- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club Forums on ideastream are made possible by the generous support of PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(energetic electronic music) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, Chief Executive here, also a proud member.

Today is February 19th, and you're with a virtual City Club forum.

On March 2nd and 3rd of this year, next month, the Urban Land Institute of Cleveland and the city of Cleveland will present a virtual symposium entitled, "Building a 21st Century City: "The Future is Now."

The symposium will focus on how Cleveland can embrace advances in technology, mobility and economic inclusiveness to result in and create a more competitive and smarter city, ready for the changing technology of the 21st century.

The symposium reflects the deep interest our community has in examining how innovative technologies can solve city problems and improve the lives of all residents.

The City Club has contributed to this conversation over the years, highlighting successful leaders in innovative projects, including Chattanooga, Tennessee Mayor Andy Berke, who spoke on the city's efforts to implement the fastest, cheapest and most pervasive internet in the country.

Susan Crawford, Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, she talked about how data smart governance can be used to build trust in the public sector and foster communities.

And last year, Code for America Founder and Executive Director Jennifer Pahlka discussed how their work is tackling some of government's biggest challenges and social problems and increasing civic engagement and community engagement on the way.

That conversation continues today with Dr. Beth Noveck.

She directs the Governance Lab, also known as just Gov Lab and its MacArthur Research Network on opening governance.

She's also a professor in technology, culture and society and an affiliated faculty at the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering.

At the Gov Lab, Dr. Noveck directs better governance programs, including work with public institutions on public engagement and lawmaking, expert sourcing innovative solutions to hard problems and co-creation between cities and citizens.

She also coaches public entrepreneurs, working with passionate individuals to take their public interest projects from idea to implementation.

Footnote: in 2018, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state's first Chief Innovation Officer, responsible for blending technology, policy and design to solve problems and deliver better services to citizens.

So she works on both sides of the Hudson River, and we're delighted to welcome her to the Cuyahoga River Valley.

Today, we'll talk with Dr. Noveck about her experiences at the intersection of technology, academia and state and local governments, and offer insights on what Cleveland can do to succeed in the 21st century.

If you have questions for Dr. Noveck, text them to (330) 541-5794.

That's (330) 541-5794.

And if you're on Twitter, you can tweet your question @TheCityClub.

We will work them into the program.

Dr. Beth Noveck, welcome to the City Club of Cleveland.

- [Noveck] Great to be here.

Thanks, Dan, thanks for having me, and nice to, at least virtually, be in Cleveland.

- It's great to have you.

When this is all over, we will have you here for real.

We'll do, like, the whole year again, basically, and bring everybody back.

- [Noveck] We definitely need a do over.

- Beth, when we're talking about innovation in government, what are we talking about exactly?

How do you see this whole world of government innovation?

- [Noveck] Look, we have to start first with the urgency of the problem.

Obviously, it won't come as any surprise to people here, you know, that the level of distrust in government has been plummeting over the last generation, and that number, you know, just when you think it can't go any lower, you know, 3% of people, for example, say they trust the federal government to do what's right most of the time.

And I think, you know, really the challenge is that government needs to earn that trust.

You know, if we look at what's going on in Texas today, we look at what's going on all over the country with the rollout of vaccines, you know, a lot of us have really grave concerns, I think, about the functioning of government, and that gets blended in, of course, with a lot of concern about what's going on with the sport of politics.

That often obscures, though, I have to say, our constant and relentless media focus on kind of left versus right, really obscures our taking a good hard look at how we solve and address problems the day after the election, not just what leads up to the elections.

But with that said as a backdrop, just to kind of make the case for why this is so urgent to be concerned about and why I'm so glad you're talking to people like Jen Pahlka and Susan Crawford and other people who think hard and work hard on innovations in governance is that there's really a lot to be optimistic about, and, you know, COVID in many ways, counterintuitively perhaps, has really shown us the pathway to more innovative government.

So I'll take just a couple of examples.

Since you mentioned some of our work in New Jersey, you know, when COVID struck, we turned around our little Innovation Office and we partnered with a private sector company to stand up a COVID information hub, you know, a website where you could get one-stop information about COVID, COVID-19.nj.gov.

We stood that up in three days.

Now in a city, and excuse me, in a state of fewer than nine million people, we've had already 28 million visitors to that website, 55 million different page views.

We partnered with an NGO called the Federation of American Scientists and crowdsourced a network of 600 scientists, who provided real-time answers to people's questions about the virus.

You know, there's been so much confusion about the science and should we wear masks?

Should we not wear masks?

You remember that in the beginning?

Should we drink bleach?

Should we, you know, clean our countertops with vodka?

So we got real time, you know, qualified scientists to be able to provide information to people, but we didn't have data, because you remember in the beginning, we didn't have testing.

We called up Kerala, India, and we borrowed the idea of a symptom tracker from them, and in one day we built a tool that would allow people to self report whether they had symptoms, and at the same time, provide them with public health information.

That gave us our first kind of real time indicator, because people were telling us, again, kind of crowdsourcing, I'm coughing, I'm sneezing, I have a fever, to allow us to predict the spread of the virus, and I have to say, as a result of that, just as a quick footnote there, we never ran out of ventilators, we never ran out of PPE.

We didn't have those kinds of crises, because we had an advanced warning mechanism that we put in place.

So there are lots more great stories to tell there, and I hope we're going to get into more, some of what's going on around the world, that even though people are very depressed in many ways and distrustful of government, especially at the national level, there's a lot going on, especially in states and cities in terms of better uses of, as you mentioned at the outset, tech, policy and design to really work differently and solve problems more effectively than we've been doing in the past.

- You know, in terms of COVID tracking, your story about tracking symptoms reminds me of an effort that Northeast Ohio's Sewer District is actually involved in locally, and I know other sewer districts around the country have been involved in is putting sensors, using wastewater sensors in wastewater to track COVID levels that sometimes appear prior to the, you see a spike or a surge prior to seeing it in testing.

- [Noveck] It was another one of the great innovations that sort of people have been looking at how to use wastewater, essentially, to measure the prevalence of disease in a public health system, and that kind of science really took off thanks to a lot of experiments in places you wouldn't sometimes anticipate them.

I mean, your sewer authority was really then at the forefront in terms of some of the experiments that were going on.

I understand they're also at the forefront in their use of social media too, so something we have in common with New Jersey, which might surprise you, is that when it comes to Twitter and it comes to communication, we do it with a sense of humor, but that wastewater surveillance and testing was a great example, I think, of both an innovative new technology and innovative science, but then combining it with the policy and also the taking action to implement these new innovations, because, you know, you can have innovations in the lab, but unless we're translating them in terms of boots on the ground, implementation in neighborhoods and in communities, you don't really get to realize the benefits, and wastewater testing really is a great way to help us at, you know, to much more pinpoint more readily where is the virus spreading?

- You brought up social media, and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District's Twitter handle, it's a great follow.

As an example in New Jersey, @NJgov is also a very funny follow and useful and informative, and I wonder if you could talk about how governments, what that, that's a tactic in a broader strategy around citizen engagement, and can you help us understand it in these terms of innovation, because it is a different mode for government to be tweeting with a wink, although it's New Jersey, so sarcasm should be expected.

- [Noveck] Well, maybe, you know, a sewer authority and the state of New Jersey has something in common there.

I mean, we are good at, you sorta need to laugh at yourself and you have to have a heavy dose of irony.

There's also a wonderful person who's been back of that account who really, Pearl Gable, who was the person who started this whole idea of government being in, you know, not just funny, but really, what underlies that is the notion that government has to be having a conversation with citizens, has to be engaging with citizens, instead of thinking about governing the way we've done in the past, which is behind closed doors, is something in one removed from citizens and where the relationship, frankly, is quite adversarial.

Citizens complain, you know, government hides.

The idea of instead reaching out, creating listening institutions who are in conversation with people thinking about, especially using technology to solve problems together is what's really exciting, you know?

So again, there's sometimes a tech piece of it.

Let's take an, a great example from the UK is a phenomenal app that was created there called Good Sam by a trauma doctor by the name of Mark Wilson.

And so he started this app to essentially match, initially, was off-duty doctors, nurses, paramedics to people having accidents with the idea being that, you know, somebody sitting at a doctor, an off duty doctor or nurse sitting on a pub bar stool can get to a victim faster than even a first responder can.

We have something like this in the US started in California called PulsePoint, but this idea of sort of using technology, again, to kind of bring government and people together sort of coordinate between first responders, and then volunteers being able to accelerate help for victims.

Or, you know, take in Louisville, they did a project called Air Louisville, together with what started as a university project, and was spun out, something called Propeller Health.

They used GPS enabled inhalers, so they put a little GPS tracker on an inhaler, but they gave it to citizens and then had people sort of, you know, it would monitor your location every time you used it.

What that allowed the government to do was to understand where were asthma attacks occurring, so by being able to collect that data and map that data, they were able to reduce rescue inhaler use by 82% in just the first year of the project.

So it's phenomenal in terms of that feedback loop you can create when government collaborates with citizens, especially with tech, helping to make that efficient and easy and scalable to then make policy to take actions that actually work, which is really what we need more of.

- I'm curious to know what two of the biggest challenges that our community faces here in greater Cleveland, but in particular, inside the city of Cleveland, although the, some of the inner ring suburbs, as well are, their outcomes mirror Cleveland's.

Those two problems are lead poisoning among children and infant mortality.

The lead poisoning here is not like Flint, Michigan, of course.

It's more environmental, and that it's old homes with, that had been painted with lead paint, lead based paint.

Are there any solutions that you've seen implemented in cities around the country to address those two issues?

- [Noveck] So let's take the, you know, you mentioned Flint, Michigan, so that's the first thing that jumps out at my mind.

And again, what you've seen for example, there is, or like in any of these contexts, well, let me take this quick example, if I might, because you mentioned Flint, so it's not specific to the lead case, but it can apply in that circumstance just as well.

So they have a significant problem, not just with lead in the water, but also with derelict land use sites and with all the problems that come with it in terms of land use challenges, you know, so radical population drop in Flint over the last generations led to a lot of vacant homes, a lot of empty lots.

You know, you have 40% of properties there that are blighted, and so what they actually did was, again, coming back to this idea of a collaboration between government and citizens enabled by technology, they turned around and asked citizens to essentially do a census of land use sites, and they were able then to really map the whole city to document what's going on in terms of where blight is happening and by virtue of having that information and having it quickly, they were able then, for example, if I recall, to apply for and receive a $60 million blight elimination grant from from Treasury.

So it's really, though, giving them a transparent picture of where problems were happening.

You know, some of you may have watched John Oliver when he came back on air this week and he talked about, I think it was, I get all my news from the comedians, but I think it was John, one of the comedians, I think it was John Oliver, mentioned an app that they rolled out in Thailand to allow people to spot problems in so-called wet markets and in other agricultural settings, you know, where is their disease cropping up?

So in other words, to be the eyes and ears.

A lot of cities also have a 311 hotline or a 211 hotline, again, to allow citizens to be the eyes and ears, allow us to understand what's going on on the ground better, and that allows governments in turn to be able to better target scarce enforcement resources.

So, you know, the lead paint that's in the, that sort of structural and systemic, is not something you can have citizens cleaning up by themselves.

It's hazardous and it's dangerous, but at least identifying where it's taking place, identifying where it is, using citizens to point out and to be able then to use data to map where the problems are taking place.

You know, that's something that then allows at least us to see where the problems are and to target their scarce, those scarce resources.

In Ohio a couple of years ago, and I'm not sure if this example is already well known to people, in Zanesville, Ohio, they had that significant problem with, essentially, red lining in water usage, and it was only because they were able to collect the data, map the data, open the data and see, gee, there's a significant disparity between black families and white families in terms of who's getting clean water supply that then allowed for the strategic litigation to really respond to that problem.

So, let me get back to, you mentioned lead.

What was the other one?

- The other one, let me just remind the listeners, that we are, you're with the City Club Friday Forum.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, talking with Beth Noveck.

She is the Director of the Governance Lab and its MacArthur Research Network on opening governance.

She's also a professor of tech, culture and society at the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University at their Tandon School of Engineering.

She happens to additionally be the Chief Innovation Officer of the state of New Jersey, and somehow she's found an hour out of all of that to join us here at the City Club Friday Forum.

If you have questions for Beth Noveck, please get in touch: (330) 541-5794 is the number to text your question.

That's (330) 541-5794 to text your question.

If you're on Twitter, please tweet it @TheCityClub, and we will work it into the second half of the program.

The other question, or the other issue that we, that is one of the most pressing issues that we face in Cleveland is infant mortality and the disproportionate impact, that, of course, is also having a disproportionate impact on black and brown women and their children.

- [Noveck] Yeah, and again, that's an area where, you know, in New Jersey, we are in a competition for the race to the bottom with you in terms of the disparity between the health outcomes for a black and a white mother, where you are five times more likely to die in New Jersey of complications from childbirth if you're black than if you're white.

And so, you know, the first challenge, though, to addressing that kind of problem is being able to see the problem, and that's where greater uses of data, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter, where there has been, I think, now much greater awareness of the fact that we are in the first place not always collecting the data that we need to be able to even spot the problems, let alone then using the data.

So we've seen, especially I think thanks to COVID, you know, look, all of us are hanging on the Johns Hopkins map or going on Google to see how the pandemic is spreading and how many people are dying.

I think we've never become more aware of the role of data in solving problems than we are now.

You know, I was explaining to my child the other day that I had a statistics requirement in college, and I wish I had paid more attention in that class, but we had no idea when I went to college how important data was to our lives in the way that we understand it now.

But so now you have really people who are just really at the forefront, like MIT Media Lab has created an Atlas of Inequality to, for example, understand and visualize phenomenon like gentrification and segregation.

You know, city of Los Angeles published its indicator, its index of neighborhood change to do something similar about really understanding disparities and land use conditions.

You have lots of different experiments, then, using data, especially in the public health context, to understand this problem of infant mortality and disparities.

You know, groups like Data for Black Lives are using data science to improve the lives of black people.

There's another group called Equal Health, which is doing great work to be able to see and measure those disparities, because again, if we can't see them, whether it's lead or whether it's infant child mortality, whether it's another issue, we have to know where it's occurring.

Otherwise, we're spreading our scarce resources too thin.

You know, I'll give you a, just a, you know, it may seem almost a silly example, but the city of Chicago was dealing with a very different issue, foodborne illness, and typically like any city, they would go down the list A to Z and inspect restaurants one after another to try to fight instances of salmonella, but when they used a little data to see where workers, where was foodborne illness occurring in the past, where have there been instances, for example, of rats reported or other complaints about garbage, they were able then to develop an algorithm to prioritize certain restaurants, and within one year, they decreased the incidence of foodborne illness by 25%, so that's a pretty, I think stark example of how, when we can see the problem and we can understand where it's happening, we can prioritize interventions instead of trying to create one size fits all solutions and try to do everything, and thereby serve no one.

- Some of the solutions and projects you've talked about, Beth Noveck, rely on citizen participation, which would rely on a certain level of digital infrastructure that many of our cities don't actually have, and I, what I mean by that is that there's a massive digital divide, and not all of our citizens have access to the broadband internet that has come to be, basically, the plumbing of our information society.

We, I mentioned at the top of the show that we spoke to mayor Andy Berke few years ago of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they created a ubiquitous free high-speed internet system.

What else is it's become a crisis this year, though, because of the reliance on remote learning for, to get students through school, without being able to come to school.

What are you seeing being implemented successfully besides the, you know, it's sort of that thing, right?

Like, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago.

So what's been implemented successfully in response to the crisis?

- [Noveck] So, you know, again, I'm glad you mentioned Andy Berke, and you had Susan Crawford on, who's probably the nation's foremost expert on broadband innovations in this country, and you're correct, I think, to point out that these challenges and we're seeing this in Texas right now.

There are chronic challenges where we should have invested in energy infrastructure, in winterizing that infrastructure 10 years ago.

And then there are acute challenges, like, we need to get generators to people today, we need to get blankets to people today and worry about, you know, defrosting wind turbines tomorrow and how we're going to upgrade the energy grid, and so for all of these, I think we have to look at the spectrum of innovations that both deal with the chronic and the acute, and especially with the chronic, and I think it's important to recognize, to come back to that idea that innovation is never just technology by itself.

It's the combination of technology with effective policy where you need it.

So, you know, we can have wonderful examples in the short-term of, let's say, public/private collaborations that we've seen where, let's say, Verizon has helped to roll out free.

You know, there's been partnerships between telcos and governments to essentially provision free broadband to people, to veterans, to school children, to provide that access in the short term and respond to those challenges.

But in the longer term, we also need to have innovative policymaking, not just innovative technology, and often it's a marriage between the two, where you are, let's say, enacting a policy for rollout of municipal broadband, where you are engaging in longer-term public private partnerships with companies.

You've seen many cities do, for example, Google, to roll out local fiber and provide access, as well as in the short-term solutions of handing out laptops and things like that.

So I think you see that in a lot of areas, but what it points to is the fact that, and I think it's really important to make clear, and I don't want people to come away with the sense that, like, I am by no means saying there's an app for that.

In other words, the common refrain like, oh, we can solve everything with technology.

We can't, right?

We need to have effective policy.

If we're going to have, for example, the data that shows us where we have effective broadband, you know, if we're really gonna have an effective broadband map that tells us this is where we have wifi.

This is where we don't have it.

These are the neighborhoods that are getting it.

This is where we don't.

The government has to step in and mandate the companies actually publish that data, and we have to have enforcement to ensure that that data is actually provided and that it's reliable, and we're following through and actually getting that data, you know, so it's, you have to do both things together, and I think that's why you're seeing, for example, coming out of this White House, the new White House, over 50 executive orders that have come out.

How long have we had this administration?

What has it been, a month of, with COVID, I have lost track of the day of the week, but I think it's been about a month since, as he's now being called, the other guy, and you've seen 50 plus executive orders, you know, an attempt, a really big push around policy to then and to marry that, then, with additional forms of innovation and implementation, so you have to have the two working together.

- One of the biggest challenges that we see, and another challenge, of course, that the pandemic has exacerbated is a lack of citizen engagement at the, and ironically, that happens at a moment when, you know, the levels of voting have skyrocketed, right?

But at the local level, citizens are not that engaged.

It's a very big problem in Cleveland, where in the last mayoral election, three and a half years ago, four years ago, there was the winning, the Mayor himself, won with just about a total of less than 37,000 votes.

That was the total in the entire that he needed to win.

That was more than half.

It was almost 60%, I think, of the votes that were cast in that election.

The, so the question that I'm sort of seeking to discuss with you here is who does the best in terms of citizen engagement?

Which community have you seen, whether a city of whatever size has the most engaged citizenry, and what effect is that having on local, on democracy at the local level?

- [Noveck] So I don't know if there are, maybe there should be an award for the most engaged community.

I don't know that there is one.

Thankfully, there isn't one place we can point to as the only place where it's happening.

You know, so first I think it's important to point out that, of course, in the last election cycle, we have seen a dramatic uptick in terms of participation in elections and in voter turnout in the last presidential election.

I mean, historic, record numbers, but that said, you know, to measure democracy only by voting at the polling booth once every four years or once every year would be a very anemic way of thinking about democracy.

And what's so much more exciting, I think, are the engagement of citizens in a wide variety of other problem solving capacities that really speak to people's talent, to their skills, their ability.

I think during COVID, you know, we see an, we saw an outpouring everywhere of mutual aid societies, of neighbors helping neighbors, of people bringing food to the elderly, you know, volunteerism of all kinds.

So, whereas yes, the pandemic put a bit of a damper on leaving your house, many people braved, you know, the danger of the pandemic and went out and did help neighbors, either in real space or in virtual ways, and we're seeing, again, lots of that kind of volunteerism and outpouring now in Texas and other places, but I think what's really exciting in terms of when you ask me about, like, where there are exciting things happening, I think it's where you don't just have civic volunteerism, but you have, again, that partnership where you have government actually working with citizens to make change happen, bringing their considerable resources to bear.

So, you know, let's take Helsinki for example, and the Nordics always have a lot of interesting things going on, but there they decided, like many communities, to create a sustainability plan, to create a climate action plan.

They set 147 different targets, and they designed that plan with citizens, so those 147 things we're going to do as a city were determined by city hall working with citizens.

And then more than that, they created, they put it up online, they created a visual map.

They assigned a civil servant who's responsible for every single one of those 147 targets, and then citizens can hold people accountable for what they're doing in terms of holding the city, you know, overlooking what the city is doing in terms of this climate watch project.

Or, let's take something that's going on just this week.

So on Monday, there will be an award ceremony for five cities in Africa: Mutare in Zimbabwe, Accra in Ghana, Kampala in Uganda, Kano in Nigeria, and Bahir Dar in Ethiopia.

Those five cities have gotten together, despite different politics and different mayors, they've gotten together, and over the last three months, they went to their citizens across those five cities, and they said help us to solve our hardest problems, and they agreed together what are the problems they're going to work on?

They picked improving waste management and urban resilience in slums and growing their informal economy, and then they asked residents across those cities for solutions to those problems, with the commitment being that if people provide solutions, the cities are gonna implement them, and on Monday, the winners, the best of the projects, and there were hundreds of suggestions that were proposals that were made, the winners are going to be announced on Monday, with then the cities committing to implement those projects with some support from UNDP going forward.

So there are lots of things like that, where you have innovative processes by which cities and citizens are actually working together to solve problems in new ways so that it's not just the volunteerism, which we're so good at in this country, but it's really changing how the institutions work to take advantage of that volunteerism to really change how we do things.

- I think one of the key.

- [Noveck] I have 100 examples like that.

- I know, and I'm very impressed that you've remembered the names of five cities all at once like that.

I can't, I can hardly remember the names of my three children, but.

- [Noveck] I confess that we're helping to run this project, so I'm deeply engaged in it.

Otherwise I would.

- Nevertheless, I mean, it's still, it's impressive, and I think one of the key things that you mentioned there is that cities are allocating resources in the form of staff, not just a grant dollar, but in the form of staff who are accountable to both their bosses and the citizens they serve to get that, to meet those goals and to stay focused on each of those goals, at least in the Helsinki project that you mentioned.

We're talking with Beth Noveck today.

She runs Gov Lab and she is also the Chief Innovation Officer of the state of New Jersey.

At Gov Lab, and in her work at NYU, where she teaches at the intersection of tech, policy and design, she helps to inspire leaders and future leaders to come up with innovative solutions to solving thorny problems.

And I want to just point out for a second too that this is a classic kind of City Club moment.

We were founded by a group of people in 1912 who wanted to create a mechanism to solve the big problems that cities were facing, and it's always, since 1912, it's always been about solving city problems, and we do other stuff too, but consistently from the beginning, it's been focused on helping to make the city work better.

That's been like, that's why City Clubs were established prior to 1912 in other cities, and why the City Club of Cleveland was established.

You can join our conversation with Beth Noveck in this innovative technological solution online as well right now by texting your question to (330) 541-5794.

That's (330) 541-5794.

If you're on Twitter, you can tweet it @TheCityClub, and we'll work it into the program.

There's a few questions come in so far, Beth, I'm gonna ask you.

Just, you know, just start kind of randomly here, but for a local government in 2021 that hasn't been on this bandwagon yet, what would be the top three things you'd suggest they do, even if it involves investing or reallocating some budget to get with it right now?

And I'll just for context, Beth, tell you that in Cuyahoga County alone, and right now you and I are speaking to, you know, actually a five or six county region or more, but in Cuyahoga County alone, there are 59 individual municipalities.

Cleveland's just the largest.

- [Noveck] So I think, look, let me be very clear that although I've mentioned some big cities like Helsinki or biggish cities like Helsinki and whatnot, that you don't have to be a big city to do this kind of work and you don't even need large budgets to do it.

So I'll give you one of my favorite examples here, which is a guy by the name of Jonathan Wachtel.

He's the single urban planner in a community called Lakewood, Colorado, which is basically a small city suburb outside of Denver, and he was constantly frustrated by the fact that citizens were coming to town meetings, to hearings and saying, if only the city would do this, if only the city would do that, if only the city would do the other thing, and of course there's one person, there's a limit to what he's going to be able to do, so he started something called Lakewood's Sustainable Solutions Network, and what he did was he turned around to citizens are those sustainable neighborhoods programs.

See, I can remember the five cities in Africa, but I forgot the name of the, of I remember it now.

So it was called the Sustainable Neighborhoods Program.

Still going, and he started this pilot project where he essentially said, I want to change how the city does things, and what we're gonna do is instead of my trying to do everything myself.

My office is gonna support neighborhoods in trying to build their own sustainability projects.

So whether it's tree planting or whether it's another kind of recycling project, they have, you know, 500 different events and workshops and projects that are going on.

They've had 20,000 people over the course of this project who participated, and that model has spread from Lakewood now to surrounding cities across the region, and now they've turned it into a nonprofit to try to manage some of these processes.

So the first and foremost thing I would say is really trying to think about where the priority areas are.

If it's in sustainability and climate, if it's in public health, if it's in transportation or waste, whatever the issues are, and that's a good thing to have a conversation with citizens about, is to turn around and say, how can we support citizens to help us in solving some of these problems together, number one.

Number two, there are great tools, free or even or cheap that can be used to go out and ask citizens, what are those problems?

So in New Jersey, we did a project using a free tool called All Our Ideas where we went out, we were worried about the impact of technology on people's jobs, sometimes called the future of work problem, you know, will robots eat all of our jobs?

And we went out and asked workers, what are you actually concerned about, and it was a little more involved than that.

We didn't just, you know, ask an open-ended question, and we actually gave people some choices, and we spent some time kind of designing the project, but it took us less than three weeks, and we heard from 4,000 people who told us this is what I'm actually worried about, so that we're able then to turn around and say, okay, now we can design solutions to the problems people care about, which were not the ones we thought that they cared about.

So the first thing is just, you know, going out and listening, and that can be done with a clipboard, that can be done with a telephone, that can be done with technology, including using Twitter, to ask people what they care about.

There's some great work, for example, coming out of the MIT Media Lab called the Cortico Project, where they are marrying use of new technology to actually have listening conversations with citizens.

So getting on Zoom, having a conversation, but then recording it and using some big data tech to essentially summarize, and, you know, what did we hear, tell us what we heard without having to transcribe every single word, just as a way of listening to the voices of citizens.

So listening to the voices of citizens, number one.

Number two, using open innovation or a competition like they're doing in these five cities in Africa and they've done in five cities in Mexico back in December to say, who has good ideas?

We're going to implement the best ones that people suggest to us, try to solve problems, and an innovation that was developed, frankly, a number of years ago, and it's been in use in 1,500 plus different communities called participatory budgeting, which is to say, we're gonna actually turn over the power to spend some money to citizens themselves and let citizens decide where we should be making those investments.

The best expertise in our communities are residents themselves.

They know where the problems are, and if you're the one experiencing the problem, you probably have a good idea about how to solve it.

So, let me stop with that for the moment.

But essentially listening, asking what the problems are and then asking people for solutions is the first step.

- And I think it's worth noting too, that there are so many of these platforms that are available, ubiquitous, free where citizens are already gathering.

I'm a part of countless Facebook groups that are about my community or my block or my neighborhood, and people are already there griping and offering ideas, so it's really, it's not that hard to go there and listen in or participate.

I'm glad you mentioned participatory budgeting, which typically, I think, involves asking partici, asking citizens to sort of, carving out a portion of the budget, 5% or something like that, to say here, this is the part that we want you to decide or you to assist in deciding.

There's another feedback mechanism that has been created locally here in Cleveland, thanks to Open Cleveland, which is a group of Code for America folks who have taken the mayor's proposed budget, presented it and offered a solution for, or an opportunity for residents of Cleveland to monkey with the, you know, this percentage going to public safety, this other percentage going to programming, community development, economic development and so forth, and you can change all of those percentages and then send your vision and your comments to your councilperson.

This is from Open Cleveland, and I'd encourage listeners to and viewers to check it out.

It's a very interesting thing, but of course, not every community has a Code for America squad.

- [Noveck] Code for America, and you had Jen Pahlka on, she founded Code for America, and they have these brigades all over the country.

She is also a co-founder of something else that started during the pandemic, which was called, which is called United States Digital Response, which was an organization that coordinates volunteer technologists, designers and other professionals to help governments, both at the local level and at the national level and state level to solve hard problems, and that's another place I would encourage people both to volunteer for their Code for America brigade, but also if you have any tech skills or design skills or other professional skills, USDR is another great place to look.

We've taken a strong advantage of USDR volunteers in our team in New Jersey, because we just didn't have enough hands on deck and we needed capacity when it came to build some of the innovations that I was talking about before.

So, you know, it's another great place.

There's people, just so many people willing to help.

And I'll mention again that, you know, I think it's important to make clear that a lot of, well, where's a lot of these things are kind of neighbors helping neighbors and kind of ordinary people coming up with good ideas for how to solve problems.

Ohio also has a lot of great universities, and one of the important things to do is to take advantage of a lot of the expertise that you have in your universities, that you have in industry, and again, with a little bit of technology, it's easy to get people to come together to come up with solutions to problems.

At the Gov Lab, we run something, a series of projects that we call smartercrowdsourcing.org where we say, look, there's a problem, and we put out a call to the world's experts.

We don't just make it a volunteer thing.

We ask people to come, we ask them to recommend other people and we let people volunteer, so it's a little variation on crowdsourcing, but we bring together diverse experts from around the world to help come up with solutions to problems.

We just wrapped up one of these Smarter Crowdsourcing kind of series of online events with hundreds of experts to help seven governments in Latin America come up with solutions to their COVID crisis, you know, public health recommendations.

So, you know, if there is a mayor, if there is a governor, if there is a town manager who has a problem and they ask, I guarantee you people, both the credentialed experts and the real experts who are the people who live in our communities and have the situational awareness of what's going on on the ground, people are gonna step up and they're gonna help.

That's what we're seeing.

- Beth Noveck runs the Gov Lab, and she also teaches at New York University, and she happens to also be the Chief Innovation Officer for the state of New Jersey.

We're talking with her to our City Club Friday Forum.

If you have a question for Beth, please text it to (330) 541-5794.

That's (330) 541-5794.

You can tweet it @TheCityClub.

We'll work it in.

Beth, a question for you.

Doesn't relying on tech and social media play into the class divide, given different participation rates?

This, the listener continues, please don't be one of those who, moving forward out of the pandemic, wants to hide government in the ether and not in person with public meetings.

- [Noveck] You know, and this is a follow on to the question you asked before, really, about digital divide and getting people engaged, and why I want to come back to the point I made before that, like, tech is not a panacea.

There are many ways in which tech is actually, we were just having a conversation with folks from the Department of Ed yesterday about exactly finding this balance.

So there are ways in which technology, for example, is bringing new access to learning, to content, to opportunity and including to government, to people in new ways.

We've been building a project in New Jersey, for example, to provide digital coaching to the unemployed, because frankly for many people, the challenge is getting to an unemployment office, not just during the pandemic, but even before, taking off from the responsibilities of caring for elderly parents, caring for small children, especially in a pandemic, having and being able to afford a car to get to an office, but also an office that may not have all the resources that you need when we can in turn use a mobile phone or use the web to provide coaching to you, to provide resources to you.

So let me say that there are many ways in which technology does help us to overcome the digital divide, you know, to be able to, like, Khan Academy is doing, provide free SAT tutoring and training to people, when before you would've had to pay, you know $1,600 to take a prep course.

That said, though, the whole, all of us, I think are eager to go back to, most of us, at least, would like to see humans again, would like to go out in the real world, would like to interact with people, for all of the community building reasons that creates, in addition to the fact that not everybody has a computer or has reliable bandwidth, and so we do have to be thinking about how do we provide services in ways that are safe from a public health perspective, but also that meet people where they are?

So there are wonderful examples, for example, of governments that are making those services mobile, putting them on a van and driving into communities as they've done.

I'll come back to Finland.

No, not this time.

This is in Brazil, this one in the state of Rio Del Sol in Brazil, in which they wanted to engage citizens in developing policy, and they recognize that not everybody in Brazil has access to a computer or to reliable internet, so they drove around from community to community with these mobile citizen participation vans and engaged with people in, you know, going essentially door to door, street to street to be able to engage people.

In Argentina, they've been doing something similar, where they've brought government, they've had these literally block parties, this was pre-COVID, where government would come and kind of, they close the road and they would set up a booth the way that an MP does in England, where they meet with their constituents at the local church basement or the local gym.

So there are lots of ways in which I think we shouldn't be thinking just about reopening government offices, which may create other challenges of access to people who don't have reliable transportation, let alone reliable wifi, but bringing government to people where they are, in the shopping malls, in the streets, in people's communities, as well as then using technology.

- I really miss block parties, Beth.

Thank you for reminding me.

The, and there really is nothing, nothing online that replaces them at all.

There's a question here about transparency and data.

- [Noveck] Have you been in the gath, have you been in Gather yet?

- [Moulthrop] Yes, we.

- [Noveck] My 11 year old has gotten me, has gotten me into Gather, which is the new block, the new block party of the internet.

- Oh, I hadn't seen that one.

I've seen Clubhouse, which is a very interesting innovation as well.

It's sort of going back to the old school kind of just audio, very familiar to radio listeners as well.

Regarding transparency, can you talk a little bit about transparency in government as a technology or policy that improves or enhances citizen engagement?

And I'm thinking about kind of the open data and also response to public records requests and things of that sort.

- [Noveck] Look, it's gotta be both.

Transparency is a yes and, right?

So I've talked a lot about examples of people using data to create maps of racial equity, people using open data to be able to track land use conditions, as they're doing in Flint, but you don't necessarily get access to that data, and especially we've seen in the last federal administration, lots of effort to hide data, to refuse to publish data.

You have companies that sit on data.

Again, many of them make data available, but we need to have legal mandates for open data.

You know, right now, for example, there's a lot of discussions around vaccines and people's vaccine distribution and accessibility of vaccines, but also the significant problem of many people not knowing whether to trust the vaccine.

If we had policies, as they do in some places, that really mandate that the companies open up all of their data, all of their clinical trial data, not just to an FDA to look at it in a single panel of scientists, but to the public, I think it would dramatically, and this is born out in survey data, many people say they would be much more trusting of vaccines and other cures that are, you know, we don't just want to take something or ingest something based on a press release.

Again, we have wonderful, I think reputable science organizations and institutions in this country, and there's a lot of reason to trust their review of the vaccines.

I've gotten a dose myself, so I, let me be very clear that I think it's important to, and it's our public health duty to get the vaccine, but opening up data would help to increase trust among those people who are concerned.

And similarly, when it comes to issues of transportation, of land use, of broadband, of any one of these other problems that we're talking about, we are gonna need legal mandates to ensure that we can collect the data in the first place, and that again, that we're using that data effectively.

So it's a yes and, where we have the tech today to enable us to use it, to map it, to visualize it, but we need to combine that with the policy that make that possible.

- Another question for you, Beth Noveck, who usually initiates and leads efforts where they didn't exist before, is it political leaders, civic leaders, ordinary citizens and then what is necessary to make sure those innovations remain embedded in the civic infrastructure?

- [Noveck] Ooh, that was two really good questions.

I, you know, I don't think there's a one size fits all in terms of the starting point.

We've seen projects where, you know, you have innovative government leaders who step up and say, I want to ask, I want to engage with citizens, and then you have other efforts where you have citizens demanding that change, who will, you know, try something at a civic level, and then that becomes embedded in government.

So I'll give you a quick example there.

In Taiwan, they had a series of protest movements known as the Sunflower Movement or the Sunflower Revolution, and you had civic leaders there who were demanding more openness, more transparency, more engagement, more of a role for citizens in government, less of the kind of government behind closed doors.

One of the leaders of those movement was a woman by the name of Audrey Tang.

Audrey has since however, then, because of her role in this pressure, become the Digital Minister of Taiwan, and has in turn instituted a process that they call the vTaiwan process, where over the last couple of years, they've engaged 250,000 citizens in crafting 26 pieces of national legislation.

So whether it's their rules on telemedicine or Uber or Airbnb or online alcohol sales, they have created these institutionalized formal processes for really using what citizens say.

In Iceland, they did something similar where a civic organization called active citizens built a tool called Better Reykjavik, and they started this process where citizens could propose ideas for how to solve problems.

That project really took off when the government turned around and said, you know what?

We're gonna take the best ideas on that site, the ones that citizens tell us are the most important, and we're going to agree to review them and where possible, to implement them.

So every month, city hall says, give us the top five ideas from the site and we'll look at them, and that's why you have 20, 25% of the population actively participating in that project.

So it can start from civil society.

It can start with an individual, you know, a Greta Thunberg sitting outside of the parliament, trying to change the world, but it's especially wonderful when these things get joined up, where citizens demand change and then government acts on it, or where you have an innovative leader who says we're going to do things differently, and we want citizens to respond.

So I don't think there's one right answer to where it has to start, but I think there's one right answer to where it has to end up, which is a collaboration that brings together the resources, the money, the attention, the command of media that government has, and also frankly, the legal power that government has with citizen engagement and activism.

And now, of course, I forgot the second part of that question.

You'll have to remind me.

- No, I think you answered it.

It was how do you make sure it remains embedded in the civic infrastructure?

And I think that, you know the involvement of government and the government buy-in is, really seems to be the answer there.

- [Noveck] Yeah, so I think the, and we did some looking this year at places that have really institutionalized change, because you've seen lots of examples of one-off kind of citizen town halls or citizen activism, and they're just that, they're one-offs, they're pilots.

The institutionalization is a really, really important question, though, so I'm glad we spent an extra second on it just to say that yes, where you have that collaboration, and that collaboration leads to real solutions to problems, not just talking for its own sake, that's where I think we've seen a lot of dramatic success.

And again, we'll, I think there are more questions, so we'll get to those, and.

- But I think, I think you're right.

I mean, it has to become the new way we do things, right?

It can't just be the way we did it that one time.

The, there's a request here for you to explain the solvingpublicproblems.org, your new effort at the Gov Lab.

- [Noveck] I don't know who that person is and whether they're on my payroll, but I'm glad they asked.

So we launched last week, a new, so let me, let me tie it back to this last thing.

So this idea of institutionalizing engagement, institutionalizing use of data, using more innovation and doing this in an efficient and effective way is not automatic, right?

It's easy to say, like, why doesn't my city do it, why doesn't my mayor do it, why is this happening in Helsinki and it's happening here and there and it's not happening elsewhere, and that's because it's a learned set of skills.

Like, we have to learn how to listen.

We have to learn how to collaborate.

Otherwise, you know, people have tried citizen engagement for years, it's not a new idea.

I mean, I would bet most people listening do not know that there is a statute from 1946, which says you have a right to participate in how every federal agency makes regulations, the thing that affect every aspect of our lives from lead, to clean air, to clean water, to maternal child health, and there's a website called regulations.gov, and you could go on there and put your comments on a federal rulemaking.

Nobody does it.

Nobody's heard about it, for the most part, and that's because these projects are often not well-designed to really, you know, make it easy for citizens to participate and frankly, make it easy for government to listen.

So, you know, you may have heard about this site when millions of people sent in comments around net neutrality, that was the big news about 2017.

Everybody was commenting, should we have net neutrality, should we not, or should we have snowmobiles in national parks?

And then everybody mobilizes and sends in a comment, and you get millions of comments, which then nobody can read.

All of that to say there's skills to be able to know how to collaborate with other people, to know how to use data, and so knowing that, we created a free course at solvingpublicproblems.org.

It's a 12 part free online course that teaches people how to take their own mission-driven project, their own passion project from idea to implementation.

We have had, in the first 10 days of the course, we've had people from 75 countries who've signed up who have been posting about problems.

They're excited about everything from food waste, to narco trafficking, to discrimination and systemic racism in government services.

You have people, yes, some people in government who are on there, but many, many more people who are just passionate individuals who want to make change happen in their own communities, and those are the people that we're most eager to work with is people who say, I want to make a difference in my own backyard, or I want to make a difference around the world.

We're here to help with providing the training, the resources, and the same training we would give to students at NYU who are taking a similar course, but make that freely available to people.

So, solvingpublicproblems.org, and it's free, and we invite you to go take a look.

- Wonderful.

In less than a minute here, Beth Noveck, because we are coming up against the end of the hour, is there any kind of benchmark tools citizens should use to gauge how far along their community is when it comes to this kind of innovation?

- [Noveck] Ooh, so I think again, we want to be, in terms of benchmarks, and there are some good people doing exactly that, but you want to be looking at how much data is your community actually making available and putting out?

Is that data available in a machine readable, reusable, free format for anybody to take, whether or not you're a data scientist or a statistician and are the one to use that data, is there data that's being put out for other people to use?

Number one.

Number two is your city asking, is somebody saying, please tell us what the problems are.

When your city design services, does it talk to the people who are affected by those services, doing what's called human centered design, and I should go out and ask people, what do you need so that we can make the service more accessible to you?

Is it going out and asking people for solutions to problems?

Is it engaged in what we would call open innovation or some kind of a citizen engagement or even a competition?

That's what we really want to know, and what we should be looking at.

- And I'm sure there's more.

For more, please follow Beth Noveck on Twitter.

And thank you for being, Beth, just thank you so much.

This has been an inspiring conversation and really helpful, especially in a mayoral election year.

- [Noveck] Lots, we should hold our political leaders to account and make them ask us, make them let us help them.

- Indeed.

Beth Noveck is Director of the Gov Lab, and also the Chief Innovation Officer for the state of New Jersey.

I want to thank our members, sponsors and donors who helped make this all possible, and special thanks to the Cleveland Foundation, Marconi Society and the Urban Land Institute of Cleveland.

Our forum today is a result of their efforts and their collaboration.

I'm Dan Moulthrop.

Stay strong and stay healthy, my friends.

Our forum is now adjourned.

(bell dings) - [Narrator] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

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