Data and Decisions in Government

When I first heard about Baltimore’s CitiStat program, which uses city data to “provide timely, reliable services to Baltimore’s residents,” I envisioned a public sector version of an executive dashboard. The mayor (the program started under Martin O’Malley, it continues under Sheila Dixon) would have data at their fingertips through a computer interface or screen of some type to evaluate the performance of city government, sending directions off to the various city administrators.

I was wrong. The award-winning program is less about technology and more about creating the management approach to directly link timely data to decision makers, and hold administrators responsible for performance. It’s remarkable how little technology it actually involves. According to a Center for American Process briefing “CitiStat uses basic Microsoft Office programs — such as PowerPoint for presentations and Excel to gather data — as well as geographic information system, or GIS, mapping software from ESRI’s ArcView unit, which costs less than $1,000.” The program cost $285,000 to set up and around $400,000 a year to run (mostly salaries), but has estimated to save the city over $350 million since its creation in 1999.

Facing a declining population, limited financial resources, and rampant absenteeism and inefficiency in city government when he took office, former Mayor Martin O’Malley told a conference he didn’t create CitiStat to win awards, but simply “to survive.” Adapting a system called CompStat invented by the New York City Police department, the city create a special office and hearing room (right). Every two weeks, participating city agencies submit data on predetermined metrics, such as days employees were absent or potholes fixed. City analysts write a 8 to 12 page memo for the mayor and cabinet, using the reported data, field research, and interviews of key staff. At the hearing (above) photos, charts, and data illustrating problem areas are displayed and discussed with the agency head responsible. In the program’s parlance, the tenants are:

• Accurate and Timely Intelligence Shared by All
• Rapid Deployment of Resources
• Effective Tactics and Strategies
• Relentless Follow-up and Assessment

The CitiStat model has inspired many similar efforts around the country. O’Malley, since elected governor of Maryland, is busy developing systems for Maryland state government and management of the Chesapeake Bay. And told a conference recently “It’s my belief that the lessons we are learning in Maryland can be applied to any government, at any level, anywhere in the world.”

The copycats are trying to do exactly that, and with varying degrees of success. In the Boston area, the Rappaport Institute sponsored an event in 2003 titled “Bringing CitiStat to Massachusetts,” and some cities to adopt the program most completely since then have been Somerville, Springfield, and Amesbury. The two major limitations of Baltimore’s CitiStat are the lack of any technical infrastructure for internal information management and and the lack of public transparency through the Internet. Technically, the system requires emailing spreadsheets back and forth (there are templates on the website) and the resulting data and meetings are not shared online in a timely way (the most recent agency reports are from October and the all-important analyst memoranda are not posted.)

The cities of Boston and Washington, D.C. are innovating in the areas of performance indicators and data availability, but neither has put the whole package together: CitiStat’s management intensity combined with robust and transparent data architecture.

The Boston About Results (BAR) program compiles quarterly performance measures drawing from a database of electronic records:

BAR collects data on hundreds of performance measures from a wide range of departments in a centralized system that integrates a department’s mission, strategies, measures and resources. The data is used by city officials to identify trends, raise questions and devise new management practices to constantly improve city services.

Absent are any independent city employees scrutinizing the data and conducting investigations, or any description of the management mechanism whereby Mayor Thomas Menino holds anyone accountable for performance. A dry PDF published quarterly means the data is not as timely as Baltimore’s bimonthly review, however does provide an interesting window into city agency performance:

Washington, D.C. has become a leader in publishing data in multiple formats including XML files ready for real-time publishing and analysis by third-party software. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer data portal contains over 274 datasets, which they hope will prove a “catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations.” In order to encourage the development of creative use of all this data, the OCTO recently wrapped up an “Apps for Democracy” contest for the best mashups that use city data sources. Presumably some of these data sources could be used to evaluate city performance (service requests and police reports are published, but not evaluated for trends) by the city or a third party.

The use of specially defined data metrics to measure government performance is necessary because government cannot readily be measured in the terms used by the private sector: profitability. The systems must be unique because what is measured — the specific services offered and associated performance expectations — are defined by the voters.

One potential pitfall to this management approach is the limits of quantitative data. (That is, if you can avoid the typical pitfalls from this brief) Although the absentee rate and number of potholes fixed can be counted easily enough, a host of government functions are not easily counted. Looking at the city of Boston’s performance data, it struck me one of the agencies missing from the system was the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the planning and urban renewal agency for the city. If it was included, what metrics should be measured? Plans produced? Property values increased? The quality of plans produced? How should the success in coordinating private investment to create quality neighborhoods be evaluated?

Urban development is certainly not the only partly qualitative function of urban government, just one of interest to me. It should be remembered an earlier generation of reformers also sought to make government more efficient, and Robert Moses himself even concocted a scheme to evaluate the performance of city employees early in his career. The danger is that the drive for performance or efficiency can sideline worthy yet difficult to quantify government functions, or create a management framework where normative issues, such as the values informing goal setting itself, remain unexamined.

> Baltimore CitiStat
> D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer
> Boston About Results
> Rappaport Institute: “The Seven Big Errors of PerformanceStat”

Public Works and … Internet Voting?

Recently, a major city decided to take a different approach to investing in public works. Instead of deciding what new facilities to build for the population, they put it up for an online vote. Elected officials set aside $11 million taxpayer dollars to build the most popular proposals in each of the city’s nine wards. What better way to end interminable debates and remove the decision from political wrangling: let the people decide.

What city attempted the bold program? Perhaps Portland, OR? Maybe one of the rustbelt strivers like Pittsburgh, PA? Try Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. The innovative 2007 project is described in detail in a recent working paper by e-democracy researcher Tiago Peixoto, who speculates the case may just be an example of the long-discussed potential for local e-democracy.

The Process
The city administration, in consultation with local elected officials, created four possible public work projects costing roughly $1.2 million each in each of the city’s nine wards. (The projects listed in Portuguese, and a machine English translation) The winners would receive funding from the total pool of $11 million in available funds. The project built upon the city’s grassroots-driven participatory budgeting program, which has allowed citizens to allocate resources through participatory decision-making since 1993. During a 42-day voting period, registered voters could log on and vote for one project in each ward, as well as post comments in an Internet forum. In order to maximize availability of the voting system, the city established 178 voting points around the city, including a mobile unit consisting of a bus with Internet access and carried out an extensive public relations campaign.

Results
After voting closed, 172,938 people had registered votes in the system, 9.98% of the city’s registered voters. (Voter registration is mandatory for adults) The forum received 1,210 posts. Peixoto’s paper compared the average number of votes per capita from each district and the average income per capita, and found there was no relationship between the two. Sadly, the case study does not discuss the nature of the public works projects, the nature of the winners, or evaluate whether the government actually followed through and built them. (The results seem to include parks and sports facilities.)

In one of the most provocative findings, Peixoto claims a minimum of 30% of the votes came from other cities, states, and countries. Assuming it was not caused by security problems, this pattern of remote voting raises interesting questions, namely, should democratic participation require physical presence? In the U.S., many college students retain voting registration in their home towns, traveling home to vote while students or young professionals. Although a majority of the visitors to Rethink College Park were local, we were interested to find many committed readers who lived far away, yet retained personal or emotional attachments to the place, or commuted there occasionally for work or pleasure. Should they have a formal voice in local politics? Are our highly spatially fixed political structures obsolete in a mobile world?

After the successful 2006 experiment described in Peixoto’s paper, the city ran the program again in 2008 (participatory budgeting happens every two years). The openness of this city to creating innovative, democratic processes for urban investment stands in stark contrast to the budgeting process in the U.S., where all to often special interests, politicians, and bureaucrats wage battle in drawn-out power struggles to implement their favored projects. Also interesting is how the online process emerged from a carefully calibrated conventional (offline) participatory budgeting process, which allocates funds according to a detailed 9-step process that provides more resources to neighborhoods with lower quality of life ratings. Although conventional participatory budgeting allocated $43 million in the same year the Internet vote spent $11 million, many more voted online than attended the participatory budgeting meetings. It seems clear the key to the programs success lie not simply in the proper technical design, but the overall program design and history of engagement in the community.

> Belo Horizonte: Orcamento Participativo Digital (E-Participatory Budgeting)
> e-Democracy Centre: e-Participatory Budgeting: e-Democracy from theory to success?

Obama-Biden Transition Website Accepting Questions and Comments

Although overshadowed in the media, two recent initiatives by President-Elect Obama demonstrates his unprecedented commitment to Internet transparency and citizen engagement. The first concept, announced by transition head John Podesta last weekend, is called simply “Your Seat at the Table.” Obama-Biden Transition team will meet with hundreds of private organizations. Anyone they meet with must agree to allow any briefing materials be posted online, where citizens can review them and post their comments. Since launching last weekend, PDFs of briefing materials from over 100 organizations have been posted, and thousands of citizen comments posted in response.

Any presidential initiative that excites both Mother Jones Magazine and the Cato Institute must be unique indeed. Although the Cato bloggers griped that similar transparency is often not applied to budget matters, they should remember that as U.S. Senator, Barack Obama was a driving force behind USASpending.gov, whose sole mission is to let Americans “see where their money goes.”

The new initiative raises many questions — who will process the comments? How will they be recorded for history? How is the transition extending the dialogue to Americans who cannot — or prefer not to — engage with their government on a website? Are there any meetings where the briefs cannot, or will not be posted? These questions aside, the experiment fundamentally transforms the usual input process for government policy by allowing some conversation to occur between individuals. Some of the most exciting technology in this area are new social feedback tools like UserVoice or GetSatisfaction that attempt to create a technical framework for a collective discussion, without the prohibitively high technical barriers to entry (and problematic lack of user restrictions) of wikis.

This type of social feedback software is exactly the type of technology the fuels the other new tool, “Open For Questions” the campaign unveiled today, which “lets you ask the Transition team any questions you have about the issues that are important to you” and also “browse through questions other folks have and check off the ones you think are the most interesting.”

Fundamentally, both of these technologies of are applicable to policy-making at the local level, which unlike for the presidency suffers a lack of participants, and a need for better ways than public meetings to bring people together across time and space. If the Obama Administration can demonstrate their practicality at the national level, perhaps it will serve to debunk skepticism and resistance at over levels of government. What will remain is to extract the technical machinery behind Change.gov and make it available to local governments, overcome the political, cultural, and policy barriers to enhanced transparency and dialogue, and develop the expertise to deploy them in constructive ways.

> Change.Gov – Your Seat at the Table and Open for Questions

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.