# Introduction This book is meant for public servants and people working inside government who want to connect with innovators and technologists outside of the bureaucracy. It highlights strategies they can use to collaborate with people doing interesting and valuable work that can benefit or support the mission of government. This book is organized into four main sections. The first section discusses how these new kinds of collaborations with local technology communities fit into a long tradition in government of tapping into expertise from outside of the bureaucracy. The second section uses the results from a survey of current and former city government officials to highlight specific benefits of working with outside technology groups, and details several case studies which describe how cities are successfully collaborating with these groups. The third section lists some of the challenges and limitations of working with outside technology groups, and also draws heavily on survey responses from current and former city government employees. The final section lists some specific strategies and tactics that can be used by government employees to identify, communicate, and collaborate with the members of their local technology community. ## Contribute You can help make this book better by [opening an issue](https://github.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/issues) if you want to suggest a change. ## License This book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. See the [license details here](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). ## Attributions The [cover photo](https://github.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/tree/925ed715e6cebb7c6b3f47d75675543b1de881d5/cover.jpg) is available under a [Creative Commons license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/) courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Burkett. ## Author's Note Heartfelt thanks to [Jessica McKenzie](https://twitter.com/jessimckenzi) for her assistance with editing this book. Her thoughtful insights have made this work eminently more readable. The ideas and recommendations articulated in this book are mine, based on my experiences working in state and local government, and working with local technology groups in cities across the country. The positions, strategies and opinions expressed in this work do not represent those of any government or organization that has ever employed me. # About this book ![Empathy Jam: New York City, August 2016](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/empathy_jam.jpg) > We need to insist on collaboration not merely as an ideal, but as a basic design element for government.1 > > \-- The Collaborative State ## Why write this book? This book is about how governments can support their core functions by developing new strategies for utilizing technology and data. In the 21st century, governments make extensive use of software, data, and technology to provide public services. Government technology assets are often poorly designed, outdated, and difficult to maintain. Governments face unique challenges in obtaining and implementing technology solutions, and in hiring and retaining people with sophisticated technology skills. Governments can augment their toolsets for developing and implementing new technology solutions by developing strategies for engaging and collaborating with people in their local technology communities. There are pockets of innovative and talented people in every state, city, and town in the U.S. These individuals might work for private or public organizations by day, but do innovative things outside of normal work hours or on weekends. Many are interested in helping others and are attracted to complex problems and challenges. Some may have unique skills that they can bring to bear on an important issue affecting the work of government. Many also feel invested in their communities and would like to help address problems affecting real people in their cities if given the chance. New civic technology groups are being created around the country, many of which are part of a national network such as the Code for America Brigade program. Even in places that lack a formal organization, local citizens have probably started their own informal network. Regardless of their current level of engagement, these people are present in your community and are a resource that governments can leverage to help solve civic problems and provide new insights. People who work outside of government can provide a new and unique perspective on complex or difficult issues; they are less likely to be encumbered by political or administrative roadblocks that typically hamper the bureaucracy; they may have proficiency in technologies or skills that governments face challenges in acquiring; they may be able to work more effectively across organizational and governmental boundaries; and they can often move more quickly to build out ideas and implement solutions. Governments already have some well developed mechanisms for partnering with people outside the bureaucracy in instances where governments may not have the skills needed in-house to address a specific issue or problem. However, these existing mechanisms are not always a good fit for the kinds of collaborations discussed in this book, which have the potential to provide numerous benefits to governments and those they serve. There are some impediments that could hinder government partnership with outside groups. These groups may use platforms and tools that are not supported inside the bureaucracy; they may not place the same value or priority on problems or issues as those working inside government; and they may not appreciate constraints that can sometimes slow down the rate at which decisions get made and solutions are implemented inside government.2 In addition to making communication and collaboration with outside groups more challenging, these factors can lead to miscommunication, frustration, and apathy in outside technology groups to becoming more civically involved. These new opportunities for collaborating often occur after traditional work hours, or on weekends. This may cause issues for those in public service who work more traditional hours and who may be subject to policies and practices that reinforce work during traditional business hours, on site in government offices.3 This book offers strategies to overcome these barriers and leverage the talents of those outside government for the public benefit. ## Who is this book for? This book is meant for public servants and people working inside government (at the federal, state, and municipal levels) who want to connect with innovators and technologists outside of the bureaucracy. It is meant to complement other useful sources of information for government employees on engagement and outreach around data and technology.4 It is designed to help civil servants find, communicate, and collaborate with people doing interesting and valuable work-particularly those working with technology-that can benefit or support the mission of government. It highlights strategies to help government employees leverage the talents of smart, passionate people in their local technology community, as well as those further afield. This book was written, in part, using responses from a survey of government employees (and former employees) from a number of different jurisdictions that have well-established relationships with outside groups of volunteer technologists. ## How is this book organized? This book is organized into four main sections. The first section discusses how these new kinds of collaborations with local technology communities fit into a long tradition in government of tapping into expertise from outside of the bureaucracy. The second section uses the results from the survey of current and former city government employees to highlight specific benefits of working with outside technology groups, and details several case studies which describe how cities are successfully collaborating with these groups. The third section lists some of the challenges and limitations of working with outside technology groups, and also draws heavily on the responses from current and former city government employees. The final section lists some specific strategies and tactics that can be used by government employees to identify, communicate, and collaborate with members of their local technology community. ## About the author Mark Headd is the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia, one of the first municipal Chief Data Officers in the United States. Mark has over a dozen years of combined experience working at the federal, state, and local level in the U.S., including one of the largest states in the nation and one of the largest cities. His experience spans both the executive and legislative branches of government: he has worked as a policy adviser, a budget and tax analyst, and as a government technology executive. Before joining the City of Philadelphia, Mark served as the chief policy and budget adviser for the State of Delaware's Department of Technology and Information. He has also served as Director of the Delaware Government Information Center, as a technology adviser to former Delaware Governor Thomas R. Carper, and in the New York State Senate as a budget and finance analyst. Self taught in technology and software development, he holds a Master's Degree in Public Administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is a former adjunct instructor at the University of Delaware where he taught a course in electronic government in the School of Public Policy and Administration, and is a former instructor at Wilmington University where he taught a course in government finance. ### Endnotes 1. The Collaborative State: How Working Together Can Transform Public Services, ed. Simon Parker and Niamh Gallagher (London: Demos, 2007). 2. For example, requirements to be inclusive and transparent which often add additional steps and time to processes that select or implement technology solutions, or the typical procurement and budgeting processes which can takes months and even years. 3. As an example, it is uncommon for governments to have formal remote work policies that would allow employees to work outside of traditional government offices. 4. The Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University maintains an extensive collection of free resources on using data for better decision making and engaging with outside data users at . # Prologue We live in a time when people outside of government often have better tools to build things with government data than government employees themselves. These new data tools tools are more powerful, more plentiful, more flexible, and less expensive than many of the tools that government employees currently have at their disposal. Governments typically have relationships with large technology companies like Microsoft, IBM, Esri, Oracle and others that offer an array of different data tools. But the gulf between what outside experts in the technology community - whether in the private or nonprofit sector - can accomplish and what governments can achieve on their own is growing wider. ![Education Hack Day: Baltimore, MD, November 2011](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/education_hackathon.jpg) We've seen this trend before. Not long ago, making a map on the internet required specialized skills and proprietary tools. Then came Google Maps. Now platforms like [Mapbox](https://www.mapbox.com/), [Carto](https://carto.com/), [Mapzen](https://www.mapzen.com/) and countless others have democratized mapmaking, and given citizen mapmakers cheaper, more powerful tools than many government employees have. The process of using data and technology to improve the way governments work is now inextricably linked to how effective governments are at engaging with outside data users and technologists. Public sector employees who want to use data to improve how government operates, enhance the quality of public services, or help governments make better decisions will need to develop a new set of skills. It won't be enough to simply enhance internal capacity for data analysis or app development, although that's important as well. In late 2013, when the federal website for the health insurance marketplace created under the Affordable Care Act suffered from a slew of technical problems immediately following its launch, President Obama and technology leaders in the federal government turned to the private sector for help. The resulting influx of technology expertise from outside the bureaucracy helped mitigate the problems with the website and speeded its return to normal operations: > After initial difficulties, CMS \[the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] and contractors **worked with outside experts** to repair HealthCare.gov, instilling changes in the project culture and work processes.1 (emphasis added) Following this work, the federal government moved to enhance its internal technology capacity with the creation of two new groups, 18F and the United States Digital Service (USDS). But engaging with outside technology communities continues to be an important part of federal technology innovation efforts.2 Our government now regularly recruits civic technologists to serve on innovation and technology teams inside of government, and after leaving public service these individuals rejoin their local civic technology communities. A virtuous cycle ensues. Governments must develop strategies for engagement that can help direct the efforts of outside technology experts to issues or challenges that will have the broadest impact and the largest potential payoff. They will need to learn how to rally people with special talents to a particular cause or challenge, and then to turn those outside efforts into tangible outcomes for government agencies. They must learn to view the technology community as a potential talent pool from which they can draw a new generation of public servants who possess unique expertise in digital service creation. This is often a relatively new skill set for those in government IT departments and CitiStat offices, where government data efforts commonly reside.3 These agencies are typically inward facing—serving the needs of other government agencies—and often don't have long traditions of external engagement. The time has come for governments to reimagine their place in the civic technology production chain. More than ever, it is essential that governments assume their role as data stewards, enablers, and conveners to bring the power of these new external tools to bear on the problems facing our communities. For governments, outside engagement will turn out to be the most important new tool in their 21st century data toolkit. ## Endnotes 1. For a more detailed discussion of the impact of outside experts on the healthcare.gov project, see the report from the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services. 2. For example, see . 3. For more information on CitiStat programs, see . # The Case for Engagement ![Hack Upstate: Syracuse, NY, October 2015](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/hack_upstate.jpg) > Contemporary democracies face challenges of building inclusive governance given bureaucratized governments tasked to make policy for large populations. Governance is viewed as a matter of technocratic elites grappling with interdependent, highly challenging problems.1 > > — Hollie Russon Gilman: Democracy Reinvented Government employees collaborating with volunteer technology groups at weekly “hack nights” or at periodic technology events may seem like a recent phenomenon, but it can be viewed as part of a larger (and longer) tradition in government of accessing expertise and special skills outside of the bureaucracy to improve public services. Engagement with outside stakeholders and experts is an important component of successful policymaking, and for designing and implementing effective public services. Governments have traditionally used a wide variety of mechanisms to engage with outside groups but the rationale for engagement (and the methods employed) typically falls into one of three general categories. * Governments solicit input from outsiders using processes like community planning or participatory budgeting to help gauge strength of sentiment, or to help balance competing priorities among disparate stakeholder groups.2 * Governments can engage directly with the consumers of public services and solicit their feedback and insights to help improve those services using an approach called “coproduction.” * Governments use an array of legal and administrative tools to directly access the skills and expertise of outside individuals or firms, particularly when the problem or issue being addressed is new or complex, or the skills required to address it are scarce inside the bureaucracy.3 This section will discuss the last two categories in more detail, as they relate most directly to engaging with outside technology groups to leverage their specific skills and expertise around technology and data. ## Building Better Services Together There is a rich history of research and practice around the idea of “coproduction” of public services which is directly relevant to the discussion of collaborating with technology groups outside of government. That being said, there are lots of people in the world of civic technology that are unaware of this long history of study and practice, and there are many people inside government familiar with coproduction that are not aware of how this concept relates to outside engagement with volunteer technology groups. In explaining what coproduction is and how it works, one of the most commonly used examples is community policing, where policing services are improved by directly interacting with residents in a neighborhood. Through personal interactions, police officers working in a particular neighborhood may gain insights and information that help them develop better strategies for crime prevention, and ultimately provide better service to the community. In this coproduction example, the residents of a neighborhood provide a kind of expertise—their intimate knowledge of a place and the people in it—to help refine and improve a public service. In a 1983 article published in the journal Public Administration Review, Jeffrey Brudney and Robert England (from the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University respectively) offered the following summary of the idea of "coproduction," which we could use almost word-for-word to describe the modern civic technology movement. > Coproduction is an emerging conception of the service delivery process which envisions direct citizen involvement in the design and delivery of city services with professional service agents. In this manner, coproduction proposes an answer to the more services-less cost dilemma: By supplementing—or perhaps supplanting—the labors of paid public officials with the service-directed activities of urban dwellers, coproduction has the potential to raise both the quality and the efficiency of municipal services.4 One of the most broadly accepted definitions of what coproduction is comes from a 2003 study in the Journal of Developmental Studies by Anuradha Joshi and Mick Moore. They described coproduction this way: > The provision of public services…through regular, long-term relationships between state agencies and organized groups of citizens, where both make substantial resource contributions.5 Though written in a different context—what we know today as “civic tech” didn’t exist until several years after this study was written—it's worth noting that this definition could very accurately be applied to the modern civic technology movement. Brudney and England make special note in their work of the financial plight at the time in the City of Detroit, where then-Mayor Coleman Young proposed a new approach to city services that leveraged the efforts of ordinary citizens. This approach was derided at the time by some as an example of “self-service government.” Brudney and England’s response to this criticism could very well have been written as part of the lexicon of the 21st century civic technology movement: > Government is a reflection of those who define the city – the local citizenry. The ‘self-service’ concept constitutes a redefinition of traditional service delivery patterns.6 The modern civic technology movement was incubated in urban areas. Governments in big cities like Washington D.C., New York City and Chicago were among the first to actively recruit outside software developers to build solutions on top of government open data. There are some obvious reasons why big cities have been among the first to embrace the idea of leveraging the talents of outside technologists. Cities provide a more comprehensive and intimate range of services to citizens than other levels of government. And they are also limited—far more so than states or the federal government—in their use of various revenue sources to fund their operations.7 The pressure for governments to do more with less is felt most acutely at the municipal level. Cities, then, can be viewed as the inception point for both our understanding of the idea of coproduction as well as the modern civic technology movement. Many of the examples of successful collaboration with volunteer technology groups that will be discussed in this book, as well as examples of the barriers to collaboration, are gleaned from responses to a survey of current and former city employees. The cities that were surveyed are leading the way in developing new strategies for external engagement that are built on our traditional understanding of collaborative services design through coproduction. Governments use coproduction to tap into the expertise of people that consume public services so that they can make those services better. It is a collaborative undertaking that affords people outside of the bureaucracy an opportunity to lend their insights and their specialized knowledge to improve how government works. Volunteers in the world of civic technology work on solutions to civic problems with data and information provided by governments. This is also a collaborative undertaking that lets people outside the bureaucracy apply their special knowledge and skills to improve how government works. ## A New Way of Collaborating The kind of collaboration discussed in this book—government employees collaborating with volunteer technology groups—fits well into our understanding of coproduction, an approach that governments have used for the last several decades. However, there are some differences between the way traditional coproduction has worked and how engaging with outside technologists to foster new solutions can work. We need to understand these differences and be able to describe them. One way to do this is to classify these activities not as coproduction, but as something new: > Exoproduction of public services can be said to occur when all or part of a service typically provided by a government or a public sector entity occurs outside of, or exogenous to, the agency of government explicitly (or implicitly) charged with providing that service, or a component of it. This description accommodates an important difference from the traditional idea of coproduction. In coproduction, a public service is provided by a government agency and the agency (or some other arm of government) invites the direct consumers of that service to provide their input in order to improve it. Something slightly different is happening when governments work with volunteer technologists, and we need to expand our definition of this new concept to accommodate this. > Exoproduction of public services can be said to occur when all or part of a service typically provided by a government or a public sector entity occurs outside of, or exogenous to, the agency of government explicitly (or implicitly) charged with providing that service, or a component of it. *While governments do not directly provide services or information in scenarios where exoproduction occurs, they do make available the raw materials or components necessary for the service to be provided by an outside party*. A clear example of this concept can be seen when looking at information on transit services. Transit authorities are charged with operating and maintaining public transit systems, and as part of their responsibilities they must communicate to transit riders the schedules for transit services, the fares for such services, and even the current status of various transit assets (e.g., is the R3 train running on time?).8 However, through efforts to share the raw data on transit schedules and real-time vehicle location information, many transit agencies are encouraging the development of third-party applications and solutions that can fill this role.9 A non-trivial number of transit riders now obtain information on transit services from a source outside the official purview or control of transit authorities.10 There are other examples where outside parties develop solutions on top of government provided data to fill a role or address an issue that would typically fall under the official responsibilities of a government agency. In Philadelphia (as in many big cities) there are volunteer efforts underway to encourage the repurposing of vacant properties, even though official responsibility for this falls under the duties assigned to specific government agencies.11 These outside efforts are enabled by the deliberate release of property information by the City of Philadelphia.12 The city encourages the development of these third-party solutions by releasing data openly, and helps maintain them by keeping that data current and updated. The new concept of exoproduction extends the traditional notion of coproduction because it can involve accessing expertise from people outside of government that are not necessarily the direct users of a government service. The expertise lent by these individuals is not a personal experience with a specific service, but rather their ability to, among other things, develop and deploy new technologies more quickly and more cost effectively than governments can. The challenge then is ensuring that the design, implementation, and marketing of civic technology solutions is properly aligned with the needs of those to be served rather than the predilections or preferences of those building these solutions.13 User-centered design is a fundamental principle of good software development, but proficiency in this discipline may vary across different volunteer technology groups. And while there is a growing body of resources available for volunteer technologists who want to engage with end users as they develop civic applications, some technology communities—particularly those that are smaller in size or newly formed—may not be as well-positioned to leverage those resources as others. It’s worth noting that although a sizeable body of research and practice exists on coproduction, this approach is not always utilized by government agencies when implementing new services or enhancing existing ones. Undertaking collaborative service design successfully often requires new resources, specialized training, and expertise. Developing the organizational capacity to do coproduction well can take time, and not every government agency is equally well-positioned to do this even if they desire to do so. And so it is with collaborative solution development by volunteer technology communities. Developing the organizational capacity within these groups to collaboratively build civic apps with those intended to be served can take time and should appropriately be viewed by those in the bureaucracy as an ongoing process, one that they can help inform and assist. It is important that our formal understanding of volunteer technology activities occurs within the framework of coproduction because of the strong focus that coproduction has on soliciting input and feedback from the direct consumers of a service or solution. In instances where exoproduction occurs, developing feedback mechanisms to ensure that a solution best meets the needs of those intended to be served can sometimes be challenging. This underscores the importance of direct involvement and stewardship by governments with those working in the world of volunteer civic technology, to help ensure that these feedback mechanisms are in place and being used. ## Tapping the Experts Outside Governments have an array of different tools available to tap into expertise or special skill sets outside the bureaucracy. Most people know that the government can use the procurement process to buy services from outside parties. Many of the technology solutions and other goods and assets used by governments to deliver services and information directly to citizens are built by (or with the help of) outside parties.14 Social and mental health services may be provided by outside parties like neighborhood-based agencies or church groups. Some cities have specially-created business improvement districts with quasi-taxing authority to support things like trash pickup, graffiti removal, and security. 15 Legislative and regulatory bodies solicit public comment on proposed laws and regulations. This allows outsiders with specific knowledge on the activity or issue being regulated to offer insights. In some cases, soliciting public input for a prescribed period of time is explicitly required before a regulatory change can take effect.16 Another common way for governments to tap into outside expertise is to appoint a panel or commission, which typically includes representatives from outside government.17 Membership on one of these bodies, particularly if it is of the “Blue Ribbon” variety,18 is usually reserved for people not connected to the bureaucracy who have established expertise in a given area. Establishment of these bodies typically follows the passage of a statute or resolution, or the adoption of an executive order that vests authority in the body, articulates the appointing criteria, and lays out the scope of work. It is not uncommon for governments to use special panels or commissions in an effort to address issues with technology implementation. In 2001, then-Governor Ruth Ann Minner established the Delaware Information Services Task Force comprised of both state officials and outside technology experts in the wake of several large-scale technology project failures. This task force recommended a new IT management structure for the state, including the establishment of an independent technology department to oversee statewide projects, and the creation of a cabinet-level CIO position. In discussing the rationale for establishing the task force, the Governor noted the lack of expertise within state government: > Many of us don't have the expertise to know exactly what we need, and by establishing the task force and bringing together a group of people from the business community as well as from government, we found out exactly where they thought we should move and moved in that direction.19 These examples almost always involve the direct oversight and control of government through a formal contract, or through some other vehicle like enabling legislation or a resolution. Governments typically provide money or explicit authority to outside parties to act as a proxy on their behalf for the delivery of a service. These channels for collaboration are usually highly formal and very organized, and it is typically possible to evaluate how specific submissions impacted (or did not impact) a policy outcome.20 Engagement with outside technology communities to foster exoproduction is different in several important ways. Instead of money, the currency of exoproduction is usually data that has been specifically formatted by governments for use by third-parties. This is especially true when such data is staged on an open data platform or provided through an API. Unlike with more traditional collaboration efforts, there is a direct relationship to the quality of outreach (i.e., the data provided) and the magnitude of the response: even a poorly written RFP may draw a large response, while a data set of poor quality or that is infrequently updated will mostly likely be ignored. Governments typically do not exercise direct control over how outside parties use data or APIs to build new solutions, conduct studies, or build visualizations.21 A government RFP can be designed to solicit responses for building something in a very specific way; a government-appointed panel or commission is given a specific scope of work and often assigned a specific set of deliverables that must be provided within a set time frame. Governments do not have the same level of control over things built by volunteer technologists through exoproduction. When selecting vendors, or members of a government panel or commission, governments can leverage existing networks and communities.22 In other words, they know who to reach out to and communicate with about these collaboration opportunities. Though it is possible to critique these existing networks as being overly narrow, governments already have access to them and use them every day as a way to identify and solicit input from people outside government with special knowledge or skills. When governments want to collaborate outside of these more traditional methods—say, by releasing open data and communicating the opportunity to use it to members of the local technology community—they often don’t have existing connections or relationships that they can leverage. And they may face some challenges in developing connections to the members of this community. ## Summary Governments can craft policies and deliver services more efficiently and successfully by engaging outside stakeholders and experts. There is a long tradition of practice and body of research around the idea of coproduction that governments have used for many years to collaborate with groups of people outside of bureaucracy to improve the way that public services are provided. Governments use a variety of existing mechanisms to leverage the expertise and skills of people outside of government to help them fulfill their mission. These mechanisms are almost always under the direct, formal control of government and involve the transfer of money or authority (or both) to outside parties to act on behalf of government or in some other official capacity. The modern civic technology movement sits firmly in the tradition of coproduction and helps extend it by enabling services and solutions to be developed in ways that don't fall under the direct control of government and do not require governments to transfer money or authority to outside parties. Identifying, communicating, and collaborating with groups in the world of civic technology engaged in exoproduction can be a challenge for governments given the existing tools available to them to collaborate with outside experts. ### Endnotes 1. 2. We might also include input like that which is given at public meetings, like testimony at legislative council meetings, in this category. Those familiar with Sherry Arnstein's "Ladder of Citizen Participation" may place these mechanisms in the consultation rung of the ladder. 3. For example, the government procurement process. 4. Toward a Definition of the Coproduction Concept. Jeffrey Brudney and Robert England. Public Administration Review, 1983. 5. Institutionalised Co-production: Unorthodox Public Service Delivery in Challenging Environments. Anuradha Joshi and Mick Moore. 6. Ibid. 7. Since local governments are ‘creatures of the state,’ state governments dictate the various revenue options available to local governments. See 8. The R3 line is the Media/Elwyn Line Regional Rail line operated by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Regional Transit Authority. 9. The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) provides a standard way for transit authorities to share data in easily usable formats. See 10. For a more comprehensive lists of third-party transit apps see . 11. For example, see Grounded in Philly. 12. For a list of available datasets on property from the City of Philadelphia, see 13. This issue is discussed again in Section 3. 14. Governments may also issue RFPs to acquire goods and services from outside parties to take advantage of efficiencies. In some cases, particularly with IT projects, governments could develop solutions in house but may opt to use COTS or other pre built solutions. 15. For example, see the Community Development Corporations in the City of Philadelphia. 16. For an example of this, see the federal rulemaking process, and the requirement for outside comments from experts here . 17. Additional rationale for appointing outsiders to a panel or commission are impartiality, objectivity, and political neutrality. 18. 19. 20. In an RFP process, a winning submission is identified and entities submitting proposals that were not selected may be informed why their submission was not chosen. 21. Though most government open data releases include a set of terms and conditions that provide some limited governance over how it may be used - typically by listing the ways in which its use is prohibited. 22. Vendors that wish to bid on government contracts are typically required to be registered with the government that is issuing the RFP. # The Benefits of Engagement ![Open Oakland: City Hall, Oakland, CA, February 2015](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/open_oakland.jpg) > Whereas dramatic efficiency gains and cost savings in the economy are rewarded through profits, promotions, stock price increases and market share, similar gains in government are rewarded with budget cuts, staff reductions, loss of resources and consolidation of programs. In this instance, incentives and rewards in the institution of government are the obverse of those in the market.1 > > — Jane E. Fountain, Building the Virtual State It is a widely held truism that governments face difficulty implementing technology solutions, and that they generally manage IT projects very poorly. It can be tempting to view this lack of technology acumen as a symptom of a larger disfunction. Governments are thought to be large, plodding organizations that do lots of things poorly technology management and implementation are but one of the many things that governments do not do well. But the challenges facing governments in how they use technology are quite specific. There are a handful of processes, all easily identifiable, that can work against the efficient adoption of technology by governments. * The annual budget process can provide a disincentive for new ideas and large efficiency gains by "punishing" innovative agencies with smaller allocations and reduced staff in the next budget cycle. * The procurement process—which can be lengthy, complex, and expensive—can turn away smaller or newer technology providers that might provide value to governments. These providers may simply lack the organizational endurance to get through the existing procurement process. * The civil service system can make it difficult to attract and retain employees with the latest technology skills, and budget support for staff training and skill development to keep up with changes in technology can be limited. Changing any of these processes takes time and political will, and many of the defining qualities of these processes were put in place intentionally in the hope that they will lead to policy outcomes that are deemed desirable.2 As discussed in the prologue to this book, we now live in a time where people outside of government often have better tools to build things with and extract insights from government data than governments themselves do. These tools are more powerful, more plentiful, more flexible, and less expensive than many of the tools that government employees currently have at their disposal (often because of procurement or budget limitations). Outside technology groups may have specialized skills and experience in building software or technology solutions that governments do not, or that those in the bureaucracy might face difficulty in acquiring. They are also typically unencumbered by political or administrative barriers that can sometimes prevent government employees from accessing new data or advancing new ideas. The potential benefits of engaging and collaborating with outside technology groups seem clear to many people with firsthand experience with the limitations that governments face in developing new technology solutions. Respondents to a survey of current and former city government employees highlighted a range of potential benefits for governments that find ways to engage with their local technology communities:3 > Fresh insights and perspectives. > > Local data and tech advocates in the private sector provide the perspective that the city lacks. Progressive cities excel at building bridges between groups (community and business) that otherwise would operate in different spheres, extracting value from combining multiple experiences, skills and missions. > > Access to talent that we don't have in government. There are so many skill sets and diverse perspectives on tech issues that we don't have currently in government. Working with outside groups allows us to tap into a wealth of knowledge and experience. > > They help us imagine new tools/approaches we might not otherwise see, and can be a resource to get some of them built. Respondents were also asked about the connection between outside engagement with local technology groups and government open data programs: The city sees itself as the data producer - not necessarily as the app producer. Thus providing data at least up to point of delivery and no further ensures that were is plenty of scope for local civic tech to innovate. In addition, respondents were asked about the connection between outside engagement efforts and other city innovation efforts: > ...since we don't have an internal data analytics we are looking for ways to connect departments with researchers and data scientists to answer some of their big questions using data on our open data portal. There seems to be a lot of interest around this effort but we haven't got anything to stick yet. There are real benefits for cities that develop strategies for engaging with their local technology community. Looking at a sample of case studies from cities that are doing this successfully shows that these benefits can be realized not only in large cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, but in smaller cities like Louisville, KY, and Syracuse, NY, as well. ## Chicago: Using Predictive Analytics to Find Dirty Beaches More than most other cities, Chicago is benefiting from the talents and skills of its local technology community by fostering deep connections with its members. The City's Chief Data Officer and other city officials are regular attendees at technology meetups, and are readily accessible to people in the community that have an interest in working on projects with civic benefits. This regular, close proximity between city officials with access to and intimate knowledge of city data to members of the technology community with technology skills and a strong desire to improve their city has led to a number of successful projects.4 One of the more notable examples of how the City of Chicago is benefiting from the outside expertise in its local technology community is a project to build predictive models for identifying beaches that have heightened E.Coli bacteria levels.5 The city had previously developed its own predictive model for food safety violations internally,6 but this project was a departure from past experience. The series of predictive models developed to detect heightened E.Coli bacteria levels was developed in direct collaboration with outside volunteers, and the finished work was meant to be used inside the bureaucracy by the Chicago Park District. While the preexisting model used by the Park District was error prone, in part due to its reliance on data collected by the Park District itself, the new predictive models developed with outside experts incorporated a wider range of data from many different sources: > While the prior model relied primarily on the Park District's immediate sensor data, the group tested a wide range of external data, including NOAA weather data, sunrise, sunset, and lunar phase data, and data on the status of regional locks and dams. Hyper-local weather information was also integrated into the model, from external data sources such as forecast.io and darksky.net.7 The experience helps to highlight one of the advantages that governments may realize by collaborating with outside experts on projects like this one. Those operating outside government may be less likely to be impeded in their work by organizational boundaries or political divisions. They may be more willing (and more able) to look farther afield for relevant data and experience that they can use to support such a project. ## Louisville: Preventing Fires in Vacant Buildings Like many other cities, the City of Louisville is working to find ways to better distribute smoke detectors that can help prevent loss of life when house fires occur.8 Of particular concern are fires that occur in vacant or abandoned buildings that can potentially spread to involve other nearby occupied structures. Finding ways to detect when fires occur in abandoned buildings more rapidly can help speed the response by emergency personnel and better ensure that such fires don't spill over into adjacent properties and put lives at risk. The Louisville Fire Department, the Department of Community Services, and the City's Office of Performance Improvement and Innovation, as part of a related project, had already gathered data from across city agencies to look at where fires were occurring, whether they involved vacant structures, and whether those fires spread to involve adjacent properties. The city already had a pretty clear picture of where vacant structure fires were likely to occur, but they didn't have good information on what they could do about it given available resources. The city decided to approach the local technology community for ideas. City officials asked for assistance in identifying ways that fires might be more easily detected in structures that were without electricity and that used low-cost components. In collaboration with a local technology lab,9 the city organized a hackathon to solicit ideas, build prototypes, and encourage broad experimentation. City officials acknowledged that the local technology lab that spearheaded the event had access to resources that they did not that were essential to the ultimate success of the event: > LVL1 had the space, and, most importantly, the right network to bring people into the fold for the challenge. LVL1 brought together the supplies, advertising, and people for a successful competition that included four entries.10 The city, too, brought things to the table in the development of this event that made participation by members of the technology community interesting and attractive. Most importantly, it brought a difficult and complex problem to the table, the kind of problem that typically resonates with people that have data and technology skills. This problem was real, not theoretical, and impacted the city in which the people in the network of the local technology lab lived. The city also provided access to experts inside of government, that provided context to problem and a better understanding of the data from the city: > We had a Major from the fire department, an IT expert from the Emergency Services department, and a fire protection company representative all participate as advisors and judges in the competition. It provided depth and understanding to the challenge that would have not been possible without them. By approaching the local tech community as a full partner in helping to find solutions to the problem, and by bringing valuable assets like new data and access to experts to the table, Louisville has developed a model that it can use in the future to enlist the assistance and expertise of the local technology community on persistent city problems. ## Philadelphia: Building a Mobile App for Transit Riders The City of Philadelphia is well known for its embrace of open data and its close ties to its local technology community,11 but it was the transit authority in Philadelphia that led the city's first open data effort. In 2011, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Regional Transportation Authority (SEPTA) began to experiment with the release of open data sets to the local technology community. Early in that year, SEPTA provided limited access to transit data to participants in a hackathon organized by a small fellowship team working with city government from Code for America. Later that year, at an event specifically focused on transit problems, SEPTA shared a wider array of data to a larger audience from the local technology community.12 | | | :--------------------------------------------: | | Apps for SEPTA: Philadelphia, PA, October 2011 | ![Apps for SEPTA: Philadelphia, PA, October 2011](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/apps_for_septa.jpg) SEPTAs view of open data has evolved over time. Prior to formally embracing open data and encouraging outside developers to use its data, SEPTA resisted efforts by some in the local technology community to improve on what they saw as a suboptimal way of accessing transit schedule data. The creators of a mobile application called iSepta originally scraped schedule data from SEPTAs public website for their application. This early application gave transit riders a taste of what was possible if SEPTA opened up its data for outside developers to use, and gave SEPTA a sense of how interested outside developers were in building new apps, apps that would specifically benefit transit riders. Originally developed in 2008, the creators of iSepta shut down their app in late 2014 because, as they noted in a final posting on the app website, "there are \[now] other, better options available." These other options were almost all built with open data released by SEPTA after the iSepta app had been built and provided an object lesson in the power of the local technology community. (Incidentally, SEPTA launched a version of its own mobile app for Android users at almost the same time that the original iSepta app was shut down.13) The approach taken by SEPTA in developing its own official transit app is instructive for other governments that want to collaborate with outside technologists.14 The official SEPTA app was never meant to replace existing transit apps that had been developed by the community—and by that time there were many—it was meant to complement them. By using open data and freely available APIs to encourage outside developers to try new things, SEPTA was given invaluable insights into the possibilities for its data. What things would developers try and build? What new technologies were available for displaying and consuming transit data? What would work well? What wouldn't work well? One way to view this approach is to think of it as a technique for outsourcing some of the risk inherent in developing new software applications and mobile apps. Using open data and direct engagement, SEPTA empowered outside developers to try new things and discover what was sustainable. Some apps were widely used,15 others were not and were eventually shut down.16 Having these kinds of insights prior to building an official app gave SEPTA a huge advantage in deciding what they wanted to build. It's also worth noting that the code for SEPTA's own official app was released as open source so that any transit developer—perhaps someone that had previously attended a hackathon and built a transit app of their own—can identify an issue or contribute an enhancement.17 ## Syracuse: Making Better Use of Road Data Like other cities in the Snowbelt, Syracuse faces a constant challenge in maintaining its roads. Brutal winters with record snowfalls lead to constant plowing and heavy use of road salt, which takes a toll on the condition of roads. A declining tax base, competing priorities, and lack of funding from the state and federal government exacerbate the challenge of repaving roads and keeping them in good condition. | | | :--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------: | | Syracuse Road Data Challenge Kickoff: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY - September 2016 | ![Syracuse Road Data Challenge Kickoff: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY - September 2016](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/syracuse_road_data_challenge.jpg) Syracuse has an abundance of existing road data, the product of work on other data-centric projects. The city is using truck-mounted cameras and inexpensive computers to map the location of potholes on all 388 miles of city streets, and is partnering with an outside group of data scientists at the University of Chicago to build analytic models for water infrastructure to help prioritize investment and repairs. The city had been tacitly supportive of local volunteer efforts to use government data and technology for the last several years, and is now actively collaborating with local technology groups to encourage the use of road data to produce new insights. Emulating the approach taken in Louisville, Syracuse is bringing existing city data and access to city experts to an event that will span several weeks and piggyback on an existing hackathon series that draws participants from across the Upstate New York Region.18 In advance of the hackathon, the city will hold a series of in-depth sessions (in partnership with the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University) where experts will help participants become more familiar with the data and address their questions. Similar to Chicago's experience with outside developers to build a predictive model for beach quality, Syracuse is encouraging the use of a range of data sources from federal state and local sources to assist participants in their efforts. Syracuse's efforts illustrate many of the techniques that governments can use to collaborate with their local technology community. It also demonstrates how these successful techniques can be reused by governments that are new to this type of engagement and that have smaller, more dispersed technology communities. ## Summary By finding ways to collaborate with a local technology community, governments can gain new insights and perspectives, and leverage special skills and tools that may be difficult to access inside of the bureaucracy, and harness them to find solutions to complex city problems. Volunteer technologists and data scientists are less likely to be encumbered by political or administrative burdens that can make it more difficult to access data or advance new ideas inside government. Encouraging outside developers to build new tools is a way for governments to outsource some of the risk and uncertainty inherent in developing new tools and services. By sharing bureaucratic expertise, authority, and existing data with local technology organizations, governments can extend their networks farther into the local technology ecosystem than would otherwise be possible. Piggybacking on existing technology events is an effective way to marshal the collective efforts of preexisting groups to work on new problems. ### Endnotes 1. 2. For example, almost every government has purchasing requirements for minority and women-owned businesses, and many have requirements that local companies receive preference over firms from another jurisdiction. The objective is to drive more government procurement dollars to minority and women-owned businesses and to local businesses that create local jobs and pay local taxes. Enacting these preferences is not inherently a bad thing, but using the procurement system as a vehicle for fostering outcomes can come at the cost of making the process more lengthy and complex for all applicants. This ideas is similar to the concept of tax compliance costs, credits and deductions intended to foster a specific outcome deemed desirable (e.g. charitable donations) may have the unintended effect of making the completion of tax forms more lengthy and more complex for all taxpayers. 3. To see a list of survey questions, see the Appendix. 4. For a list of some civic technology projects built in the City of Chicago, see . Note - not all of these projects were built in direct partnership with city government, but several notable projects were. 5. 6. 7. 8. According to the National Fire Protection Association, a trade organization that develops model building codes, three of every five home fire deaths result from fires in homes with no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms. 9. 10. 11. Several members of the city’s open data and innovation teams were previously active members in the city’s civic tech community. 12. 13. 14. It’s also worth noting that this approach stands in direct contrast to an approach taken by the City of Madison, WI on a pet registration application discussed in more detail in the Section 3. 15. For news coverage of one SEPTA app that was built by an outside developer that had wide usage see 16. For new coverage of a SEPTA app that was now widely used and eventually discontinued see 17. SEPTAs open source code is hosted on Github at 18. # The Challenges to Engagement ![Space Apps Challenge: Philadelphia, PA - April 2013](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/space_apps_challenge.jpg) > Our findings show a critical link between cities and practitioners. Civic tech is not a sector that has been driven forward entirely outside of governmental systems. Rather, it has been built in partnership with key stakeholders inside and outside government…1 > > — Omidyar Network: Engines of Change The prospect of partnering with innovators in the local technology community has many potential benefits for those working in the bureaucracy. This is particularly true for state and local governments, which can face more acute challenges in acquiring and managing technology, and in attracting employees with the skill sets to build new solutions and use data in creative ways. But working with outside groups of technology volunteers is not without challenges either. ## Managing a Volunteer Army In surveying a group of current and former city government employees with experience working with outside technology groups and similar kinds of volunteers, a common set of issues appears. Project scoping and sustainability were mentioned as challenges by almost every survey respondent: > One challenge is the external parties' time and commitment to the project. Cities should not rely on these partnerships to provide enterprise level solutions for big city problems. > > Most of this is done on a volunteer basis, which necessarily limits the scope to tiny, weekend- or evening-level wins, resulting in criticism that our ideas and solutions aren't big enough. Expectations on the government side for what people can/should do without any form of compensation are unrealistic. One way to view the efforts of volunteers from the local technology community who want to devote time and energy building solutions for their city or community as part of a larger tradition of volunteerism which has benefited governments for many years. Government collaboration with volunteers may be new to the world of technology and software development, but in other areas of public service delivery it is far more common. Volunteer fire and ambulance companies are probably the most well-known example of volunteer efforts providing critical services in some communities, where government-supported professional services are used in other communities. This does not mean, however, that volunteer efforts to supplement or improve government services can exist only in areas where governments are unable (or unwilling) to provide such services. There are some prominent examples where volunteer efforts operate side-by-side with government-supported professional services, even in the case of critical services like fire and emergency services. For example, the Hatzalah is a volunteer emergency medical and ambulance organization that serves Jewish communities in cities around the world, but most notably in larger urban and suburban areas (like the New York City area, where paid ambulance services already exist) that have large Jewish populations.2 Neighborhood watch groups, adopt-a-highway programs, and community cleanup efforts are other common examples where volunteers are helping to provide (or enhance) a service that would ordinarily fall to government alone to provide. In many of these examples, the level of specialized skill needed to participate in a volunteer activity is relatively low, which contrasts with volunteer activities focused on building technology or using data, which may require very specialized skills. There may be personal motivations for engaging in certain kinds of volunteer activities over others. Self-interest may serve as motivation (at least in part) for participating in a community clean up or neighborhood watch effort, where volunteers can benefit more directly from the activities of a group. The motivations for participating in a volunteer technology effort are more nuanced than for other kinds of volunteer activities because the people creating a civic technology solution may not be the people who end up using the solution. In addition, neighborhood watch and community clean up groups typically don't require investment in infrastructure that must be maintained over time, which can differ significantly from volunteerism that generates technology solutions which must be maintained and updated over time. In the case of volunteers from the world of technology, government employees may face barriers in accessing the tools and platforms that these groups use to congregate and communicate. Some government agencies place strict limits on access to certain websites that can extend to the most common platforms used by civic technologists (Slack, Github, Trello, and some social media) to collaborate on projects and share ideas. One respondent to the survey of current and former city government employees described these limitations this way: > There are many restrictions on what technologies I can use, which makes it hard to collaborate. We are generally set up only to work on projects we either own completely or take no responsibility for. Working in true partnership is extremely difficult to do. In addition, opportunities to meet and collaborate with the local technology community in the same physical space often occur at inopportune times for government employees. Technology meetups and hackathons typically occur after traditional work hours or on weekends, and often take place outside of official government offices. The previous section touched on efforts in the City of Chicago, where government officials are regular participants in events organized by the local technology community. However, this is often the exception rather than the rule — it is rare for governments to have official remote work policies that would better enable public sector employees to participate in these events.3 Beyond just a minor inconvenience, this limitation goes to the heart of what some experts believe is a key ingredient in fostering innovative partnerships. As an example, consider the work done by Bell Labs and the culture of creativity fostered by its longtime leader, Mervin Kelly.4 As research director at Bell Labs, Kelly had very specific thoughts on the need for physical proximity to foster innovation and new ideas: > His fundamental belief was that an 'institute of creative technology' like his own needed a 'critical mass' of talented people to foster a busy exchange of ideas. But innovation required much more than that. Mr. Kelly was convinced that physical proximity was everything; phone calls alone wouldn't do. Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing.5 This same thinking underlies the creation of new public and private collaboration spaces like Civic Hall in New York City and Superpublic in San Francisco.6 These are places where government employees and those from the technology community and other sectors can work in close proximity to share ideas and create new solutions to persistent problems. The absence of opportunities for government employees to work in close collaboration with outside groups can foster apathy and frustration. In Philadelphia, one recent government employee with close ties to the local technology community opted to leave government service—in part—because of restrictions on working remotely that stifled opportunities for closer physical proximity and collaboration with outside groups: > Little things, like time tracking and a byzantine work-from-home policy, eat away at creative workers used to a more enlightened approach.7 ## The Free Work Problem As noted above, it can be challenging to scope work for volunteers on civic technology projects. Since many of the other mechanisms governments already use to tap into outside expertise operate under the direction and control of government, it can be tempting at times to view civic technology volunteers as direct extensions of government IT staff. This can lead to problems if government employees view the efforts of outside experts simply as a way of achieving their own project and policy goals. In Madison, Wisconsin, a nascent engagement effort between city officials and the local technology community got off to a rocky start when city officials presented a list of projects to the civic technology community.8 Government officials presented this list as an expression of their own priorities, with the expectation that the technology community would embrace these priorities and begin working on the identified projects. It didn't work out that way. The civic technology community largely ignored the recommendations from the city. Public comments suggest they reacted negatively to the idea that they should primarily be focused on working solely on what city officials believed was important. Taking the "free work" view of a volunteer technology community can be counterproductive. Interacting with a volunteer community—particularly one that is comprised largely of technologists, developers, and creative individuals—is more complicated than interacting with other outside constituencies. Since the market values the skills of this community highly, they are typically very aware of the value of their efforts. Engaging this community requires an understanding that members want to be a part of both building the solution and helping identifying the problem to be worked on. Alex Hillman, cofounder of the pioneering Philadelphia coworking space Indy Hall and an expert on building and nurturing creative communities, offers the following observation on engaging a community around a specific problem or issue:9 > People don't like a story where they know what happens (or is supposed to happen) at the end nearly as much as they like a story with potential and possibility. You can tell people how it's going to go, or you can learn to let them co-author the story with you. ## The Inclusion Problem Another issue raised by respondents to the survey of former city government employees is that of diversity and inclusion in the volunteer technology community. As previously discussed in Section 1, the practice of exoproduction extends the traditional idea of coproduction to include the development of solutions by people outside of government that are not necessarily the direct users of those solutions. While this practice enables new opportunities, it does raise a concern that the development of civic technology solutions may not always be properly aligned with the needs of those to be served, but rather with the preferences or perspectives of those building the solutions. Governments serve a wide variety of stakeholders and some of the groups that rely on government for the provision of essential services may lack access to technology or certain communication channels. Access to web-based services can be more challenging for some groups in need of public services, which can impact the efficacy of certain volunteer-driven technology projects. Outside technologists may not have the same insights into the challenges facing consumers of these services as those in the bureaucracy charged with serving these constituencies. And the composition of volunteer technology groups may not reflect the diverse range of stakeholders that benefit from specific public services. As one respondent to the survey of current and former city government employees put it: > Who can work at length for free? Not many people, and those who can are typically in positions of extreme privilege, which narrows the scope of what we even think about building and in some ways reinforces or exacerbates existing inequities in our society. Helping to ensure that the efforts of volunteer technology groups are appropriately aligned with the needs of different constituent groups that government must serve is an important role for government partners to play, but it can be tricky. This is especially true in light of the free work problem discussed above, which suggests that governments should provide the volunteer technology community some degree of latitude in the identification of issues to be addressed. Finding the right balance can be a challenge. ## The Sustainability Problem A persistent problem that vexes many volunteer technology communities is the long-term sustainability of solutions that are development, and transitioning them to governments where appropriate. This problem was raised by several different respondents to the survey of current and former city government employees: > The usual red tape of procurement which is not set up to make use of smaller, shorter engagements with individuals and small companies \[is a challenge]. Reform is needed. > > There's literally no mechanism by which government can "catch the ball." The way we procure and build software is out of sync with both user needs and the realities of the modern market. In 2011, a small group of technology volunteers began a project to develop an application for San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency (MUNI) that would allow MUNI managers to track the position of city buses in real time. The goal of the project was to improve on and eventually replace the existing paper-based system used by MUNI track vehicle location by using modern software development techniques and commodity mobile devices. Developed in less than two weeks, the solution developed by the group was lauded by the city officials who viewed it.10 But the application was never adopted by MUNI, where managers went on using their existing paper-based tracking system, and city officials later acknowledged that they did not have the resources or the mechanisms to bring such a solution in house. As one respondent to the survey of current and former city government employees put it: > ...if we can't maintain it after it's built, it is kind of useless to us. Identifying ways to sustain and expand awareness of solutions developed by the volunteer technology community is often a more challenging problem than fostering interest in building apps. Ensuring that all parties' expectations for long-term maintenance and enhancement of volunteer-built applications are aligned is a key to their ultimate success. The technology community in Madison, Wisconsin, identified a pet registration application as a worthy project and invested time in developing an application called PetPass, which officially launched in 2013. Like the previous example of a tablet-based tracking application for San Francisco's MUNI, city officially initially praised the work and vowed to use it inside the city government.11 Several months later, however, the city launched a competing pet registration application, which strained relations with the volunteer technology community. The community eventually abandoned their project and a growing sense of frustration dramatically reduced interest in working on civic technology projects. ## Summary Governments will face challenges in engaging and collaborating with outside groups of volunteers that want to devote time and resources to building technology solutions. There may be limitations on the kinds of tools and platforms government employees can use, which can hinder communication and make cooperating on projects more difficult. In addition, there may be limitations on the ability of government employees to work remotely in venues where technology groups congregate or during non-traditional work hours. Traditional approaches to external engagement where governments seek to leverage outside expertise may not be a good fit for engaging with volunteers from the world of civic technology. Traditional methods often don't accommodate a more collaborative approach to problem scoping and solution identification which can be essential to working with a community made up of highly-motivated, highly-skilled, and creative members. The composition of civic technology communities may not be representative of the community as a whole, and may underrepresented constituencies that are most reliant on government services. Governments need to be aware of this and may need to invest time helping to ensure alignment of volunteer activities to outcomes that serve a broad constituency or that provide maximum community benefit. Long-term sustainability of civic technology solutions is a common problem, and existing procurement and budgeting processes may not provide adequate ongoing support for such projects, even if they are widely viewed as being valuable. ### Endnotes 1. 2. Coverage areas for Hatzalah affiliates are listed here . A discussion of how Hatzalah interacts with 911 dispatch and professional EMS and fire service see . 3. There are many examples of government officials who attend regular technology meetups, but it’s not always clear if these officials re attending such events in their official capacity or if they are carving time out of their personal schedules to attend. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. For a fuller discussion of the issues in the Madison civic technology community, see 9. 10. 11. # Strategies for Engagement ![Hack for Reno: Reno, NV, October 2014](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/hack_for_reno.jpg) > The promise of opening government is that, by connecting government institutions to people and organizations with diverse forms of expertise, government will be able to produce better results. 1 > > — Beth Simone Noveck: Smart Citizens, Smarter State Strategies for engaging with the local technology community should be an important part of the toolkit of every government that wants to use data and technology to improve public services and to make governments operate more efficiently. Looking to governments with experience forging these kinds of partnerships helps highlight specific steps that every government can take to start making these connections. ## Open Data The common ingredient in every successful engagement effort with local technology communities is open data.2 Building a formal open data program that prioritizes the release of highly valuable, usable data is the cornerstone on which successful technology engagement rests. Making data easily discoverable, and formatting it in ways that invite outside users to create new things is an invitation to the local technology community, as well as researchers, entrepreneurs, journalists, civic activists, and many others, It's worth noting the contrast between data that is made available explicitly for outside users to build things with, and data that is merely made available publicly. Open data is specifically formatted to be usable in software platforms and data analysis tools. Public data is available for viewing, typically as an HTML page (or series of pages), a PDF document, or in some similar format suitable for publishing on the web. It is meant to be consumed by human eyeballs, not by computer programs or software applications. It is possible to access public data in a programmatic fashion through the use of scraping tools that are available in most programming languages,3 through increasingly plentiful web-based services,4 or even using something as simple as Google Docs.5 However, writing web scrapers or using third-party services to obtain public data in bulk, while not technically difficult and increasingly inexpensive, does place a barrier in front of data that can make it more difficult to obtain. A key part of successfully engaging with outside technology groups is understanding the signals that data publishing can send to the members of this community. Publishing data openly in easy-to-use formats and making it easy to find on a centralized web portal tells the outside technology community that your government wants to collaborate and build things together. Publishing valuable data only in inaccessible formats like PDF, making it publicly available on a government website but not available as a bulk download—or worse, requiring people to submit formal requests for data through open records laws—signals that your government is stuck in the 20th century, does not want to collaborate. Governments building open data platforms should also include ways for data users to suggest new data releases and to provide feedback on existing releases should be available. Making feedback channels readily available, and being responsive to the feedback provided, underscores your government’s commitment to collaboration. Neglecting this detail will send a tangible signal that your government is not interested in listening to data users.6 Another important signal that governments can send to outside data users is to demonstrate the value of data that is released publicly by using that data themselves. In technology parlance, this is often referred to as “dogfooding,” where a company or firm makes use of its own products and services to conduct its business. When governments release one version of data for outside users and make use of another, richer version for their own work, it can relegate the publicly-released version to second class status.7 This is especially true of data that is made available on centralized open data portals, or data that is made available through an API. If governments themselves are not willing to use the data they make available on official open data portals or through government open data APIs, then why should anyone else bother? The City of Philadelphia makes extensive use of open data APIs and has developed official city web applications that leverage the very same APIs that are made available for public use. If there is a problem or issue with these data resources that could impact outside users, the city feels the pain of these issues as well and is more likely to move quickly to resolve them.8 Another example of this principle at work—discussed in Section 2—can be seen in Chicago, which has developed a predictive model for food safety inspections that uses the very same data sets available to the public on the city's open data portal.9 ## Open Source Software Another common element in successful efforts to engage with local technology communities is open source software. When governments share the source code for the software they build and buy on platforms like Github, along with clear instructions for how outside developers can contribute, it sends a strong signal that they want to collaborate. A growing number of governments are using open source as not only a way to be transparent about investment in technology, but also as a way to collaborate on specific software projects with outside developers.10 Section 2 discussed the efforts of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Regional Transportation Authority (SEPTA) to both release open data and publish the source code for software applications as open source. SEPTAs publishing of transit data in open formats fostered the development of a host of new software tools for transit riders by the local technology community. When the organization later opted to develop an official set of mobile apps for transit riders, they released the source code for these apps on Github, where anyone can view the code, log an issue or suggest an improvement. This reinforces the organization's commitment to working with outside developers and opens new pathways for collaboration. An easy way to get started on sharing software code more openly is to focus on applications or components that are citizen-facing and web-based. For example, the City of Philadelphia publishes the source code for a citizen-facing app that lets city residents look up the details of a specific property (one of the most common reasons that citizen visit the city's web site).11 Since this application is built with common web components like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the underlying source code is already visible in a user's web browser (if the user knows how to look fr it). But by sharing this software code on Github, which has tools that let users suggest changes or point out defects, with a standard open source license, the city is explicitly articulating an opportunity to collaborate. For obvious reasons, it may be difficult or impractical for governments to share the software code for older legacy applications. But adopting a formal approach to sharing software code as open source may create incentives for governments to build and buy new software more effectively. A formal open source policy can help governments think of software applications as a set of components instead of one monolithic application. Structuring citizen-facing applications as a set of web-based components that leverage a shared backend API can make it easier to share those components as open source software, and make it easier to build and maintain such applications. ## Pick a Champion Another strong signal that governments can send to the outside technology community that they are ready to engage and collaborate is to appoint someone to act as the chief liaison for that community inside of government.12 This person can be a Chief Data Officer, a Civic Technology Advocate and Innovation Specialist, or whatever other title is deemed appropriate. Examples of officials with these and other titles can be seen in many cities across the country (and in other countries). This person should be someone empowered to lead engagement efforts and have authority to work across different agencies—part of the job of this position will be to identify opportunities for agencies to collaborate with outside groups in productive ways. In practice, this position is often organizationally aligned with the central technology agency, within an innovation office, or, less frequently, as part of the mayor’s office. Wherever this position is accommodated within a government organizational structure, efforts should be made to align it with other parts of the organization that use external engagement as part of their work. For example, planning departments and economic development offices make extensive use of external engagement and outside networks to do their work. There may be overlap in the communities that these other offices of government interact with and those in the technology community that will want and use government data. In addition, these other agencies may have valuable insights into engagement techniques that have proven successful in the past, and those that have not. ## Be Present Perhaps the most important job of the person (or people) appointed to lead engagement efforts with outside technology groups is to be present in places where the members of this community come together to do their work. Being visible and available for members of this community who want to collaborate or have questions is absolutely critical to the success of external engagement efforts. In every city that has developed strong relationships with their local technology community, officials are present at regular technology meetups and events. Most are active participants or supporters of such events. In some places, as one respondent to the survey of current and former city employees explained, external groups are opting to bring their regular meetings into government buildings. > The city hosts \[the city’s] Hack Night at city hall every other Tuesday...the Director of Open Data and Performance Management attends various community and technology meetups to get the word out about the city's work. The City of Oakland has regularly hosted outside technology groups inside city hall, and the City of Philadelphia has hosted technology events with outside groups in its city hall as well. Sometimes the Mayor is even on hand to kick things off. This aspect of external engagement is ongoing and time consuming, and it can be difficult for some government employees because of restrictions on remote work or on the kinds of tools and platforms that city employees may use to communicate and collaborate with external groups. ## Make it Official In Section 1, we reviewed some of the existing mechanisms that governments currently use to tap into expertise from outside the bureaucracy. One of the themes that emerges from this examination is that existing mechanisms for leveraging outside expertise always operate through some official policy of government. When a government issues an RFP, it does so in accordance with a formal policy that has been adopted to govern the process and to make it legal. Government task forces and commissions are organized through the adoption of formal policy declarations that outline the scope of their authority and the deliverables they must provide. When agencies engage in coproduction and partner with external users to improve a service, they do so under the purview of official policies and through the allocation of funds from adopted budgets. Many volunteer activities that benefit governments and supplement public services also happen through an official grant of sanction from government. For example, adopt-a-highway programs use official signage on roadways to designate the groups responsible for cleaning them, and some governments have formal designations for groups of volunteers that work directly with city agencies. In the City of Philadelphia, there is an official program to designate citizens who have the support of their neighbors as "Block Captains." These individuals act as the liaison for a community and interact directly with designated employees within city government. 13 In Section 3, some of the challenges of working with outside technology groups were discussed. One problem that emerged in this section is that, in some cities, there are limitations for government employees on the kinds of tools and platforms that can be used to interact and collaborate with outside technology groups. In addition, even when government officials are present at external technology events, it can sometimes represent an ambiguous commitment from government primarily because most events take place after hours or on weekends. Are these individuals attending in their official capacity, or as enthusiastic technology volunteers themselves? It's not always clear. As with the other mechanisms that governments employ to tap into external expertise, the tools and practices used to engage with a local technology community need to be granted official sanction. Governments that want to succeed at this kind of engagement would do well to remove limitations on tools or platforms that are used to interact and collaborate with the outside technology community, and by adopting official policies to govern remote and after-hours work. Any official policy around open data and external engagement can't be successful if the tools and practices needed to engage with data users aren't officially supported as part of a government employee's job duties. ## Bend the Rules Another theme from the previous section on the challenges of working with outside technology groups was sustainability, or transferring the work done by outside groups to governments. While this is a difficult challenge, there are some strategies government can employ to mitigate it and help ensure that projects developed by or with outside groups continue to provide benefits. The existing government procurement process can be lengthy and complex and is often not a good fit for projects developed by outside technology groups. An example of this can be seen by looking at a project to build a website for lobbying data in the City of Chicago. After a group of technology volunteers created a website with data released by the City of Chicago, the city issued a formal RFP for a lobbyist disclosure application that was very similar to the volunteer project that had already been developed. Because the volunteer group was not organized in a way that would have allowed it to bid on the RFP, the contract eventually went to an existing vendor. The issuing of the RFP and the award of the contract were met with exasperation and frustration from the volunteer technology community.14 Some cities have successfully circumvented the more onerous requirements of the formal RFP process by using small dollar procurement thresholds to target projects to smaller groups that might not be able to respond to a formal RFP.15 The City of Philadelphia has done this with some success by aggregating small dollar procurements into a central website where interested parties can easily find and respond to them.16 The City of Syracuse, New York has partnered with a small New York City startup to provide cameras and inexpensive computers to map every pothole in the city by positioning the project as a pilot and allowing the company to use its work on the project in marketing materials.17 ## Summary Open data is the centerpiece on which successful efforts to engage and collaborate with local technology communities is built. How governments implement their open data programs can send strong signals to external partners on their readiness to collaborate. Appointing an official to act as the point of contact for engagement efforts with the outside technology community is critical, and this person must be present with the community when they do their work. Removing internal barriers facing government employees that are working to collaborate with the local technology community is important. If the official duties of government employees working with outside technology volunteers don't support effective engagement, such efforts will ultimately be less successful. Governments need to be creative in finding ways to continue collaboration on projects long-term, and to transfer authority of volunteer-developed projects in house through small dollar procurements or other means. ### Endnotes 1. 2. The Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University maintains a large number of highly useful guides for designing and implementing a formal open data program. See 3. 4. 5. 6. The City of Philadelphia has successfully and for many years used Google Groups as a way to foster dialog on open data releases. See 7. There are some obvious exceptions to the dogfooding principle. For example, if a data set contains personally identifying information or other sensitive information, a redacted version may be made available publicly and the complete version used internally by government agencies. In these instances, however, governments should clearly communicate these circumstances to outside data users. 8. For a complete listing of these open data APIs, see . 9. See 10. 11. 12. There is a set of detailed guidelines for creating formal open data policies and appointing officials to oversee such efforts available from the Sunlight Foundation. See . 13. Block Captains in Philadelphia are also issued ID cards to designate their status. 14. 15. A list of procurement thresholds for various cities and states can be found at . 16. 17. # Epilogue ![Empathy Jam: New York City, August 2016](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mheadd/how-to-talk-to-civic-hackers/master/images/empathy_jam_2.jpg) There has never been a better time than now for governments to build new partnerships with outside technologists and data users. These partnerships can yield important benefits for the people that governments serve. This book looks at the ways governments have traditionally tapped into outside expertise to help solve problems or achieve an objective. These traditional mechanisms are often not a good fit for projects that involve new technologies, and the preceding sections outline some new strategies and ideas that those working in government can use to collaborate with partners outside the bureaucracy. As potentially valuable as these new opportunities to collaborate are, it would be a mistake to view them as a replacement for the ways that governments have traditionally done things. These new strategies can provide an important compliment to the tools that governments already have at their disposal to serve the public. In early 2016, the Department of Defense (DoD) launched a new program called "Hack the Pentagon." This program was the DoD's first attempt at a bug bounty program - a competition where outside security experts are invited to find vulnerabilities in technology assets and report them to the DoD for a share of prize money. We can look at this experiment by DoD as a manifestation of many of the core motivations that governments have for reaching out to civic hackers and collaborating with outside technology groups on civic issues: > We can't hire every great 'white hat' hacker to come in and help us...but \[Hack the Pentagon] allows us to use their skill sets, their expertise, to help us build better more secure products and make the country more secure.1 Bug bounties are an approach often used in the private sector to enhance security and identify previously unknown vulnerabilities in technology assets. But bug bounty programs, by themselves, are rarely used as a wholesale replacement for other kinds of security testing. The nature of bug bounty programs probably isn't a good fit for certain kinds of penetration testing that some organizations view as critical - for example: social engineering.2 Private companies that use bug bounties also hire outside security experts to conduct different types of penetration tests, to augment the issues that can be identified through bug bounty programs. While bug bounties can be valuable because they are a relatively cheap and easy way for organizations to tap into outside expertise, they may be limited in the types of issues they can address. This same is true when governments collaborate with outside technology groups. Providing open data, open source code and collaborating with groups of talented outsiders to focus on important problems are a part of the job description for public servants in the 21st century. But this isn't the only tool that public servant have in their toolkit. This book began with a simple observation - we now live in a time when people outside of government often have better tools to build things with government data than government employees themselves. This imbalance has implications for those inside government that want to use technology and data to make government work more effectively. The process of using data and technology to improve the way governments work is now inextricably linked to how effective governments are at engaging with outside data users and technology experts. Hopefully, this book has provided some insights on how those working inside government can do this more effectively. ## Footnotes 1. 2. ) # Appendix Current and former city employee survey Questions: * Has your city or state established a relationship with an outside group (or individuals) to discuss data or technology, or to work on technology projects that benefit residents? * Briefly describe the relationship and the parties you are, or have worked with (if possible). How long have you or others in government been working with these outside parties? Is the engagment regular and sustained, or infrequent and ad hoc? * Are there regularly scheduled events that you or other government officials attend as a way to interact, communicate and collaborate with these parties? * How did (or do) you identify or locate outside parties to work with? What barriers / questions have you encountered as you worked to locate outside groups or individuals to work with? * When not meeting in physical space, what tools or platforms - Slack, Github, Trello, etc. - do you or others in government use to connect and collaborate with civic technologists and others outside of government? * How does working with outside groups of civic technologists and open data advocates fit into your city or state’s strategy around open data or innovation? * Are there any potential connections to other government initiatives (e.g., internal data analytics and performance benchmarking, technology procurement, etc.) that you hope to create by working with these outside parties? * What would you say is the biggest potential benefit from working with civic technologists and other data and technology advocates outside government? * What would you say is the biggest challenges (or potential challenges) to working with these parties? * Any other thoughts or comments that you would add relating to how your city or state interacts and partners with outside civic technologists? # Glossary ## Civic Tech Civic tech is a term that has been used to mean different things, and there is a fair amount of debate over what the term means *exactly*. One of my favorite definitions of the term comes from a longtime civic hacking organizer, [Christopher Whitaker](https://medium.com/@CivicWhitaker/what-is-civic-tech-b61a58c3eba8). In his words, civic tech means: > \[t]echnology projects involving intentional collaboration between technologists, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and nonprofit employees to engage the public or solve civic problems. ## RFP An RFP is a Request for Proposal - an solicitation by a government agency for private sector entities to provide a proposal describing the work and cost to achieve some end or provide a service to or on behalf of the agency. When a government issues an RFP, it does so in accordance with a formal policy that has been adopted to govern the process and to make it legal. ## Open Data According to the [Open Data Handbook](https://opendatahandbook.org/guide/en/what-is-open-data/), open data is: > Open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike. ## Open Source According to the [Open Source Initiative](https://opensource.org/faq#osd), open source software is: > ...software that can be freely accessed, used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Open source software is made by many people, and distributed under licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition. ## Application Programming Interface An Application programming Interface (API) is a way of formalizing the interactions between computer systems by specifying how one system may interact with another (for example, by requesting data from a separate system). There are many different definitions for APIs. but I have often described an API as being like a contract that governs a transaction. An API for a computer system specifies the types of things that another computer system can get from it, or store in it. It describes in detail how requests for information must be made and what the response will look like. In the event that the request was n ot formatted properly, the API will specify why the request was not correct and how it should be modified to be correct.