civic technologies - tools or therapy?
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This document discusses civic technologies and the different forms of civic participation they can enable. It explores whether civic technologies are scientific, activist, libertarian, or aimed at deliberation. It examines participation as compliance, feedback, monitoring, and co-governance using examples like trash tracking. However, it also notes participation is not always positive and can burden citizens or individualize responsibility. It discusses emerging forms of accountability through ambient or outcome-focused means. In closing, it lists related books on urban data, accountability technologies, and decoding cities with big data.
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civic technologies - tools or therapy?
- 1. Civic Technologies - Tools or Therapy? Dietmar Offenhuber, PhD Northeastern University
- 4. Popular Epidemiology A Civic Action - John Travolta (1999) Brown, Phil. 1987. “Popular Epidemiology: Community Response to Toxic Waste- Induced Disease in Woburn, Massachusetts.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 12 (3/4): 78–85.
- 5. Grassroots Science Public Lab, Brooklyn NY. Balloon Mapping of the Gowanus Canal. Photo Josh Weinstein
- 6. The Rise of the ‘Expert Amateur’ (E. Paulos) Pieter Franken, Safecast
- 7. The monitorial citizen: civic technologies
- 8. “BigGov has become irrelevant in the public sector, eclipsed by someone with a supercomputer in their pocket, open source hardware and software at their fingertips, and a global community of like-minded geniuses at their beck and call: YOU.” Ed Borden
- 9. “there are some things that can only be accomplished at scale […] For better or worse, governments are among the few actors capable of operating at the necessary scale to accomplish things like that; they're certainly the only ones that are, even in principle, fully democratically accountable” – Adam Greenfield
- 10. Algorithmic Governance and private infrastructure “In this future scenario, the roads on which Jen is driving will have also become autonomous actors, doing trades with the car on TradeNet. They can submit bids to the car about how much they're going to charge to use them. If she's in a hurry, Jen can choose a road that's a bit more expensive but which will allow her to get into the city faster. Awesome, right?” Mike Hearn, Bitcoin Developer, about the future of public infrastructure
- 11. Are civic technologies … scientific? activist? libertarian? deliberative?
- 12. “The idea of citizen participation is a little like eating spinach: no one is against it in principle because it is good for you.” Sherry R. Arnstein. 1969. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (4): 216–24.
- 15. Urban Entropy (2015), Dietmar Offenhuber, Ars Electronica Center
- 16. Participation as monitoring Trash | Track, Senseable City Lab, 2009 - 11
- 17. Trash | Track, Senseable City Lab, 2009 - 11
- 18. Items reported from this facility between Oct. 22 and Nov. 8. some objects for several days.
- 20. Participation as co-governance Forage Tracking - Senseable City Lab COOPAMARE facility in downtown São Paulo
- 21. Truck collection vs. manual collection Blue = truck routes Orange / red = manual collector routes
- 22. Too much traffic (public busses) Too much traffic, distance, lack of material Steep hills Steep hills Steep hills Many shops
- 23. Participatory design workshop at Coopamare
- 24. Is participation always a positive value?
- 25. Incrementalism “Busy-ness is a handy method of maintaining the status quo yet is simultaneously active, optimistic, and often makes people feel better.” Samantha MacBride. 2011. Recycling Reconsidered (p. 6). MIT Press.
- 26. Individualization of responsibility Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World? Michael Maniates
- 27. Participation as a burden
- 28. Ambient Accountability Dieter Zinnbauer, Transparency International Know Your Rights Mural – Hunts Point, NY
- 29. Ambient Accountability Inflatable ‘Union Rats’ - informal pressure through naming and shaming (Hossain 2010)
- 30. A new form of accountability - focus on outcomes rather than process (Goldsmith & Crawford 2014). Jan Banning, Bueraucratics
- 31. Dietmar Offenhuber d.offenhuber@neu.edu offenhuber.net Discussed examples from these books: Offenhuber, Dietmar, and Katja Schechtner, eds. 2012. Inscribing a Square: Urban Data as Public Space. Vienna, New York: Springer. Offenhuber, Dietmar, and Katja Schechtner, eds. 2013. Accountability Technologies - Tools for Asking Hard Questions. Vienna: Ambra V. Offenhuber, Dietmar, and Carlo Ratti. 2014. Decoding the City: Urbanism in the Age of Big Data. Basel: Birkhauser.
Hinweis der Redaktion
- What we see here is a famous dissertation, from a very popular German politician. Because he was so popular, he had very little time to actually write his dissertation. Rumors of plagiarism emerged early on, but were quickly dismissed. Until an online collective created a wiki-site and started to map every instance of plagiarism they found and verified. In this visualization, everything that is colored is plagiarized. What I like about this visualization is that it was not designed for presentation, it is rather a tool for collaboration. It is obviously not made by a designer. It was built by the volunteers who analyzed the dissertation, to organize their work process – an artifact of the process. Confronted with this evidence, the Defense minister had to step down. Project Guttenplag is an example of social accountability, meaning community-driven efforts to hold power-holders to account. Recently, social accountability heavily relies on what I would call accountability technologies – digital tools that are used for collecting evidence (sensing tech.), for coordinating volunteers (crowdsourcing platf.), and finally, disseminating message to the public to achieve change (social media).
- Here in comparison, the visualization of the same data that was widely publicized, by visualization designer Gregor Aisch, visually very elegant and arguably more clever in its analysis. But as I said, I like the richness of the “dirty” vernacular visualizations, that are made when people try to figure something out together. the equivalent of a “back of the envelope” drawing, that never makes it into the final presentation (except into those by “design thinking” aficionados)
- There are historical precedents for the kind of social accountability initiatives such as project guttenplag - Cases of childhood leukemia in Woburn north of Boston, where drinking water was polluted by toxic waste. The affected residents not only mobilized the public, but also drove the scientific research into the case, worked together with Harvard epidemiologists, and were in the end able to produce impeccable data. Based on this case, our colleague at NEU - Sociologist Phil Brown coined the term popular epidemiology. Brown analyzed the advantages and constraints of citizen-driven efforts. Brown revisited his seminal paper ten years later, and expanded the term from popular epidemiology to ‘Citizen Science.’
- ‘Citizen science’ as a term again has also changed its meaning over the past years. Initially citizen science was mostly used for practice of scientists working with volunteers who help with data collection (birdwatchers, marine debris). More recently it has been associated with a growing ambition to democratize science, in some ways also to challenge science, claiming that also uncredentialled people outside of Academia can do research. Examples include the excellent work by the Public lab – i.e. mapping the event horizon Oilspill
- This new definition of citizen science has lead to a new actor - what Eric Paulos calls the “expert amateur” Safecast - mobile radiation monitoring in Japan after all geiger counters were sold out, documenting radioactive pollution and uncovering flaws in official radiation measurement methodologies. (presented in a chapter our book “inscribing a square”)
- The idea of “Civic technologies” is to capture the energy of participatory projects and use them for local government, making the process of governance more interactive, responsive and engaging. As the name suggests technology plays a large part in this. (Here Boston’s highly successful Citizens Connect feedback app) There is some proximity to the model of New Public Management: paradigm of the city as a firm, the citizen as a customer. 311 systems are often literally built on top of Customer Relationship Management software. But I think this association with NPM is also not entirely true, because these technologies are not really saving the city money, nor do they make urban services necessarily more efficient. Their point is about “access” and “voice” and I do think that there is a genuine idea of civicness behind them.
- But most discussions of civic technologies involve a heavy rhetoric of ‘bottom up’ and decentralization, which are touted as positive values. Here a screenshot from 2011, the ‘internet of things’ platform Pachube (no longer existing in this form) - claiming that volunteers can replace government as infrastructure stewards.
- On the same page, a reply by Adam Greenfield, who is a bit uncomfortable with this Silicon Valley interpretation of civic engagement.
- And it goes much further into this direction: Technologies such as Bitcoin and the Blockchain make it possible to automatize transactions, charging smallest amounts of money with almost no transaction cost. With these technologies, we can measure the smallest instances of service consumption and bill it. Mike Hearn, Bitcoin Developer and former Google employee, calls this his idea for the future of “public infrastructure” - actually, this kind of infrastructure is no longer a public good in the sense of a “commons” at all - it is a 100% private model of pay-per-consumption
- These processes raise the question - what is the ideology of civic tech? we have at least four ideologies of civic technologies: libertarian (pachube); vs. activist (safecast); vs. scientific (birdwatching); vs. deliberative (responsive city) – problem is, you cannot separate them out into neat dichotomies such as top-down vs. bottom-up, commons-based or neo-liberal, left-wing or right wing. they are hybrid, combine aspects of all of these.
- one way to separate them out is by looking at the role of participation. what do we mean when we talk about participation? Starting with a classic Sherry Arnstein’s sarcastic dictum that ‘participation is like spinach, nobody is against it because it is good for you’ until it questions distribution of power. True today as it was in 1969. Participation is rarely questioned, its value is taken for granted. Arnstein’s famous ladder based on the degree of agency afforded to the participant. from pseudo-participation as tokenism and therapy on the one end, to real distribution of power on the other end. We can do the same with the role of participation in civic technologies:
- Participation as compliance – education campaigns, recycling … the goal is that citizens learn to use an infrastructure how the system builders intended it. In this sense, “gamification” and “civic engagement” are efforts to manufacture compliance - it is not discussed what happens with all the cans that are collected, or whether their manufacturer is somehow held responsible as well …
- The next level is participation as feedback - i.e. incident reports for infrastructure issues. This information mostly benefits the provider / maintainer of the system, but to some extent also the submitter, if this annoying pothole is fixed in front of her driveway. I am very interested in how design is used in these systems to strike a balance between “engagement” and “troublemaking” - my hypothesis is that the way these complaints are displayed is used to moderate behavior - by managing the visibility of the complaints
- just a recent project i just finished for a media facade in Austria - using text to speech to read the complaints to the city on the main street across the city hall. Quite entertaining, I have to say, Austrians are skillful wordsmiths when it comes to complaining. In a way it is a “feedback of feedback” if you will. Of course these complaints are also on the website for those who already know about it and are interested, but in Richard Sennet’s and Jane Jacob’s spirit, in a real public space you are exposed to some things whether you like it or not - and here everyone on the street is exposed to the computerized voice from the loudspeakers behind the facade.
- Next level - participation as monitoring - our trash track project at the senseable city lab …
- … working with volunteers in seattle
- lead to many interesting results - here a couple of reports from a gravel facility - not a landfill.
- The response from the local manager at this place “I have no idea what you are talking about”
- We asked ourselves the question – if we find this in a formal system, how would an informal system look like? and here we worked with formerly informal recycling cooperatives in brazil - they are a real model of co-governance, where the waste pickers got together and built an impressively effective recycling system
- traces of truck collection vs. manual collection - tradeoffs between traffic, parking issues… in the end the manual collectors recovered twice as much material per involved worker
- understanding the spatial decisions of manual collectors - many factors come into play.
- incrementalism as a distraction: participation creates a distracting Busy-ness: the idea incremental change – every citizen takes a part – distracts from systemic change. Do we really need applications to report power outages and damaged electricity poles, if we can just put all the installation underground, like in the rest of the “civilized world”?
- Individualization: shifting responsibility to the user, in order to prevent systemic change. The individual is shamed for not recycling enough, but the manufacturers are not challenged, who could really make a change by choosing different packaging etc. strategies.
- and using participation as an smoke screen for reducing public services (as in the case of David Camerons “Big Society” that celebrated volunteering, but cut public funding). Participation becomes an unfair burden: why should citizen support a government that does not support them in the first place?
- i think we focus too much on participation as a positive value, a goal in itself. and not enough on the idea of shared governance. shared governance is about accountability. This holds exciting challenges for design: How can the urban environment become articulate about governance / accountability issues? Dieter Zinnbauer’s idea of Ambient Accountability (in our accountability technology book).
- Many different forms and Informal means for creating accountability – the “court of public opinion”
- But where I really see a lot of value in civic technologies is how they can lead to a new form of accountability Where today most governments measure how well civil servants perform particular prescriptive activities, the digital data stream allows public service agencies to measure outcomes instead. Goldsmith, Stephen; Crawford, Susan (2014-08-11). The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance (p. 110). Wiley. Kindle Edition.