Year: 2015

Active Listening 101 for Civic Tech

Laurenellen McCann

Active listening is the art of focusing: lending your full attention to what a person or a bunch of people have to say and how they say it before responding.

It’s both a skill and a series of practices. Listening exercises have been utilized by community organizers for decades, often in two-way educational spaces. (More info about that and tactics to get you going here.) The goal of listening is to make space for individuals and communities to express themselves and define their own problems and ideas before imposing “solutions” upon them. In this way, listening is an essential civic skill.

Active listening: the art of civic reflection.

Active listening: the art of civic reflection. Photo by Laurenellen McCann.

As part of the Experimental Modes convening earlier this month, we conducted an active listening exercise to reflect on how those of us who do community-driven civic tech tell our stories. This was both part of building a common language for us in the room and to get us into gear for the case study sprint — a collaborative documentation project. (That you can still contribute to!)

Below, I’ve outlined the exercise we used. Try it out with a partner and try discussing your own work. What do you learn? What sticks with people when you tell your story that you didn’t expect? What do you spend time explaining? What resonates and what doesn’t?

Sample active listening exercise

3 – 5 minutes: Define the goal and the rules

The goal of this exercise is to learn how to understand your civic project through the eyes of someone less intimately acquainted with what it is and why you do it. You’ll work in pairs, taking turns playing the role of Speaker and Listener. When it’s your turn to speak, you speak. When it’s your turn to listen, you goal is to be as quiet as possible, focusing on what the other person says. You can take notes or doodle or whatever helps you listen, but your role is to listen. That means, no questions, no clarifications, no corrections. Just focus.

3 minutes: Break into pairs (or grab a buddy).

Pick an “A” and a “B”. Person A will be the first Speaker. Person B will start as the listener.

Round 1 — Discuss WHAT you do

2 minutes: Person A Tells Their Story

. For the next 2 minutes, Person A will be the Speaker, explaining who what their project is, who it’s for/who is involved, and, briefly, how it got started. Person B is the Listener. (Again, offering no feedback or solicitation.)

3 minutes: Person B Tells Person A’s Story.

For the next 3 minutes, Person B will reflect back what they heard from Person A. Person B speaks. Person A is only allowed to listen (and take notes) — no corrections.

5 minutes: Group Reflection.

(Scaled to as many participants are part of the exercise.) What’s hard about this exercise? What did Person B hear that you (Person A) didn’t expect? What did they miss? What words did they use that you don’t normally use to describe your work?

Round 2 — Switch!

2 minutes: Person B Tells Their Story.

3 minutes: Person A Tells Person B’s Story

2 minutes: Reflection.

Round 3 — Discuss HOW you do what you do

2 minutes: Person A Shares How

Person A is the Speaker. Person B is the Listener. Talk about how the project works, how you go about implementing it, connecting with the people you’re working for, etc — the strategic and tactical bits you’d share if you were making a recipe of your work. While you (Person A) talk, Person B will lesson, taking notes on the key strategies and tactics they hear.

2 minutes: Person B Shares How

Switch! Person B is the Speaker. Person A is the Listener. While Person B shares their recipe, Person A takes notes.

5 – 7 minutes: Reflection and review.

Together, look through the strategies and tactics identified. Think about and discuss the language your partner used to capture your description of how you do your work. What stands out? Take another few minutes and review what’s similar and different about the way you approach your work. If you’re doing this exercise in a group setting, after some internal conversation time, open this topic up to the group.

What do you see about your work that you didn’t see before? Which parts resonate — or didn’t? How will that affect your storytelling going forward?

Getting sponsors for your local civic hacking event

Christopher Whitaker

logoPreviously, we had talked about how to plan and run a civic hacking event. Today, we’re going to go into a little more detail about getting sponsors for your event using resources from Code for America’s Brigade toolkit and asking a number of companies that have sponsored events in the past.

Terms to know before we get started

Donations vs Sponsorships

First, it’s important to understand the difference between donations and sponsorships. Donations are tax-deductible and cannot have business benefits for the donor (giving) company. If you’re an official Code for America Brigade Chapter, then Code for America can help intake donations for your local brigade.

Sponsorships are not tax-deductible, require a signed agreement, and will often include specific deliverables.  These deliverables are usually worked out in advance and will include what’s getting purchased and if the company is paying or reimbursing the organizer.

Fiscal Agents 

If you’re working with a local non-profit partner, it may be easier for that partner to accept donations or sponsorships money than for you to handle it as individual organizers. Depending on the organization, they may even be able to pay for things upfront (like food or venue costs) and have the sponsor(s) reimburse the organization. If you do partner with a non-profit partner, it’s recommended that you sign a Memo of Understanding stating what each party will do. (A memo of understanding is a signed document that just lays out 1) the scope of the project or agreement and 2) lays out what everyone agreed to do and when.)

Asking for money – Who to ask

Asking for money can be intimidating, but it’s something that comes with the territory. There are a lot of funders out there – be sure to figure out which ones are most relevant to your organization and interested in your work. They might be corporations, foundations, or wealthy individuals, and they might give anywhere from $1,000 contributions for an Annual Campaign to $500K grants for General Operating Support.

It also helps to know if the company or organization has sponsored similar events in the past. Have they sponsored hackathons for other groups? Have they ever expressed an interest in civic hacking? If they have, then they’re good candidates for sponsoring your event.

The other thing to check on is if any of your non-profit partners have an existing relationship with the organizations you’re thinking about asking for sponsorship. They may be able to make an introduction.

Asking for money – Being prepared

One of the best things that you can do to increase your chances of getting a sponsorship is being prepared.  You should have information about your group and your event that can fit on a single sheet of paper. You should also include information about your group’s previous wins. If this is your first National Day of Civic Hacking event, you can also show what’s been done during National Day of Civic Hacking during previous years.

Once you have all that, all that’s left to do is to reach out and make the ask. The key in making the ask is to show your genuine enthusiasm and passion for your cause, while not being afraid to directly ask for their financial support. You want to be clear when describing how much financial support you are seeking and how you will use their money.

After the event

After the event, be sure to reach back out to the sponsors with a thank you note and to let them know what the results of the event were.

For additional reference, here’s the Code for America Brigade Training video regarding fundraising. You should also check out Code for America’s fundraising toolkit as as well!

 

The Code for America finance and communities team contributed to this blog post. 

There Are No Innocents: Data Rebroadcasting and Server-Side Responsibility – Karl Fogel at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

karlOn April 14th, Karl Fogel of Open Tech Strategies and QuestionCopyright.org presented at OpenGov Hack Night on data rebroadcasting and server-side responsibility.

Data rebroadcasting is when one datasource posts data from another source. Civic apps tend to do this all of the time. For example, clearstreets.org rebroadcasts data from the City of Chicago’s plow tracker website and chicagoflushots.org rebroadcasts data from the city data portal.

Fogel used several examples to showcase the problems that can occur when people rebroadcast data that may invade someone’s privacy or may be downright inaccurate.  The first example was Chicago Councilmatic. A resident’s name had been placed on the record after filing a dispute about a very high water charge. The resident had asked that her name be removed from the site. However, this proved difficult since the app scrapes the Chicago City Clerks’ Legistar Website and is part of the official public record. Whatever’s in the public records ends up being placed on the Councilmatic website.

Another example that Fogel used to talk about the problem of data rebroadcasting is expungement. Whenever you get your criminal record expunged, the law considers reality as you having never committed the crime in the first place. So, when you’re applying for the a job and they ask “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” you can answer no and be legally correct.

However, if you start googling sometimes you’ll find the information about your criminal record still exists on the internet. Most infamously, there are sites that make money by posting mugshots online and charging for their removal. Additionally, news sites about the case may still come up as a top hit in a google search. Fogel used one news site as an example where the news site posted an updated disclaimer at the top of the site saying that the person charged with the crime had been exonerated – but it the site still came up high in the search results.

Fogel proposed a set of working principles when thinking about rebroadcasting data.

  • Techies are binary: Fogel points out that tech minded people can be pretty binary. The data is or isn’t available. It either is open sourced or it’s not. For people outside of tech, questions like this can have a whole range of answers. (It’s available, but it’s really hard to get.)
  • Is the info there through the subjects own actions?
  • Can you make all the important follow-up visible? If something changes (like a record being expunged or a credit report being fixed), will the changes be reflected?
  • Is there a customary legal forgetting process involved?
  • How would you feel if it were your kid?

You can watch Fogel’s presentation in full below:

Before you came to this room, did you think of your work as “civic tech”?

Laurenellen McCann

On April 4th, as part of the Experimental Modes project, we gathered together 30 technology practitioners in a one-day convening to discuss the strategies they use to make civic tech—though very few attendees would call it such.

Artists, journalists, developers, moms, community organizers, students, entrepreneurs (and often, some combination of the above), the practitioners in the room represented diverse parts of the civic ecosystem and the words we each used to talk about the work that we do reflected that.

Below, we’ve rounded up thoughts from each participant in answer to the question:

Before you came into this room did you think of your work as “civic tech”? If you didn’t, how would you describe your work?

The answers provide an important window into the limits and potentials of “civic technology”: who feels invited into this latest iteration of the “tech for good” space and who doesn’t (or who rejects it) and why.

(What follows are a slightly cleaned up version of the live notes taken during our conversations. You can read the original, unedited documentation of this conversation here.)

Attendees of the Experimental Modes Convening. April 4, 2015. Photo by Daniel O'Neil.

Attendees of the Experimental Modes Convening. April 4, 2015. Photo by Daniel O’Neil.

Marisa Jahn (The NannyVan App): At first we called our work public art, but then we identified as civic tech because the White House called us.

Maegan Ortiz (Mobile Voices): I identified the work as civic tech because I was told that what I do is civic tech, though with the populations I work with, civic engagement has a particular meaning.

Geoff Hing (Chicago Tribune): If you owned the language, what language would you use to describe your work?

Maegan Ortiz: Great question — for me, we have meetings and make media. We’re putting ourselves out there in different ways.

Marisa Jahn: We code switch a lot. Communications, civic media.

Asiaha Butler (Large Lots Program): We’re open to being as “googleicious” as possible. What we do is community.

Geoff Hing: I call my work journalism/journalistic.

Greta Byrum (Open Technology Institute): “Training”.

Stefanie Milovic (Hidden Valley Nature Lab): I’d call it “civic tech”. The21 only people who get involved are people who are looking to learn.

Jeremy Hay (EPANow): I’d call it civic tech depending on the grant. Otherwise, “Community journalism”

Tiana Epps-Johnson (Center for Technology and Civic Life): Skills training and civic tech.

Naheem Morris (Red Hook Digital Stewards): Training.

Laura Walker McDonald (Social Impact Lab): For FrontlineSMS, I’d say m-gov, m-health, etc. Digital Diplomacy. Civic tech. But the term I like the most is “inclusive technology”, which baffles people because we made it up.

Robert Smith (Red Hook Digital Stewards): Training, skill building. Not tied into government, so “civic” may not apply. Community building. “Independent”. “Tied in to building the Red Hook community”.

Jennifer Brandel (Curious Nation): Well, now I’m going to start using “civic tech” for grants. Usually, though, we call our work “public-powered journalism”. Sometimes I think about our work in terms of psychogeography: “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities… just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape”. (“A New Way of Walking”)

Demond Drummer (Large Lots Program): I only started using “civic tech” about 6 months ago. Usually I refer to the work of tech organizers as “digital literacy” and “digital leadership”, in the mode of the literacy trainings from the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Now I think of what I do as the “full stack of civic tech”.

Josh Kalov (Smart Chicago Collaborative): Open data and website stuff. “Everything I do is civic tech though I hate the term”.

Anca Matioc (AbreLatAm): I work with a foundation in Chile, similar to Sunlight Foundation. Building platforms to inform people about voting, political issues. I hate the term “civic tech”. It’s missing “a lot of what you guys [in the room] have”, missing the communities part, the engaging grassroots part. People from civic tech need more of that. Impressed with R.A.G.E. (Asiaha’s organization), their structure and constituent funding (and therefore their constituent accountability). Maybe that’s why organizations like R.A.G.E. don’t immediately identify as civic tech, because they don’t have to adopt language for funders.

Allan Gomez (The Prometheus Radio Project): I don’t use the term civic tech, but our work does fall under it. I’d call it “participatory democracy”. Having a voice (through radio) is a civic ambition. Electoral politics is not the full range of civic participation. What about non-citizens? People who don’t vote can be politically engaged in a really deep way, more so than people who only vote and that’s it.

Sanjay Jolly (The Prometheus Radio Project): Our work falls into civic technology frames – and that can be important, useful. For a long time Prometheus was a “media justice organization” (to tell funders “what we are”). Now nobody call themselves media justice anymore. What makes sense to people is to say that “we’re building a radio station so people can have a voice in their community”.

Whitney May (Center for Technology and Civic Life): Our work fits pretty squarely with civic tech language because we’re building tools for government. But it’s also skills training, so I’d also call it “technically civic”.

Sabrina Raaf (School of Art and Design at University of Illinois at Chicago): I’d call it open source culture. Documenting new tech. Teaching new tech. Bridging between academia and maker culture (two cultures that are biased against each other). “Sharing knowledge”, documenting knowledge, workshopping knowledge.

Daniel O’Neil (Smart Chicago Collaborative): I work in civic tech, and I find the people in civic tech deeply boring.

Sonja Marziano (Civic User Testing Group, Smart Chicago Collaborative): “Civic” is a really important word to what I do every day.

Maritza Bandera (On The Table, Chicago Community Trust): I never thought of what I did as “civic tech” before. Conversation. Community-building. Organizing.

Adam Horowitz (US Department of Arts & Culture): Social imagination, cultural organizing, building connective tissue in social fabric.

Danielle Coates-Connor (GoBoston2030): Something I haven’t seen in the civic tech space is about the interior condition of leaders…the visionary elements.

Diana Nucera (Allied Media Projects): I think of civic tech more as product than process. It’s hard to hear people wanting to take the term and use it because it takes several processes to create a product that can scale to the size of civic tech—beyond a neighborhood, something that can cover a whole area. Taking over the term civic tech de-legitimizes the history of social organizing. When we use blanket terms we have to start from scratch. What I do is “media-based organizing”. The work is heavy in process, not products. The products are civic tech. So, I discourage people from using words civic technology to get grants, and so on. We actually need more diversity in processes—that’s what can make civic tech valuable.

Laurenellen McCann (Smart Chicago Collaborative): This is something I’ve been struggling with as I’ve been exploring the modes of civic engagement in civic tech—it’s a study of processes people use to create civic tech…but I’ve been wrestling with whether and how things that identify as “civic tech” count.

Diana Nucera: What you’ve shown us is that community organizing, media making, public art, all have a place within civic tech. And what I find helpful is to understand how people are approaching it: “Civic tech” or “Community tech”.

Speakers announced for this weekend’s Civic Design Camp at Smart Chicago

Smart Chicago

rvprofileSmart Chicago and Code for America are pleased to announce our first two speakers for Civic Design Camp. Civic Design Camp is an annual event designed to bring together government employees, nonprofit partners and professional designers.  This year’s event is being held in Chicago on April 25th at the offices of kCura.

Our first speaker will be Raphy Villas from 18F’s Chicago office.

Raphy Villas began his public service as a Presidential Innovation Fellow working on MyUSA, a platform for accessing government services. He is now a product manager and co-founding member of 18F. Raphy lives in Chicago with his wife and two kids.

Villas will speak about the work of 18F with examples of how their using design thinking to transform government.

Our second speaker is Sonja Marziano, Project Coordinator at Smart Chicago Collaborative.

CCT Headshots-380-editedIn this position, Sonja manages projects including the Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup), the Chicago Early Learning Portal, Expunge.io “Plus,” and the Chicago School of Data. Before Smart Chicago, she worked in customer service and community programs at the Chicago Children’s Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Sonja has a Bachelor’s Degree in International Studies from Allegheny College.

Sonja will speak about the methods and processes of the CUTGroup, and how CUTGroup is a new model for UX testing, digital skills development, and community engagement in civic tech.

You can register for Civic Design Camp right here on our SplashThat Page!