The Changing Places group runs the City Science lecture series. Today they are hosting Nigel Jacob (Co-Chair), Chris Osgood (Co-Chair), and Michael Evans (Developer) from the Office of New Urban Mechanics for the City of Boston.

Ryan Chin (Managing Director, City Science) introduces the three speakers as the key people to talk to if you want to interface with the City of Boston around innovation and open data.

Nigel begins and describes how Chris, Michael and he are ¾ of the New Urban Mechanics Team. They are going to introduce their approach and then talk about specific projects. NUM is a civic innovation incubator and R&D lab. In the last election, Mayor Menino made the statement “We are all urban mechanics” which is what inspired this office. The Mayor was trying to find an approach to civic innovation that could be more deliberate and thoughtful. He posited those questions to this team.

They had been thinking of ideas around this for awhile. The mayor is famous as being a people-oriented mayor. 60% of people polled by the Globe say that they have met the mayor. That figure exemplifies his approach and the approach of the office: people-centered, relationship-driven. When they look at cities around the world they are trying to innovate. It’s not just about higher performance and more efficiency.

Nigel shows a quote from Jane Jacobs that states that cities can provide things for everybody because they are created by everybody. He speaks about community-led innovations that often operate outside of government. But increasingly they are connecting with government to try to work together on solutions. They are trying to connect with civic entrepreneurs – in public safety, health, education.

He describes how the office works in contrast to the slow, expensive “waterfall” method of government action. At the beginning the office needed to operate like a start-up – quick, flexible, iterative. The diagram he shows has three stages:

Source Ideas: They gather ideas from many places: businesses, community members, the public. To get to step #2 the ideas have to be really good because the office is small and their time is limited.
Support & Study Projects: They try to provide support for the development of the ideas. They develop metrics for success and assess the pilot. They don’t have a ton of resources and can’t waste attention on things that don’t work initially.
Scale & Share: An innovation that can’t scale isn’t worth much to them. This is the hardest part of the process. They make introductions to other sources of capital, other resources, potentially make the city a customer for the innovation that was developed.

Nigel discusses the idea of “risk”. They have created a framework in NUM that can help spread the risk and support a project’s development and scaling. They can also manage risk from the perspective of the city. The city doesn’t have to brand the project as City of Boston. The public sector sometimes just needs a little bit of cover to innovate.

He shows a slide with the Office’s areas of focus: 21st Century Learner, Clicks & Bricks, and Social Enterprise.

Chris Osgood jumps in to discuss the 24-hour call center that the City of Boston runs. He shows a slide with the Mayor manning the hotlines. He says it’s rare to actually get the Mayor but it’s symbolic of what the Mayor wants to do: bridge the divide between city people, city services and individual people. Until they did this project, a lot of people would just blog about their neighborhood rather than actually calling City Hall. A lot of this has been about building trust in local government.

He shows a slide of the Citizens Connect app. You take a picture of something wrong with your neighborhood and send it to the city and it routes it to the right office. It hasn’t reduced the number of calls to the call center but it has expanded the eyes and ears of the city. The reporting on the device actually leads to a different type of report. With Citizens Connect, you see whole streams of reports. People will do 4 or 5 reports at a time. Being on the platform actually meant a different type of interaction with residents. People say “When I call the hotline I feel like I’m complaining whereas when I use the app I feel like I’m helping.”

He shows the Commonwealth Connect app which does the same thing but geolocates the request and routes it to the right city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He describes the research they have been working on which contrasts usage patterns in urban vs rural locations in MA.

Originally they wanted to see if the power of the smartphone could lead to further civic engagement beyond just clicks. They partnered with a researcher on an application called StreetBump which actually records potholes from your cell phone’s accelerometer. It helps them discover where people have the roughest rides in the City of Boston. They discovered that instead of potholes what triggers the app more frequently are the 200,000 iron castings in city streets. The city has fixed more than 1250 of these because of the app. They are also launching a new competition for the design of better castings.

In the end, they want to give residents tools to solve really basic quality of life issues.

Ryan notes that it would be interesting to cross-correlate safety and bumps. Chris agrees.

Nigel says that what’s interesting about StreetBump is that it turns your phone into a volunteering opportunity. Instead of time or money a new form of volunteerism might be volunteering your data.

Kent Larson (Principal Investigator, Changing Places) notes you could couple this with an app that is a service for businesses, for example a traffic or routing app in this case.

Michael discusses further efforts for citizen participation. Girls Make the City was a program they ran to connect 12-14 year old girls with fabrication and science efforts. They partnered with Science Club for Girls to recruit a diverse group of students. The Mayor is always concerned about inclusivity.

They also have a project called City-Hall-To-Go which is basically a food truck that provides basic city services to people in Boston. They were working with the Department of Play in Boston and thought about including maker tools on it and to start collaborating on making with people around the city. They identified a site in East Boston where they could install a bike rack and repair area since they didn’t have many bike services there. They borrowed legos from the Media Lab and created a station for people to design bike signage. People’s designs were printed on the spot and are now being reviewed for inclusion as the official bike signage for the City.

He describes the Pulse of the City project by George Zisiadis. Interactive sculptures detect pedestrian’s heartbeats and set them to music in real-time. Unfortunately someone vandalized the sculpture the first weekend it went up. They are now working with the artist to make things more secure. This is a good illustration of the iterative, experimental process they follow to try new things in the city.

Kent: What are some of the big problems you’d like to take on if you had more resources?

Chris: Education is by far the number one issue for our residents. Figuring out how to provide the best tools in that area to help teachers, parents and kids. Another thing is how to respect people’s privacy while doing educational tools. A second item is the notion of residents thinking of themselves not as consumers but as active citizens. We want to help them understand how their participation matters and can go deeper.

Audience: Your Commonwealth Connect app is fixed on a particular point in space. All of us have a trajectory over time that interacts with the government. The same with the StreetBump. If you could record more information over time then you could learn more about your processes.

Nigel: We totally agree and we are working on some related things. Each of these little technologies are currently treated as silo-ed experiences and we don’t share the data between them. We are creating a technology right now called “StreetCred” that is an API layer that can connect these tools with others into a reputation system. We are also working with the Institute for Data Driven Design for the development of a civic ID system. There’s a way of federating your identity so that you have control over how you share your data.

Audience member: I work on air pollution and quality. The state government runs a station by Dudley. Are you guys interested in this?

Chris Osgood: Yes, we are working with Mike Barnett at BC on an air quality project. The calibration issue is a big hurdle for further embrace of the results.

Audience: If you could make a link between childhood visits for asthma with the air quality work then there might be some interesting connections.

Nigel: There was some research out of Louisville about this tracking inhaler prescriptions and air quality.

Audience: Is your data public?

Nigel: There’s a lot of stuff we could be capturing that we are not. We have to be careful.

Chris: If folks have ideas about data they want us to share you should come talk to us. We have an open data portal. But there’s not a ton of use of it. Tools are more used so we tend to prioritize them. We’d be interested in hearing more about what data people want to work with.

Nigel: We are also very interested in qualitative data. We’ve done work with Eric Gordon about using games to have more effective civic deliberation processes. That’s all qualitative data. That’s just as important.

Audience: My question’s about the sustainability of the office in the new administration. Mayor Menino seems to understand the importance of technology and civic engagement. Have any of the candidates made a statement about whether they will have the same commitment?

Nigel: (laughs) The answer is no, no one has made that commitment.

Chris: For Menino, government is about focusing on people. He believes that and lives that. It has a huge impact on where we spend our time. I hope that the next mayor continues that philosophy.

Nigel: There are some pragmatic issues. We focus on the value-add. Our record is pretty strong and should speak for itself but you never know.

Ryan: Do you see a push or national network to bring more support to cities to support this kind of work?

Nigel: Yes and no. There are some federal efforts that we tend to critique. It focuses on open data in a very specific way. Certain efforts are highlighted and others are not. We would like them to focus more on the tangibles – how do you deliver product? When you want the government to open data there’s no purpose for it in itself. But if you focus more on what you do with the data then there is a value proposition and more of a focus on execution.

Chris: The city innovation movement is being led by mayors. When we started there were a handful of other offices. Now there are probably a dozen innovation offices around the country and we keep seeing an increase in that. There’s priority to deliver services at the local level.

Kent: How do you share ideas with your counterparts in other cities?

Nigel: There are couple efforts to create networks. But we have found that visits and talking one-on-one are the most effective ways of sharing information.

Chris: In addition to idea sharing there’s been a lot of product sharing.

Michael: There was a flu shot app that was built by the mayor’s office in Chicago. I got the code from github and Chris entered all the data for all the flu shot locations and we deployed it on Heroku. The mayor tweeted it like 10 minutes later and that was it. We had a product. I have a big interest in cultivating engineering interest in City Hall because if we had just a couple more people there is so much more we could do. For example – a fellowship model. So much of the city leadership wouldn’t have gotten into city government apart from the fellowship. I’m hoping we can do the same thing with engineering and design talent. There’s a need for people embedded at City Hall so that they understand the everyday problems.

Nigel: On the topic of cities working together – there’s a huge interest in this right now. I think we are reaching a tipping point where cities are starting to work together more.

Audience: It’s great that Nick is there in City Hall but what about other agencies and departments in the city? Do they have to go through you guys?

Chris: Our StreetBump developer is actually embedded in the Public Works Department. There is now some growth in the Boston Public Schools IT division because of our collaboration. People in city agencies are talking about hiring developers which is new and different.

Audience: Have you looked at gamification or partnerships to incentivize citizen action and maybe co-fund the expansion of your effort? For example, I get a parking spot for a day if I participate or a gift card to Starbucks or free Hubway for a week? Maybe a microeconomic model where people and businesses who do good are rewarded.

Nigel: The Engagement Game Lab at Emerson – so gamification, yes. We are experimenting with badges right now with them.

Chris: I don’t think we want to rush to monetize civic behavior. I think we want to exhaust other approaches first. Our initial approach is to have the public good be the reward first.

Nigel: Civic behavior is not one monolithic thing. It’s a range of behaviors that might have a range of solutions and incentives.

Sandra Richter: We are actually doing research on behavior change here in the Changing Places group and we’ve found when you incentivize with money or goods you are changing from an intrinsic to an extrinsic motivation. For example, social incentives are the ones we’ve found to be most valuable.