Washington, DC was first out of the gate in 2008, with Apps for Democracy, the brainchild of Peter Corbett (iStrategyLabs) and Vivek Kundra (then the District's Chief Technology Officer, now our nation's first Chief Information Officer).

Many cities and communities have since embraced similar efforts: New York, San Francisco, and Seattle among them.

This week, in conjunction with OSCON (O'Reilly Open-Source Convention and a programmers' paradise), Portland, Oregon honored its own Civic Apps competition award winners – Sara Sharp, Robb Shecter, John McBride, Andy Wallace, Edwin Knuth, Max Ogden, and Gary Kee.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams emceed the event. Dozens of tech denizens were in attendance, along with venerable OSCON host, Tim O'Reilly.

What the Civic Apps Movement is Really About

It's irresistably exciting – the idea that government could make data available to enable new intelligence, create new services, even spur new businesses that meet the real needs of citizens and residents. But there's also something more profound going on here: we are redefining what it means to govern.

Tim O'Reilly hints at this idea in the video below ("open source is not about what we thought is was about"), and Andy Wallace reinforces it.

Andy built PDXBus because he wanted to use it (apparently, so did a lot of other people, myself included). Before open source (the behavioral code, not the actual code), Andy might have shared the idea with TriMet and a few friends, but it may not have made TriMet's list of top priorities. And then, who knows?

Instead, TriMet made data available that Andy could use to build an application that we could all download onto our phones and never have to stand wondering what to do at a bus stop again.

This is one (tiny) example of a broader and ongoing renegotiation of roles between governments, residents and citizens, and businesses happening all around us.

Cities and communities that experiment with data and information sharing, engage residents in problem-solving, make it easy for diverse people to connect with one another and their government(s), and allow the lessons of small collaborative ventures to influence the larger structures of governing and managing at a mass scale are laying the foundation for gov – and community – 2.0.

And the winner?

It's us.

Innovation and Transformation

Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think-tank based in Washington, DC, hosted From Small Innovations to Social Transformation, a panel discussion on public sector innovation in support of the Center's Doing What Works project. Accompanied by the release of two new reports, "Capital Ideas: How to Generate Ideas in the Public Sector" and "Scaling "New Heights: How to Spot Small Successes in the Public Sector and Make Them Big", the event featured the reports' authors Jitinder Kohli (CAP) and Geoff Mulgan (The Young Foundation, UK), as well as panelists Willam  Eggers (Deloitte), Judith Rodin, (Rockefeller Foundation), and James Shelton (US Department of Education).

New Social Compact For Innovation

Public sector innovation matters. It's not about about government adopting new set of best practices, but about fundamentally renegotiating the roles of government, business, philanthropy, and civil society – transforming how we govern ourselves, share the commons, and construct a sustainable foundation for future generations across the globe.

The panel offered a torrent of highlights:

• The unapologetic assertion that government has a role to play in innovation, that progressives should quick to embrace it. (G. Mulgan)
• The US government did play an important role in the creation of the American (private-sector) innovation system, which was been the envy of the world for many decades.
• Key industries poised for growth in the coming years include those in which government plays a key role – health and social care, education, and energy and infrastructure, for example.
• The demand for public services so far exceeds the resources available to provide them (and increasingly so – see California's current budget woes) that incremental productivity improvements or marginal budget-cutting will be enitrely inadequate.
• The case that problems are too complex and interdependent – and the stakes are too high – for the old model of philanthropy-as-social-venture-captial and government-as-scaler-and-funder-of-programs to be effective over time. (J. Rodin)
• We need a more systems-based approach where every sector (business, government, philanthropic and non-profit, and citizen) innovates where it can, intentionally connecting, sharing, and leveraging assets and insights on an ongoing basis.
• We need not just product-based innovation aimed at the solutions to a particular problem but also process innovation that will help all sectors find better solutions to all kinds of problems (and build an evidence base) over time.
• We can also take advantage of our vastly increased connectivity to emphasize recombinant strategies - taking existing innovations and mashing them up in new ways to create new value out of them in business, government, or communities across the globe.

Resources for Change

The reports themselves are easily accessible, genuinely informative, and directed at those in and outside of government.

Go ahead. Watch and read for yourself – and share with every innovator, innovation champion, and change agent you know.

[Full disclosure: I worked with Geoff Mulgan in the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit in 2001 and have followed his work (and adventures since). I am an unabashed and unapologetic fan, but I would (and do) champion good ideas wherever they come from.]

Last week, I participate in a two-day event that brought together researchers, thinkers, urban leaders, policy professionals, and social innovators to share strategies for strengthening regional economies and improving the quality of life in the world's urban regions. Graciously hosted by Keshav Varma, Head of the World Bank Institute's Urban Program, the Innovative Cities' agenda was organized around the theme of competitiveness, but covered a wide range of challenges urban leaders face: intra-regional competition, social inclusiveness, positioning on the value chain, "smart" policies, transport and infrastructure capacity, and cultivating a healthy business climate.

Unfortunately, I had to leave for a flight just prior to the last panel – the summary panel. So I will offer my own top takeaways, based on no criteria other than personal resonance. I have not been able to stop thinking about these issues since I left the symposium.

1. Jurisdictional boundaries are rarely aligned with where problems need solving, but collaborative approaches can make a real difference.

The first panel (on intra-urban competition) featured economic developers and urban planners from the Washington, DC region: Gerald Gordon (Executive Director, Fairfax County Virginia Economic Development Authority), Steve Silverman (Director, Montgomery County Maryland Department of Economic Development), and Richard Reinhard (Deputy Executive Director, Downtown DC Business Improvement District). After a brief presentation from each on their approaches to development and key priorities, moderators Stephen Fuller (Center for Regional Analysis, George Mason University) and Greg Clark

(OECD, LEEDs Program) began asking hard questions about shared strategies and significant challenges. Transportation surfaced immediately, as did the incentive structures and institutional barriers to collaboration on long-term (read: expensive and shared) priorities. Rich Reinhard (attributing the framing to his boss) offered the following insight:

"Our policy and program tools exist at three levels: federal, state local. Our problems exist at three different levels: global, regional, neighborhood."

Therein lies the problem.

At the risk of sounding like I've got a hammer and have discovered a bevy of nails, I have since come to see so many contexts in which this misalignment impedes shared action: jobs policy, site selection/location, educational cachement areas, investments in higher education or business support programs, etc. Government services (and the policies that drive them) are nearly always tied to jurisdictions in ways that inhibit scale and discourage broad, public participation through which creative solutions can emerge.

A specific example was raised in the room: a DC-commuter admitted "slugging" (essentially, organized hitch-hiking to DC from northern Virginia) and wanted to know (quite rightly) why it is illegal and what the alternatives might be.

At one level, this is a commuter-specific issue economic development professionals tend not to want to spend their time addressing (imagine the safety and liability issues...). But it is also an example of a larger pattern of citizen-led innovation (enabled by technology among other things) that could inform regional policy approaches on transport and other issues. So many citizen-led innovations emerge as neighborhood-based social practices (and occupy a legal grey zone), that it is hard to link them to policy making, let alone share them across a region. Moreover, this is the kind of innovation that can be shared any any direction – advanced economies have as much or more to learn from emerging ones as the other way around.

This speaks to new role of leaders - it's less about being the one with the solution, and more about knowing how to cultivate, test, and grow ideas that work (see reivew of Open Leadership for more on this subject) collaboratively, at different levels, and on different time horizons.

2. We need many more conversations about the enabling role of technology in helping cities thrive (citizens and residents, not just governments) so that we can inspire new models of governance and leadership.

Relina Bulchandani (Cisco Smart + Connected Communities initiative, of which this blog is a part), Gerard Mooney (IBM Global Government & Education), and Debra Lam (ARUP) made important presentations about how shared data and information platforms, systems (and sensors) integrated into the built environment can change what's possible for city leaders trying to manage extremely complex systems.

Relina's presentation emphasized how ubiquitous connectivity and the proliferation of mobile devices give us the potential to reimagine many aspects of work, learning, commerce, and life. By partnering with cities like San Francisco and Amsterdam to redesign urban information architectures, Cisco is helping city leaders reinvent the way they collect data, turn it into intelligence they can act upon, and share it with citizens and residents who can apply it (and contribute to it) too.

Gerald described similar partnerships with urban environments in the context of IBM's SmarterPlanet initiative, an effort to help cities get smarter about systems that support water, health, public safety, and transport, and begin to place citizens at the center of their work.

ARUP is an employee-owned engineering and design firm helping to green the built environment. Debra's presentation focused on measurement and feedback systems in the built environment that can help influence behaviors of people and communities. She offered some terrific visualizations that made evident why data transparency and presentation matter. When her slidedeck is made available, I will link it here.

Debra was also the first speaker to champion middle managers and experienced civil servants. While most of the symposium focsed on leaders and leadership, she argued that it is middle managers that make things work – these doers should not be overlooked as key agents of large-scale metropolitan change efforts.

3. We're not just reinventing strategies and tactics, but our fundamental approach to economic competitiveness and urban development.

Bruce Katz, Director of Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program, launched the Symposium with some key observations about cities:

• They will drive the next economy and create low-carbon ways to work and live.
• They will grow in importance (because urban migration is increasing worldwide).
• They will insist on new approaches to common, urgent challenges like long-term infrastructure planning, trade policy, and regional development.

Many other speakers used these as a foundation for their own observations about important changes within and across cities – growth, aging, poverty, access issues (energy, water, food), etc. – and described approaches to their key challenges.

But competing paradigms did emerge, provoked in particular by Bijal Bhatt (SEWA), Deputy Mayor Jerry William Silaa (Dar es Salaam), Michael Joroff (MIT), TIm Campbell (UrbanAge) and Melanie Walker (Gates Foundation):

• Are we building clusters or making places? How are these agenda linked?/li>li>What role does human capital play in development?
• Is competitiveness about growth or about broader indicators of health, soul, and prosperity?
• Is development about sharing lessons from the US and Europe with the rest of the world, or about co-creating and sharing new models for sustainable working and living?
• Do leaders make places or do citizens?
• How do cities learn from each other (who doe the learning?)
• How do we think about integrating the poor in development strategies? Are there things leaders need to do differently to ensure engagement?
• How do we start measuring/comparing true costs of development, resource extraction?
• How do we scale approaches that work (and does that mean replicate? grow? network? or something else?)
• When (and how) are we going to integrate citizens and residents in not just policy review, but actual implementation – engaging citizens in placemaking as we do leaders?

We began defiing components of a "new operating system" for cities of the future.

And that's when I had to leave. I'd be grateful if another attendee could summarize the last session in the comments below. I will attach any materials I receive in the next week or so to this post.

Many thanks to Sabine Palmreuther, Jennie Datoo, Narmeen Iftikhar, Damon Luciano, Kashev Varma, and everyone else at the World Bank who helped organize the event, and the speakers and attendees who made it come alive

The depth and breadth of the formal and informal coverage - much of it live - helped bring the conference to the world.

Tim O'Reilly's "Government as a Platform for Greatness" is below, but the entire collection of presentations and interviews is available here.

There is much to inspire:

• Alec Ross (US State Department), spoke to what Secretary of State Clinton calls  bottom up, citizen-centered diplomacy – or 21st Century Statecraft, citing the importance of technology in enabling its very practice not just in this county, but across the globe.
• Andre Blas (Web Citizen) shared "Vote on the Web", a Brazilian effort to engage citizens the practice of democracy and governing by making Congressional voting transparent and comparing it to the (symbolic) voting patterns of citizens by congressional district.
• danah boyd argues that transparency is necessary but not sufficient for generating intelligence or making good policy, using Megan's Law as an example of the kind of complexity transparent data presents.
• Tim Berners-Lee and Alex Howard discuss open data here, which offers a fine prelude Berners-Lee's presentation on why linked data is like a bag of chips.

Media coverage of the event is here.

Alex Howard's "Week in Review" post on Radar provides a through summary of the event.

Dan Taylor boils the event down to three points in his GovLoop "One Perspective" post.

OhMyGov provides a completely subjective list of top 33 tweets from Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3, but the entire  tweet stream is archived here (thanks to August Jackson at @8of12).

A quick peek into any of these links will likely make even a cynic hopeful about where this all heading.

While public officials from President Obama to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal continue to emphasize BP's responsibility for the disaster - and the cost of cleaning it up - Americans expect the US Government to respond. And it does, naming Coast Guard commandant Admiral Thad W. Allen to oversee the federal response, including the efforts of Environmental Protection Agency Admininistrator (and New Orleans native) Lisa Jackson; Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar; and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Science Administrator Jane Lubchenco, among dozens of state and local agencies and emergency services.

While this event is extraordinary, Government faces many challenges like it - so-called "wicked problems" characterized by their complexity, scope, scale, and resistance to narrow solutions. Unemployment, the credit crisis, climate change, food safety, economic revitalization, the competitiveness agenda - these are difficult issues that citizens expect their Governments to address, even as Government options for managing them are limited.

Why the expectations gap?

Donald Kettl, author of The Next Government of the United States, argues that in the US, this gap stems from the "vending machine" view of Government most citizens hold: the idea that we pay-in (through taxes) and in return, we expect specific solutions (legislation, resources, agencies, regulations, programs, etc.) for which we can hold Government accountable.

This (mechanistic) approach is highly efficient (and appropriate) for simple, predictable, work - processing passports or unemployment claims, for example. When it doesn't work, we 'bang it around' (like the vending machine) by complaining, protesting, or calling our Congressional representatives. But for most of what Government does, this model is not only inappropriate, it's an inaccurate reflection of how actually Government functions.

First, Government services are often aimed at wicked problems and increasingly provided through vast networks of contractors (private for- and not-for-profit organizations) as well through cost-sharing agreements with state and local agencies. This makes many Government services hard to discern on the ground, providing a possible explanation for protest signs like this one:

Second, Government typically sets standards and then relies on the participation of citizens, residents, firms, and communities to meet them, and to report exceptions. The US Food and Drug Administration's approach to food safety is a good example of this. The Government  does not test every vegetable for bacteria before it is shipped to  grocery stores or restaurants (nor could it). But when hazardous bacteria are found and reported, Government establishes bans, announces recalls, and exercises its power to prevent further damage and expose the causal chain.

Third, and increasingly, Government coordinates, even collaborates, with citizens directly to generate ideas and partner on solutions to shared challenges. While new and experimental, social technologies are beginning to reconnect people to Government in ways that set the stage for new models of Government - more transparent, more participatory, more accountable, and sometimes, unexpected, as in this suggested grassroots approach to cleaning up the Gulf oil slick:

This meme, the evolution of Gov2.0 and the remaking Government and public policy, will be a regular topic here at Networked Publics.

Wikipedia identifies 20 different varieties. A Google search returns over 180M results. The word, derived from the 16th century French platte-forme meaning map, first made itself known to me in the form of a pair of (tall) shoes, and later, as a technology environment in which to learn and experiment.

In today's public policy environments, "platform" is the new black. Platforms connect voters and candidates (John Kitzhaber for Governor), government agencies and citizens (US Department of Labor on Facebook), community based organizations and volunteers (VolunteerMatch), neighbors and neighbors (PortlandNeighborhoods), and so on, with the Web serving as the underlying operating system for new modes of interacting. (Incidentally, if you are reading this, you are arguably sharing a platform with me and the Smart + Connected Communities initiative right now).

The Nature of Platforms

In January, JP Rangaswami named four dimensions of platforms at the DGREE 2010 Summit.

1. Purpose. Whether an airport, the stock exchange, or Facebook, platforms maintain a clear purpose that attracts people with an interest in that purpose.
2. Standards. Because a platform brings people together, it employs  standards so that activities performed by the crowd work better for everyone. In an airport, we all have to pass through security with our  appropriately-sized carry-on bags. In a social network, we share  information about ourselves in order to access people and information important to us.
3. Participation of different kinds of entities (with different business models). A platform enables a range of activities in which different  kinds of organizations and entities participate. A conference is a kind  of platform, for example, where some people attend as individuals, while  others attend on behalf of firms - probably paying different rates based on when they registered, whether they are sponsoring, or what they  plan to do during the conference.
4. Action enabled by but independent of platform itself. Social networking  platforms that encourage community-level action demonstrate the power of this kind of leverage everyday.

At its core, a platform is a foundation upon which we build or do other things. It's an enabling system for people to not only interact with their governments, and participate in the delivery of government services, but to actually "[reconstitute] what is a government."

Increasingly, platforms connect people (from across agencies, sectors, and geographies who might not otherwise meet), data (from anywhere or anything), services (that help people share, learn, act and measure, collaboratively), and possibility.

And that makes platform a perfect (if evolving) metaphor for the kind of foundation we need to tackle our most critical challenges and find ways to realize sustainable prosperity in communities all over the world.

Reinventing Our Government

Sadly, we were not able to attend last month’s Gov2.0 Summit in Washington, DC. I did contribute the to “What does Gov2.0 mean to you?” video contest, with this, but I really liked Andrew’s (@Krazykriz), which I embedded above. However, thanks to social media, the community that did attend let us in on some of the action.

• News coverage and links to presentation files
• Summit videos (blip.tv)
• TwitterStream

Other Gov2.0 Resources

• GovLoop (Ning network, just purchased by GovDelivery)
• Sunlight Foundation
• GovFresh
• You2Gov

Gov2.0 Expo May 2010

Next up? Gov2.0 Expo, May 25-27, 2010 (DC). Sign-up for information here. Word on the street is that the May event will offer more relevant content for state and local government folks.

Share/Save

What’s Community Agility?

Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-recession, we were hearing flat, but seeing spiky. Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and all over Michigan. So while the U.S. economy at the time was widely perceived as booming, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few year before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to new challenges, and the beginnings of new kind of economy.

In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:

• Decreasing overall economic security for families despite job growth
• Industry-wide transitions changing job and skill requirements for large numbers of workers
• Lack of access to investment capital where entrepreneurs seemed to need it most
• Chronic budget shortfalls compromising basic public services in our communities, and
• Institutions, agencies, and organizations with clearly shared missions acting in isolation.

At the same time, we saw opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility.

Developing Methods for Change

With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive while also managing through downturns, and with partners including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, we developed methods and approaches for cultivating agility:

• Developing shared intelligence, by collecting and making meaning out of data that matters to multiple community organizations and agencies.
• Promoting network weaving, based on the theory that a whole host of benefits derived from well-networked communities (we had been studying networks for some time, but found Sean Safford’s early work at MIT – subsequently published in book form – very compelling). Later we partnered with June Holley to learn techniques for social network analysis.
• Facilitating collaboration across “silos”, so that people from across disciplines, departments, agencies, programs, organizations, and institutions find common ground and begin to share ideas, talent, and resources in ways that maximize wider community benefits.
• Encouraging public engagement, since real change happens in firms, schools, and neighborhoods, not just boardrooms.
• Advancing an entrepreneurship agenda that emphasizes not just new ventures, but entrepreneurial culture itself.

These methods emphasize the building of capacity—to collaborate and to innovate—so that communities can reinvent themselves over and over, not just build the next new thing. We worked with (and learned from) community leaders and project partners from five U.S. Department of Labor WIRED regions (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership) and two BRAC regions (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition.

Checking In

Last week, our team met in person to review progress, and take a look at the current (and growing) ecosystem around community agility (now increasingly called resilience.)

New Trends

While we’d been paying attention to the emergence of new conversations and community innovation spaces individually, sharing this information helped all of us see that we are now in the company of more (and more diverse) people advancing some of the same goals. Here are a few we’re pretty excited about.

Social Innovation

The people who identify with “social innovation” are a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from the academically-inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review crowd to the entrepreneurial community that is Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) to the activists, organizers, and media mavens who see new ways to make change through the social web. The new White House Office of Social Innovation will certainly accelerate interest in the field, which is now beginning to map itself. And interest in social innovation is appropriately global. The Young Foundation, SIX, and the Skoll World Forum, together with institutions like Ashoka and the Aspen Institute have nurtured social innovation networks around the globe for years. More recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has sponsored a host of initiatives designed to help innovators of all ages and stations leverage the power of social media and the web.

Video and Twitter have helped make much of this activity accessible and transparent. Last week, 900 people gathered at SoCap09 in San Francisco to figure out how to fund it.

Gov2.0

Government (at all levels) is also beginning to reimagine itself. The Obama campaign demonstrated the power of technology to enable self-organization in a campaign context, now we’re working through the implications of this kind of mass connectivity on governing itself. Catalyzed by Tim O’Reilly’s advocacy of “Government as Platform,” gov2.0 has become a rallying cry for transparency, participation, and just better, smarter, government  – among people inside government and out. This week’s Gov2.0 Summit brings together public servants and technologists and advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.

The Resilience Movement

The resilient communities movement stems from two different though related sets of ideas: one relating to security, and the other to sustainability more broadly.

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploring Community Preparedness and Resilience in a variety of ways – the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI), for example, reflects a partnership between DHS, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, and a handful of communities in the Southestern U.S.
• The Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California Berkeley (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) has established a Building Regional Resilience Network , which has published a variety of papers on different dimensions of resilience (environmental, social, economic).
• The Council on Competitiveness made the materials used in its Risk and Resilience workshop available to the public.

People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exists in Australia, and a more locally-driven approach launched in England.

Smart Communities

Firms like Cisco are promoting smart cities from a data-connectivity point of view, and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda. But people and processes matter just as much. The stakes are high, the promise, great, and the need, urgent. Brookings is tracking the impact of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) on cities and regions seeking to advance innovation or leverage structural change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Stanley Litow offer a manifesto for smarter, more connected communities.  John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift focuses on change dynamics in firms, but their analysis offers insight relevant to communities, too.

Going Forward?

We’re taking a good look at this context in an effort to learn from others, and focus our efforts in ways that maximize impact.

We believe in the power of not just tinkering, but “…unbundling and reconstituting…”
– Don Tapscott