In my last post ( Next-Generation Engagement Platforms , May 12), I covered three of the most powerful open source next-generation public engagement platforms. These platforms are compelling because they invite residents and citizens to do so much more than vote and submit complaints to governments. Each platform I […]
In my last post (Next-Generation Engagement Platforms, May 12), I covered three of the most powerful open source next-generation public engagement platforms. These platforms are compelling because they invite residents and citizens to do so much more than vote and submit complaints to governments. Each platform I covered invites its users to co-create their society through meaningful actions like voting on budget priorities or determining the physical makeup of forthcoming public spaces.
In the month since that post, Black Americans and their allies have led a long-overdue national reckoning on racism. The movement was sparked by yet another horrific police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, but it quickly grew to encompass racism in all its systemic permutations, at the individual and institutional levels.
One of the most concrete demands of this massive, decentralized movement is to de-fund the police. In many cities, police budgets have continued to grow by the millions while crime sharply decreased, crowding out spending on health and human services and other community. Black Lives Matter activists are determined to use the power invested in them by the protests to confront racism at the systemic level this time around, in the hopes of addressing some of the root causes behind the racist policies, decisions, and hierarchies affecting their lives before attention shifts.
This organizing work includes concentrating public pressure on municipal budgets. In CityLab, Laura Bliss writes about the Peoples’ Budgets blossoming in cities across the country. These proposals offer alternatives to the double-edged status quo organizers see, of over-funded police departments harassing underfunded communities. As Bliss notes, these budget alternatives follow in the spirit of participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting is where the residents of a city get to develop local improvement projects and then vote on funding them with public budgets. It’s a popular form of civic engagement because instead of just voting for a representative, residents get some degree of direct say in what their tax dollars will support. (We track over twenty participatory budgeting projects in the Civic Tech Field Guide, if you’d like to learn more).
Now, with a nationwide protest movement testing the levers of participatory democracy to see if they still work, we may see a shift from tactical urbanism’s parklets back to its social justice roots. There’s an election this year, and a huge amount of energy will necessarily go towards enacting change at the ballot box. More immediately, however, participatory democracy platforms can help give the public a meaningful place to engage. With this context established, I’ll review three more leading examples of digital engagement platforms.
To B-Corp, Or Not to B-Corp
All three of the following engagement platforms are operated by for-profit companies. In the civic tech sector, that often means the companies are social ventures, pledging to work toward public interest missions and reinvest profits back into their products and services. At least, until they get acquired by a larger govtech vendor, which, as we’ve seen, happens fairly regularly to civic tech startups. Still, an organization choosing a for-profit tax structure doesn’t make it inherently less virtuous than a non-profit organization.
There’s a halo effect that comes with open source projects, because they re-invest in the commons in a way that could benefit everyone, not just individual organizations. But choosing a private company’s engagement platform isn’t always a bad idea. To the extent that many of these engagement platforms are offered under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, that comes with real benefits in freeing up your team’s time from managing technical minutiae. Installing, hosting, maintaining, and updating an engagement platform demands technical skills, time, and often, money, whether in the form of salaries or hosting fees. Government bodies and organizations without technical capacity to spare probably should choose a SaaS platform, which are hosted for them. The monthly fee is often less than the cost of a single software engineer in many places.
These platforms are free for resident-users, because they’re paid for by the government or institution hosting the public engagement process. Their pricing models are designed to reward, not punish, high levels of public engagement. For example, if a resident’s online proposal attracts 300,000 votes and comments from their neighbors, it won’t cost the host any more than if the proposal only attracted 100 votes and comments. Instead, the hosts pay for the features and level of consultation they desire.
