Harvard fellow Gene Koo wrote a thought-provoking post last week about how games can be used to bolster civic engagement and democratic participation. He noted two general ways they can be used towards these ends: games for crowdsourcing and games to determine what things people value and how they value them (value discernment).

Games for value discernment are essentially a new way of improving democratic or popular input into the governmental system. Whereas today we mostly rely on polls, lobbyists, and elections to serve as proxies for public support, Koo suggests that we might be able to use games to more subtly tease out people’s true values or more meaningfully engage them in the decision making process.

While value discernment is an interesting and noble goal, it’s the second application, games for crowdsourcing, that I’m more excited about.  The idea here is that some sort of value is produced as a direct result of the players’ actions. While playing the game you are simultaneously doing something productive. The canonical example of this is the Google Image Labeler, which shows you images and asks you to label them:

Projects like Google Image Labeler illustrate how a well-designed game can harness collective intelligence to do productive work. The small amount of work you’re doing for Google is matched by an equally small motivational reward (a score and the fun of playing). While an interest in the project’s goals might lead you to the Image Labeler in the first place, continuing participation is driven by the game, not charity.

While certainly not a new idea, I think this is an area that is largely unexplored, and I’m curious what types of problems can reasonably be solved by such games. I’ve thought about this a bit, and here’s the general criteria I’ve come up with:

This one’s obvious, but it should be stated nonetheless since it’s absolutely crucial: No matter what, there must be a strong incentive — most likely fun, but possibly something else, maybe self-satisfaction? — for the players to participate. Absent an incentive to play there’s really no point.

The incentives must align. Being more productive ought to directly align with doing better in the game, so that the players’ drive to do well in the game maps directly to whatever positive effect the game is designed to bring about.

It’s got to be robust enough to withstand nefarious players. There are always going to be at least a few people who get a kick out of trying to screw up the system, so it should take that into account whenever possible. For the image labeler, Google addressed this problem by randomly matching players up and having them act as checks against each other, making it substantially harder to game the system.

Players shouldn’t need a lot of context. Put another way, the barrier to entry has to be really, really low. Again, the image labeler stands up well: You don’t need any context to start playing, just look at an image and start typing what pops into your head. And each round is only two minutes, so you can participate without committing a substantial portion of your time.

The problem should lend itself incremental contributions. If it’s an all or nothing affair, it’s tough to get people to participate. Best of all would be an app that allows a gradual ramping up of participation, so if people do get really jazzed about it there’s a clear path forward.

There are of course several challenges and pitfalls here. Many games seem to be fun for a bit, but eventually the novelty wears off and people stop playing them. How sustainable could this really be? (One idea I’ve had is that the scope of the problem could be limited in such a way as to have a  relatively fixed end point, but that’s not really a solution to the core problem.)

Another challenge I see is related to what Ian wrote about in Voting Sucks (or: what is constructive involvement?). Many easy and quick types of interaction can only nominally be called “participation,” and it’s hard to call them meaningful. But I think this may in fact highlight the beauty of this idea: If the game is designed well enough, it might actually become a positive outlet for what would otherwise be useless or even negative behavior. Again, this may or may not be practical, but history and human nature do indicate that people like to vent and express their outrage at things; why not try to harness some of this for good?

One idea I’ve had, which is admittedly half-baked, is a game for predicting bus arrival times. It’s become abundantly clear that there’s a need for better information about when buses are actually going to show up. What if there were a game that rewarded people for accurately predicting when a certain bus line would arrive at a destination? You would also presumably need either a disincentive to providing inaccurate information, or at least a check against it. This could also take advantage of people’s frustration; bus arrival information is most useful when the arrival times differ substantially from the scheduled times. This is also when people are most likely to be frustrated. Imagine if we could leverage the energy people put into Twittering about how annoyed they are that their bus is stuck in traffic (I know I’ve done this) and direct it towards a more positive outcome?

What problems do you think could be solved by games?

Photo courtesy of Jim Henderson (via Wikis Take Manhattan)

At TOPP we talk a lot about technology promoting open government and civic engagement, but projects may fail to bring about real change if they don’t actively engage government as well.  Take Stimulus Watch, a great project which furthers these two goals, but—as Ian points out in his recent post— assumes that politicians will take the initiative to visit the site and base their decisions on its results. A few of us from different divisions at TOPP have started work on a project called Build a Bike Rack, where we want to combine citizen activism and volunteer labor with governmental needs.

The situation: Transportation Alternatives Brooklyn Committee wants to help NYC DOT install bike parking more quickly and efficiently. DOT’s CityRacks program has a mandate to install 1200 new bike racks by the end of 2009, but assessment of potential spots is a major bottleneck in this process.

The current CityRacks website allows for one-off rack location requests from the public, but their process is served better by a bulk order for one neighborhood that can be installed en masse. In fact, the Park Slope Civic Council has successfully submitted such a bulk order, conducting both physical assessment and community outreach (signatured statements of support from property or business owners) before handing the order in to Community Board 6 for sign off and DOT implementation. Unfortunately, very few people know the PSCC did this and can’t easily replicate the process because there was no online documentation.

The solution? A mapping tool allowing community/government collaboration to open and streamline CityRacks’ process.

There are some precedents—such as SeeClickFix, FixMyStreet, and Vespucci—but we believe none of them takes an approach ideally suited to the needs of this situation (and probably others). These are some areas in which we want to build upon their work:

Starting Small
We are not attempting to write an application that fixes every planning issue in New York City. Rather, we are focusing on a specific planning issue, in a specific place to maximize integration between a governmental process and a particular community’s needs. We plan to expand this tool for use throughout the city (and hope it might prove useful for other planning issues too), but believe we’ll get better results by starting with the specific. The concept of submitting requests in a “project set,” for example, may be the single most helpful outcome of this project for the DOT, but is not emphasized in preceding projects like SeeClickFix and FixMyStreet.

Proactive Rather than Reactive
One criticism of SeeClickFix is that it could fuel more reactive nagging than positive action on the part of citizens. In San Francisco, for example, 311 told Streetsblog that “increased use of SeeClickFix wouldn’t translate into action because [it] won’t be coordinated with their internal work flow and won’t improve efficiency.” The SF Department of Public Works also said the software “wouldn’t improve their ability to respond to the public.” While open government and community input are important objectives, we believe it is crucial to clearly embed working with—rather than against—government if we expect positive outcomes. Build a Bike Rack aims to bolster a struggling government project lacking proper resources by drawing in community support and (wo)manpower.  By facilitating volunteer work to assess locations, we hope this project will actually enable rapid real-world action rather than just online action.

Providing Useful Geographic Information
We’ve also noticed that other projects haven’t included much geographic information beyond what’s on your basic Google map. We intend to include data on things like existing bike infrastructure, institutional buildings, and Community Districts to bring this information to public’s attention and help communities make smarter decisions. Crowdsourcing data and research is great, but we’ll be able to get further if we start with more.

By engaging with government from the get-go, we hope they’ll be more amenable to our attempt to open their process. We’ll follow up with another post on the progress of this project and more details about the technology and design in the near future.

-Lily Bernheimer & Ivan Willig

As much as I am loathe to paraphrase that clichéd Ben Parker quote, I had a nightmare a few nights ago that made me worry about the good work we do here at TOPP Labs. There was nothing specific about it that worried me, but I did have a general sense of foreboding and unease about the tasks that we’re taking on and the responsibilities they entail.

But first, an anecdote… There was a time in the mid-20th century when progressive voices saw community boards as a tool for bringing community-based planning to neighborhoods throughout New York City. The most optimistic of them saw this as a way to curb the excesses of the centrally-planned urban policy that had scarred neighborhoods from East Tremont to Bay Ridge under the leadership of Robert Moses and others. Many progressive activists today, especially those within the livable streets movement, see the community boards as at best ineffective and and at worst obstacles. The failure of community boards to effect change is often laid at the feet of the community boards—either because of flaws in their design, as was the case with the Atlantic Yards project, or because of a lack of members, funding, technology, and training. While many have looked to community boards as a voice for “the community,” others argue that the system does not effectively facilitate community-based planning and may even serve to hinder it.

As we move towards encouraging open government and increased transparency, I wonder if we’re not being sufficiently critical about the tools we are building. Just as free access to government data enables us to build tools to encourage progressive change, it also enables others to cripple the machinery of government or hijack them towards ends we cannot foresee and wouldn’t necessarily support. Tools like Uncivil Servants, which allow progressive transportation advocates to underscore parking permit abuse and push for reform could just as easily be reconfigured to highlight the abuses of cyclists and push for policy changes with which progressives would disagree.

Just as activists on the right are now concerned about being surveilled by the very systems which they built, we should be careful with our own efforts. As we build tools, create processes, and establish precedents designed to affect how government operates we—and the entire open government movement—should be mindful of the potential unintended consequences of our actions and take responsibility for correcting for them as best we can.

Recently Phil Ashlock and I headed down to DC to participate in TransparencyCamp, a BarCamp event put on by the Sunlight Foundation.  We spent two days with ~200 open government and transparency advocates from all sectors — government, non-profit, tech, etc.  All in all, it was a pretty amazing event — great people and good sessions.  We learned about some cool projects, met a ton of people, spread the word about TOPP, and basically got our transparency on.  Here are some of my really quick takeaways, in no particular order:

Tech people love twitter. The whole weekend was basically a giant twitter party.  Walking around any session, pretty much every single person’s screen looked like this:

­

In case you’re wondering, that is TweetDeck, an all-powerful Twitter client.  Using TweetDeck, you can follow conversations along twitter hashtags just like you’d follow conversation in an IRC channel.  Amazingly, the ~200 people at TCamp pushed #tcamp09 to be the #1 Twitter search term for the weekend.  So every session was two conversations at once — one in person and the other via tweets.  The tweet stream also served as live, distributed note-taking, and is probably more rich than the wiki in terms of content. UPDATE: Chris Abraham recently posted an interesting reflection on twitter usage at conferences, after going to SXSW.

Ok, on to the real stuff of it:

Open Government and Transparency are a really big deal. If you don’t know, now you know.  This was evidenced by the big, high-quality crowd — folks from major federal agencies, the Obama campaign, Recovery.gov, Tim O’Reilly, Craig Newmark, just to name a few — and by the tangible sense of community and excitement.  The train has left the station and everybody is along for the ride. Andrew Hoppin is breaking new ground at the NYS Senate, Sunlight is driving the transparency bus (to continue the transit metaphors), and events are happening at rapid-fire pace (like Government 2.0 Camp next month).

Governments are just learning how to handle it all. One session was called “Drinking from the Firehose,” where the firehose is the potentially overwhelming stream of constituent feedback that can come in once you open the spigot.  For agencies that are already under-staffed and generally not as web-comfortable as the private sector, this can be a lot to handle. Getting it right can require a pretty significant re-thinking of government->citizen communication — most importantly, this means managing constituent expectations, and empowering more people in an agency to be communicators.  Other potential solutions included encouraging more citizen-to-citizen communcations (w/ gov acting as a router), prioritizing questions and responding in bulk (like NH power did via twitter during the big winter storm), etc. etc.

Many “government 2.0 sites” are actually rethinking core concepts of government. I am no political scientist, but it’s clear that technology is leading the way in exploring twists on representative democracy as we know it.  Projects like WhiteHouse2, MetaGovernment and YourOwnDemocracy are exploring new ways of employing citizen preference (voting) to impact decision-making.

Transparency has many levels, and starting at the source is the best. For example, Recovery.gov is collecting and aggregating info from all recipients of federal stimulus/bailout money.  They will then be republishing it all in machine readable format.  However, this introduces a layer of abstraction, and in strict terms, an opportunity for corruption.  Transparency advocates push for access to data at the source — in this case, directly from each individual recipient.  This is, of course, not practical at the moment, and many new transparency-related services are doing the hard work of transforming the data to make it accessible (in a geoserver-ish kind of way).

There are many policy barriers to transparency, and they’re not just technical. The actual government employees at tcamp expounded on the internal bureaucratic hurdles to transparency.  While the larger tech community is tackling the strictly technical issues (such as formats and standards), many of those inside government are working to reform 20th century policies that make transparency difficult to achieve.

Government transparency and civic engagement go hand in hand. One line I overheard that I really liked was: “a ‘push’ government can encourage relevant contributions from citizens by providing relevant data.”  I think there’s something really powerful in that, and somewhere in there is a core idea for TOPP and TOPP Labs.  If we are interested in encouraging citizen participation and empowering individuals, the opening up of government data will be a core component.  It’s my theory that there’s a huge latent demand for participation, but that people just don’t know how or don’t have the right ways to engage.  The proliferation of civic data that’s on the way should provide ample seed for interesting citizen engagement projects.

Distributed systems need a way to cooperate. Of course, a huge challenge here, that’s not unique to government — information and accounts are siloed across systems.  A lot of the conversations at TCamp focused on ways to share data across systems.  There was talk of OpenID, OAuth, microformats, DiSo, semantic web, and all the others.  One of the more interesting presentations was on the potential civic uses for the semantic web.  Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack.us keeps a piece of the Linked Open Data cloud in his data store, and can do pretty impressive queries of distributed data regarding federal legislation, lawmakers, campaign contributions, etc.

Ok, that’s about it for my little brain dump, for now.   I’ll leave you with some photos of the event, after the jump. (more…)

I was at a get-together recently where people were asking “how do we sell government on transparency?” The general context was: we don’t like quantity or quality of data the city government is giving us.

The idea people offered were things like it’s our data, we paid for it, and it is important for people to be monitoring government.

This is terrible marketing. I imagine a politician hearing this and translating it in his or her head to “tell me what you are doing so I can better complain about you.”

So what would be a more compelling way to sell this to government officials? Some ideas:

Government needs to be transparent to itself, not just to the public. If the public can’t get some important data, probably not many other people in government can access it either. Transparency is a tool for government. When you talk to a government official, don’t be an ass and say things like “the public needs to watch you!” That’s just not polite. “The public needs to watch those other guys!” – that’s how you sell an idea.

A related argument: there’s a lot of data. Decision-makers in government don’t spend their days playing around with a spreadsheet to find items of interest. So why not let the public try their hand at it?

Another idea: instead of it’s our data, we paid for it! say: let us do interesting things with this data! For example, the MTA is not letting Google release the transit feed for New York. They are missing out on the opportunity for other people to build tools around the MTA, tools that will help the public and the MTA, and cost nothing. Every agency wants people to think it is important and useful, so anything that makes an agency’s work more present in people’s minds is positive.

Or: data is a tool for advocacy. When you say “people need to monitor government” there’s a sense that The People are out to get the government. But The People can also be an advocate, and for any particular person in government they probably have things they want to see happen that could use some advocacy. So you should speak directly to what an official would like to see happening. Uncovering corruption might not get Mayor Daley excited. But if you can think of a way that transparency could help Chicago get the Olympics, then you are talking his language. Transit organizations want to know how to get higher ridership, and ridership that will advocate for funding. Teachers want to know how to balance power with school administration. School administrators want to know how to get parents more involved. Police want to seem more friendly. The Department of Motor Vehicles would like to stop being the butt of all government-bureaucracy-related jokes.

And above all: we should all try really hard not to sound whiney. Given the power dynamic it’s hard.