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.

Obama Reaches 1 Million Facebook Supporters

Around 10 p.m. last night, Barack Obama’s official Facebook page reached 1 million supporters. The news has generated buzz, and rightfully so. It dwarfs John McCain’s 147,000+ supporters, demonstrating his breadth of support. (techPresident has charts of various online popularity metrics) Politico’s Ben Adler reported the two campaign’s internal social networking tools have similar numbers - with my.barackobama.com over 900,000 and McCain Space reporting only “tens of thousands.”

I found it interesting it took so long to reach the 1 million milestone. After all, it took just 9 days for Stephen Colbert’s group to reach 1 million members in October 2007. Barack Obama’s independent “One Million Strong” group is only up to 566,000 after several months of trying. I don’t think it’s because of political apathy, especially since political groups opposing Bush and Clinton already hit the mark. What I think it suggests is that people take supporting a candidate seriously, even if that action is the single click it requires to join a virtual “group.” With five months remaining until the election, I wonder how high the numbers will go.

There’s no easy way to find a list of the biggest lists on Facebook, although a few lists exist. Here’s a sampling that have tasted the rarefied air of 1+ million supporters:

• Six Degrees Of Separation - The Experiment (4,911,727)
• Let’s set and break a Guiness Record!!!! Approved by guinnessworldrecords.com (2,822,768)
• If you remember this you grew up in the 90’s (1,538,571)
• When I was your age, Pluto was a planet. (1,306,606)
• 1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert (1,248,629)
• The Largest Facebook Group Ever (1,191,504)
• I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush! (1,001,973)
• Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary) (992,294 - was over 1M)

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?

The Wrong Way the Solicit Participation on the Web

I noticed two flawed attempts to solicit public participation on the web recently.

First, on Tuesday Hillary Clinton said the following during her nationally televised speech: “Now the question is, where do we go from here … But this has always been your campaign, so to the 18 million people who voted for me and to our many other supporters out there of all ages, I want to hear from you. I hope you’ll go to my website at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.” If you read it closely you’ll see she’s only asking her supporters to visit her website, but you can be forgiven if like me you got the impression she was casting a wider net. As the DCeiver noted, when you visit her website the only option is to sign a petition declaring “I am with you, Hillary, and I am proud of everything we are fighting for.” The form includes an “optional” box for comments. I guess asking her supporters to “sign a pledge offering me your unconditional support” just wouldn’t have had the same ring in the speech.

Second, the D.C. Office of Zoning has opened a commenting feature on their website, where visitors are allowed to review and comment on the proposed policy changes to the city’s zoning code. Visitors must download a 115KB PDF of the proposed policy, which is embedded with HTML links to this webpage with boxes for comments.

Sharing policies, soliciting comments, and allowing visitors to view other’s comments are all good things. However, a number of things about the implementation bug me. First, never require someone to download a PDF unless you have no other option. In particular, documents containing text can be easily displayed on a webpage. In general, PDFs are a hassle to download on a slow connection, and for various reasons can cause browser crashes. If the draft policy were presented on a webpage, the boxes for comments could be located near the policy. The current structure requires you to switch back and forth between both documents. Lastly, offering a long page of input boxes all in one place will probably depress the response rate. Breaking it up into just a few pages or fewer fields would make it seem more manageable.

The technology and techniques of soliciting input online are rapidly evolving, but being honest about what you’re interested in and making the system as easy to use as possible are two good places to start.

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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Txt with Obama

Yesterday it was brought to my attention not all of my friends who support Obama have signed up for his text messaging list. Subscribers receive short messages roughly once a week or less, related to major announcements in the campaign, primaries, and media appearances. You can sign up online, or by texting GO to OBAMA (62262). I first subscribed after seeing it advertised at his College Park rally earlier this year. The campaign website also offers a variety of ringtones, wallpapers, and suggests high-volume users should follow him on Twitter.

> Obama Mobile