Transition News Items

Since President-Elect Barack Obama’s election last week news has been flying fast. Here’s a few items that caught my eye.

Obama quickly launched an official transition website, appropriately called Change.gov. Featuring a blog and an invitation for users to submit their vision about what “America can be” and “where President-Elect Obama should lead this country.” The website briefly featured his campaign platform, which has been removed. The platform was captured on WhiteHouse2.org, a private effort to allow thousands of citizens to set the agenda for the new president’s first 100 days. The website links to this transition guide for Obama’s transition team and various nominees and appointees, which features among other useful information a directory of acronyms and this high-level organizational chart of the federal government. (See full size)

The Change.gov transition website is reminding some of his tech policy, released a year ago, which pledged he would let Americans review and comment on non-emergency legislation online for at least five days before signing it. Here’s a piece from Slate on the possibility the Obama administration’s website would function as a social network:

The sort of Web site the Obama team seems to be envisioning—one in which the president and his citizens hold deep discussions about the controversial issues of the day—will surely be much less focused than My.BarackObama.com, which had a singular goal: to get Barack Obama elected. Obama’s campaign Web site connected disparate people who shared a common passion; the White House social network will connect people who disagree with each other and with the president—and whose goals might be in conflict. So far, the Web hasn’t had a great record of bridging social divisions. If Obama can change that, maybe he really is a different kind of politician.

On another topic, Obama adviser and transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett recently reiterated he plans to create a White House Office of Urban Policy. In addition to the new office, his picks for many other posts will have a profound impact on our cities, including three posts Richard Layman is thinking about: Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Director of the Federal Transit Administration.

> Slate: “You Are Now Friends with Barack Obama”
> CNN: “Obama launches Web site to reach public”
> Change.gov

Report Finds Public Participation Improves Policy

A new study published by the National Academy of Sciences has concluded public participation processes can improve the quality of policies and help them become implemented. The 270-page report is the product of a research panel of a dozen experts. The report’s primary recommendation urges “Public participation should be fully incorporated into environmental assessment and decision-making processes, and it should be recognized by government agencies and other organizers of the processes as a requisite of effective action, not merely a formal procedural requirement.”

While I have not read the full study yet, I am not surprised by the findings. After all, in the words of panel head Thomas Dietz, since “a lot of science has to be applied to a very local context, local knowledge is essential.” Although a dearth of good research on the topic exists in the field of urban planning, I found several studies drawing similar conclusions. One interesting examination of 60 planning processes in Florida and Washington concluded that “with greater stakeholder involvement, comprehensive plans are stronger, and proposals made in plans are more likely to be implemented.” The study author went on to write (with two others) a subsequent article analyzing how states should mandate participation. I adopted that group’s general framework, derived as it was from the previous study of effectiveness, for my final paper describing how the Internet could be used as a participation tool.

I think the lesson from the National Academies panel must be driven home to the urban development community. Since we are so intimate with participation, we lose perspective on its broader importance and role. Given the legal requirements for transparency and professional approaches to participation, the key is to look beyond an obsession with the intellectually vague “NIMBYism” and design processes that foster consensus and prevent Morriss Fiorina’s “Extreme Voices” from having a monopoly. In particular, I think it means designing processes that are less time-intensive and allow involvement on a wider scale of commitment levels.

> [Read it Online] National Academies: Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making
> NYTimes: “Report Says Public Outreach, Done Right, Aids Policymaking”
> Previous posts: NIMBYism, Urban Development, and the Public Involvement Solution, Public Participation in Urban Planning Series

The Internet as a Participation Tool

This post is Part 4 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning

While the Internet makes possible new types of interactions between citizens and government, the purpose and structure of these interactions are not new. The section creates a road map for the use of the Internet as a civic participation tool by describing the technical implications of participation history and theory.

Despite scholarly interest of the web’s potential to improve e-democracy, most have viewed it as simply digitizing existing processes. Instead of corresponding with government officials through mail, citizens can use email. Instead of requesting pamphlets or reports they can download digital copies online. A 2004 study of the websites of 582 U.S. cities with a population of 50,000 or more in the 2000 Census found 35% provided an email address for citizens to contact the office, 74% offered the zoning ordinance and 55% had plans, and 37% had minutes of planning meetings.(1)

Most planning agencies have placed large amounts of information online, viewing it as something analogous to newspaper notices or the creation of an official record for public review in person. This means planning board agendas, meeting minutes, and a wide range of planning documents are posted online, often in PDF format. Furthermore, many have adopted web GIS systems allowing visitors to view GIS data and create their own maps.

The discussion above demonstrates a gap between the current theory regarding public participation and the state of government planning websites. While we have a historical basis for widespread outreach and education about planning processes, information is scarce and often missing. This section seeks to apply the historical and theoretical lessons to suggest a path for use of the Internet for participation. As a framework, it adopts the five choice areas advocated by Brody, Godschalk, and Burby for participation in general.
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From Online Politics to E-Government

Via techPresident I found this post on Open Left by Matt Stoller, who, inspired by a conversation with the UK-based nonprofit mySociety, concludes:

I’m going to guess that a good amount of 21st century campaigning will look like the 19th century, with a politicized business community, much stronger local political machines, and engagement levels at 80% or 90%. Local debating societies, nonprofits that do service work and voter turnout, and a blurred line between government and politics are probably in the cards. As social media and public spaces increase in importance in our culture, they will dominate our politics. Right now, internet campaigns take people who like public spaces, harvest their time and money, and use it to target those who want consumer politics. What happens when politics takes place entirely in social public spaces?

mySociety has developed tools that help British citizens become engaged in their community, communicate with elected officials, and even connect with neighbors to improve their street. It reminds me in some ways to Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime and EveryBlock projects, and the work of the NYC-based Open Planning Project. In a comment on Matt’s post I observed what he’s really talking about is e-democracy, and I believe there’s an important role here for governments to play, whether it’s providing data or hosting the conversation themselves.

Software for E-Government

A topic I have begun to explore is the best e-government software to support public participation in urban planning. I’ve previously written about LimeHouse’s tool, which amounts to a web-based document management system that supports the equivalent of blog comments on document sections.

Adobe has been advertising their LiveCycle suite of tools heavily on the D.C. Metro and buses. It features interactive, online forms that interface with existing government databases and processes. Not a bad thing, but this is the type of one-to-one e-government I described in my blog post about urban planning and e-government. Online forms are necessary, but have limited applicability for planning exercises.

Today I noticed a recent announcement from Microsoft regarding their

“Citizen Service Platform (CSP), which will make it easier for governments to interact with citizens, streamline processes and, as a result, save time and taxpayer dollars. Together with its partners, Microsoft’s CSP offerings will help governments of all sizes more responsively deliver services to citizens via the Internet.”

While the list of features is promising, I’d like to see exactly how smoothly the entire package comes together. They claim to have some GIS support, something potentially useful to planners.

Finally, in my new copy of The Next American City (you should be subscribing if you’re not) I saw an ad for a “Survey of Open Source Software Use by Municipal Government,” that seeks to “discover if small to medium cities (population less than 500,000) can conduct business and provide services using only open source software as an alternative to commercial software. The results of this research may provide insight that can help cities reduce the annual cost of information technology and software through the use of open source software.”

Do you have experience with any of these or other e-government software packages? What are the best software tools available to local planners?

Urban Planning and E-Government

This post is Part 1 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning, which received the University of Maryland Urban Studies and Planning Larry Reich Award for Best Final Paper.

Since the advent of information technology, there has been intense interest in its potential use to enhance and improve government functions. Despite innovations in many areas of governance, the use of the information technology in general and the Internet specifically to facilitate citizen involvement in urban planning has been limited. Two fundamental reasons explain this: the unique character of public participation has made it difficult to replicate online, and professionals have hesitated to work on the Internet due to the unequal distribution of Internet access. These reasons also serve to describe the obstacles that must be overcome before effective online participation can be realized. New tools and expanding Internet access address these concerns.

Limited Online Work by Planners
The Center for Technology in Government defines e-government as “the use of information technology to support government operations, engage citizens, and provide government services.” The four broad government functions reflected in this definition are: the electronic delivery of services (e-services), use of information technology to improvement management (e-management), use of the Internet to facilitate citizen participation (e-democracy), and the exchange of money for goods and services over the Internet (e-commerce).(1) Although e-services and e-commerce have spread rapidly, the development of e-democracy tools has lagged behind. To the extent there has been innovation in the area of participation, it has been to facilitate individual communication (e.g. email) to government officials.

Although enhanced participation in government decision-making has long been a theoretical goal of e-government advocates, its actual implementation has been limited. By 2008, the vast majority of planning departments and commissions had at least posted plans and other information online, many posted contact information to government officials, agendas and minutes from government meetings, and many have also begun to experiment with putting geographic databases online.(2) Consultants have emerged specializing in workflow management, online document production, and even receipt of public comments for proposed plans in electronic formats.(3) Despite broad adoption of some level of Internet use by public sector planners, few have elevated it to an important place in their work. A 2003 study of 60 urban planning processes in Florida and Washington states found just 5 percent used web sites as a “central role in providing information.”(4)
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Government as Data Source

A provocative new article in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology titled “Government Data and the Invisible Hand” (PDF) makes the proposal that the federal government should abandon their attempt to create public websites, and focus almost entirely on providing data in standard formats for use by private websites. The article points out greater access to data is supported by all three leading presidential candidates, perhaps most strongly by Barack Obama who says on his website he’ll seek to make “government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities.” (Via TechPresident and Read Write Web)

This argument can be extended to the local government level. At Rethink College Park, the single most important ingredient to our success was government information. However, local government planners generally view their jobs as analyzing proposals for the benefit of elected officials, and providing data to the public is relegated to a secondary role. The City of College Park’s website rarely presented timely development information (almost never the valuable renderings, plans, and maps presented to the city council that we were interested in) and the Prince George’s County Planning Board website deletes their online data after six months. Let me repeat: in a world where Amazon.com is charging $.15 per gigabyte per month for data storage, Prince George’s County (population 828,770) does not archive planning board documents older than six months.

DC government has been a leader in this area, offering dozens of data feeds through their CapStat program, and the neighborhood website JDLand has probably been the most successful at scraping them for neighborhood-specific data. However, as Jon Udell pointed out two years ago, the hoped-for flowering of DC mashups has been slow to materialize, the only notable ones being JDLand and CrimeinDC. While I agree with the article authors’ emphasis on data availability and found data access to be an obstacle to advocating for smart growth and improved citizen participation, I’m not willing to write off government work on the web. One of the things I’ll describe in upcoming posts is extensive history of government planners going to the public to both conduct education and solicit input, two things the web is ideally suited to do. Despite their slow pace of change, I think there’s plenty of space for governments that want to try more innovative websites. After all, as one commenter points out, citizens still turn to government websites first to find the data they need.