Re-thinking public engagement: a Calgary experiment
It’s funny how different aspects of your life serendipitously cross from time to time. Following my presentation at Leadership Calgary earlier this month about the current state and possible future of western democratic government (in LC speak it was titled “how do we build a systemically and systematically adaptive democratic government?”) we find a British Labour Party getting trounced from office primarily because of an expenses scandal, the Canadian parliment mired in public confusion as to why they would not want to let the Auditor General review MP expenses, and closer to home, the City of Calgary’s auditor says the procurement process is so murky and devoid of rules that fraud has almost certainly taken place.
What do all of these have in common? A lack of respect for the role the public plays in democratic government.
I won’t bore you with the details – I’ll save those for another post or for the Cities and Towns in Transition conference on June 4 and 5, which I have been asked to speak about this topic at – but at the end of the day public wisdom and government adaptability must grow together. Each relies on the other to succeed. This is done through transparency (government giving to public) and accountability (public giving to government).
I believe open data plays a big role in the transparency side of the equation, and a useful role in the accountability side, but I’ve recently been struck by the lack of systemic adaptability in our governance systems. In short, why are 15 people making all the decisions for the City of Calgary when we know public wisdom itself contains much more useful decision making information. One multiple choice question every four years hardly seems like the kind of thing our bravest citizens should be asked to give their lives to protect. Shouldn’t there be more? What of the really good ideas that lay outside the institutional input model? The good ideas that model is not designed to – and therefore unable to – reach? Do we just give up on those? Do we just call our current system ‘good enough’?
I’ve recently re-discovered Clay Shirky. I’ve been familiar with his work for several years but I’ve always classified them within the box of mind as applying to ‘technology’. Which is fair given that most of his examples lay in this field (Wikipedia, Flickr, Linux, Meetup, etc). But recently I was afforded the opportunity to apply his theories and teachings to the world of governance systems and I was surprised that what he was talking about almost seamlessly fit this world.
But so what.
I’m just a regular guy. I have no power; no input. And I certainly cannot change the 150-year-old institution of Canadian democracy. So I relished the opportunity to do what I and many others witnessing a travesty that I am unable to change would do: I whined about it.
Fortunately, I recently read the book “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts” and was reminded of the quote by Ken Low, “despair is not an option”. I could blame others and wallow, or I could look within myself and see what I could change.
I am not the mayor, premier or prime minister, so tackling one of those institutions is ludicrous. But I am the president of another governance system: my community association. Upon quick inspection of that organization I found we – despite having an active membership, being well respected by the community, and being in excellent financial shape – exhibited the same things I wanted to rail against. We had a board of 14 elected officials who were charged with doing all the work of the association. But who cares what we thought most needs doing? We’re just 14 people who happened to have some time or caring to sit on a board. That doesn’t make us any smarter or more capable than any other group of 14 people from the community. It just means we were willing to make the commitment. But how did we make our decisions? Where did our information come from? How did we ensure the really good ideas that lay outside our institutional model were invited in?
The answer is: we didn’t. We did what almost every government does; we made decisions based on the best information available. We went with our gut and our experience; we talked to our neighbours, did the odd bit of research, and made decisions at a boardroom table. All of this put the onus on the 14 people and never once invited the public to be part of the decision making process (aside from that one annual vote or having the ability to complain). We also never invited them to be part of the implementation process either.
I was lucky enough at this point to make a connection to something that happened several months earlier. Following the second CivicCamp I had a discussion with someone had the general tone of which was: ‘Having these kind of un-conference meetings where we talk about things that matter most to the participants is great. I wish there was more of this in other places.’ The ‘open spaces technology’ format discussions used by CivicCamp I found immensely useful because the agenda for the day was never based on someone’s unintentional bias, it was the group bias that set the agenda. And being the sum of our parts almost always proves to be better than that of one person, or a smaller group of people. (Hence my trouble with 14 people at a boardroom table making all the decisions.)
So how could we engage our community to get the best ideas out of them? And do so in a format that is not just a ‘town hall’ style event featuring general discussions, Q & A sessions, and the same 14 people responsible for implementing things at the end of the day anyway?
To do this, the Winston Heights-Mountview Community Association partnered with CivicCamp to create “CivicCamp in a Box”. A sort of ‘kit’ that anyone can use, which asks members of the community to come forward and say what they believe most needs doing in the community. It does not end here however. If we are truly going to invite them into the decision making process, we also have to involve them heavily in the implementation process. After all a small army of people working only on the specific project that interests them the most, affords much more possibility for getting ‘stuff’ done than a group of 14 board members working on things they may only be casually interested in.
Take for instance what I mention in my 2009/10 presidents report on how things often work at a community association: You as an interested community member want to plan a Stampede BBQ (for example) and you come to the board and tell us you want to plan a Stampede BBQ. More often than not, because you are a warm body who is interested, the community association will promptly make you a board director. The problem is now the majority of the work you will do has nothing to do with planning a Stampede BBQ. This has been a major focus of my time on the Winston Heights-Mountview board, lowering the bar of involvement and eliminating these kinds of barriers. You want to plan a Stampede BBQ? We’ll let you do that. Do you want to join a board? It is our responsibility to provide that opportunity too. Government should be about empowering the people, not getting in there way.
And so that is the second half of “CivicCamp in a Box”. Once participants have listed the ideas they have to make the neighbourhood a better place, they will each be given the chance to select one idea that they ‘think most needs doing’ from their perspective and to work on making that idea a reality. We will provide whatever resources we can to help them – starting from lunch and coffee at the event, through to any funds the association might be able to give to their project, to our contacts with neighbours, local businesses and all three levels of government.
I’m confident the ideas coming out of this event being held tomorrow will be better and more robustly thought out than anything our dedicated and whip smart board of 14 people could have done on their own. It will even have the added benefit of creating more engaged residents who will be illustrating their commitment to a better neighbourhood, which of course comes with many unintended side benefits from Block Watches to cleaner streets to more friendly ‘over the fence’ conversations.
I’m excited about this event even though I’m not sure what any of the outcomes might be, but I’m willing to take a risk and see if it will work. Cherie McCauley and Sarah Arthurs – who I’ve been working with on the logistics of creating “CivicCamp in a Box” – and I have floated the concept to other community associations and many are interested in how this might be used in their neighbourhood.
But why stop there? If this process works, why could we not see the Province or the City apply this kind of citizen engagement to, for example, budget deliberations? When an alderman says something is what their constituents want, what process did they go through to ensure it’s not just what they think and that had received little negative criticism? A process like this can eliminate their unintentional bias created by an institutional decision making model. Heck you could go the other way with it too and use it at the local elementary school, senior’s centre or baseball team. The possibilities are endless, really. And I believe by taking our time to do public engagement in a way like this (let’s not kid ourselves, this will slow down the current institutional decision making process) we can see added benefit of increased caring and decreased expenses.
Someone just needs to be willing to try it to see if it works. So, I’m happy to volunteer to take the risk. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Nenshi + Hawkesworth = stronger McIver
Today Naheed Nenshi has announced he will be running for mayor. On Monday we can expect a similar announcement from Bob Hawkesworth. The big winner from these announcements? Ric McIver.
As recently as yesterday, things were not looking great for Mr. McIver’s chances of becoming Calgary’s next mayor. As each mayoral candidate announced (Joe Connelly, Jon Lord, Craig Burrows) observers could see small parts of McIver’s assumed lead chipping away. Once Kent Hehr announced, enough had been chipped away that we were looking at a very real two way fight between McIver and Hehr.
With Nenshi and Hawkesworth entering the race, it’s fair to assume Mr. Hehr is now the one experiencing the chipping away of potential voters from his target group. It’s my guess that when it all plays out, enough will have been chipped away to return Mr. McIver to a healthy leading position once again.
What are your thoughts?
Cross posted to calgarypolitics.com
City of Calgary fraud allegations and a simple open data solution
The process of transparency and accountability is one we often talk about – certainly some of the mayoralty candidates have put it at the top of their list of election issues – but rarely take steps to do much about. Often the idea boils down to “people need to vote to hold politicians accountable” or “our politicians need to work harder to hold administration to task”. But both of these solutions are simple-minded and are just putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound.
The fraud allegations unfolding at the City of Calgary should be surprising to no one. Our band-aid is not working on this gunshot wound.
I applaud the City for investigating better regulations to the procurement process, but even that will not be enough to heal the wound. It’s just enough to stop the bleeding.
Have you, as an owner of the City of Calgary corporation, ever read a single contract the company you are co-owner of has tendered? I’m guessing no. If you wanted to read one, who would you call? I’m guessing you have no idea. If you got through to someone to ask them about a contract, what are the odds they would be willing to send you a copy? I’m guessing slim to none.
If you co-owned any other business, would you stand for that kind of treatment by your staff and their policies?
I’m a big proponent of Open Data because of situations exactly like this. If we have ease of access to information (transparency), staff and elected officials will be less likely to try to take advantage of the hiding in the shadows and avoid potential fraudulent activities (accountability). You need one to have the other however.
Here’s my proposed solution to avoid this sort of harmful – or perceived harmful – activity in the future: make all City of Calgary contracts available online. All of them.
Not only does this kind of transparency lead to better accountability on both the City’s and public’s sides of the equation, but I also believe it can lead to more cost efficient services and better value as well.
If you, as a contractor, are considering bidding on a project, and you can visit the City’s website and see what other previously successful vendors bid on similar projects, you now have an idea as to what your potential competition might bid and what has resonance with the City. Arming vendors with this kind of knowledge increases the likelihood they will attempt to add value to their bid on the new project either by offering the service more efficiently (read: cheaper) or by adding benefit to their bid that may be attractive to the City in ways they had not previously considered (delivery schedules, quality, etc).
I know it’s often comfortable living in the shadows because when no one can see what you’re doing you don’t have to constantly be on your toes. I get that. But the benefits to opening up the data and being more transparent does not have to be a negative experience. Accountability often has more positive outcomes for the person being held to account than negative. It’s time we stop worrying about the negative, embrace the positive, and be willing to let the public help build a better City through accountablity.
Let’s start simple. Please post the contracts online.
Winston Heights-Mountview 2009/10 President’s Report
Last night we held the 2009/10 Annual General Meeting for my community – Winston Heights-Mountview. As a reader of this blog you may not know that I’ve just completed my first year as the president of our community association. I love our neighbourhood. I think it’s a great place to live. And while the majority of readers may not care about the ins and the outs of a neighbourhood you don’t live in; I wanted to post my report to the community here on my blog none-the-less because it is such a big part of my life. Heck, maybe you’ll even find something you want to ask more about and implement in your community.
Last year at the AGM, I was asked to layout the basics of what the board would be doing over the next year. We had a passionate group of volunteers and a solid vision and mission to build from.
The board set about improving the governance of the organisation this past year with a goal of helping create a community association where people can volunteer their time to work on projects that interested them. Far too often the moment a community member in any neighbourhood expresses an interest in helping organize a fun event, they shortly find themselves on a board doing work they never had an interest in to begin with.
To have an engaged community it is paramount to be able to interact with residents in the way they most want to. If you want to work on a specific idea, we have groups for you to work with. Please read more on the sheets on the wall, and feel free to sign up to work with any group you find interesting. We are only as good as the people working on these projects. If you want to sit on the board, we happily invite you to join us there too.
The first year of our plan has been filled with re-writing the bylaws you have been presented with, creating board policies, and terms of reference. All kinds of boring stuff to most people. But all this needs to be done to make us a flexible organization capable of doing all kinds of cool stuff.
I’m happy to report that we are ahead of schedule. If you picked up one of the fridge magnets at the Eco-Fair you will see we have more events going on this summer that anyone can probably remember.
Here is a snapshot of some of our more popular events over the past year:
One of the highlights of this year is all the work that has been done on the Centennial Garden. It is a great addition to our Community Hall and the perfect place to take wedding photos or photos of your family! If you have a green thumb and would like to help with the ongoing maintenance of the garden, please talk to Yvette.
As part of the new Garden, we have introduced a series of Gardening Education workshops, the next one this Thursday. If you don’t have a fridge magnet that lists our many events this summer, please get one from Darlene.
We celebrated the New Year with a fabulous Gala attended by about 120 people. Attendees loved the food and dance their way into the new year.
In April, we hosted a sellout rain barrel sale and ecofair. Thanks to Coca-cola, we could offer the barrels at a very attractive price and engage our community in some volunteer opportunities. Following this event we now have 200 volunteer hours in the bank to use on upcoming projects.
We continued to show great stewardship of our offleash area on the escarpment with the annual Scoopy Doo Day cleanup attracting 26 volunteers.
In May, we held our first Jane’s Walk that provided a window into our community’s colourful landscape and history. It was one of the most highly attended walks in the whole city. Following the walk, we held a Volunteer Tea to salute our hardworking volunteers.
Reports on what each board committee undertook this year are available in the May newsletter and the hand out you have been given today. I hope you have a chance to read it and see all that has been accomplished by our community volunteers.
In all, I’m very proud of the work of all our volunteers this past year and they all deserve a hearty thank you. Without our volunteers we would not be as great a community as we are.
2010/11 may well prove to be a watershed year for Winston Heights-Mountview.
The board plans on working much harder this year to build out our membership further and engage volunteers and residents in more events.
We plan on providing more opportunities to get more of you involved in more ways that you want to. In short, we’ll be doing more.
Coming up in July, we will once again be hosting a Stampede Barbeque. Tickets are $15 for members, and $20 for non-members. There will also be details in our next newsletter. Come on out, it is always a great event!
We strive to enhance the recreation opportunities in our community. For example, this winter, we brought back our skating rinks to the enjoyment of both children and adults. We have also embarked on a major project to upgrade the playground on 7th Street. Alex, Christine and their hard working committee have secured a unique playground structure for the location, and we anticipate the build will take place this fall. If you are interested in helping to build this great addition to our neighbourhood, talk to Christine.
On May 29, all community members are invited to join us for an opportunity to help shape our community’s future. The Civic Camp will run from 9-2:30, with lunch provided, and will guide community members through a process to identify your best ideas for our community and how we can help make your vision a reality. If you have ideas about what you want to see changed or improved in the neighbourhood, or want to get to know your neighbours better. Join us! The ideas coming from this event will propel us forward for the next year and beyond.
We hope that you love our community as much as we do, and see its potential, and will get involved in 2010 to help us achieve that potential. We can’t do it without you.
What CivicCamp is doing for the 2010 Calgary Municipal Election
I don’t know about you, but leading up to the 2007 Calgary municipal election I had a heck of a time finding information about candidates. Sure the big “main stream media” did a good job of covering the basics and they did a very good and detailed job of dissecting the mayoral race, but I couldn’t help but struggle in my own efforts to find out more about who was running and what they stood for. Simply a one line bio and the answer to “what’s in your CD player” was not enough for me to make an intelligent decision. I longed for more of the kind of detail I knew existed. The kind of stuff that was being put on a great 2007 election Wikipedia page (I’ve since learned was mainly updated by Grant Neufeld) and the coverage offered via the Enlightened Savage’s blog (since revealed to be Joey Oberhoffner). It was in model of these online election offerings that I first started my blog.
But more can be done and I don’t want anyone else to go through the same struggles I did. True, I’ve been lucky enough to convince the majority of bloggers with an interest in Calgary’s municipal government to get together to cross-post to CalgaryPolitics.com, but I still don’t think that’s enough to make the average potential voters’ decision making any easier.
That’s where CivicCamp comes in.
At CivicCamp I found others who felt the same way and were willing to get to work to reduce ignorance as a barrier to voting in the 2010 election. The CivicCamp Governance group (aka “Cabin”) were tasked with coming up with the 2010 election plan and have been meeting regularly for a couple of months. Today we’re ready to let you know what the plans are. (For full details please read my post on the CivicCamp website here.)
CivicCamp will “act as an honest broker” of election information. Nothing partisan, no endorsing of candidates or anything like that.
- We’ve partnered with Grant Neufeld on a project of his called CalgaryDemocracy.ca. Just as CalgaryPolitics.com will gather all the news about candidates together, this new site will gather together all the basic information on candidates you could ever want. Websites, phone numbers, Twitter usernames, Facebook Pages… all of this for every candidate, for every race, will be listed here for your one stop shop for candidate information.
- CivicCamp will undertake the most comprehensive candidate survey Calgary has ever seen. The key aspect being: we will not let our own bias determine the direction of the questions. Using the online tool Uservoice, every citizen is given the opportunity to ask a question and to vote on which questions others have suggested, that you would like candidates to answer. Yes, democracy can even be applied to the process of asking candidates questions. This will ensure the questions being asked really are what citizens are wanting answered. So go and see if you’re question is being asked. If it is, vote for it. If not, please add it. The top however many questions will be handed to candidates on nomination day when they file their paperwork. Visit civiccamp.uservoice.com to ask your questions and vote.
- The biggest and most complex undertaking during any election is organizing an all candidates forum. CivicCamp has committed to organizing one all-candidate forum for each aldermanic race and one for the mayor’s race. This is a HUGE undertaking. I don’t know any other group that has tackled such a big task in past elections, but it has to be done. The questions from the Uservoice poll will form the basis of the questions for the candidates, and the crowd will be given a chance to fill in any local holes not addressed by those questions. It will be a pretty crazy couple of weeks between nomination and election day as CivicCamp hosts a forum almost every night. A call has gone (or is about to go) out to community associations asking for donations of hall space to host these events. If you have a space or if you would like to volunteer to help out with the forums, please contact the people listed here.
- CivicCamp is also undertaking a poll of the Campers to find out what issues they think are most important. The results of that survey will be posted on their website for the public and all candidates to read.
This group is doing a lot of work. Details on everything they are undertaking can be found at here and a summarized version is available at civiccamp.org/2010election.
If you’re interested in getting more involved with CivicCamp and their election activities, the next Cabin meeting is Thursday, May 20 at 7pm at Eau Claire. Please feel free to show up and volunteer to help out.
It’s my hope that these projects will help voters find out more about the candidates, and more easily, than 2007 afforded. Getting basic information and finding out what the candidates think about issues should NOT be a barrier to voting. I’m proud of the CivicCamp volunteers for doing their best to tear down that barrier.
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