An engine for increasing the velocity of democracy
It’s an accepted truth that a healthy democracy requires citizens who participate in the civic life of their communities, and who engage with government institutions. But while civic participation is vital for a healthy democracy, it’s an inadequate prescription.
Government institutions also have to effectively engage and respond to citizen concerns, and by extension, government institutions have to report to citizens how their concerns were answered. Elected officials who fail to do so run the risk of being removed from office.
Technology is quickly creating new possibilities to strengthen and increase the speed of the democratic feedback loop. Interactive Web 2.0 technologies provide more direct opportunities for citizens to engage with government institutions. Examples include blogs, Facebook pages, streaming video, and application programming interfaces (API’s) that allow the development of third-party apps which can display government records on mobile devices. Government API’s are now available in San Francisco, San Jose, Portland, Washington, D.C., Austin, Boston, and New York.
These are all fantastic trends, but Web 2.0 technology isn’t “pixie dust,” wrote Michael Daconta for the November 30th issue of Government Computer News. The less glamorous side of transparency, and the real source of transparency, is records management, data governance, and information sharing. Daconta warns that redirecting expenditures on flash rather than substance could actually be harmful to real transparency. Just as a tree won’t produce good fruit if the roots, trunk, and limbs aren’t healthy, there isn’t much good to a technology that provides the appearance of transparency if the underlying information is garbage, and if there aren’t any changes to the human resources business processes that can handle citizen input.
Here in New Orleans, we know how vitally important civic participation has been to our own recovery. We ourselves have driven the progress we’ve seen to reclaim our neighborhoods. Sadly, the other side of that reality is that some neighborhoods which lack financial and human capacity haven’t been able recover as quickly, and this is a manifest illustration of the fact that government institutions haven’t effectively responded to human needs.
As New Orleanians, we know all too well how government can not only fail, but how government can actually be an obstacle to private initiative. We know how hard it has been to extract permits from City Hall, to reform the criminal justice system, to get our streets repaired, to eliminate blight, to fix a broken school system, to balance the budget, to struggle for storm protection, or to simply ask that our elected officials behave like mature adults and coordinate their activities. We know that where progress has been made in any of these areas, it was often because we created the change through our own activism. We have all also experienced the frustration, however, of having complained about some function of government that was broken and unresponsive, and the feeling that our complaints and our efforts to reform government institutions ended up going nowhere.
So how do we fundamentally change the core systemic problems of our government institutions so that we can obtain the meaningful response that we expect from a democracy?
We could begin by measuring the responsiveness of government institutions — and we should. That’s why a core feature of the NolaStat policy reform is the creation of a performance management process, formalized in a NolaStat Office of Transparency and Accountability, staffed with performance management and technical professionals. NolaStat was adapted from successful examples found in cities around the country where performance management has improved government operations. The most celebrated example is Baltimore’s CitiStat process — but a more recent CapStat reform in Washington, D.C. has become the inspiration for President Obama’s Open Government Initiative to improve the transparency and accountability of federal agencies.
We’ve also learned in New Orleans that when neighborhoods and government finally do work together, the sum is greater than the parts. For example, when neighborhoods have initiated their own housing surveys using teams of volunteers, they have shared that data with the code enforcement office, which is grossly understaffed and overworked in a city with over 60,000 blighted properties. Helping code enforcement target properties for action not only allows neighborhoods to set the intensity of enforcement they desire, but saves code enforcement officials the time of having to undertake surveys by themselves. The current gap in this process is that the feedback loop isn’t always neatly closed. Neighborhoods may not receive direct feedback on how blight complaints were resolved. One can manually search for the data in PDF documents on the city’s Web site, but that’s a classic case of how a cumbersome format offers the appearance of transparency without really useful transparency.
A truly revolutionary reform would be launched if the city opened up an API to the 311 records system, allowing neighborhoods to develop applications on mobile devices, or build Web sites, to send blight complaints straight to the code enforcement database — assuming there’s a database somewhere. This would require an integration of records systems — everything from trafficking 311 requests through to code enforcement, to displaying the geometry of properties with the correct addresses (but see contract reform below for concerns).
There are many other critical data modernization and integration initiatives that need to be undertaken in New Orleans government. The New Orleans Police Department, for example, needs to deploy an electronic police report, as well as modernize its information management system, and integrate its records with the other elements of the criminal justice system. This would expedite the processing of police report records through to the courts, prosecutors, and defenders. It would also improve the ability of the police department to conduct investigations and identify perpetrators. Coincidentally, a modernization and integration project of this sort would also make it possible for the public to understand the effectiveness of the criminal justice system from end to end.
One last example merits attention: Surprise demolitions. Everyone should remember the horrible stories of owners whose flood-damaged homes were bulldozed after they made a commitment to rebuild. Either they weren’t notified that their house was on a demolition list, or they had actually obtained permits to rebuild and the permit didn’t cancel the order to demolish. These are very likely examples of records management failures, and the lack of integration of records between different operations of government. It would do little good to improve transparency by publishing a list of demolitions, and a list of building permits, if there was no integration of data systems, and no business processes to remove a home from the demolition list if a permit is issued.
We can all agree that we want more transparent, accountable, responsive government, and Web 2.0 technologies are increasingly an important part of the solution. What is probably less apparent to the casual observer is that solving the information modernization and integration problem, along with the human resources business processes problem, is more important than deploying cool Web 2.0 apps. Fortunately, as Daconta concluded in his skeptical article about Web 2.0 technologies, “the same infrastructure and processes required for information sharing provide the path to achieving real transparency.”
It’s a very tiny step to go from a modernized, integrated information system architecture, to a fully operational Web 2.0 API that supports independent development of applications that use city data. This was the experience when the D.C. Data Catalog was created. Data integration that supported administrative functions was used to then publish real-time data on the city’s Web site.
The NolaStat policy recommendations incorporate all of these features — both advocating for improved public access to city data, but also calling for the creation of a performance management process that would reward collaboration and problem solving to overcome the business process challenges. By supporting the kinds of initiative we have seen in neighborhoods since Katrina, and improving the ability of citizens to engage with government institutions in meaningful ways, the NolaStat reform is as much a model for managing reform as it is an engine for using technology to increase the velocity of democracy.
Finally, the best intentions of the next mayor will be for naught if we don’t have a competitive contracting process that awards projects to the most qualified contractors — not politically influential contractors, and if we don’t have a project management process that holds contractors accountable for deliverables that actually work and are usable. Given the numerous IT contracting failures over the last several years, the next mayor should consider voiding every IT contract, and undertake an evaluation of how technology should be used to answer the city’s highest priorities. Then, a new contracting process can be initiated that selects the most qualified contractors to support those needs — but that’s a topic better reserved for a future post.
[...] Read more about how NolaStat is a model for managing reform of City Hall in the post, “An engine for increasing the velocity of democracy.” [...]