Civic Engagement is still broken — and a huge opportunity.

When everyone agrees something is a problem, one of two things must be true; (1) There exist an opportunity to solve the problem, or (2) it’s not actually a problem.

A decade ago, Nathan and I started MindMixer because we believed the former about civic engagement. We believed it was a significant problem and there was a real opportunity to solve the problem (and create a business). In a short period of time, MindMixer worked in thousands of communities and engaged millions of local residents. It appeared in some small way, that moving engagement from a predominantly offline activity to an online activity, we had found a solution to the problem. Since then, there have been lots of creative attempts to use technology to improve citizen engagement. Yet, I’m not sure the state of citizen engagement is any better than it was ten years ago. It’s possible it has even gotten worse. WTF.

Before we address the specific issues, let’s talk a little about purpose. The purpose and objective for any engagement program is typically three-fold:

• Participation — a high share of people in the city choose to engage in some way. They recognize that it is important and worthwhile to engage with the city.
• Responsiveness — there is a reasonable level of responsiveness inherent in the program design. This includes acknowledgement of response to when there are problems, they are flagged and fixed.
• Representation — the voice represented in citizen feedback or democratic decision-making are representative of the population as a whole. They are not concentrated among those with money, time, and education. They are all-inclusive.

Civic engagement’s practitioners and products, mindful of these objectives, have made a number of attempts to improve the results over the years. While the era of smart phones, open data, and smart cities hyperbolically promised to solve our citizen engagement woes, the state of affairs is much the same:

1. The predominant method for citizen engagement still happens to be the classic town hall event. The town hall has seen some slight adaptations with the introduction of charrettes and various participatory tactics, however, the essence — going to a specific time at a specific place — still holds true.
2. The people who engage in local affairs are typically unrepresentative of the population as a whole. They are “power users” and contributors whereas the voices of people without the time, the education, or the resources to participate often go unheard.

To date, attempts at using technology for engagement have simply followed the rational choice model; if we reduce the time and cost for people to get involved, the result will be more involvement. This simplistic view of the world ignores two very important factors; (1) humans aren’t rational, and (2) technology is subject to the same constraints of the real world, notably time, cost, and access. Both of these factors appear to be having a significant impact on meaningful improvement when it comes to civic engagement efforts.

As we know, humans have a set of psychological tendencies that make them behave quite irrationally. In many ways, new technologies and products have only enhanced these tendencies. We’re:

• Default-prone
• Loss-averse
• Routine-oriented
• Status-driven

How is this relevant to civic engagement? We see these factors present themselves in a myriad of ways. The following are a set of hypothesis formed through years of practice, observation, and research as to why efforts in civic engagement continue to produce lackluster results.

Hypothesis #1: An individual’s willingness to engage in local community affairs likely follows a form of the exploit-explore continuum.

Our tendencies to be both default-prone and routine-oriented mean we quickly assimilate to a personalized version of community — my house, my street, my neighborhood — and then move into exploit mode. In doing so, we reduce risk, protect our investments (i.e. home value), and largely fall into routines. There are a small number of life changes that disrupt this routine and put us back into explore mode:

• Moving to a new place
• Buying a home
• Having a child
• Children moving out of the home
• Death of a partner

The implication here is that individuals often approach civic engagement as a way of solving problems applicable to their version of community. It is challenging — in the absence of these disruptive events — to prompt individuals to engage civically beyond the issues directly relevant to their house, street, and neighborhood.

Hypothesis #2: Participation in local community affairs depends strongly on the ease with which citizens can learn about a particular program and sign-up.

Like any voluntary activity, citizen engagement faces a number of barriers. These include things like time, access, trust in government, agency responsiveness, cultural misunderstandings, and opportunity costs. Most notably, civic engagement is generally presented as a high effort / high time activity. The lack of easy on and off-ramps into local engagement is quite stunning. Even government benefits such as Obamacare and Food Stamps have had a difficult time of getting people to enroll in free services. The success of CalFresh, a food stamps enrollment program, can be instructive for improving participation more broadly.

Hypothesis #3: Engagement processes and products aren’t designed to tap into a diversified set of interest and expertise in any given community.

If shouldn’t come as a surprise, but citizens have varying degrees of interest and competencies when it comes contributing to an engagement process. Programs and products actually cater to and promote power user behavior and interest, unintentionally rewarding people with the most time. Technology doesn’t change this, contrary to popular belief. The world is complicated and citizens shouldn’t be expected to have the expertise to make anything close to optimal decisions in all of the domains of their local community. Engagement programs and products should be designed to allow people to contribute across time and interest spectrums.

Hypothesis #4: Successful engagement programs (as measured by the number of people involved) have diseconomies of scale.

As an engagement program moves beyond the power users and always involved, it experiences a similar problem to last-mile shipping costs. The drag forces on sharing information and involving the traditionally uninvolved increase substantially, thus resulting in more energy and resources on a per participant basis. In the event that a program does involve more people, the increased inputs (people, ideas, comments, etc…) create more work for the sponsor to be properly responsive. These diseconomies of scale are often either not considered at all or not understood until the budgets been used.

A New Framework

In order to overcome some of these issues, engagement programs need to consider a new conceptual framework. Too many engagement programs are a series of independent tactics (i.e. meetings, surveys, etc..) without consideration for how and why people participate. A channel-driven framework, might look something like:

• Passive Engagement: Efforts where data is collected from citizens as a part of their routine and non-routine interactions with the city, both the governing body and physical environment. Cities are effectively machines for generating continuous feedback. Residents are constantly interacting with city services and infrastructure, providing a constant stream of information about preferences, destinations, and place-based behaviors. Engagement programs can and should be designing transparent solutions to take advantage of this information and in turn presenting the findings back to residents as a set of baseline conditions.
• Active Engagement: Efforts where citizens go out and invest the energy to make their voices heard. Town hall meetings and idea collection technologies can and should have a place in the process. We simply need to understand that these methods do and will always require energy and effort from citizens. Active engagement efforts should also start exploring the use of AR / VR as ways to provide experiential opportunities for residents. Establishing permanent brick-and-mortar locations for citizen feedback, appreciation, or grievance should also be considered. We shouldn’t need a “project” in order to be active members of the community.
• Hybrid Engagement: Efforts where citizens are intercepted within their routines and given an opportunity to provide feedback. A current tactic that falls into this category is transit rider surveys, that take place while people get on and off or ride transit. This kind of intercepting can include much more than surveys and often times can provide both appropriate context (feedback on transit while riding transit) and time (transit time) for people to participate meaningfully.

Open to Being Wrong

I thought I was done with civic engagement a long time ago, in the professional sense at least. As I watched govtech and civictech grow, it feels like civic engagement has largely been forgotten and even in some circles it’s considered a “has-been” problem. I don’t think thats true and hope that someone or some organization is willing to take some risks and push it to what it can become. If you have examples of engagement done well, please do send an email to nick (at) betterplanning.co.

*Special thanks to Ben Armstrong at MIT for his contributions, feedback, and continued interest in this space.

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