Public Experience Network: Tapping Talent and Experience to Co-create Solutions to Government Challenges
This working draft document is the outcome from a working group discussion at #FOCAS13. Our group got started with a discussion about 'Citizen-Government Interaction for Legislative or Regulatory Activities'. We converged on the concept of a register of citizen experts, comparable to organ donor registration (which in DC can be opted-into at the DMV). After further discussion, we focused on an approach that helps city staff directly tap experience around specific issues.
Please comment, modify and extend this draft. Suggest a change or submit changes via a pull request.
There is no perfectly engaged citizen. No individual who participates in every single local meeting, responds to all calls for comment or draft proposals, attends each Council hearing, votes in every election. But most people are smart about something: riders of a specific bus line on how that impacts their commute, youth and their parents around a park.
The Public Experience Network taps into the latent and under-used experience of citizens, making it accessible for city government. It's a technology platform that makes focused, time-limited conversations possible between city staff and citizens.
There are two groups of users served by the Public Experience Network:
- Government staff, who use the network to get expertise from municipal residents about specific local issues.
- Municipal residents, who self-identify as having experience and make themselves available.
The relationship between citizens and cities that PEN facilitates is not about “asking” or "ideation", it’s about solving a clearly-defined problem. The tool makes it easy to taps community talent that is going to waste.
The network starts small and focused around a few "verticals", e.g. local transportation issues, parks, trash and sanitation.
We see three areas to start with:
- identify categories where cities need help
- identify categories where citizens can help
- come up with a group of funnels, where we collect the people who are the intellectual capital for the tool.
Participating in the Public Experience Network is designed to be a rewarding civic experience. The platform can be smart about recognition -- for example, triggering preparation of a letter from the Mayor once you share your expertise three times. Many aspects need to be designed and refined, learning from citizen users to understand their tolerance for getting contacted, the right duration of engagement, whose contact emails are the most effective at getting responses, and so on.
City staff invite people to become involved through a variety of outreach methods: face to face requests, invitations to participate at the end of other government interactions at City Hall and the DMV, promotion on screens at gas stations. (This is a marketing challenge. We don't yet know the best approaches, we'll want to establish these through user testing with staff in government and citizens.)
Matching citizens to areas of expertise is tricky. We discussed several approaches:
- starting with a small list of city needs that people can match with
- issuing broad requests and learning people's interests based on their responses (e.g. reach out to everyone who offered expertise around parks, with a specific ask about trails)
- building on LinkedIn, where people have already identified some skills and expertises (and where the peer-evaluation model might be better at documenting what experience people bring).
In the long term, offering experience to your home town is an opportunity for positive civic involvement. It's an starting point for other types of involvement, and membership in the network helps to create a new experience of what civic engagement can be.
Feedback from the group at FOCAS:
- Using this tool might be perceived as extra work for city staff.
- Can we start with some cities where it's possible do a lot of hand holding.
- Commerce should be incorporated (argument that we need to pay the experts)
- We should build the experience before building the tech
- How will this be accepted into the public record?
- How can you get people beyond the rockstars using this.
- Look at Kathy Conrad's microtasking process for government staff, with badges and visible recognition as an incentive.
- Maybe introduce a vetting process, start with civic engagement and then work up to what people might be good at.
- Identify two problems in our communities
- Does this set back open gov efforts -- if city governments invite contributions but don't act on them, or if they take bad advice and act on it? What does this informal approach to government do -- government is formal for a reason.
- Start small and offline - find a topic area and a network, then build the tool later.
- What's the right size of municipality for PEN? Maybe small ones where gov and citizens are already close?
Similar models
Volunteering tools
- Sparkd
- Catchafire
- Volunteer Network
- SCORE - senior citizens, expert business counselling.
- RSVP - another retired service person group.
Existing networks
- small community consultations (e.g. citizen committee to help rebuild a playground)
- The Open Opportunities Initiative at the GSA's Digital Services Innovation Center, a network for micro-tasking by federal employees.
Recognition and rewards
- Street Cred