We are actively engaged in the dialogue and debates of our space: on issues of social justice, global development, and democratic innovation, and on the ethics and methodological evolution of design, mediation, and co-creation practice. More of our writing can be found at Medium.

Ethan Wilkes and Zack Brisson are continuing Reboot’s talk shop on operationalizing empathy today at UNICEF with Natalia Adler and Rafael Villa. For this event, they’ll explore empathy as a tenet of social innovation in development through recent work in Nicaragua.

Ethan Wilkes and Zack Brisson are kicking off an “operationalizing empathy” talk shop tour today at the Inter-American Development Bank. Joined by UNICEF Nicaragua’s Chief of Social Policy Natalia Adler and P-Lab Principal Rafael Villa, they’ll be discussing recent work on developing a framework for children’s rights policy in Nicaragua’s North Atlantic Autonomous Region.

Dave Algoso and Ethan Wilkes will be attending New York Social Good tonight, a new event series from Be Social Change and the Centre for Social Innovation that features both for- and nonprofit organizations trying to tackle the world’s toughest social and environmental challenges. Dave will be presenting Reboot’s experience of navigating complexity in the Niger Delta to help deliver better public services.

Samantha Hammer and Ethan Wilkes visited Purpose yesterday to deliver a talk on Reboot’s people-centered approach to change making. We were excited to engage in a fruitful discussion about seeding citizen agency to create social change, and we look forward to future opportunities for conversation and collaboration!

Ethan Wilkes is at CROWDFUNDx NYC today. The conference is aimed at building awareness around crowdfunding and the benefits it can offer businesses and social entrepreneurs in the future.

We are thrilled to see Panthea Lee at the 22nd Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable. Beginning yesterday morning, the roundtable examines emerging information technologies and their relationship with societies including required new leadership roles.

We are excited to announce that Panthea Lee is attending this year’s 2013 Forum on Communications and Society on July 10-13. Hosted by the Aspen Institute, the forum focuses on how to connect citizens with their government.

Panthea Lee and Zack Brisson are in Washington, D.C. today to deliver a talk on “catalyzing impact” at USAID. Focused on the topic of institutional investment, they are discussing how different funding models are evolving and being used to accelerate development.

Before checking out the fireworks, check out this awesome report on civic engagement designed by Mollie Ruskin. Produced for the Bus Federation to document the organization’s impressive feats during the 2012 election cycle, you can find the report in a lovely web-friendly format or a downloadable PDF (both courtesy of Mollie).

“Voting should fit the way we live” Kate Kronitiris explains in her latest piece featured in Politico. In a push to modernize the mechanics of American democracy, Kate talks about how local elections systems provide the best insight.

The mechanics of American democracy are due for a modernization. Finding out how to vote, when to vote, and where to vote is too often a test of jumping through bureaucratic hoops. On Election Day, long lines, registration obstacles and machine failures further plague the American voting experience.

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which convened its first public meeting this past Friday and has a second scheduled for June 28, would do well to recall that in the United States there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to elections administration.

The commission is one of two big federal initiatives seeking to make the American voting experience meet the expectations of 21st century citizens. “Established to identify best practices and make recommendations to the President on the efficient administration of elections,” the commission is exploring poll site management, poll worker training, voting machine technology, voting accessibility and voter education, among a slew of other issues. The Voter Empowerment Act, the second big federal initiative, aims to require that all states offer online voter registration.

These are interesting initiatives. But for all the talk about what may (or may not) come out of Washington, the reality is that elections administration in the United States is an entirely local affair.

Each of the more than 10,000 US election jurisdictions has its own unique systems that define the voting experience locally. While administrators must comply with federal guidelines, elections are ultimately organized, implemented, and assessed according to local regulations. They are locally funded and deeply reflective of local political history. Even during Friday’s briefing, the Commission’s research director noted that while its directive is national in scope, elections administration is famously determined at the local level.

To identify “best practices” and make recommendations on the “efficient administration of elections,” context matters. Earlier this spring, my organization conducted a six-city research investigation into a diverse subset of election offices around the country. Our aim was to understand the human motivations, technological systems and institutional landscapes that define elections administration at the most local levels.

Our research team found that irrespective of what happens in Washington, many election administrators are already troubleshooting their way to providing their residents a better voting experience.

Take Wendy Noren, for example, who is the Boone County Clerk in Columbia, Missouri. Wendy has worked on local elections administration in the clerk’s office since 1978 and remembers the 1980 presidential election well. “We got slammed,” she recalls. “There were thousands of people waiting in line to register to vote. We never recovered from processing all those registrations.”

In the wake of the 1980 election, Wendy taught herself the programming language COBOL to build the tools she knew she needed to improve the Boone County voting experience. To alleviate long lines during the last election cycle, Wendy custom coded a system that redirects voters quickly by sending real-time updates to digital poll books, soon to be stored on a network of iPads across the county’s poll sites.

Other examples abound. In Travis County, Texas, home to the tech savvy city of Austin, voters will soon be able to use a new online tool to select polling locations based on the number of people waiting in line. In Martin County, Florida, a jurisdiction more commonly associated with its “snowbird” retiree population, the Supervisor of Elections has launched a “Pledge to Vote” drive to engage pre-registered teens in the political process. In Jefferson County, Kentucky administrators have custom coded a two-in-one system that allows them to input voter information once and have it automatically uploaded to both the state and local databases.

Granted, not every election office has the tech talent of Austin or the resolve of Wendy Noren. And even these bright spots on the elections administration map are constrained by regulatory friction, budget reductions and political influence, all of which conspire to make improvements difficult and slow.

But there are more successful examples of vision and entrepreneurship than headlines about system failures like 8-hour lines to vote in Miami-Dade or the redeployment of voting technology from the 1890s in New York City would suggest. These ideas have also typically been tested and refined over multiple election cycles. The challenge is that election administration innovations often occur in isolation, preventing good ideas from spreading.

The Presidential Commission can help surface, popularize and remix these ideas to encourage greater uptake across the country. But ultimately, the federal government is far from the sole provenance of elections administration reform. Organizations like Code for America, New Organizing Institute and TurboVote have demonstrated the positive impact a small group of technologists can have working hand-in-hand with local government. Rallying the creative talents of the country to bolster the capabilities of existing innovators like Wendy Noren can make tangible and immediate improvements.

Voting should not be a burden. The future of American elections administration should not be plagued by more long lines and high barriers to participation. Rather, voting should fit the way we live. By focusing energy at the most local levels, helping good ideas grow and spread, reformers can build a future for the American voting experience that is seamless, accessible and completely in sync with the expectations of 21st century citizens.

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This post was originally published in Politico.

We are thrilled, excited, honored, and humbled to have among our ranks a Presidential Innovation Fellow! Congratulations to Mollie Ruskin, our tremendously talented creative lead, for scoring this tremendously impressive feat! We couldn’t be happier for you.

Jennifer Thibault is attending tonight’s NYWSE “How She Does It” dinner. The event  is an evening of female empowerment and social entrepreneurship featuring speaker Beth Ferguson, Founder of Sol of Design Lab.

Panthea Lee is at PopTech‘s “The City Resilient” today. Come say hi if you’re there! The conference is a unique look at urban infrastructure and adaptability.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s $50 billion worth of damage to New York City, resilience has become the new buzzword. Last week’s report release from the Mayor’s Office Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency explores how this term applies to NYC. Titled “A Stronger, More Resilient New York”, the report offers a series of recommendations for “rebuilding the communities impacted by Sandy and increasing the resilience of infrastructure and buildings citywide.”

So, what exactly is a more resilient NYC?

Simply defined, resilience is the ability to recover readily from adversity. Put in the context of a disaster affected community, resilience translates to the ability of a population to return to its everyday functions after being subjected to a shock.

In the post-Sandy exploration of approaches to boost NYC’s resilience, discussions have largely focused on the merits of hard versus soft infrastructure. Hard infrastructure, such as flood walls, are defense systems to keep the sea out. Hard infrastructure systems have been employed in the Netherlands and Venice with great success, but also at great cost. Soft infrastructure, such as wetlands or sand dunes, utilizes natural barriers and is generally less costly.

There are advocates for each approach, and others who advocate a strategy that makes use of both. But all of these voices ignore a third–and equally critical pillar–to resilience: social infrastructure.

Unlike static engineered solutions, whether hard or soft, social infrastructure provides communities the ability to respond, reorganize, and adapt at a highly local level to cope with shocks. Soft infrastructure taps into existing community capital, institutions, and networks to build trust, enable learning, and provide individuals with the resources to prepare and respond to crises. Social infrastructure can often be simplistic, but it is also extremely impactful.

In the response to Sandy, for example, local community organizers with established networks were best able to communicate with those in need to provide crucial resources. Pat Simon of the Ocean Bay Community Development Corporation organized private donations to help her community when multiple emergency response groups failed to deliver what was needed, such as diapers and baby formula. Instead, the response groups brought generic goods like blankets and ready-to-eat meals, which resulted in a surplus of unwanted items and an undersupply of what really mattered.

Similarly, another Rockaway community relied on social infrastructure, the Beach 91st Street Community Garden, to meet their needs after Sandy. The vegetable garden served as their primary food source during the days the community was isolated from transportation networks and outside assistance.

“During the first weeks after the storm, a group of people gathered at the farm every night to build a fire and cook dinner,” Lee Altman, a Five Borough Farm initiative fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space, explains. “The garden offered a valuable community resource in creating a gathering place for people to share food and conversation when they had no electricity or heat and very little else to rely on.”

Stories like these illustrate the importance of developing and strengthening NYC’s social infrastructure. But Governor Cuomo’s home buyout program announced earlier this year,  which will use federal disaster relief funds to purchase homes in vulnerable areas of New York for public reclamation, could actually do the opposite. The program will likely displace many low-income residents who cannot afford disaster repairs. The program also poses a prisoner’s dilemma to residents: what will happen to the community if some families leave but others choose to stay? Most likely, the community will lose existing social infrastructure and the ability to recover quickly–this is the antithesis of resilience.

For those like Susie (she declined to provide her full name), a retiree from the Rockaways who was displaced during Sandy, these issues are all too real. “This is my home,” she says, “I’m not going to move because of this storm or the next storm.”

To cope during the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, she relied on friends in her neighborhood for housing and other basic needs. In the absence of this social infrastructure, Susie would have had nowhere else to go. The surge in displaced residents following the storm sent rents through the roof, making affordable housing extremely difficult to find, especially since Susie has yet to receive any relief aid to rebuild or relocate. Social infrastructure filled the void where the official response fell short.

Last week Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city will not retreat from it’s shoreline. The newly released report solicits strategies to build robust transportation, coastal defense, and other technical infrastructure to allow communities to remain where they are. But, if New York City is really to ‘build back stronger’, the social infrastructure of its neighborhoods cannot be ignored.

Megan Marini is a designer, urban planner, and former Rebooter. She is currently the co-founder of 3×3 Design.

We’re delighted to welcome two new additions to our growing Nigeria team, Angela Ogbu and Nonso Jideofor. Angela joins Reboot from an impressive background in research and social policy with the World Bank and British Council, among others. Nonso brings a history of entrepreneurship and a similarly impressive background in project management for clients like the World Bank and the Niger Delta Development Commission. Both Angela and Nonso will be exploring community power dynamics, institutional relationships, and community governance.

Since joining Reboot, there’s one word in particular I’ve been using more and more: empathy.

Empathy allows us to understand and share in someone else’s experiences. The concept plays a prominent role in design methods—where understanding the user experience is critical—but this kind of thinking is less apparent in the international aid and development space.

This might sound surprising. A deep empathy with victims of poverty or disaster should be central to the approach of donor organizations, NGOs, and social enterprises.

The caricature of aid workers and development consultants who parachute in, spend all their time meeting officials in the capital, and fail to relate to the people on whose behalf decisions are made, however, does have its truths. The typical fundraiser’s or journalist’s portrayal of aid recipients is also often dehumanizing. They’ve earned the moniker “poverty porn” and drawn calls for reform for a reason.

I would call these failures of empathy. Although I didn’t use this term regularly a few months ago, I’ve since found that empathy provides a useful framework for much of the critical analysis of the aid industry that I’ve articulated over the years.

The aid industry’s empathy failures don’t result from any lack of personal empathy among those working for donors or NGOs. In fact, the industry naturally draws people with high levels of empathy. Rather, the failures result from institutional and funding structures that produce a lack of collective and operationalized empathy.

We should think of empathy as a capability similar to creativity or analytical thinking. Similar to these other capabilities, some individuals may be more empathetic than others. And just as we can work together to produce more creative outputs or better analysis than we could alone, we can work together to be more empathetic than we are individually.

This is the essence of operationalized empathy: creating work practices and mechanisms that leverage our individual capabilities to better understand the needs of the people we’re serving.

At Reboot, where we do research and implementation, we see both the methodological and programmatic dimensions to operationalizing empathy. In our research, we draw from applied ethnography to understand people in their contexts and relationships, with all the complexity that entails. For our recent project exploring media development in Pakistan’s tribal areas, this meant hiring a local research team, training them to conduct open-ended interviews that avoided biasing responses, and helping them to interpret what the findings meant for their own communities. The process took time and reached fewer total respondents than a survey.

This approach also yielded greater depth of insight. When discussing elections and voting habits, the research team found that formal politics was far removed from the day-to-day concerns of residents in the tribal areas. Meanwhile, policymakers had trouble overcoming infrastructure and communication barriers to get to know these communities. The result is a deep disconnect felt on both sides. Lack of voter participation is merely a symptom of that deeper disengagement.

Instead of the detachment, objectivity, and external validity that’s so highly valued in academic research, we seek to understand people and communities at a very human level. Empathy informs our analytical categories as well. Where an economic or political framework might see corruption, an empathetic one surfaces the cultural norms and social expectations facing public servants. A broad label like “corruption” obscures the diversity of activities and motivations that have to be understood before a coherent policy response is possible.

On the programmatic side, empathy is trickier. It doesn’t mean touchy-feely management (though home-baked cookies do often appear in our office!). Rather, empathy calls for staffing and communication practices that reduce the gap between the source of funding and the people that funding seeks to help. Cultural translation is facilitated by hiring and promoting staff from the communities we serve, as well as staff who have lived in multiple contexts. Other useful principles include minimizing organizational hierarchy, trusting your team, and recognizing that much of the work is done in the field by the most junior staff.

Similar to analytical thinking or creativity, empathy also has its limits. The question of whether anyone can ever truly understand someone else’s perspective is best left to philosophers. We don’t expect to fully grasp what it means to be an elections official in a small American town or a teacher in northern Nicaragua, but empathy—deliberately operationalized and leveraged—helps us get closer.

Tech President recaps our Reimagining Elections speech delivered by Kate Krontiris and TurboVote’s Katy Peters at last week’s PDF13.

In the run up to Kate Krontiris’s talk at PDF 2013, we’re excited to release our new brief “Reimagining Elections Administration”. The brief details the findings of our six city tour of elections offices across the US with TurboVote exploring how to modernize the mechanics of American democracy. Learn more about the project here.