City of Victoria Seeks Public Input for New Engagement Strategy

The City of Victoria is fast tracking a citizen and business consultation process for a new Public Engagement Strategy – with an announcement on the city’s Facebook page, and, judging by the current comments, there will be a long road to gaining trust for any any sort of new “engagement process”.

Cit of Victoria Public Engagement Plan

This has been in the works for a while. City of Victoria communications staff, led by director Katie Josephson, have been in the vanguard to change the internal culture of communication policy and technology since the new administration was elected in 2008. One of Mayor Dean Fortin’s platforms was increased citizen engagement, and a more open information policy. This does take time, and consideration – while I personally hope it will lead to a new paradigm in how municipal governments engage and inform the citizens they represent, recent events (like the Johnson Street Bridge debacle – which is still on going) call for questioning the process, yet again. Why does this have to move so quickly? How are Victoria residents being informed – why a deadline of the end of October? To get involved you can attend a Public Ideas Forum at the Victoria Conference Centre: 4-9pm, submit your ideas to an online forum through Idea Zone, and/or download a PDF Workbook for your community group, for submission.

Then there is the question of what engagement actually means and provides. Ultimately this should derive from open and credible information. Which is where Open Data Platforms - as now adopted by Vancouver, New York, Portland Oregon, and others is paramount. Maybe the question should be not about how we engage – but how governments provide information?

In a Web 2.0 leading to a Gov 2.0 world – online and off – defining the paradigm is important.

Quote from the RemarKK blog: Community members with an interest in open civic data in Toronto have a unique opportunity to engage City government, to learn about what the City is planning and to participate in a meaningful way in helping to shape the future of Toronto as a “city that thinks like the web”.
Toronto Open Data Lab, part of the Toronto Innovations Showcase
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
1:00 – 4:30pm
City Hall Council Chamber and Members Lounge

Special Guest Speaker: Peter Corbett, iStrategy Labs and AppsforDemocracy.org

The Open Data Lab is an opportunity to explore the innovation possibilities of open civic data in Toronto. Join City subject matter and technology experts, community stakeholders and talented members of Toronto’s vibrant technology and design communities in an interactive and collaborative afternoon imagining commercial, social and civic applications of the City’s newly launched open data program.

What is Open Civic Data – Why is that important?

The example provided – along with Vancouver, Portland and New York, illustrates where the engagement policy should begin. This is not about just Social Media (facebook, twitter and RSS feeds), the paradigm begins with taking all the collected information from all municipal departments, and providing that in a format that can be accessed, utilized and freely ‘mashed’ by outside sources, leading to some interesting results.

Quoted from Vibrant Victoria:

There’s the Vancouver example: Vancouver opens up the city to web developers; Data collected by the city can be found online (it refers to the drinking fountain google map mash-up I posted earlier, too). The Vancouver initiative is also discussed by David Eaves, Vancouver’s Open Data Portal: Use it or Lose it. Boris (in comments) chastises Eaves for his “use it or lose it” formulation:
I think the “use it or lose it” is an incorrect framing. Use of Vancouver’s open data to create new things creates new value, which adds value to the city. With mashups and “citizen coders”, I’m sure there will be a handful of apps created — I love the fact that we’ve got our own city to experiment with all these cool tools with.

But waggling your finger and saying “use it or lose it” is not, I think the correct approach. In most open source projects, unless there is continued economic drivers, it is very hard for a project to continue. Growing a commercial ecosystem is healthy.

It’s great to see Sandy from HomeZilla here. This is an example of economic value seen by one commercial entity. How do we attract more? How do we maintain the apps that do get created?

I’d love to see a contest with prizes to motivate people to set up some usage of this data with real longevity. I think the Apps for Democracy contest in DC was a good example of this. (source)
I thought that both Eaves and Boris Mann point to the fragility of these initiatives. Just because they’re out there, doesn’t mean they’ll get used enough and/or thrive. It takes users, and also economic drivers (as per Boris’s comment).

…Meanwhile… Here’s another example: Smart Grid a Reality in Boulder, Colo. This project allows residents to monitor their energy / utilities usage:
Boulder Colorado’s $100 million SmartGridCity project, which launched in May of 2008 and was the subject of an ABC news story last year, is completed, according to Xcel Energy, the company responsible for developing the system. With the smart grid system, meters and sensors send information via broadband over powerline to an operations center. Functions for customers include the ability to monitor energy usage, select when to use high-energy devices such as clothes dryers, and keep track of how much carbon the household is putting into the environment. Customers will soon be able to access a Web portal to monitor and control home energy management devices. SmartGridCity functions also include switching power through fully-automated substations; re-routing power around bottlenecked lines; detecting power outages and proactively identifying outage risks. The deployment integrated more than 20 applications, 95 new interfaces and more than 300 test cases according to a company release. Xcel Energy says it can now read customer meters remotely and have reduced power outages and false alarms. According to the company, the new smart grid warned about transformers that were ready to fail and they were replaced without loss of service.
iirc, Boulder is smaller than the CRD (i.e., Victoria-as-a-whole). Pretty cool to get this up and running.

What all of this illustrates is that Open Information is the KEY to public engagement. Up to now the City of Victoiria has been relying on ‘less than timely’ updates to the victoria.ca website – which is difficult to navigate, and does not provide open RSS data feeds; with print post notes on bulletin boards. It is time not only the City of Victoria, and all CRD municipalities, entered the new communication paradigm. This is not simply about internet, social media and open data – it involves all levels of information provision.

The City of Victoria should be re-assessing it’s engagement strategy.

Open Data = Realistic Engagement