Advanced Practice 3: Citizens Reaching For Results
Handheld Technology Empowers Neighborhood Citizens
By harnessing the power of consumer palmtop technology, several organizations across the country are equipping citizens with an efficient means of gathering and transmitting information about observable physical problems in their neighborhoods to local government agencies. Citizens can later hold those agencies accountable for making repairs. The movement began with Computerized Neighborhood Environmental Tracking (COMnet), a project of the nonprofit Fund for the City of New York, a local operating foundation that involves citizens in surveying New York City neighborhoods. Volunteer residents, and in some cases high school students, walk their neighborhood streets and log numerous physical problems, such as graffiti, broken or missing signs, broken streetlights, and broken sidewalks into a handheld computer for digital mapping and reporting back to city agencies responsible for dealing with those issues. The success of COMnet prompted groups in several other communities across the U.S. to adapt the technology for their citizens to use. Most have used it to conduct digital surveys of neighborhood streetscapes, and some have used it to survey parks. The nonprofit Connecticut Policy and Economic Council (CPEC) developed its own variation of the technology for its City Scan project by programming a different off-the-shelf palmtop computer for citizens to use to survey neighborhoods and parks in several Connecticut cities, including Hartford and Stamford. Both COMnet and City Scan offer readily transferable, easy to use technology, and both FCNY and CPEC have provided technical assistance to organizations in other communities to adapt and use their systems. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded the development and initial applications of COMnet and City Scan, as well as some of the transfers of COMnet to other cities, such as Worcester, Massachusetts, and Des Moines, Iowa.
How Digital Neighborhood Surveys Help Citizens Reach for Results
Digital surveys enable citizens to present data about conditions in their neighborhoods and parks in a format that government officials can respond to with greater ease. Also, by building up their own databanks and digital maps of observed problems, citizens can later effectively track whether their local government solved the problems and kept them solved, to hold public officials accountable for results. In Des Moines, the accountability is usually more immediate, as the data from the Des Moines Digital Survey (DMDS) are downloaded directly into the city government’s web-based electronic tracking system. Des Moines citizens can use the Internet to check the status of all DMDS-reported problems that qualify as manageable complaints. Other issues are handled through meetings involving neighborhood representatives and city government staff and may eventually be resolved through inclusion in budgets or capital planning processes.
Citizen Roles in Community Improvement
Citizens are often engaged up front as issue framers (agenda setters) to determine what kinds of physical problems to cover in their surveys. Then they become evaluators of neighborhood conditions when they track specific outcomes—the specific physical problems they are observing in their community. They become evaluators of the local government’s response by resurveying community conditions, or, in Des Moines, by monitoring the city’s complaint tracking system on the web. New York citizens have taken their evaluation to a deeper level by reviewing survey results to determine which problems need the highest priority attention, which leads them to be agenda setters again when they report those priorities to city agencies. Des Moines citizens play collaborator roles when they meet with city government staff to determine how to resolve the exceptional issues that cannot be resolved through the complaint tracking system.
Additional Community Improvement Themes
Collaborations, which play out differently in different communities, are an important part of the effectiveness of digital neighborhood surveys. These include collaborations between organizations with technical capabilities (“data intermediaries”) and grass roots community groups to recruit citizen volunteers to conduct the surveys. Some of the collaborations have been with high schools to recruit students to conduct surveys. Collaborations between the data intermediaries, usually civic nonprofits such as FCNY or CPEC, and local government agencies have been important for getting citizens survey data accepted. In Des Moines, the data intermediary is the city government, which facilitated programming the DMDS to work smoothly with the city’s automated complaint system. The key collaboration in Des Moines is between the city government and the nonprofit Des Moines Neighbors, an umbrella group for neighborhood associations across the city. Collaborations in all communities, backed up by survey data, have created links between desired results and accountable government organizations. That accountability has been most systematic in Des Moines, as citizens are able to track resolution of most reported problems through the city’s web-based complaint tracking system and are able to meet with government officials about how to resolve exceptional issues.
- See a full List of Examples and Case Studies in Results That Matter
- Go to the Overview of Effective Community Governance or read Chapter 1 of Results That Matter for more on the advanced governance practices of the Effective Community Governance Model and related key community improvement themes.