“findings should encourage administrators of 311 systems to engage in constituent outreach efforts that highlight territorial attachments, not just people’s general proclivities to be good citizens. For example, as one of us has demonstrated in an experiment, effective promotional materials could highlight neighborhoods rather than entire cities: “Clean up Eagle Hill!” vs. “Clean up Boston!”.” – How Citizen Attachment to Neighborhoods Helps to Improve Municipal Services and Public Spaces | Scholars Strategy Network
civic tech
“Happily, I heard an admonition from the Code for America summit stage that we should not push apps ahead of the need for them: that we should avoid being “a solution in search of a problem.” And yet this only tells us what to avoid doing — and not what, affirmatively, to do. How do we identify a civic problem? And, more to the point, how do we know it’s a real and meaningful problem that’s worthy of attention and investment?” – Civic Wants, Civic Needs, Civic Tech — Medium
“we can’t let society’s norms be defined by which features are least expensive for storing on a database server in the cloud.” – What Is Public? — The Message — Medium
“This toolkit will lead you through a governance design process and help you become a more effective social inventor. Start with the four steps—investigate, re-think, design, prototype—then continue designing, testing, and iterating new forms of governance where you see opportunities.” – IFTF: Governance for the Future: An Inventor’s Toolkit
“Former Mayor Tom Menino—who once said, “Visionaries don’t get things done”—earned the nickname “the urban mechanic” early on in his 20-year tenure as mayor of Boston for his obsessive focus on the nuts and bolts of urban management. He was the most prolific user of his own mayor’s hotline, calling in several service requests a day.” – Boston: There’s an App for That
“The tech sector’s embrace of urbanist lingua franca and its enthusiasm to engage with urban problems is awesome, and much welcomed. But these folks need to become better urbanists.” – What Tech Hasn’t Learned From Urban Planning