Last year, we hosted four incredible interviews with folks driving radical collaborations across the globe. Our world has transformed so much in the time since, but the wisdom of these great leaders sustains. Take a listen.
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.
Representing 100 individuals and teams working at the intersection of design and service globally, Zach Brisson and Panthea Lee were listed on the Public Interest Design 100 list.
Sharif loves using his mukhabera. “I use it daily, mostly at night time, because signals are clear at that time,” he says. “I am in touch with most of my friends this way.”
Mukhabera means walkie-talkie in Pashto. For Sharif, this tool is what a mobile phone might be to other young men around the world: a cheap, reliable way to keep in touch with friends and family, so long as they are within an 18-mile range. Every week, he spends about 100 rupees, just over one U.S. dollar, on batteries. In the evenings, his group of friends all tune in to “hang out” on the same frequency.
Sharif likes to stay connected, and not only for fun. His life depends on it. Sharif, 28 years old and unemployed, lives in Datta Khel, a town located on the border with Afghanistan in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
FATA is one of the most underdeveloped regions of Pakistan. Decades of crisis, underpinned by poor governance and regional conflict, has kept the region in a perpetual state of instability, poverty, and isolation. Sixty-six percent of FATA’s residents live below the poverty line. Unemployment is estimated at 60 to 80 percent.
Datta Khel is also a dangerous place. Since 2008, U.S. intelligence operations have launched over 40 separate drone strikes in Datta Khel, killing more than 240 people. One particularly lethal attack in March 2011 killed approximately 40 people and sparked anti-American protests across Pakistan.
“Everyone in my village is schizophrenic,” says Zahir, a 24-year-old man from North Waziristan. “You hear screams in the middle of the night from people having bad dreams about the drones. Everyone is always angry or suspicious of everyone else.”
In the face of enduring insecurity, FATA’s residents use mukhabera as lifelines for gathering and sharing information about the threats around them. When they learn of a drone strike or other attack nearby, they immediately contact friends in search of anyone with first-hand knowledge of what happened. Often they speak in code.
“I hear today’s match was thrilling,” one person might say, implying that clashes in the area were intense. “Did the players hit any balls into the crowd?” someone on the other end of the line will ask, which means did mortars or rockets hit houses in the village.
The downside to mukhabera, essentially a two-way radio, is that FATA’s residents never know who else is listening. Talking in code helps evade informers for militant groups who might be on the same radio frequency.
Residents regularly discuss and analyze the information they gather with those closest to them, fact-checking for veracity. They often only trust friends and family. Other credible sources are in short supply.
Across FATA, residents face severe constraints accessing reliable information on the issues and events that most affect their lives. At less than 5 percent, internet connectivity is far from widespread. While 64 percent residents have access to a mobile phone, signals are intermittent at best. Satellite dishes remain a luxury that is out of reach for many, given that FATA’s $250 annual per capita income is half the national average.
The media that penetrates the region most widely, namely Radio Pakistan and Pakistan Television, are state-owned and heavily censored, focusing overwhelmingly on conflict reporting. A 2012 study found that over half of the journalists surveyed in FATA admitted that 75 percent or more of their stories are about terrorism or conflict.
“All the time, we have to select [news] topics which have the potential to be linked with terrorism,” explains Farooq, a radio producer in North Waziristan. “For example, the simple and general problem of inflation can be linked with the economic depression and destruction caused by terrorism.”
While the conflict narrative in FATA’s news media is a reflection of its people’s most pressing concerns, reporting often lacks relevance to their daily lives. News stories tend to cover incidents rather than patterns and challenges rather than solutions, offering little in the way of useful knowledge for personal security or community development.
In the absence of alternatives, FATA’s residents turn to each other, relying on the breadth of their social networks to secure the information they need to navigate an environment of ongoing existential threats and longstanding underdevelopment.
This communal nature of information-gathering can be limiting. Information passed from person to person introduces error and bias, keeping residents even further from reliable sources. But the premium placed on finding eyewitness accounts and credible media is also empowering a subtle shift in the social fabric of FATA.
Traditionally influential sources of information, such as tribal elders and religious leaders, are increasingly unable to answer for their communities’ most pressing challenges––militant activity, drone strikes, and persistent poverty. In some cases, they are even distrusted. Many feel the rise of mullahs in politics over the last 15 years has undermined their authority as trusted spiritual leaders, making them one less source of credible information and one more source of possible misinformation.
Abdul, a researcher in North Waziristan, claims, “[P]eople have realized that they are being used by the mullahs and other religious leaders… People have become mature now and they know that they have been used in the name of Islam.”
Disappointment with traditional leaders is, however, matched with a rise in the social status of those with access to information from a variety of sources.
Barbers, for example, are seen as well-informed about local news because they converse with a wide range of people daily. Despite the mobility constraints in many parts of the region, all men—rich and poor, educated and uneducated—still go to the barbershop. Sultan, a barber in Khyber, thinks of himself as “a computer where people feed and receive information.”
Similarly, diaspora populations are increasingly important providers of information to FATA’s residents. Living outside of the region, migrants often learn about local events before their families and call home when they do. In the past, when his phone rang at 4 a.m., Atif from Orakzai would think, “What has happened to someone that I love?” Now he worries, “What might be happening to me?”
As technology increasingly––albeit slowly––penetrates the region and opens new channels for information access, the influence of the literate and technology-savvy is also growing among FATA’s communities. Young people, especially those with higher education, are the strongest example of a demographic becoming the “eyes and ears” of their communities as a result.
In decades past, “youth were not allowed to sit on chairs or charpoys [traditional bed] in front of the elders even,” explains Subidah, a teacher in neighboring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, “but now the technology is changing this whole social structure.”
The nature of the shifts occurring in FATA today points to a potentially more encouraging future where access to information both within and about the region is more widely available. Despite the U.S. government’s “targeted killings” of militants narrative, many ordinary people in FATA live in fear that they could be caught in the crossfire of the conflict engulfing the region. A more nuanced picture of FATA’s residents can inform an honest accounting of the policies that affect their lives.
Is open government working?
I asked the question in a previous post. Folks much better informed—Jerry Brito, Tiago Peixoto, and Nathaniel Heller, to name a few—have been asking the question for some time. The answers are not forthcoming.
Too often, assessing the impact of open government initiatives amounts to measuring outputs: how many developers flocked to a civic tech hackathon; the amount of procurement records feeding corruption hawks and socially-minded graphic designers; or the number of tweets or media mentions about a particular initiative, regardless of whether they are from the same industry blogs and actors covering open government.
Quantitative metrics have their place. They may be useful for gauging the popularity of an initiative. They are almost always used to justify funding for an initiative. But, ultimately, these studies say very little about open government’s actual impact on people.
For every FOIA request fulfilled, are we improving livelihoods? For every civic app downloaded, are we changing how public institutions function? For every new country that joins the Open Government Partnership, are we making progress in the realization of government accountability? The answer is: we simply don’t know.
We need to rethink how we evaluate these initiatives. The promise of open government to deliver more just and accountable public institutions demands active participation from citizens. But cultivating greater civic engagement is not simply a question of who and how many showed up. We must understand why they came in the first place, what happened when they got there, and would they do it again—motivations and outcomes matter.
We need to move beyond measuring outputs and toward understanding experiences.
Applied ethnography holds great potential for understanding how individuals experience open government initiatives. Ethnography—“a portrait of people”—is the study of people within their social and cultural contexts.[1] It embraces context, examining how results can be explained by human factors and situational interactions. Ethnography allows us to understand the meaning of participation for different individuals—who is affected or not, and why.
Take, for example, this ethnographic study of a participatory budgeting initiative in Rome. The study found that through engagement with the participatory budgeting process, some participants “discovered a passion for politics,” leading them to join neighborhood associations and local political parties. Other participants, however, left the budgeting process feeling more cynical about and disengaged from participatory democracy.
Why such different outcomes?
Probing the broader context of the participatory budgeting initiative, the study discovered that discussions at the budget meetings were not always as important as the conversations that occurred outside of the formal gatherings—in the hallways, at the bar, or on the street. Those that embraced the informal social dynamic became more engaged; those that failed to follow the unspoken rules were sanctioned and became disengaged.
“Instead of including as many residents as possible,” the study writes, “[participatory budgeting] very often excluded those who could not speak immediately the language of the institution.”
Another ethnographic study on a land rights initiative in India also surfaced the negative, unintended consequences of open government. The project developed an open data portal for land titles, assuming that information transparency would increase citizens’ bargaining powers vis-à-vis the state. In fact, the opposite happened. The portal was used by public officials and corporate actors to shape urban policies and development in their interests. Instead of empowering poor citizens, the initiative further marginalized them.
Exploring individuals’ experiences of open government endeavors, therefore, yields a rich understanding of their real-world impact. We know who became engaged and why. We understand motivations and outcomes. And most importantly, in the two cases cited, we gain valuable insight into the specific pain points that ultimately made these initiatives fairly private affairs. Were we to implement such programs again, we know what challenges to address.
Ethnographic evaluations are important for all initiatives, but they are especially critical for the burgeoning field of open government. Social change is, at its core, about human systems. Attempts to change political behavior or spur communal action depend on the choices and actions of individuals. Those choices and actions are highly context-specific, influenced by communal norms and personal preferences. Counting outputs doesn’t provide the necessary level of nuance. Only an understanding of those individual experiences will.
Evaluation rooted in understanding experiences takes us beyond the binary of “program design” and “impact evaluation”. These terms become one and the same, intertwined and supporting each other. The design world calls this the prototype-testing-iteration loop. The public policy world has been talking about problem-driven iterative adaptation.
At Reboot, we focus heavily on understanding how individual experiences will shape a program’s success. Our hunch is that a well-designed user experience is truly built-to-fit, tailored to the needs of different stakeholders.
For example, a recent open government program we worked on in Nigeria paired community associations with a local government office and required reasons for engagement on both sides to be effective. Citizens were displeased with some of the public services provided by the government office. In collaboration with communities, we developed a text message-based mobile feedback tool that allowed citizens to provide feedback on their frustrations.
That much was straightforward. But what incentive did the local government office have to respond?
According to an initial assessment: not much. The office was already overworked and understaffed. Probing deeper into the context and constraints of the office through applied ethnography, however, revealed more. We learned that officials were deeply frustrated. Although they were hardworking and committed, program beneficiaries often complained of perceived government misconduct. Citizens believed that they were not receiving the benefits owed to them, but as we found out, beneficiaries had an inaccurate understanding of what the program entitlements actually were.
Taking these frustrations into account, we built in a much-needed opportunity, from the officials’ perspective, to set the record straight. Instead of just asking the underappreciated officials to respond to citizen feedback in the name of “open government”, we also provided these officials a mechanism to explain program benefits to citizens providing feedback—and, in the process, clearing their own names. By tailoring the program to the specific needs of both citizens and government officials, we were able to address their respective barriers to participation and enable constructive engagement for both..
Naysayers might argue that seeking to understand the human experiences within open government initiatives is too difficult. Implementing organizations might claim that they can create open government platforms or campaigns, but they have no control over whether these initiatives will change how people or institutions behave. Donors might say that measuring outputs is much less expensive than the in-depth research needed to assess motivations and outcomes. And everyone will maintain that attribution is tough, as is developing a credible counterfactual—how to gauge what would have happened without this initiative?
But too “difficult” and “expensive” are lousy excuses. Each open government initiative should be treated as a unique opportunity to learn and develop a more substantive understanding of what is working and what is not through an exploration of individual experiences, among citizens and within institutions.
We can begin by recognizing that organizations should not do their own evaluations. Success bias is well documented (and no surprise), particularly if future funding is at stake. Anonymizing names of programs and participants, and protecting the identities of projects—as we do for respondents—is also a simple, smart idea. This strips ego and allows practitioners more freedom to be honest and self-critical in their work.
We’re excited to see ongoing discussions on this topic and some of these ideas becoming institutionalized. We’re heartened that the medical profession—whose scientific methods have been transposed to public policy in the form of randomized control trials—is embracing applied ethnography to take a more human experience-centric approach to research. Whether under the guise of “impact evaluation” or otherwise, understanding the experiences of patients through explorations of cultures, beliefs, and needs can enable the design of more effective treatment programs.
Our hope is that through more nuanced evaluations rooted in understanding individual experiences, we can untangle the putative causes and build toward a more robust knowledge of how citizens participate in civic life and how governments meet their demands.
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I’d be keen to connect with other practitioners that are taking ethnographic (or similar) approaches to impact evaluation, whether in the open government sphere or elsewhere. Please email me at panthea AT theReboot DOT org.
[1] Ethnographic research is often mistakenly equated with “interview studies” or other types of qualitative research. An immersive research approach, it uses techniques such as participant observation, unstructured interviews, and artifact collection to attempt a holistic analysis of human behaviours, interactions, and perceptions over time.
“Is open government working?” Panthea Lee asks in her latest post for Tech President’s Back Channel. To answer that question, “we need to move beyond measuring outputs and toward understanding experiences.”
“Following Pakistan’s May 11 general elections, the first in which political parties were allowed to field candidates in the region, residents across FATA face severe constraints accessing reliable information on the issues and events that most affect their lives,” Panthea Lee writes in this piece on information and empowerment in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Jennifer Thibault was featured in Wakefield Design Story “Swell Morocco” where she discussed the process behind logo craft and her design for an elementary school in Morocco.
We’re very excited to have Vicki Sotiros join our growing family. Vicki will support Reboot’s communications, contributing to editorial, social media, and outreach. She comes to Reboot from a diverse background spanning public relations, graphic design, and design research. We’re thrilled to have her!
We’re thrilled to announce that Kate Krontiris will be joining TurboVote‘s Katy Peters on the PDF main stage during the 2013 conference on June 6-7. They’ll be talking about how to reform voting from the ground up through the 8,000 local offices that administer elections in the US.
Well, folks, the TurboVote and Reboot local elections research roadshow has come to close.
We’ve got gobs and gobs of data, which we’ll look forward to parsing through over the coming week to develop clarity around our findings (more on that soon!). But for now, we’d like to our musings from our final research stop: the City and County of Denver Elections Division in Colorado.
In the “Centennial State,” (named so for its admission into the nation 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence), 72 percent of the voting population statewide votes by mail. If things go as expected, new legislation will make Colorado an all mail-ballot state, in time for next year’s midterm elections.
For those of you unfamiliar with voting by mail, this means that voters in Colorado can request a ballot be sent to them via the post, to be completed in the convenience of their own home. If you like to track your mail, you can sign up for Ballot TRACE in Denver, which uses intelligent mail barcodes to inform you where your ballot is in the postal delivery chain. Once marked, the ballot can be returned by mail, or dropped off at Voter Service Centers, the local clerk’s office, or at secure drop-off boxes distributed throughout the county.
If you’re thinking “Hmm, that sounds about as easy as the drive-through window at McDonalds,” you wouldn’t be far off the mark.
If the new Colorado bill is signed into law by the Governor, Colorado voters will receive a mail ballot by default. Vote Service and Polling Centers will still be available for those who prefer the in-person voting experience though. Additionally, voters will be allowed to register and vote on Election Day, known as “same-day registration”.
Eleven other states have passed same-day registration, so Colorado is not a pioneer in this respect. Still, these are pretty big steps toward a more convenient voting experience.
Some opponents fear that voter fraud could become more prevalent under the new system, or that people who should be ineligible to vote might slip onto the rolls on Election Day. The Colorado County Clerks Association, which had a strong hand in drafting the bill, is in full support of its implementation. The counties are expected to see somewhere between $10-15 million of cost savings, and the state will incur a one-time fee of approximately $1.5 million to implement the switch.
In our conversations with state-level representatives this week, we were curious to learn how legislation that makes voting easier for citizens affects the backend administrative processes.
In a place where so many votes are already cast by mail, the state is not so concerned about its ability to absorb additional vote-by-mail ballots. In order to do same-day registration for those individuals who choose to vote in person on Election Day, however, the state will need to enhance its technical processes for registering and signing in voters.
One example of how this will play out concerns staffing at poll sites. While individual counties will require fewer poll workers (a general election in Denver is now likely to require about 750 workers, instead of the previous 2,000, if the bill is signed into law), those workers will need to be selected based on slightly different capabilities. The counties and the state will need people who feel comfortable using new technology and can troubleshoot without fear of the machinery. The counties will have to train them using new materials and for a different set of tasks, and they will have to provide day-of internal support to these workers that also takes into account the new technical processes.
This week’s visit provided some interesting insights not only into the process of state-level innovations in elections, but also into the implications of those legislative changes. When new laws are passed, new systems must be developed. For voting, that means coordinating the backend technical and human processes that the voter never sees.
As we rounded out our research tour, we were reminded of how deeply our democracy depends on the public servants who manage all of these behind-the-scenes challenges. As so many of our research respondents have said over the course of the past few weeks, elections work is always changing, with every election offering an opportunity to test something new or different. These elections teams operate within an ever-adaptive environment. Although the media only reports when things go off-track, the reality is that most elections benefit from the care and attention that these officials pay to solid process implementation.
We look forward to seeing what happens in Colorado, as the state moves into a new chapter of the voter experience!
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If you’re eager to hear in greater detail about our findings, be sure to register for Personal Democracy Forum 2013, happening on June 6th and 7th in New York City. Katy Peters, co-founder of TurboVote, and Kate Krontiris of Reboot will be presenting our conjectures about the future of elections in America, based on what we learned by speaking with some of the 8,000 people who deliver the voter experience in this country.
Tech President wrote about TurboVote’s journey with Reboot to help change the future of voting in America. “Out of that research is going to come the specifics of the tool that we’re going to build for election,” TurboVote’s Seth Flaxman says of Reboot’s work with his organization.
Patrick Ainslie was featured on Caixin’s podcast this week. Titled “The Underground World of Migrant Remittances“, he discussed opportunities for inclusive financial services targeting China’s migrant workers.
Each year, about 60 million people travel to the state of Florida, including one very special subset of visitors: “snowbirds.”
Florida-bound snowbirds are typically retirees from the northeast of the US who spend their winters in search of sunshine and warm weather. With no state income tax requirements, Florida also makes an attractive destination for formal residency, which means snowbirds can vote.
And vote they do.
Similar to older generations in most American states, Florida’s snowbirds are consistent and engaged voters. Turnout for the 2012 presidential election in Martin County, Florida–where Reboot’s elections research team traveled last week–was 78 percent. Snowbirds like their ballots as much as they do their beaches, apparently.
But for all the influence snowbirds have on local elections here, the most interesting tidbit we learned from the Martin County Supervisor of Elections had nothing to do with snowbirds at all–and everything to do with young voters.
In Florida, 16 year-olds can “pre-register” to vote when they apply for a driver’s license. Once they turn 18, they are automatically registered to vote with no further paperwork required. They are also eligible to become poll workers during the interim period, even if they are not yet able to cast a vote. Martin County’s Supervisor Vicki Davis, and her team of elections administrators, takes advantage of this nicely designed quasi-“nudge” in state law. After a week with her team, we learned just how much this office has invested in future generations of citizens.
Alongside a voter registration drive for those students who were eligible to vote in the 2012 general elections–which resulted in 800 new voters–the elections team launched a “Pledge to Vote” competition among the county’s high schools. The idea came from the office’s Student Advisory Board, which realized it could use the increased awareness of the elections to encourage underage youth to make a “pledge” that they would vote upon becoming eligible. Schools that generated the most commitments to vote won trophies from the office.
According to Kherri Anderson, the Deputy Supervisor of Elections Outreach, the students observed that, “you can’t make anybody register to vote; but if we pledge, that says we’ll get involved when we are old enough.”
Both young Democrat and young Republican groups at the schools were invited to share their party platforms with their peers, to simulate the political decision-making environment. Students who volunteered their cell phone numbers received text messages from the elections office with reminders about registration. On graduation day, inside their diploma covers, the graduates found a voter registration form and an absentee ballot–a not-so-subtle invitation from the Supervisor herself to become civically engaged.
Students were also invited to become pollworkers, which thrilled the crew of regulars, whose average age is 71. Anderson received phone calls from her (yes, snowbird) pollworkers after the election day, raving about how the young people could set up polling sites much more quickly, and seemed nonplussed by the technological aspects of the voting equipment. One local professor even offered all of his students a full test grade and 15 points on the final if they agreed to work the polls.
Our takeaway from Martin County this week was a strong reminder of how deep the connection is between the future of American elections and the future of youth civic engagement. Even though the county experiences among the highest voter turnout rates in the country–thanks largely to the commitment of the snowbirds–Martin County Supervisor of Elections demonstrates a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Vicki and her team say that their legacy in office is to “keep democracy going for the future.” They back up these words with investments in engaging the county’s young people.
Over the past few weeks, our research has revealed just how local our democratic processes are, different in substantial and important ways in each place we have visited. What emerged anew this week seems refreshingly applicable across state lines: local government, no matter where it is, might find advantage in dislodging just a bit from the needs and habits of today’s more active voting demographics, and act more directly to ignite the civic spirit within tomorrow’s.
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Say hello to us this week @theReboot in Denver, Colorado, if you live there! We’re looking forward to spending some time with the City and County of Denver Elections Division for this, our final week research into the administration of elections in America!
It’s 8:00am, and we’re up and running. Reboot Nigeria rises early.
We have a big day ahead of us. We’re working out of our office in Benin City in the Niger Delta. This week, we’re examining public works projects, working on an education-focused radio program we helped launch, training government officials on design research, and prototyping improvements to an elections monitoring platform. It’s a sizeable plate.
But first on the agenda this morning is research. Our focus: roads.
Specifically, we’re trying to understand the process through which public works projects go from inception to execution, and we’re doing so through the prism of road construction. Edo, one of the states we’re working in, has undergone a transformation in the recent years—the current Governor has made road building a key priority. Though only 10 to 15 percent of Nigerian roads are paved, the present administration has made visible gains in their delivery of new and improved roads. We meet many Edolites returning from abroad for the first time in many years who are happily surprised at the changes they see.
Drawing from this, our key question: What happened, and what can we learn from this experience? What does it take to get a road built; which stakeholders are involved; how does the process work; and, ultimately, what does all this mean for public service delivery?
8:00am and Joel meets with the research team.
I’m helping manage the research team, which has now grown to 11 including: three colleagues from the Niger Delta Citizens Budget Platform, Osione, Panthea, Zack, Dave, Angela, Nonso, yours truly, and Joel, the most recent addition to our team.
I’ve prepared a sticky note for each researcher with a list of respondents. Using these lists as a guide, we strategize our plans for the day. We’ll be talking to a range of individuals today, from government officials to private sector actors to community members. We divide into pairs to practice interviewing each other so we’re well prepared when we do speak with them.
Joel chooses to practice for his interview with a traditional community head, who he’ll meet later in the day. Joel knows that the expansion of one road project caused demolitions in this community. He’s eager to hear the community’s perspective about this experience, but knows he’ll have to introduce himself first to the community head to gain permission to speak with other community members.
After an hour of prep, the team heads out to the designated sites, which are scattered around Benin City. The omnipresent motorcycle taxis, referred to locally as okadas, are a logical choice for getting around.
Angela is studying a road project on the outskirts of the city. Angela is keen to hear about the community’s perspectives and involvement in the project. After speaking with several community members, Angela learns that the road prioritized by the community was not the road that was built. Apparently, a local leader overruled the committee and convinced the contractors to build the road in front of his house instead.
Elsewhere in Benin City, Panthea is running a training workshop for government officials. She’s teaching the use of design research to understand community needs and design tailored strategies for outreach and redressal of complaints. This is part of our collaboration with the World Bank and several states to support positive relationships between citizens and sub-national governments. Providing government offices with the tools to better understand community needs and aspirations is one way we hope to help them achieve their public commitments.
Later in the afternoon, the team trickles back to home base to document their research findings. Osione spent the day working with government stakeholders and is recording his thoughts. Angela is jotting down the different perspectives she heard from the community she visited. It’s a full house this afternoon. Zack has just returned from a few days in Port Harcourt, where he’s been working with our partners—a radio station and two civil society organizations—on a public interest radio program. Though it just launched a few weeks ago, the program has already had a few successful episodes, and Zack fills us in on the behind-the-scenes programming activities.
By 4:00pm, the full team is back and our daily synthesis session is underway.
Today’s session proves especially interesting. Angela’s findings echo those of other team members, confirming some observations of how communities are able to lobby for their needs. This involves understanding the role of traditional leaders, community organizations and other influencers such as the head of a powerful local church. Additionally, Sebastian (front left above) from the Niger Delta Citizens Budget Platform explains the path that some individuals take in gaining political power.
It’s getting late.
Synthesis was supposed to finish by 6:00pm, but the whole team wants to continue, even though we’re now sitting in the dark. Power is spotty in Benin—ironic for us, as we’re living just off a street the locals refer to as Power Line Road.
The discussion is moving toward ideas for improvement. Dave, Reboot’s new Director of Programs, has only just arrived in Nigeria, but is no less ready to dive in. He offers a fresh perspective to the analysis and interpretation of the data. He also raises new questions about the dynamics between local and state governments—all this and he’s operating on little sleep after 50+ hours in transit.
Once synthesis finally finishes, a group of us head out for a well-deserved drinks to wrap a long day. At 9:00pm, the core Reboot team returns for a quick meeting to plan the next day before we all call it a night. I take the time before bed to work on my non-Nigeria projects. I also prepare the research plan for the next day before lights out, so that when Reboot Nigeria rises early again we’ll be up and running.
Mollie Ruskin and Ethan Wilkes will be at General Assembly this evening. They’ll be teaching a class on how design research can be used to address social challenges as part of a General Assembly business course.
This past week our research team traveled to Austin, Texas where we got a first-hand look at how Travis County runs its elections.
We spent time with the Travis County Tax Assessor’s Office, which oversees voter registration and districting activities. We also met with the Clerk’s Office, which is responsible for the implementation of elections. This quirky bureaucratic distinction is a relic of the days when Texas had a poll tax.
We arrived at an opportune time, coinciding with the announcement that Austin is soon to be the proud owner of high-speed internet, compliments of Google Fiber. The press was abuzz discussing the effects Google’s new technology will have on life and economy in this Texan city known largely for the annual SXSW conference.
We too got excited about Austin’s tech upgrade and its potential to impact local elections. But we were most excited about the human systems and processes we found in Travis County’s election administration. Travis County, we learned, is home to numerous organizational innovations in governance—and four in particular stood out to us.
First, we found a strong organizational emphasis on staff training and exposure to elections work at the national level. Many county elections officials had crystal plaques on their desks, indicating that they had been trained, sometimes out-of-state, as certified elections/registration administrators through the National Association of Election Officials. A few managers even hold leadership positions within national associations, and use this birds-eye positioning to stay informed on relevant elections developments. The result is that staff members throughout the hierarchy know what is happening outside their county and are aware of how their work affects the bigger picture.
Second, we noted an impressive level of professional specialization. The county offices have succeeded in bringing in-house functions that other jurisdictions only dream about: a dedicated web designer who can maintain electronic engagement activities and develop new engagement tools; public information and legislative tracking capacity that offers situational awareness to the office on politics and the media in real-time; and business analysis capacity that exists to anticipate and implement a good blend of technological and human processes in the office.
Third, we saw a clear resourcefulness in staffing. Because of its large size (602,000 registered voters), Travis County relies heavily on temporary workers. These workers help to register new voters close to the deadline, prepare and test elections equipment ahead of voting day, and who support a variety of other critical functions during peak activity periods.
Instead of viewing temporary workers as a secondary inputs to the process, the county offices invest in their pool of temporaries. Most of these individuals have worked numerous election cycles. Many of the offices’ permanent employees started as temporary workers, indicating a talent pipeline that is carefully built and tapped effectively when new positions become available.
Finally, the Travis County Clerk convenes “study groups” from across academia, business, government, and civil society when the county seeks to innovate its own technology or processes. Consulting friends and foes alike, this allows the Clerk’s Office to source opinions and insights from a variety of perspectives and provides legitimacy for the eventual decisions. Based on a review of its needs and a survey of existing options, the Clerk’s Office has developed a prototype for a voting product it would like to see built, effectively guiding the market from the driver’s seat.
This kind of organizational innovation is the foundation for an effective use of resources, including technology. As Michael Winn, Director of Elections at the Clerk’s Office, aptly summed up for our team, “each election is an opportunity to test something new.” We are eager to track what happens in Travis County, especially as Google Fiber spreads from street to street.
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We are taking a breather this week to process our findings to date. But we’ll be back on the road next week. Looking forward to spending some time with the Martin County elections team in Florida soon!
Ethan Wilkes is joining Robin Hood Foundation’s Innovation Workshop today. The Robin Hood Foundation is bringing together a group of grantees with the best and brightest to explore how mobile technology, open data and the social web can help fight poverty in New York City.
For the last 6 months I have watched my growing family of colleagues pen their passions, thoughts, and experiences about Reboot’s work toward building a 21st century social contract.
But, I have not been able to share myself, as I have been head down and hard at work. Today, I am extraordinarily pleased to tell you why.
Reboot Nigeria is now officially open.
We’ve established our first country office and laid the groundwork for growing into the next stage of Reboot’s vision.
Though our office is newly established, our experience in Nigeria is not. Since early 2012, we have been increasingly growing our portfolio here working with members of the international community, major private sector actors, and various parts of the Nigerian government. We have partnered with organizations large and small—from the World Bank and PriceWaterhouseCoopers to the local NGOs Stakeholder Democracy Network and the Niger Delta Citizens and Budget Platform.
Our focus has been a consistent reflection of Reboot’s overall mission: supporting new and improved relationships between citizens and their government to create more justice, accountability, and opportunity for Nigerians.
This has been both humbling and highly rewarding work.
I’ve had the chance to laugh, sweat and cry alongside great colleagues. These include the members of our first country team, comprised of some of the smartest and most talented people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. We have benefitted from one another’s experience and perspective as we wrestle with the hard questions behind achieving accountable governance.
And we’ve learned plenty too!
I can only dream of the time and space to step back and adequately capture all of the lessons gleaned from this experience. But for the eager reader keen to try and bootstrap a theory of change into ground reality, here are a handy few takeaways:
That implementing a ‘people’ driven approach to development and governance would require significant adaptation is unsurprising. The number of partners, stakeholders, and communities involved in our work in Nigeria makes this truism ring only louder. The volume of feedback on our plans is extraordinary!
The best plans help give us direction, but every stage of implementation requires structural revision to our approach. In Nigeria, we are iterating constantly with plans involving many people and complex strategies. The adaptive process impacts financial planning, team morale, and how we manage progress among our partners.
Our work in Nigeria relies on great partners, who bring valuable expertise, capacity, networks, and knowledge. Our partners define the caliber of our success. We’ve learned to put even more effort than anticipated into identifying the organizations we collaborate with. This requires doing extensive upfront work on tight timelines to ensure our partners share enough of our philosophy and professional standards for a happy marriage over time.
Trying to change a big problem at scale and over time means diving into local politics, whether you want to or not. Maintaining the right relationships, getting invited to the right events and knowing when to gracefully leave the show are all factors that define success. This took some adjustment given our organizational culture which preferences meeting people’s needs over wading into the political processes that can make that possible. We’ve had to replace our determined refusal to engage in politics with a willingness to leverage political dynamics for our programmatic goals.
Expenses come hard and fast, and often well before the receivables to support them arrive. Partners can’t work on sweat equity, offices must be rented and capital investments made. This has forced a level of financial planning and security that has improved many parts of our enterprise. And we’re eager for help! In the next week we’ll be listing a job description for a new Manager of Finance and Administration. If you’re the bees knees when it comes to managing the financial operations of a rapidly growing social enterprise, we want to hear from you.
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I am extremely grateful for the colleagues, partners and institutional supporters that have made this progress possible. Our vision for the future is one where new models of collective action will improve governments, institutions and communities. It is these collaborations that help us make our contributions towards translating that vision into reality.
Onwards, upwards.
In Vermont, March is the season for sugaring—it is when the days are warm and nights are cold that the maple sap starts flowing. In addition to sampling one of state’s better-known food products, our research team got a taste of some pure democracy last week, straight from the tap of “town meeting.”
Only seven states administer elections at the town level, and Vermont is one of them. The other 43 states administer by county. Town meeting—which takes the form of representative democracy in Brattleboro, Vermont—is when local officials are elected, annual budgets are approved, and other affairs are settled. We spent this past week with Brattleboro Town Clerk Annette Cappy, and her small but mighty team in the Clerk’s Office, learning how this approach structures local decision-making.
Brattleboro is unique among Vermont’s towns for holding Representative Town Meeting on the third Saturday of March. Unlike Vermont’s other town meetings, which are an exercise in direct democracy, Brattleboro elects about 140 “town meeting members” as representatives. They vote on the town budget, school budget, and articles of consideration.
Prior to the 1960s, all of Brattleboro’s residents could attend and vote at town meeting. When the number of attendees began to exceed the available space for holding meetings, the town opted for a representative model. Any resident can still express an opinion at the meeting, but only town meeting members can vote.
In order to become a town meeting member, all one needs is 10 signatures on a petition and confirmation that s/he is registered to vote. Select board members—a central organizing group with an additional layer of responsibility—must secure 30 signatures to be elected. The meeting is facilitated by an elected “town moderator”—an individual who must possess an uncommon patience and sense of fairness in deliberation—who executes the guidelines of the town charter.
In recent years, growing income diversity in Brattleboro has contributed to a greater variety of opinions and perspectives among town meeting members. The result is a more prolonged democratic decision-making process.
According to residents, this year’s meeting was the most contentious in recent memory. From 8:30am to 10:30pm, members debated an increase in the school budget and the future of a prominent downtown building, among other issues. And as one resident observed, “you have to be there to know what it’s like, you really do.”
Still, residents are proud of their town meeting process, which they described as the purest form of democracy. Many we spoke with preferred the deliberative nature of town meeting to the “Australian Ballot,” also known as secret ballot, where all voters mark their choices on paper in privacy.
Although Clerk Cappy reminded us that Vermont’s one electoral college vote will never qualify it for swing-state status in the United States; the residents still want their say in global affairs. One of the more famous recent advisory articles in the town, put forward by a local citizen, aimed to indict Former President George W. Bush and Former Vice President Dick Cheney for war crimes, should they ever set foot in Brattleboro.
Despite this history of civic deliberation, Brattleboro is facing a recent challenge of motivating residents to run for town meeting member. In the past, the position bore a sought-after status.
Some cited apathy as the reason for this diminished willingness to participate. A gentleman who has had a long history of public service in the town postulated that “the essence of democracy is about compromise; but Americans, we love a winner, so it’s hard to get impassioned about something when you have to make large sacrifices.”
A young town meeting member offered a different perspective, suggesting that voters did not have enough information about the candidates or the issues in advance of the election to translate why the act of voting should be meaningful to them.
This week raised an interesting question in our ongoing exploration of the future of American elections: what does it mean for our civic future if even the most carefully cultivated of democratic processes, built upon strong bonds between neighbors, struggles for fresh inputs?
Deliberative democracy is arguably more robust in this small corner of Vermont than in the cosmopolitan areas of the nation that receive the most media coverage. But are they not both subject to the necessity of engaging the newest members of our polity to participate as civic actors?
For this challenge, our nation’s towns and counties alike may need to ask new questions about how to reach younger residents, on whom they will by necessity rely to keep activities like town meeting thriving into the next era of our democracy.
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Up this week: Austin, Texas!
We are looking forward to spending some time with the Travis County elections team, moving from a small blue state to a big red one. Tweet @theReboot with any good barbecue or music recommendations!
In recent years, crowdfunding models have offered disruptive examples of collective action problem-solving.
Crowdfunded micro-lending initiatives like Kiva are enabling people all over the world to support entrepreneurs in emerging contexts. In only two years, the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter has helped hundreds of thousands of creators secure the capital they need to bring new ideas, products, services, and stories to the world.
And there are many more mission-driven crowdfunding platforms—Global Giving, Crowdrise, Donors Choose, Raise 5, and Catapult, to name a few.
How could development organizations leverage the emergence of these new models to collectively finance and advance human development outcomes worldwide?
This is a question a cross-divisional team at the World Bank raised among staff as part of this year’s annual Sustainable Development Forum. With Reboot’s support, this team convened a “Crowdfunding for Development” brainstorming workshop to help identify answers to this question. Together, we identified several dimensions through which crowdfunding can integrate with and inform World Bank initiatives worldwide.
For starters, crowdfunding projects often make use of similar financing models that are commonly used by the Bank. These include:
Grant and Reward-Based
The original crowdfunding model was designed around individuals pitching their project or product offering a compelling story to secure funding. In some cases, the person providing the grant was offered a non-monetized return. The rewards could come in the form of a signed fan-picture, a “thank you” in the end of an independent film, or similar.
Recoverable Grantmaking / Debt-free Lending
Crowdfunding enables impact investing by marrying interest in social change with specific financial needs. This can be done without a profit motive through investments that do not return a financial gain, but are instead coupled with the accrual of social capital or other non-monetary reward.
Investment / Debt Lending
Similar to traditional private market lending, crowdfinancing can be used by lenders to offer capital with an expectation of receiving some monetary gain on their principal.
Crowdfunding also has the potential to support the success of World Bank operations and programs through a variety of practical applications. Some of these include:
Expanding Entrepreneurs’ Access to Capital
Crowdfunding reduces the cost of accessing capital by aggregating potential lenders. It can also increase the lending capacity of capital by linking crowdlenders with an institutional credit facility. For example, institutional credit worth USD 5 million could provide the base capital to attract crowdlenders who significantly expand the pool of available financing for a given sector.
Aggregating Demand and Filtering Supply
Crowdfunding specifically and the potential for accessing capital more generally both act as incentives to aggregate demand and filter supply. In crowdfunding, producers gain increased benefit from the aggregated demand for a given good, product, or service. Mechanics on many crowdfunding platforms allow funders to work collectively to determine which supply option has the highest collective demand.
Enabling Organizational Innovation and Efficiency
Organizations often face scenarios where they have unused capital. Crowdfunding can be applied in these instances to encourage internal groups to propose projects worthy of funding. Participants from the entire organization (the “crowd” in this case) can then select their common priorities as “winners” of the available financing.
Capitalizing New Markets
Certain markets may have enough demand to be sustainable, but lack the necessary startup capital to properly mobilize. Crowdfunding can help overcome these barriers by aggregating a long-tail of relatively small demand, and sharing risk across a large group. This is a particularly interesting model for ‘pro-social’ markets that enjoy demand based on their social benefits, but do not necessarily offer a competitive financial return in the near-term.
Crowdfunding is not without its limitations, not the least of which is scale. Successfully crowdfunded initiatives tend to be very straightforward and small. Complex projects that require explanation beyond a 90-second visual pitch generally don’t fare well on the crowdfunding circuit. Securing capital for large, potentially game-changing initiatives through crowdfunding, therefore, can be exceedingly difficult.
But this didn’t stop the workshop participants from hatching some great ideas of their own. One team saw crowdfunding as an excellent means of keeping communities invested in projects. Potential projects could be pitched to the community. Those that the community is able to raise money for, the Bank would then provide extra backing to scale. Another team saw crowdfunding as a useful mechanism internally, through which Team Task Leaders could use end of the year funds to support colleagues’ projects. Finally, a third team identified opportunities to match Bank financing with crowdfunding to grow small and medium-sized enterprise credits.
Crowdfunding platforms and crowdfunding initiatives hold great promise for the future. We’re excited by the emergence of these new models and their potential for supporting the World Bank’s programming worldwide, and governance and development efforts in general. Indeed, crowdfunding for development raises many questions, but it is space that merits further exploration.
Ethan Wilkes is speaking at Columbia Business School‘s annual “China Business Conference” today. He’ll be joining a panel to discuss social media’s role in modern Chinese society.