Modes

Active Listening 101 for Civic Tech

Laurenellen McCannApril 22, 2015

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. 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?

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

Laurenellen McCannApril 21, 2015

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.

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”.

Show Your Work: Submit a Civic Tech Case Study

Laurenellen McCannApril 10, 2015

Through the Experimental Modes project, I’ve been researching and analyzing methods for community-controlled civic tech. These “modes” of civic engagement in civic tech were distilled through a process of evaluation, research, and interviews.

Now, we’re inviting you to tell your own story as part of our Civic Tech Case Study Sprint. This documentation project (inspired by bookprints and Beautiful Trouble) was set in motion at our practitioner convening last Saturday.

In the afternoon, I led an exercise on storytelling and documentation. After presenting on the 5 Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech, we discussed additional strategies and tactics used in our work. We also discussed this sprint and what we, as practitioners, would like to see in documentation of our work, and adjusted the form based on based on this feedback.

Digging into documentation and civic tech at the Experimental Modes Convening on April 4, 2015.

The case studies produced as part of this exercise will be published on the Smart Chicago website and will be spread as far and wide as we can. To contribute to the sprint, all you have to do is fill out this form. We are open to examples from within the United States as well as abroad and don’t care whether the examples are 10 years or 10 minutes old.

After completing your DIY Case Study, you will get a copy of your submission immediately by email. Everything Smart Chicago publishes is Creative Commons 4.0.

Once we have all of the case studies in from everyone who attended our convening, I will compile of the responses into a document that reviews quantitative info (number of times a particular mode was used, prevalence of specific tactics, etc.) along with an analysis of trends & insights from your narratives. (The Smart Chicago CUTGroup Final Reports are good examples of this type of analysis.)

Submit your case study before Sunday, April 19, 2015 to be included in this report. All of these outputs, including the raw form data (example) will be housed shared on the Experimental Modes project page, where we’ll also post and link to the case studies as individual PDFs.

Questions? Comments? . Otherwise, get cracking!

Primer for Experimental Modes Meeting

Smart ChicagoApril 4, 2015

Here at Smart Chicago, we’ve always had three areas of focus:

Access to technology and the internet
Digital skills for all
Meaningful products from data

This focus keeps us on the right path— one that requires us to lay practical groundwork before delivering cool apps— to put people first. We’ve done this since day one.

On a personal note, I’ve been a worker in community technology for a long time. I love it. In the early 2000s, I started a side business to help people get an internet life. I learned that nearly no one goes beyond default configurations, or even knows they can.

In 2004, I conducted bilingual computer training at my church to teach people how to post to our blog. I learned that everyone has a thirst to express themselves.

In 2006, I taught a 6-week course in websites for small businesses. I learned that people love certificates.

I’ve also been a part of a parallel path, which started taking off right about this time: the open data and civic tech movements. As a co-founder of EveryBlock, one of the earliest examples of a site that sought to use civic data in communities, I helped shape and build things like the 8 Principles of Open Government Data and Open Gov Chicago, a gathering of technologists in the field started in 2009.

We like to think these worlds— those of community technology, grounded in the needs of the people, and civic technology, driven by the most technical people, are aligned. When we’re at our best, they are. Very often, however, they are worlds apart.

This is why Smart Chicago exists. Our mission, grounded in our areas of focus, situated directly in the community (as we work here at the region’s community foundation), based in community technology research (lead by the MacArthur Foundation), and fully engaged with the governments and institutions that serve the people (including the City of Chicago, one of our founders)—this is us. This is why we’re here today.

We designed this project to fit under a larger area of work that Smart Chicago: the Knight Community Information Challenge grant awarded under their Engaged Communities strategy to the Chicago Community Trust “as it builds on its successful Smart Chicago Project, which is taking open government resources directly into neighborhoods through a variety of civic-minded apps”.

Materials for today:

Here’s all of the research and synthesis that led us to this meeting in one handy PDF.
Here’s live meeting notes— follow along starting at 9AM Saturday, April 4, Central time.
Here’s the form we’ll be using in our Case Study Sprint: https://smartchicago2012.wufoo.com/forms/diy-case-study-civic-engagement-in-civic-tech. Fill it out!

There is no other organization in the country that is more qualified to lead this thinking. I am proud of where we are, and steeled for the work ahead.

Tomorrow: Convening on Experimental Modes

Smart ChicagoApril 3, 2015

Tomorrow Smart Chicago is hosting a convening at The Chicago Community Trust as part of our Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech Project.

The gathering, led by consultant Laurenellen McCann, brings together people who provide community leadership in the creation of technology. Each participant works in different contexts, with radically different types of technology, but what unites us is the degree to which our work is done with, not for, the communities we serve.

Here’s all of the research and synthesis that led us to this meeting in one handy PDF:

Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech from Smart Chicago Collaborative

Here’s live meeting notes— follow along starting at 9AM Saturday, April 4, Central time.

Here’s the form we’ll be using in our Case Study Sprint: https://smartchicago2012.wufoo.com/forms/diy-case-study-civic-engagement-in-civic-tech. Fill it out!

All are welcome to participate in the meeting notes, to complete your own case studies, and to hang out of Twitter— @SmartChicago and @elle_mccann are good places to start.

The Chicago Community Trust

Mode #5: Distribute Power

Laurenellen McCannMarch 30, 2015

This is the final 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: Distribute Power

The art of leading a collaborative process is the art of getting out of the way. You can follow best practices — building your work through public commons, rooting your projects in the existing social and technical practices of a community, and teaching new technical skills while listening — but if you can’t get out of the way, you can’t run a community-driven development process.

Getting out of the way means sharing project control with the group. Below are four essential tactics for sharing and releasing power that have been applied in the creation of civic technology:

Treat Volunteers as Members

Another title for this tactic could be: value your participants equally. Put everyone on the same level. No matter their status — whether or not a person contributes once to project or 50 times, whether they lead a process or follow along, whether they’re paid staff or high school students — treat the folks who participate in your project as equals, and use titles for participants that make this status explicitly.

Facebook journalism outlet, Jersey Shore Hurricane News, considers anyone who submits a photo, an event, a story, or a tip to be a “contributor.”
Although technically a non-profit, Public Lab, the DIY citizen science group, identifies all participants (folks who contribute to the listservs, wiki, in-person events around the world, etc) as part of Public Lab itself (see the org chart below) and has created structures (like working groups) for community input on decision-making.
Free Geek is a non-profit works with communities to transform old technology into new electronics made available to those in need. Free Geek runs on human power and uses community service as a currency. However, it makes little distinction between roles as all are essential. So, whether you’re learning how to refurbish technology, building computers in the shop, teaching a class, sorting donations, or helping to keep the facility clean, you’re a “volunteer” and you are essential.

Public Lab’s organizational chart demonstrates how to include a variety of participants with equitable footing.

This is a foot-in-the-door technique to build trust and a way of demonstrating that any contributions a person offers as part of the co-development process will be valued — an important message to send if you want actually want a diverse group of community members to feel invested and free to drive a project.

Teach Students to Become Teachers

Handing off control and treating people as equals doesn’t mean removing structure or leadership. Projects that sustain community development are those that enable participants to expand their skills and responsibilities as they’re interested in doing so, with specific tracks for leadership that are accessible to everyone from the onset.

As noted above, by default, all participants in Public Lab are identified as part of Public Lab. But for those participants who are interested or active in coordinating projects or contributing to the Lab at a different scale (from helping with communications to moderating community discussion lists), Public Lab has an open call for community leaders called “organizers” which anyone can join.
Digital Stewards programs often enable graduates to mentor, if not fully teach, the next group of stewards, further developing the technical skills individuals pick-up from the program and deepening the communal history and relationship with the wireless networks the stewards oversee.
Mobile Voices (or VozMob) is a content and technology creation platform built for, by, and with immigrant and low-wage workers in Los Angeles. VozMob has a few mechanisms for individual and group-level leadership, including a tier of “Affiliates”, peer organizations and groups active in sharing stories through the platform who decision-making.

White-label Your Approach

“White-labeling” means putting a product, service, or program model out into the world in such a way that anyone can rebrand it as though they made it.

An illustration of the Digital Stewards approach. Image via OTI.

For example, several times throughout this series we’ve looked at a program called “Digital Stewards” in both Detroit and Red Hook, Brooklyn. Although these two programs use the same language (“Digital Stewards”) in reference to a training program to help design, build, and maintain community wireless networks, the programs are not one and the same, nor are they “chapters” or the expression of a single brand.

Rather, each Digital Stewards program is an imprints of a white-labeled training course on digital stewardship developed by the Open Technology Institute (OTI) at New America in conjunction with Allied Media Projects (AMP) that is available for anyone to adopt and use. OTI identifies its role in the creation of Digital Stewards not as the parent or owners, but as a “resource center”, adding to the Digital Stewardship materials over time and responding to requests from communities (like Red Hook, Brooklyn) for support in training. Neither OTI nor AMP exerts copyright or brand control over how the program exists in the world and neither identifies as “owning” the program.

Removing “ownership” is a direct expression of the open ethos that drives civic tech and way of ensuring that communities get genuine ownership over a technology or other civic project, even if the development of this project is guided by an external organization.

Other examples:

DiscoTechs (short for “Discovering Technology”) are a model of collaborative events for creating and exploring community technologies. The DiscoTech model was developed by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (DDJC), but DiscoTechs maintain no branding affiliation or ties to DDJC, allowing communities all over the country and the world to customize, remix, and implement as they see fit.
Although the CUTGroup (where “CUT” is short for “Civic User Testing”) was designed by Smart Chicago as a way for residents in Chicago to use civic apps and give feedback to developers, Smart Chicago released the nuts and bolts of the program as an online guide so that others can utilize and riff on the model. Note that the branding is not specific to Chicago or Smart Chicago and that the model is available for use without explicit consent from or identification with Smart Chicago.

Be a Participant

Ultimately, you can’t marshal a community’s energy unless you’re part of that community. To share experiences and engage in the wants, needs, and interests of the people your civic project is meant to serve.

Participation is a mindset shift. Instead of leading, you as a practitioner, are listening. (Much like the two-way teaching style talked about in Mode #3.) Whether you’re an individual doing work close to home or an organization supporting distant activity, to be a participant is to allot time and space to others and to seek opportunities to support work that supports them.

Laura Amico, a crime reporter and co-creator of HomicideWatch, a platform for following murder cases in Washington, DC, struggled to find information about the murder cases she cared about. After watching her neighbors and how victims’ and suspects’ family and family were haphazardly monitoring information on an individual level, Laura and her husband, Chris, began to design a platform that would allow for collaborative coverage, with more data sources and opportunities for communication. HomicideWatch is the product of innovation, yes, but also shared grief and shared struggle.

Public Lab’s paid staff directly coordinates with and wields a number of communications platforms to listen to its extended community and brings together its network in an annual meeting (called a “barnraising”) to build relationships, tinker with tech, make big decisions, and break bread.
EPANow is an ongoing experiment in youth-driven hyperlocal news co-founded by Stanford University Knight Journalism Fellow Jeremy Hay with residents of East Palo Alto, California. Jeremy is not an East Palo Alto (EPA) native, but is helping to steward the project after local community activists asked for his help. Hay started with a defined vision of what the news platform would be, but has since slowed his approach, both directly in response to community challenge and in response to his own revelations and experiences working with (and, increasingly as part of) the EPA community.

“While I am not superfluous to the process, and what I bring to it is important, I am of necessity secondary.”

(More about Jeremy’s journey participating in EPA as an outsider is documented here.)