A rare Saturday, when I have time to blog and reflect on 2010. Funny how the plans that I had for Hackable City at the beginning of the year were completely erased, replaced on the fly with what hopefully were better realities.

A year ago I was preparing to go to the first CityCamp, in Chicago. I had proto-plans to use HackableCity to make a big difference in open data for state and municipal K-12 education, or perhaps to serve as a directory of municipal open government projects to increase re-use. The energy at CityCamp was amazing, and many of the attendees are now emergent as the national leaders in the City 2.0 movement (@pahlkadot, @corbett3000, @philipashlock, @nickgrossman to name a few).  I received a lot of encouragement to pursue the education data path.

So what happened?

3 weeks later, Rep. Patrick Kennedy unexpectedly announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election to RI District 1, and it became fairly obvious that Providence Mayor David Cicilline was going to run for the Congressional seat. This put the Mayors office unexpectedly in play. I and others realized that this was a critical juncture for the city’s forward momentum, and provided an opportunity to start a new conversation about what city government and leadership could look like, what the role of the citizen could be, and how social tools and technologies might enable both.

It was a discussion of possibilities, but we recognized that there was peril as well. Providence and Rhode Island had been deeply impacted by the economic and housing conflagrations, and bitter arguments over immigration, police scandal and public schools had put a lot of people in a very bad mood. The “better angels of our nature” were not in much evidence.

At this fulcrum point, a group of us were compelled to form the Uncaucus, with the idea to “use this time of political uncertainty as an ideal opportunity to stimulate greater civic engagement”, and to “initiate a citizen-led search to hire a Mayor who will help us build a stronger city.” We weren’t quite sure what we were up to, but we believed at our core that the political and civic conversation of the past decades would not sustain us for the next.

We sprinted out with a publicity stunt, posting our citizen-led job posting for the Mayor’s job to Craigslist in select cities around the world. This got us press, and not a small amount of controversy, but it was a “purple cow” and gave us the opening to start a real, substantive effort to reset and rebalance the electoral conversation between candidates and the citizens.

Rather than rehash the events of the next 9 months leading up to the election, here are a few of the lessons I took from what we accomplished, and what we didn’t.

- We called for unusual suspects, and they responded. One of the goals of the Uncaucus was to draw new candidates into the race, and to surface citizens who wouldn’t ordinarily engage in a public political conversation into the race. Hundreds of people showed up at our in person events, on Facebook, and on our Idea Line. Several first-time candidates entered the race. The underdog, Angel Taveras, won in a landslide. The Uncaucus can’t take credit for all this, but I think we played a small part in opening the door to new players and new ideas.

- The candidates co-opted our methods. Our lead message to citizens was “Its your city, you have to engage and offer your ideas, not just say what you want or expect”. We put up an Idea Line powered by Google Voice, hosted an Undebate where the candidates listened and the citizens spoke, and a Facebook group where we hosted citizen conversations. Before long we saw the same tools, approaches, and “listening language” reflected by the candidates.

- Citizens aren’t practiced at giving their ideas, rather than their expectations. This was my biggest learning out of the process. Citizens, when asked for their ideas of how to solve problems, grow the city, manage efficiencies, or engage communities, struggled to shift from saying what they wanted to suggesting how to achieve these expected outcomes. This was true regardless of whether the problem was something directly under City Hall’s control (potholes) or more diffuse (inter-neighborhood relations). I think this is partially because citizens aren’t used to being asked, because the solutions to some problems  are complex or unknown, and because many folks struggle when put on the spot in public forums. Nevertheless, if citizens want their ideas to be heard in this brave new world, they’ll need to get better at articulating those ideas.

More in Part II…

2010 has nearly run its course, and I’ve had a grand total of one update to this blog. This doesn’t mean that Hackable things haven’t been happening, but I just haven’t had time to write about them, and the main idea for Hackable City 2010, around K-12 data, was too complex to get off the ground. Instead we focused our energy on the Uncaucus, a new platform for citizens to engage with their municipal government in Providence, RI.

Now that political silly season is nearly over, a group of us are thinking that a CityCamp Providence makes a lot of sense. So look for news about that in Twitter, hashtag #hackablecity.

Meanwhile, check out this presentation from Angus Davis on school performance in Rhode Island. Super interesting and compelling, foreshadowing Waiting for Superman which debuted here last week.

Its been forever since I’ve maintained HackableCity, though I’ve been working on and off in the background on open government issues, really trying to figure out how and where I could make a difference. After attending the Gov2.0 Summit (sponsored by O’Reilly) and the first CityCamp unconference (organized by Code for America), I think I’ve figured out how HackableCity, and our sister site MashableCity.org can make a difference in both Providence and across the country.

In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be redesigning the site and posting regularly on City Government as a Platform for Citizens, Transforming K-12 Education, and economic development strategy in Rhode Island. Meanwhile, you can keep up with the emergent City2.0 community through a Twitter List we’ve set up at: http://twitter.com/aptuscollab/citycamp.

Here’s some links to keep you busy while we putter away in the background on the new site design.

CityCamp Forum (new members welcome)

MashableCity (join the Google Group!)

Tim O’Reilly’s session at CityCamp on What Makes a City Great

A trio of young design-geeks, immigrants to Providence, have taken it upon themselves to document the impact of the foreclosure crisis in Providence, one boarded-up house at a time. Their site, ForgottenProvidence, is a mashup of user-generated photo content, property data, and Zillow real estate data. Though it has what would be considered a sampling of abandoned homes, if they could find a way to crowdsource the effort, I’m sure some others could get on board. Read about the project at ProJo, or just go visit the site. Nice work, gents.

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I’ve been meaning to post this article from the NY Times Architecture Issue for a while, about Guerrilla Gardening, “the cultivation of someone else’s land without permission.” I think our social services non-profits should train people in this subversive spread of growing things.

Guerrilla Gardening in London – Richard Reynolds – NYTimes.com

Just after sunset on one of the first mild nights of spring, Richard Reynolds parked his hatchback near a traffic circle in the London neighborhood of Hoxton. Tied to his roof were a potted honeysuckle and a dozen box hedge plants, spilling out of garbage bags. Trays of bright white Paris daisies filled the trunk, and cartons of variegated ivy were wedged in the passenger seat. Hipsters drank indifferently outside a nearby pub.

The car was swiftly unstuffed. Soon Reynolds and five accomplices were over a short black fence and onto a small, squalid crescent of land at a bend in the sidewalk. They were ankle-deep in food wrappers and beer bottles and the spindly overgrowth of a bullying bush that Reynolds — bent over, wearing work gloves and high black rubber boots — started clipping fervidly.

In a small but worthy step, Providence has posted a site Providence Sunshine with tax adjustments, received by individuals and corporations against their property taxes. Usually these are small adjustments for small reasons – hardship, administrative error, hospitalization – but it is good to see them opened up. Its obvious that this is being fed manually, as the last update is from 2/19/09. The site lacks RSS or any other export functions, and has no link to the Property database, but this could easily be accomplished through a mashup off the Plat/Lot number.

Super interesting post from O’Reilly’s Vanessa Fox on the (un)findability of government data, which is an essential underpinning of the MashableCity effort. Although Fox’s focus in the article is on search, I think there is also a role here for a concept browsing approach that unifies data from the user perspective, rather than silo-ing it along government agency lines.

From O’Reilly Radar:

Thursday on this blog, Congressman Honda asked, “how can congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government?” He noted that “A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met. Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.” He asked for input on what web 2.0 features he should add to his website to take advantage of today’s online world.

Full article here…

In California, a Massachusetts native has come up with a novel way to take whole cities and counties over into alternative energy sourcing using a technique called Community Choice Aggregation, or CCA. It requires state legislation to enable, but once it happens, municipalities have an effective way to negotiate and buy their power from any source, using the power company as a carrier, rather than a monopoly supplier.

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“I’m saying that seniority is not an appropriate way to manage the assignment of teachers based on what we know in the 21st century,” he said. “It’s no longer about teacher preferences. It’s about whether the teacher is the best match for that particular student.”

With that strongly worded statement, Peter McWalters, the retiring RI Education Commissioner, let the Providence School district know that teacher vacancies must be filled based on qualifications rather than seniority, and that “bumping” of less senior teachers in favor of more senior ones will cease. This is a major victory for the common sense idea that a school principal and its community should have the right (and the responsibility) to determine how to build their educational team.

There will be a lot of noise about this from the teacher’s union, which has yet to offer up a clear argument as to why seniority should trump all – already the comments list on this Providence Journal article is the longest I’ve ever seen. What the union hasn’t accepted is that, until they remove their contract provisions that work counter to student achievement at the individual school level, they won’t be able to credibly work with parents to hold schools and their administrations accountable for the resources that will produce better results.

You may have read Good to Great, a classic business book by Jim Collins that examines through research why some companies “take off to greatness” after many years of mediocrity, while others lag behind. If you haven’t read it, you should, it is applicable far beyond traditional for-profit businesses. I was freshly reminded of Collin’s tenets for transformation while reading this piece in the Providence Journal “Hope High School nearly triples its reading scores”. It is the first of a three part series on how “Hopeless High”, with a historic dropout rate of above 50%, is slowly stabilizing and succeeding at its job of giving urban teens a decent environment and access to learning.

I see Good to Great’s findings woven throughout Hope’s ongoing story. [Read more →]