ANNUAL REPORT2012

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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 civic innovation. 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 innovation and 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 defining methods and emerging practices that enable municipalities to foster and adopt innovative practices.

In our first 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.

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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. We’ve 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.

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California Civic Innovation Project’s RoleLike 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 Berkeley’s 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 understanding how 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 first 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 officials and citizens.

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

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Impact of Participatory Budgeting in VallejoCCIP 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, as citizens 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.

TimelinePB in Vallejo will involve five 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

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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 Project’s RoleAs 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.

Oakland’s CityLabs’ ImpactCityLabs will achieve the following outcomes:• New ideas and processes will develop that improve service delivery and increase

efficiencies 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.

TimelineIn early November the City of Oakland learned that it was not selected as a finalist in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge. The CCIP continues to support the City’s 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.

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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 Project’s 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 significant and lasting change will occur.

In this partnership the New America Foundation’s CA Civic Innovation Project will:• Collaborate with local governments within the CCIP’s network to determine

systemic challenges facing California cities• Lead defining 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 Alliance’s ImpactThe Civic Marketplace is the creation of a sustainable marketplace for civic-focused businesses and products. The marketplace also creates the following beneficial 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 identification and solution building• Mutually beneficial public / private partnerships

TimelineThe Alliance is currently seeking funding to pilot the model and pursue replication in other cities in early 2013.

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RESEARCH PORTFOLIOCCIP’s research program complements its partnerships by defining processes of in-novation that can be modified and replicated to scale approaches beyond the initial spaces 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 define and engage the field of civic innovation.

Though our research draws on a variety of fields 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 CCIP’s partnerships and its research portfolio goes in two directions; research informs what types of projects CCIP will pursue in future partnerships, and current partnerships influence the direction of CCIP’s 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-Berkeley’s 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 CCIP’s 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 define civic innovation. Both will play an important role in shaping the CCIP’s research and partnership agenda in the future.

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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 modified 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 modification and replication of successful projects. Along with a number of mid-project deliverables, including several policy briefs and standalone articles, we anticipate a final research report to be released in March 2013.

DEFINING CIVIC INNOVATION

Now more than ever our local governments are looking to their residents to lend a 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 wasn’t possible in the past, and hopefully creates a collaboration that sustains as our cities evolve.

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Through a literature review we will develop an overview of civic innovation and present a definition 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 first quarter of 2013 that provides a point-of-view on the meaning of civic in-novation and the influence 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 Hackathon Ever.”

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 officials and entrepreneurs.

The collaboration produced multiple articles in Slate, including one authored by Alissa Black “The Most Important Important Information is Missing from Yelp.”

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2013 ROADMAPINSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE - REGIONAL CIVIC LABS

The CCIP and the Institute for the Future (IFTF) have proposed a series of regional civic labs in California to kick-off in early 2013. The core aim is to discover new ways for leveraging a region’s 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 CCIP’s Director, Alissa Black, has extensive experience facilitating collaborative and innovative efforts between cities, the business community and grassroots 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.

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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 we will use their networks to share our findings.

Timeline: We will produce a report with our recommendations in the first quarter and convene stakeholders to discuss our findings.

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 first 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 employees with 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 first beta training in early 2013.

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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 Controller’s Of-

fice

• Lenny Mendonca, Director, McKinsey & Company

• Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer, 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 DirectorBased 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-profit 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 Mayor’s Office and the City of San Francisco’s Emerging Technologies team.

Rachel Burstein, Research AssociateMs. Burstein is investigating how local governmental leaders use formal and in-formal networks to share information and make decisions, and how innovation spreads 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.

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BY THE NUMBERS

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2 Research Projects

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