Knight Foundation

San Francisco’s Public Voice Project & the CUTGroup Collective

Sonja Marziano

San Francisco's The Public Voice: City Service Design CenterThe City & County of San Francisco recently submitted a proposal in the Knight News Challenge: How might libraries serve 21st century information needs? for The Public Voice: City Service Design Center. The goal is to “make San Francisco Public Library a forum for the collaborative design of government digital services through a public user testing program.”

This is an impressive project that will create better tools and systems that serve residents by conducting usability testing and incorporating and responding to resident feedback.

Our Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) work is cited as an inspiration and the City & County of San Francisco will implement the CUTGroup methodologies laid out in our documentation to replicate similar success in San Francisco.

The Public Voice honors the CUTGroup’s pioneering model and builds on it with an explicit focus:

1) We focus on government services being redesigned as part of our citywide initiative to be “digital by default”. The Public Voice creates collaborative environments where public services are built “with, not for” the people of San Francisco.

2) We create structural relationships and feedback loops with agency digital product managers. Feedback and testing will be prioritized for products where feedback is highly actionable and impactful. Librarians assisting people in accessing government services in their day jobs are critical to this feedback loop.

3) We focus on accessibility for people with low digital literacy, non-native English speakers, and people with disabilities. We plan to implement the CUTGroup methodologies laid out in Smart Chicago’s documentation to replicate similar success in San Francisco.

The CUTGroup is a flagship Smart Chicago program to establish sustained, meaningful collaboration with residents around data and technology. We recently launched the CUTGroup Collective as a way to convene organizations and institutions to help establish new CUTGroups in other cities, and create a new community to share and learn from one another. The City & County of San Francisco are members of this network and are committed to sharing lessons learned from implementing CUTGroup processes in San Francisco with the entire CUTGroup Collective. We see immeasurable value from San Francisco participating in the CUTGroup Collective and communicating their lessons and insights to other cities.

Through the CUTGroup Collective, Smart Chicago is dedicated to helping the City & County of San Francisco implement best practices from the CUTGroup based on what we learned. In addition, we are excited to learn what The Public Voice project can teach us about building CUTGroup processes from within government and public libraries and see how that could help other cities implement similar models.

Come to the February 2016 Connect Chicago Meetup: Chicago Public Library’s Internet to Go Program

Denise Linn

Our next Connect Meetup will feature the Chicago Public Library’s hotspot lending program, Internet to Go.

At the event, the Connect Chicago community will learn about Internet to Go, hear about the program’s goals & impact, and have a larger discussion about 21st Century Library resources addressing digital equity. Lunch will be served.

Event: Chicago Public Library’s Internet to Go Wi-Fi Hotspot Lending Program

Where: The Chicago Community Trust

When: Friday, February 26th from 11am to 1pm

RSVP at this link.

Our special guest will be Michelle Frisque, the Chief of Technology, Content and Innovation at the Chicago Public Library.  

You’re invited to join this cross-sector discussion on libraries and Internet access projects. Come meet and network with computer trainers, nonprofit professionals, and fellow residents who care about the digital lives of Chicagoans.

LearnReadDiscover

About Internet to Go

Chicago Public Library’s innovative Internet to Go program lets patrons check out a Wi-Fi hotspot for three weeks. Launched in 2015, the lending program targets neighborhoods with low Internet use and adoption, giving patrons in that neighborhood free access they can take outside of the library’s walls. Supporters of the programs include the Knight Foundation & Google.

“To increase engagement with the Internet in communities with extremely low Internet use, Chicago Public Library will test Wi-Fi hotspot lending from six neighborhood libraries in combination with robust digital skills coaching. Laptops and tablets will also be available. Devices will be loaned for three weeks, and digital and information literacy services will be made available to patrons at checkout. Internet to Go will allow the library—already the city’s largest provider of free Internet access—to test the idea, refine it and ultimately expand the project.” – The Knight Foundation

Hotspots are available for check-out at the following Chicago Public Library branches:

  • Austin
  • Brighton Park
  • Daley Richard M.-W, Humboldt
  • Douglass
  • Galewood-Mont Clare
  • Greater Grand Crossing
  • Legler
  • North Pulaski
  • Vodak-East Side
  • Woodson Regional Library.

You can read more about the Internet to Go Program here. You can access the program’s FAQs here.

Austin

Smart Chicago at the Knight Media Learning Summit

Christopher Whitaker

knight-foundation-logoSmart Chicago’s Dan O’Neil, Demond Drummer, and Laurenellen McCann attended the Knight Media Learning Summit in Miami. The event is in it’s fourth year is specifically for community foundations, place-based foundations and media organizations looking to develop partners to bring information to their communities.

Dan spoke on the first day on a panel about entitled: KCIC Deep Dive Presentations; Design Thinking and Learning Together.

Here locally, the Knight Deep Dive supports our Deep Dive project. Previous to this, the KCIC grant supported our CivicWorks Project – a project that spreads resources and energy around the civic tech movement in Chicago.

We have four projects that fall under the Deep Dive Project:

  • On the Table – A community-wide conversation to discuss the ways in which we can commit to continue to make our communities stronger, safer and more dynamic.
  • CUTGroup – Our civic user testing group that gets real people to test civic apps. Under this grant, we will be expanding our CUTgroup program to Cook County.
  • Experimental Modes Project -A project led by Laurenellen McCann that deepens her work in needs-responsive, community-driven processes for creating technology with real people and real communities for public good
  • Unsummit: Mass neighborhood meetings centered on data and technology

Dan went into detail on our progress so far. You can catch the entire talk below – or skip to 46:02 to hear Dan talk about our work.

Immediately following Dan’s panel, our own Laurenellen McCann led a panel discussing Community, Technology and Partnerships. The panel included Demond Drummer as well as the founder of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE) Aisaha Butler and Chicago Deputy Commissioner for Planning and Development Kathleen Dickhut.

Laurenellen went into further detail about her work with the Experimental Modes Project. Specifically, she talked about how people are not just inventing new technology but rather remixing old technologies in new ways and that the number one tactic for this work was collaboration.

Demond, Aisaha, and Kathleen also spoke about their work on the Largelots program and the role that collaboration played in developing it. The Large Lot Program is a housing land use approach that was developed as part of the Green Healthy Neighborhoods public planning process. was built to make the process of purchasing City-owned land through this program easier for residents. It was initiated by Demond Drummer while he has at at Teamwork Englewood, built by DataMade, and funded by LISC Chicago with support from the Boeing Corporation, and the Knight Foundation for LISC’s OpenGov for the Rest of Us project.

You can view the entire presentation below:

You can find our more information about the event including videos of all the panels on the Knight Foundation website.

Thoughts on the Knight Community Information Challenge: Design Thinking and Learning Together

Smart Chicago

Today I was on a panel at the Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar along with colleagues from three other foundations, along with the Chicago Community Trust, who have formed a cohort doing work around the principles of design thinking. We’ve participated in a number of workshops and we’re sharing our deep dive with others. The hope is that we can move forward the practice of community foundations as they discover and serve the information needs of communities.

Susan Patterson, Program Director at the Knight Foundation, is moderating the panel and she sent along some prompts. This post lays out some thoughts as my primer to the panel.

At Smart Chicago, we’re in a unique position. We’re housed at The Trust, which is the actual partner for the Knight Community Information Challenge (KCIC).  The Trust provides matching funds and has been deeply invested in this work, long before Smart Chicago even existed, centered around the journalism ecosystem in Chicago. You can see the river of work that went into that here. There’s also a complete evaluation of the program: “News that Matters: An Assessment of Chicago’s Information Landscape”.

Smart Chicago has been doing work under the KCIC banner since 2012, starting with our Civic Works program, designed to spur support for civic innovation in Chicago. Christopher Whitaker has led that project for us, and it has been hugely successful, helping projects like Roll With Me (accessible transit directions in Chicago), mRelief, (a text-based way to check your eligibility for benefits in Chicago & Illinois), and. We’ve used it to give seats to innovators at 1871 and support collaboration between local government and emerging companies like Textizen.

Our current project under KCIC is the Deep Dive. There are four components; two to expand existing programs for engagement and two that are brand-new:

  • Support for the 2015 On The Table— a community-wide conversation involving more than 20,00o people in a single day
  • Expansion of the Civic User Testing Group,  a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test out civic apps. This has allowed us to add hundreds of testers, expand the program to all of Cook County, and conduct more tests
  • Our project on Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech,led by Laurenellen McCann, which includes deep research and explication of community-driven processes for creating technology with real people and real communities
  • Lastly, our Un-Summits, which are mass neighborhood convenings around digital skills and data

One of the coolest things about this deep dive cohort is the support and structure that the Knight Foundation has fostered. There are a number of components.

We’ve gotten together, as a group, three times now to learn specific methods for design thinking— formal methods problem-solving. The best thing I’ve learned on this is interview tactics— how to find hyper-users, how to design a questionnaire, and how to conduct interviews that yield actionable information.

It’s the specific skills— not aphorisms, anecdotes, or notions— that I really value.

We’ve also done some online collaboration, which frankly hasn’t worked all that well. I’ve learned that choosing and imposing new software or processes on people never really works. It’s the genuine expressions of an organization that really make an impact. Again, that’s why I value specific modes, specific actions, that are genuine.

Lastly, I really appreciate the work of ORS Impact— the formal evaluators of our program. They’ve created a theory of change that really makes sense and pulls together a set of threads into a coherent narrative.

We look forward to continuing our work in this cohort. In fact, we’re hosting our next meeting here in Chicago in September.

KCIC Inspiration Workshop in San Mateo, CA

KCIC Inspiration Workshop in San Mateo, CA

Here’s the panel in full:

KCIC Deep Dive Presentations; Design Thinking and Learning Together
Moderators: Susan Patterson, co-director, KCIC, Knight Foundation
Panelists: Daniel X. O’Neil, Chicago Community Trust/Smart Chicago Collaborative; Kelly Ryan, CEO, Incourage Community Foundation; Emmett D. Carson, Ph.D., CEO, Silicon Valley Community Foundation; Chris Daggett, president & CEO, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Meet people where they are: new analysis on the top best practices in #civictech, according to the people who do the work

Laurenellen McCann

“Democracy is a conversation, not a monologue!” — US Department of Arts & Culture

Last month, I posted an open call to hear from practitioners who build tech for public good with their communities (not “for” them) how they do their work, in their own words. This framework is important: to understand the most effective approaches for creating community-led tech, we have to practice what we preach. Although, through the Experimental Modes initiative, I’ve researched and analysed best field practices “civic engagement in civic tech”, I wanted to understand if the models I found resonated with real world practice—and if not, what models did.

To this end, at the Experimental Modes convening on April 4, 2015 in Chicago, we launched a case study collection project (the “case study sprint”) on-site and published it online soon after.

Today, we share an in-depth analysis of the case studies we received. From radio activism in Mulukuku, Nicaragua to community journalism in East Palo Alto, California, question campaigns about Boston’s metro transit future to a “People’s State of the Union” held by creatives USA-wide, the case studies we assembled represent a diversity of geographies, communities, conditions, and technologies. Though they may differ from each other in many ways, and certainly from our mainstream understanding of “civic tech”, what they have in common is their approach.

Go where people are and work together

By and large, the projects documented in this case study invest energy in in-person outreach and build close relationships with individuals as well as communities in spaces they share, often by playing with, discussing, and teaching each other how to get creative with the technology that’s already there.

“Take leadership from the most impacted”

Commonly identified approaches that intersected with and went beyond the 5 Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech included

  • student-led teaching (with several specific citations of the Frierian model)
  • establishing community ownership by “building with, not for”
  • embedding engagement and technical work inside demographic and communally relevant events, and
  • investing concentrated time in relationship-building before moving on to technical development

As you’ll see after reviewing our findings in full below, this study is just a start, but what it reveals about existing community technology practice is vital to consider. Putting people before tool production when it comes to civic projects isn’t just a throwaway cocktail line. It’s a series of real practices, work evident in communities across the country and the globe who make the democratizing and empowering potential of technologies real by ensuring the work they do is democratized and shares power. Whether or not these projects identify as “civic” and whether or not the tech involved meets the mainstream standard doesn’t impact whether the work is solid, genuinely collaborative, and co-created with those it seeks to help.

There’s more work to do and more we’ll learn about how to do it if we ourselves collaborate. We’re leaving the case study form open for further contribution and analysis. Share your story with us here.

Results of the CDOT / Textizen Poll on Placemaking

Christopher Whitaker
CDOT Textizen Poster

CDOT Textizen Poster

As part of the CivicWorks Project, we maintain a Textizen instance so that local nonprofits and government agencies can get feedback from residents. Our most recent partnership was with the Chicago Department of Transportation and their placemaking survey.

We wanted to give a few highlights of what we learned doing the survey as well as talk about how your organization can take advantage of Textizen.

Overall Results:

Total number of participants: 2117

English: 1887

Spanish: 220

Total Texts: 13485

Completion Rate: 58.5 %

Age Range: 41% of English respondents were 15-25, 36% were 26-35

Most Active Times: 9am and 7pm

Responses to Select Questions:

I would like to see more _ for Chicago’s streets! (Multiple Choice) [English]
A. Trees & Landscaping 44
B. Seating 13%
C. Public Gathering Spaces 19%
D. Bike Amenities 17%
E. Wider Sidewalks 7%
Which events do you want to see more of in Chicago? (Multiple Choice) [English]
A. Cultural event/art 22%
B. Street Fests 23%
C. Farmer/flea markets 34%
D. Free community services 22%
Cuales eventos le gustaria ver mas en Chicago? (Multiple Choice) (Spanish)
A. Evento cultural/arte 28%
B. Mercados 22%
C. festivales en la calle 29%
D. Servicios comunitarios 21%
How do you mainly get around your neighborhood? (Multiple Choice) (English)
A. Drive 9%
B. Bike 14%
C. Walk 38%
D. Transit 38%
E. Other 1%

Mindmixer Results

The Chicago Department of Transportation also ran a Mindmixer campaign at the same time as the Textizen poll. Mindmixer helps governments get feedback from residents by letting them post ideas on different topics. One of the most popular ideas on this Mindmixer poll was the idea to create a suburban bus station on the empty lot at Michigan and Roosevelt.

The Chicago Department of Transportation will use the results of the campaigns to further develop their Complete Street design guidelines. You can find our more information about the program on the Chicago Department of Transportation website.

Textizen Record set for most participation in a Spanish Language Poll 

This CDOT campaign had the most participation out of any previous Textizen poll with 221 total responses. CDOT achieved this by deploying an equal number of ads and using different photos. CDOT also gave presentations at Spanish speaking audiences to help spread the word.

The campaign also hit several community blogs which helped spread the word throughout different neighborhoods.

Next step: Crunching numbers

The next step for CDOT is to take the Textizen and Surveymonkey results and merge them together. The team will then start to run analysis so they can give better guidance to policy makers. When the CDOT team makes their recommendations for placemaking, the document will likely have a lot of technical information.  CDOT intends to interject results from the survey into their recommendations so that they can tie their results back to people.

To keep up with the progress, you can visit http://www.chicagocompletestreets.org/ for more inforation on CDOT’s efforts.

If you think that Textizen could help you government agency or non-profit, feel free to start a conversation with us here!