new wrinkle on the hackathon! Here is an interesting use of that concept: a hackathon formed around the particular and peculiar environmental and conservation needs of a particular region. Does your state or region have a waterway or environmentally sensitive area that needs special treatment: convene some hackers!!

The Knight Foundation report represents the first attempt to develop a coherent picture of civic tech, an industry that a lot of us involved in a variety of projects related to upgrading or transforming various aspects of online government services knew existed (because we were actually part of it ourselves) but hesitated to name. This initial report will be followed by others promising a greater and more comprehensive set of tools for analyzing the effectiveness and durability of civic tech projects.

Making zoning and the entire permitting process for locating a business more transparent and easier to understand for all sizes and kinds of businesses is the goal of this new tool that maps open zoning areas based on an applicant’s interests. The tool, called ZoningCheck, comes from OpenCounter, a Code for America Accelerator company and Knight Foundation grant recipient. The tool (which I have tried) walks users through a four-question process. Users choose a city where they want to start a business, pick a business type, select a location from an address or map — and if the area clears municipal codes — are immediately directed to OpenCounter’s application process. Users finding that a particular city is not suitable can go on to check any of the 30 others in the database. Could your city/county use such a tool to facilitate the growth of the local economy? Get into the beta.

The City of Chicago has a long history of innovation in the collection and use of data to inform policy making. That history, especially connected to the University of Chicago and Hull House, is featured as part of a fascinating exhibition called "Chicago City of Big Data" presently on view at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. At one of the lectures related to the exhibition I learned about plans to place more than 100 poles in the downtown area to collect data. This project has begun and by the end of July or early August, as many as 30 sensors will be attached to specially designed poles to collect environmental data that will be able to provide precise weather and air quality information, block-by-block. The information, minute-by-minute measurements of temperature, humidity, light, sound, barometric pressure and air quality, will be shared with researchers and the general public in real time.

The rise of the megacity (especially in Asia), the vast migration of peoples spurred by economic opportunity and government action consciously planning for new megacities. This interesting video by Parag Khanna, a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Senior Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, provides a brief but compelling glimpse into the near future of cities.

How does the increasingly connected world with its programmable environments impact government at all levels. Clearly, the developed world is on the verge of a revolution of connectivity by which individuals can program their home environments from their mobile devices while at the same time collecting and reporting physiological data to an increasingly digitized medical records system. The impact on the way government runs itself and interacts with the citizens it serves could be enormous from monitoring and reducing the environmental impact of home heating and cooling to more efficient public buildings to improving public health and reducing health care costs. Much will depend on the readiness of government at all levels to become a real participant in the new connected world and the Internet of Things.

In an excellent example of precisely what I blogged about in my last posts, the region including the city of Helsinki has developed a shared approach to open data and spawned a genuine cottage industry of useful apps.

These are the performance measures adopted by the International Organization for Standardization for cities to follow in collecting data. The 46 performance standards are not mandatory but will set a uniform basis by which citizens and granting agencies can evaluate the performance of city government. From my standpoint however, this is not enough. I would like to see discussion of broader standards for the regions in which cities function.

Measuring and comparing the performance of cities has always been difficult. Now a new standard comprising 46 data points established by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization has been devised and will set the framework for measuring the performance of cities worldwide in such critical areas as the availability of clean water, public transportation and debt ratios and average life expectancy. If cities worldwide share many patterns of behavior regardless of location or economic model then what about other local or regional government entities like counties, departments or provinces? Establishing standards for one governing entity is important but it is equally important to realize that cities are embedded in a region and that region may have a greater impact on the lives of urban dwellers than the cities themselves.

Making cities smarter with the use of sensors to monitor everything from traffic to storm water events and bringing all this data together in one place for analysis. As cities become larger and more complex, efficiency in the management of resources is vital. Are sensors and big data the answer? How well and accurately do they measure? What are the downsides in terms of citizen loss of privacy and control over their lives? These are questions that all local governments are going to have to ask in the next few years as the internet of things takes over.

Chicago pioneers the use of analytics for municipal big data sets. d its The new predictive analytics initiative,is called the SmartData Project, and is designed to provide the city with data-driven predictions and insights for its complex of departments and services. The platform is connected to WindyGrid, a hub housing information from every department in real time and gathering about 7 million rows of data per day. Interestingly enough, The SmartData Project is open source and therefore available to other government entities as a template for their own analytics projects.

Data Analytics comes to Minneapolis in the shape of a collaboration between the city and IBM. The collaboration which is called the Minneapolis Intelligent Operations Platform, will provide a platform capable of integrating data from different departments for near-real time analysis. In developing this project, Minneapolis joins cities like Chicago in recognizing the critical importance of analytics to make sense of and effectively utilize the data that city government is constantly accumulating.

The Faculty Summer Institute held each May at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois is an invitation only event that focuses on technology in higher education. My session, "Using Web Analytics to Measure Visitor Engagement With Website Content", was designed to demonstrate the way in which analytics could be used to evaluate the engagement level of site visitors to websites designed to win over supporters or adherents (political or religious). The session was well received with several members of the U of I Political Science Department in attendance. This session was part of a larger project using analytics to analyze political campaigns but the use of analytical packages like Google Analytics or the browser extension Alexa can also prove helpful to businesses or governments wishing to compare the engagement of visitors to their websites with the levels of engagement achieved by the websites of competitors. 

There is progress in making life more convenient for the residents of Cullman County, Ala. Next month the Revenue Commissioner’s Office plans to roll out a new free mobile app that will allow residents to renew their vehicle tags from their smartphones. In order to renew the vehicle tags for any and all their vehicles, residents can enter their driver license number to search all vehicles registered to them and after verifying their drivers license number and insurance the data is sent to the county tag office for verification. The tag office then verifies the information, calculates the renewal fee and the new tags are sent out by mail to arrive in a few days. In developing this app, the county joins a growing national movement among counties to make it easier for residents to pay taxes and fees electronically instead of having to use the mails or trek into county offices.