Knight Foundation

This is the third piece in a five-part series exploring how to develop civic technology with, not for communities. Each entry in this series reviews a different strategy (“mode”) of civic engagement in civic tech along with common tactics for implementation that have been effectively utilized in the field by a variety of practitioners. The modes were identified based on research I conducted with Smart Chicago as part of the Knight Community Information Challenge. You can read more about the criteria used and review all of the 5 modes identified here.

MODE: Create Two-Way Educational Environments

The first two modes encompass strategies and tactics for starting civic technology projects within existing community contexts, both in terms of social infrastructure and technical infrastructure. The next three modes will address ways to affect these structures.

Adding new technology into the infrastructure of a community is more complicated than simply teaching community members how to use the new tech. For the skills and tech-use to stick, communities have to have the opportunity to integrate the new tools and new skills into their lives on their own terms. In an educational setting, this translates to allowing community members to tinker— to play and feel ownership and figure out how they relate to the tech (or don’t).

It also means creating environments where the teacher is actively listening and responding to the ideas and stick-points offered by participants. Rather than pushing on the development of a single skill, a teacher in a two-way educational environment treats every training as an opportunity to listen as well as be heard.

As people learn, they tend to express wants and needs that are particular to the tool they’re using as well as how that tool could relate to their lives. Two-way teachers keep their ears perked for both, and seize opportunities where issue overlap allows for skills development to translate into community-driven tech development.

Start with Digital/Media Skills Training

Many community-driven civic technologies are the product of training in foundational media and digital skills that open up immediate and long-term opportunities for co-development.

Hidden Valley Nature Lab, a student-run experiment in place-based learning using QR codes, came from digital skills training at a public high school. Teachers gave students the chance to develop an idea inspired, but not directly taught, during class and the lab and associated work developed as a direct result.

The impact of digital training is not always so immediate, however. For example, LargeLots.org, a web platform for purchasing city-owned vacant lots, was made possible through paid support for a digital literacy instructor (“tech organizer”) at a local community organization. This trainer’s job was explicitly to teach, listen, and find opportunities to connect the needs of community groups with appropriate technological solutions — something residents were able to capitalize on during the development of the Large Lots Program.

Similarly, The NannyVan’s Domestic Worker Alliance App was also the product of a longer-tail two-way educational initiative. The app, a phone hotline structured around a fictional, educational show, was developed in coordination with a hyperlocal partner and the domestic worker community in New York. The NannyVan developed a relationship with this community through a media production training. Later, when an advocacy opportunity arose, the local partner turned to The NannyVan team to co-develop a tool that would best fit their social and technical needs, trusting The NannyVan’s approach based on their previous experience.

One of the longer-tail impressions of this tactic is seen in the creation of Detroit Future Media, an intensive digital literacy program crafted to support Detroit’s revitalization, created by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. In 2009, fueled by a grant from the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), the Allied Media Projects (AMP) had an opportunity to expand broadband Internet adoption in Detroit’s underserved communities — communities that were already reaching out to AMP looking for digital and media skills trainings. As AMP notes in a later report, as they approached the idea of expanding not just how the Internet could be physically accessed, but how digital technologies could be sustainably leveraged by communities for their own needs, they encountered an unavoidable capacity gap.

“…there were few people in [Detroit] had the special combinations of technical skill, teaching experience in non-academic settings, community connectedness and desire to use media for community revitalization.”

So, AMP had an idea: what if the BTOP grant could be used to train trainers — folks who were already acting as teachers, connectors, and leaders in the context of Detroit’s many communities? To pull this off, AMP joined with 12 other community organizations to create the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, which applied for BTOP funds to create the Detroit Future trainings along with a few other programs.

Detroit Future Media’s Digital Literacy Guide

Approaching technology training from this relational perspective allowed the impact of teaching one individual to be immediately amplified and interconnected through social infrastructure — and created new structures that support continued development at both hyperlocal and city-wide scales. One outcome was the creation of a Digital Stewards program to create and maintain community wireless networks across Detroit.

Co-Construct New Infrastructure

On-site learning can also be two-way. Between 2002 and 2010, the Prometheus Radio Project worked with over 12 communities around the country and the world on barnraisings — a method of rapid construction for community radio stations. With an explicit nod to the Amish tradition, radio barnraisings bring together locals (through the stewardship and organizing capacity of a local community group (see parallels to Mode #1 here)) and radio experts and advocates from around the region to go from idea to live on the air over the course of three days. In addition to literally co-creating new technical infrastructure, volunteer facilitators lead workshops throughout the barnraising to get community members up to speed on federal regulation, radio engineering, programming and the lobbying and advocacy needed to keep their stations on the air over time.

A crowd waits for a world premiere broadcast after the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste Barnraising in Woodburn, OR. Photo credit: The Prometheus Radio Project.

Although Prometheus aided in the format of the event and the literal construction, in every instance, the process of education and development that occurred over the course of the barnraising was shaped by the input of the convening community group and all the participants in the event.

Installing new technical infrastructure through collaborative educational processes that instill community ownership is also readily present in the work of:

• Red Hook Wifi: a community wireless network in Brooklyn that is maintained by the Digital Stewards, an educational program for young adults)
• Free Geek: which provides access to free computers built by a community for a community)
• Public Lab: an international community of citizen scientists who develop and share tools and techniques to aid in each others’ distributed research

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Up next is Mode #4:  Lead from Shared Spaces.

This is the first of a five-part series exploring how to develop civic technology with, not for communities. Each entry in this series reviews a different mode, or strategy, of civic engagement in civic tech along with common tactics for implementation that have been effectively utilized in the field by a variety of practitioners. The modes were identified based on research I conducted with Smart Chicago as part of the Knight Community Information Challenge. Read more about the criteria here.

MODE: Utilize existing social infrastructure

Social infrastructure refers to the ecosystem of relationships and formal and informal organizations in a community. Structures can be physical (such as institutions with actual storefronts, like a daycare center) or purely relational (like a parents’ meet-up group), and most are organized by some element of place (neighborhood, school district, city district, city, etc).

Although structures can be shared across communities (a daycare center can draw people from multiple neighborhoods), the particular social infrastructure of a community is always unique. One may rely heavily on the daycare center while another nearby may prefer informal babysitting co-ops or church programs. Outsiders aren’t likely to spot these more informal and relational structures,  making it hard to discover the structures that really matter in a given social context.

To address this knowledge gap, literally meet people where they are — work with (or as part of) the social structures that you can identify that already play a role in the context you hope to affect and work together to customize the best community approach.

Here are three specific tactics, each with concrete examples of real-world use, that can help you think about using existing social infrastructure in civic tech:

Pay for Organizing Capacity in Existing Community Structures

Whether you’re trying to catalyze new tech activity or create general opportunities for communal self-direction in tech, investing money where a community is already investing social capital is a one method of working with existing social infrastructure.

Investing in the capacity of organizers to expand their work and seek opportunities to leverage technology is a direct way of ensuring that tech is both is situated in a communal context and won’t be made an afterthought to competing priorities.

The Chicago Large Lots program has gained a lot attention for its tech platform LargeLots.org, which lets residents of particular neighborhoods purchase city-owned vacant lots for $1. This online platform originated not within Chicago’s civic hacking community but thanks to the coordination of various neighborhood associations and community groups at the helm of the policy response to this issue. As the policy developed in coordination with the City, these groups eventually leveraged social connections to craft civic tech to help execute the policy.

These social connections existed in part due to a previous investment in organizing capacity from the federally-funded Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). In Chicago, some BTOP money was directed towards helping local organizations hire tech organizers and digital literacy instructors to “expand digital education and training for individuals, families, and businesses”.

Demond Drummer, former tech organizer at Teamwork Englewood, presents on LargeLots.org. Photo by Chris Whitaker.

One of those organizations was Teamwork Englewood, a community organization that would later play a role in the creation of the Large Lots Program. As part of the larger Program, Teamwork Englewood was able to steward the creation of LargeLots.org because, thanks to BTOP, Teamwork had existing paid staff whose responsibility it was to both invest in local digital skills and seek context-relevant opportunities to leverage those skills for neighborhood change.

Paid capacity can express itself in a far more localized ways, too. For example, the student-run Hidden Valley Nature Lab, which enables teachers to modify their curricula for place-based learning using QR codes, is the product of general paid support (at both the teacher and student-level) for digital educational programming within the communal social infrastructure that is New Fairfield High School, a public school in Western Connecticut.

Partner with Hyperlocal Groups with Intersecting Interests

Digital Stewards settling up the Red Hook Wifi network. Image via DigitalStewards.org.

Red Hook Wifi, a community-designed and stewarded wireless Internet network in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, is the product of a layered series of partnerships:

• A national organization (the Open Technology Institute (OTI), with expertise in community wireless networks)
• A hyperlocal organization (the Red Hook Initiative (RHI), a community center devoted to social justice and restoration of local public life through youth-led approaches)
• A variety of educational, residential, and local business relationships that not only utilize the network, but help expand the capacity available to keep the network alive through another RHI program, the Digital Stewards.

This deep meshing of missions, skills, and structures enabled the national organization (OTI) to support hyperlocal work in a way that genuinely allowed the local organization (RHI) to not only drive, but ultimately (literally) steward the ongoing success of both the wifi network and the social infrastructure needed to keep the network relevant and present within the community.

Offer Context-Sensitive Incentives for Participation

Although most of the examples above focus on organizational relationships, to catalyze the participation of individuals, explore the use of specific incentives.

For example, the Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) is a model of user experience testing run by the Smart Chicago Collaborative that enables “regular residents” to explore and critique so-called civic apps. To date, most participants are given a $20 VISA gift card for their engagement, although Smart Chicago is exploring the use of more contextually relevant awards, such as money for groceries for testing apps related to food access.

Sometimes getting to play specific role in the activity can be its own currency. DiscoTechs (short for “Discovering Technology”) are an open event format for teaching and sharing digital skills in a communal context) and operate utilizing social capital incentives. Although some DiscoTechs cater to specialized skills, many give neighbors, peers, and local organizations the chance to demonstrate a variety of personal technical expertise (such as photography, digital storytelling, music-making, coding, fabrication, you name it) and gain new community credibility alongside new contracts and other opportunities in the process.

DiscoTech stations can range from mapping and coding how-tos to digital storytelling to…Scrabble., each offering unique incentives to participate for both teachers and attendees. Photo by Maureen McCann.

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Up next: Mode #2: Utilizing Existing Tech Skills and Infrastructure.

**Disclaimer: I receive funding for my research from both the Smart Chicago Collaborative as well as the Open Technology Institute at New America. However, any projects covered by these organizations in the course of my research have been subjected to the same evaluation criteria that all projects in the Experimental Modes Initiative are subject to. More details about these criteria and my methodology can be found here.