CCIP Annual Report 2012 1

7/29/2019 CCIP Annual Report 2012 1

1/16

ANNUAL REPORT

2012

www.ccip.newamerica.net


2/16

ADVANCING INNOVATION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

The California Civic Innovation Project (CCIP) aims to diffuse innovation in Califor-

nia local governments through researching and recommending organizational and

emerging practices that enable the creation and adoption of innovative policies,

technology, and programs that deepen community engagement and accelerate civicinnovation. Our research and practical exploration aims to break down barriers to

innovation within municipalities allowing for deeper relationships between resi-

dents and government.

Municipalities are responsible for providing services and support to the communi-

ties they serve, and in that mandate they are also responsible for delivering services

and engaging with the community in ways that are inclusive. Too often local gov-

ernments do not effectively collaborate with residents to solve chronic community

problems and they are unable to adapt to the emerging needs of their constituents

because they lack the organizational conditions and practices that foster innovationand the adoption of innovative solutions.

Innovation is simply the creation of new or improved methods, services, or prod-

ucts that meet the needs of the users. Without the ability to promote and adopt

innovative practices, local governments will continue to struggle to meet the needs

of residents. Participatory and inclusive governments are those that have the ability

to adapt to changing community needs, leverage outside expertise, deliver effective

and impactful services and involve residents in public decision making. To make

the changes we want in government the CCIP is dening methods and emergingpractices that enable municipalities to foster and adopt innovative practices.

In our rst year we have assembled a team of staff, interns, advisors, and partners

that are dedicated to supporting CCIP in achieving long-term sustainability and

changing the way California local governments work.


3/16

CALIFORNIA CIVIC

INNOVATION PROJECT

PARTNERSHIPS

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

RESEARCH

KNOWLEDGE SHARING

PILOT CITY PARTNERSHIPSWhen the CCIP was launched the project focused on practical experiments to test vari-

ous partnership models that would eventually lead to an innovation process that could

be replicated in cities throughout the country. As a lean team with two staff members, in

order to reach our goals we needed to identify a way to create a repeatable and scalable

process that spurred innovation in cities. Weve found that partnerships are innovation

models that can be replicated by local resources and scale regionally or nationally if

needed.

This section describes the three partnerships that we piloted over the past nine months,

the learnings from the partnerships, and impact each project has on its community.


4/16

California Civic Innovation Projects Role

Like Participatory Budgeting itself, the evaluation process is a collaborative effort of

diverse actors with different skills and levels of involvement. CCIP is acting as a co-

evaluation coordinator with UC Berkeleys Goldman School of Public Policy and the

Participatory Budgeting Project. As an evaluation coordinator the CCIP staff are able to

provide valuable expertise in conducting research, gathering data, and understandinghow the evaluation data can inform the team about the success and failures of process,

baseline level of community engagement, patterns of on-going engagement due to

the process and various other data points about participation and the impact of the PB

process.

The CCIP will produce a report in August 2013 that evaluates the impact of PB on:

the relationships between residents and the City of Vallejo

civic engagement in the city

changes in the community as a result of the process

The report will also include recommendations on:

how to improve the PB process for future engagements

how the design of the process impacts public participation

how participatory processes can be applied to other civic challenges

CITY OF VALLEJO - PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING

In 2012, Vallejo, California launched the rst city-wide participatory budgeting (PB)

process in the United States. The City of Vallejo will invite residents to decide how to

spend over $3.4 million in sales tax revenue. Through a year-long PB process, thou-

sands of residents will engage in critical discussions and decisions about the future of

the city. The process aims to generate more informed spending, develop new grassroots

leaders, build stronger communities, educate the public, expand civic participation,

and forge deeper connections between government ofcials and citizens.

It was a way to give back to the community and alsoput a different face on Vallejo because instead of beingthe largest city to declare bankruptcy rst in Califor-nia, we became the rst to have participatory budget-ing. - Marti Brown, City of Vallejo Councilwoman


5/16

Impact of Participatory Budgeting in Vallejo

CCIP got involved in this project because we are interested in the numerous impacts

participatory budgeting can have in a community. A study conducted by the World

Bank reported that positive impacts from participatory budgeting can include:

government accountability

democratic practice

improved trust in government

Participation has also improved relations between citizens and local authorities, ascitizens feel that local authorities have become more transparent and trustworthy. Ad-

ditionally, social justice is advanced through the entrance of traditionally excluded

groups and citizens into vital decision-making venues.

Timeline

PB in Vallejo will involve ve main stages. Below is a plan for the PB process in

Vallejo:

Planning (June-October 2012) Neighborhood Assemblies (October-December 2012)

Budget Delegate Meetings (January 2012 April 2013)

Voting (May 2013)

Evaluation, Implementation, and Monitoring (July - August 2013)

Photo courtesy of pbvallejo.org

Photo courtesy of pbvallejo.org

4


6/16

CITY OF OAKLAND - CITYLABS

It was in pursuit of the Mayors Challenge contest of Bloomberg Philanthropies that the

City of Oakland, New America Foundation, and California College of the Arts partnered

to develop the CityLabs project. The CityLabs will bring together cross-functional city

employee teams to develop new ideas, as well as to deconstruct existing government

processes and redesign them from the ground up. CityLabs is planned as a physical de-

sign laboratory within City Hall for staff to collaborate with each other and community

partners. This will create space for ideas to collide, cross-pollinate, and with new staff

training, move into action.

CityLabs will also provide ongoing training to staff in leadership building, human-cen-

tered design, digital storytelling, communications, civic engagement and technology,

and will provide City of Oakland staff and community partners with co-working space,

online tools and resources that are proven catalysts for creativity.

California Civic Innovation Projects Role

As a partner on this project, the CCIP has consulted with city staffers on the concept,

facilitated community meetings to discuss the proposal, and met with various internal

city staff to solicit buy-in for the project. The project has support from the highest levels

of city leadership and will continue to move forward with support from the Mayor and

partners.

Oaklands CityLabs Impact

CityLabs will achieve the following outcomes:

New ideas and processes will develop that improve service delivery and increase

efciencies in local government processes - demonstrating to residents that the city is

actively trying to serve them better, and allowing City staff to do more with less.

The City staff will grow their capacity to innovate through leadership training and

investment in new technology, ultimately making the City work better, faster and

cheaper.

Action-oriented results will be developed that better the experiences of constituents

and create better access points into City Government.

Timeline

In early November the City of Oakland learned that it was not selected as a nalist in the

Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge. The CCIP continues to support the Citys

efforts to prototype the CityLabs in early 2013. This support includes conceptualizing the

program, facilitating connections between city staff in Oakland and other cities that have

similar programs, and continuing to get buy-in from city staffers.


7/16


8/16

CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO - CIVIC MARKETPLACE ALLIANCE

Our cities need new models for delivering services and ultimately engaging with

residents. Without the ability to adopt the technologies that are ubiquitous in public

life, government continues to become less engaged, less representative of its con-

stituents, and increasingly less capable of providing public services.

The Civic Marketplace Alliance is a collaboration between the City and County of

San Francisco, the California Civic Innovation Project, and the HUB Bay Area com-

mitted to creating a sustainable market for emerging civic technology, such as SMS

technology that provides food pantry locations to low-income families or data visu-

alization tools that display government data on a map - beginning with community

needs assessment and resulting in bringing solutions to market.

California Civic Innovation Projects RoleCCIP is pursuing this partnership because it will allow us to move the needle in

civic technology. When ideas and products being hacked everyday have an entry

into our local governments there is real hope that signicant and lasting change

will occur.

In this partnership the New America Foundations CA Civic Innovation Project will:

Collaborate with local governments within the CCIPs network to determine

systemic challenges facing California cities

Lead dening and promoting best practices that emerge from creating the part-

nership Create a model and process that can be replicated and provide support to Cali-

fornia cities wanting to expand the civic marketplace

Civic Marketplace Alliances Impact

The Civic Marketplace is the creation of a sustainable marketplace for civic-focused

businesses and products. The marketplace also creates the following benecial

outputs:

Emerging civic enterprises that improve the quality of life for many

Products that can be piloted and used within local governments

Unifying local communities through needs identication and solution building

Mutually benecial public / private partnerships

Timeline

The Alliance is currently seeking funding to pilot the model and pursue replication

in other cities in early 2013.


9/16


10/16

RESEARCH PORTFOLIOCCIPs research program complements its partnerships by dening processes of in-

novation that can be modied and replicated to scale approaches beyond the initialspaces in which we have established partnerships. In general, the CCIP is inter-

ested in research that sheds light on how local governments innovate and engage

their communities, as well as work that helps to dene and engage the eld of civic

innovation.

Though our research draws on a variety of elds and methods, including those used

in academia, our main focus is on producing actionable research that has wide dis-

tribution and that can be produced relatively quickly in response to demonstrated

need or interest. Our primary audience is those who work in local government and

those who run organizations that cater to this group.

The relationship between CCIPs partnerships and its research portfolio goes in

two directions; research informs what types of projects CCIP will pursue in future

partnerships, and current partnerships inuence the direction of CCIPs research.

In some cases, research projects may also involve their own partnerships. This is

the case for the evaluative report that CCIP is undertaking of Participatory Budget-

ing Vallejo, in collaboration with the University of California-Berkeleys Goldman

School of Public Policy, with on-the-ground support from the Participatory Budget-

ing Project.

Partners that are engaged for research are able to leverage something that the CCIP

cannot provide on its own. For example, we have partnered with membership or-

ganizations to distribute the CCIPs knowledge sharing survey of local government

staffers, and the CCIP plans to make recommendations to those professional asso-

ciations about how to improve knowledge sharing practices.

Our initial research portfolio consists of two projects: a study of how knowledge

sharing related to innovative practices and approaches occurs between staffers in

different local government, and a project to dene civic innovation. Both will playan important role in shaping the CCIPs research and partnership agenda in the

future.


11/16

LOCAL GOVERNMENT KNOWLEDGE SHARING NETWORKS

In September 2012, CCIP began an exploration of how innovation spreads in local

government, through a study of how local governmental leaders use formal and

informal networks to share information. The project uses a diverse set of method-ologies -- from conversations with experts on networks and city administration, to

surveys and interviews with public servants and city government associations, to

documentation of knowledge sharing practices in several innovative projects under-

taken by cities in California.

Together, these methods will allow us to explain how city staffers currently receive

and disseminate information related to innovation, the barriers to more effective

diffusion of ideas and approaches, and the ways in which existing formal networks

might be modied to promote better collaboration and communication. We hope

that the study will build on successes in the civic innovation space by helping to

institutionalize the spread of innovation within and between cities. We seek to

provide a roadmap to formal networks for effective modication and replication of

successful projects. Along with a number of mid-project deliverables, including

several policy briefs and standalone articles, we anticipate a nal research report to

be released in March 2013.

DEFINIING CIVIC INNOVATION

Now more than ever our local governments are looking to their residents to lenda hand - while they cut back on services due to budget shortfalls and layoffs. This

renewed reliance on the community creates an opportunity for civic innovation

that wasnt possible in the past, and hopefully creates a collaboration that sustains

as our cities evolve.


12/16

Through a literature review we will develop an overview of civic innovation and

present a denition that does not solely rely on technology or government as en-

ablers. The literature review will inform a more in-depth report to be published in

the rst quarter of 2013 that provides a point-of-view on the meaning of civic in-

novation and the inuence it has on current public policies and community engag-

ment in California.

COLLABORATIONSCODE FOR OAKLAND

Code for Oakland is an annual hackathon where programmers, community mem-

bers, and city leaders come together for a day to build mobile applications for

Oaklanders. In July, Alissa Black served on the planning committee for Code for

Oakland and helped to organize listening sessions at four Oakland libraries to

give residents an opportunity to identify issues or challenges that they would like

for technology to help solve. Additionally, Alissa got sponsorship from a technology

company, NeighborLand, to offer their online community collaboration platform

for free to residents of Oakland as an online site to generate ideas for applications

(mobile apps) for the community.

Code for Oakland was later described by Forbes as The Most Diverse HackathonEver.

CIUDAD MOVIL (MOBILE CITY) - MEXICO CITY HACKATHON

In September the CCIP and Future Tense, a partnership between the New America

Foundation, Slate, and Arizona State University, helped to organize a three-day

conference and hackathon in Mexico City focused on open data and open govern-

ment. The CCIP was involved in this event because it provided an opportunity for a

California local government (the City of San Francisco), and two California-based

technology companies, to share best practices and innovative ideas with Mexico

City ofcials and entrepreneurs.

The collaboration produced multiple articles in Slate, including one authored by

Alissa Black The Most Important Important Information is Missing from Yelp.

11


13/16

2013 ROADMAPINSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE - REGIONAL CIVIC LABS

The CCIP and the Institute for the Future (IFTF) have proposed a series of regionalcivic labs in California to kick-off in early 2013. The core aim is to discover new

ways for leveraging a regions talent and technology assets to support the functions

of our cities while also encouraging the development of new forms of community

engagement.

With its long history of foresight work related to technology and society, IFTF pos-

sesses the unique capacity to frame potential futures of communities for diverse

audiences. The CCIPs Director, Alissa Black, has extensive experience facilitating

collaborative and innovative efforts between cities, the business community andgrassroots developers. Combined, the organizations have the capacity to engage

effectively with these groups to help these stakeholders to draft their own strategies

for leveraging new technology options.

With a deep understanding of regional needs and coordinating local governments

to think regionally and act locally, the regional civic labs could be highly replicable

in regions throughout California.

Timeline: We are currently seeking funding to launch the labs throughout California.

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWSHIP

Through generous support from Arizona State University the CCIP is hiring an In-

novation Fellow to expand the project throughout Southern California. The CCIP

Innovation Fellow will test and pilot innovative practices that diffuse innovation in

local governments, and seek opportunities to replicate policies, programs and tech-

nologies that deepen the engagement between municipalities and residents.

Timeline: We will begin recruiting for the fellowship position in early 2013.


14/16

DISSEMINATION OF RESEARCH FINDINGS

Our research plan includes disseminating our recommendations to local govern-

ment professional associations and local government employees. The CCIP is part-

nering with a number of professional associations to conduct our research and wewill use their networks to share our ndings.

Timeline: We will produce a report with our recommendations in the rst quarter

and convene stakeholders to discuss our ndings.

REPLICATING PILOT PARTNERSHIPS

The CCIP plans not only to share the outcomes of the partnership models, but to

replicate the partner projects in other CA cities.

Timeline: We are aiming to create new partnerships in Southern California in the

rst quarter.

DAVENPORT INSTITUTE - ONLINE ENGAGEMENT TRAINING

The Davenport Institute leads successful public engagement trainings for local gov-

ernments throughout California. With public engagement moving online and more

governments embracing transparency, CCIP and the Davenport Institute felt it was

necessary to develop a training program that provides local government employeeswith knowledge about open government, open data, and mobile engagement. The

training will also equip government participants with tools to assess their cities

needs and to develop an action plan to move their cities toward more openness

and mobile engagement.

Timeline: We are currently developing the curriculum and plan to administer our

rst beta training in early 2013.

3


15/16

ADVISORY COUNCIL & STAFFADVISORY COUNCIL

Amy Dominguez-Arms, Program Director, The James Irvine Foundation Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist, Red Hat

Hilary Hoeber, Portfolio Lead, IDEO

Malka Kopell, Malka Kopell Consulting

Tina Lee, Director of Northern CA Outreach & Innovation, State Controllers Of-

ce

Lenny Mendonca, Director, McKinsey & Company

Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Ofcer, City & County of San Francisco

Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director, Code for America

Pete Peterson, Executive Director, Davenport Institute

Adrienne St. Aubin, Public Policy Analyst, Google

Alissa Walker, GOOD Ideas for Cities

CCIP STAFFAlissa Black, Project Director

Based in the Bay area, Ms. Black is exploring the use of innovative technologies,

policies, and practices that engage disadvantaged communities in public decision

making throughout California.

Prior to joining New America, Ms. Black was the Government Relations Director

at Code for America, a non-prot organization that helps governments work better

through the use of technology and new practices. She also has extensive experi-

ence as a leader in local government, having worked in the New York City Mayors

Ofce and the City of San Franciscos Emerging Technologies team.

Rachel Burstein, Research Associate

Ms. Burstein is investigating how local governmental leaders use formal and in-

formal networks to share information and make decisions, and how innovationspreads within and between cities.

In addition to her work at the New America Foundation, Ms. Burstein is pursuing a

PhD in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation examines the pub-

lic relations strategies of American labor unions between 1947 and 1959.


16/16

BY THE NUMBERS

600+ Newsletter subscribers

24 Blog Posts

11 Advisory Council Members3 Pilot City Partnerships

2 Research Projects

2 Project Collaborations2 Articles Published

2 Staff

2 Interns

www.ccip.newamerica.net

Documents

CCIP Annual Report 2012 1