MIT Logo

Engaging Community

Models and Methods for Designers and Planners

Media & Technology

Engaging Community: Media and Technology

By David Lee and Rob Goodspeed
May 2010

Contents

Introduction

Media and technology are not approaches to community engagement, but rather, essential tools for implementing any approach to community engagement. Any large society (some theorists argue over 150 — known as Dunbar’s number) needs media to communicate ideas efficiently, document progress, and pass down knowledge. Forms of media can include the written word, visual art, television broadcasts, and even video games and online narratives. Technology can accelerate the production and exchange of media. In addition, new communications technologies including cell phones and the Internet, reduce distances of time and space and enable previously difficult forms of many-to-many communication and coordination.

This report will describe the historical and future context of media and technology in engaging community, and describe how technology is being used to enhance each of the “approaches” discussed in the course. Although it concludes with a short bibliography, most additional resources are included in the text as links.

Context

Integrating media and technology into efforts to engage with community introduces an additional layer of complexity. Although the “digital divide” has shrunk in recent years, disparities exist in access to technology in society. The digital divide is sometimes conceived of as a problem of hardware and bandwidth. However, equally as important as the hardware is the technical literacy and personal motivations of users. Although this section describes some of the latest research on these topics, like with any community outreach effort the best rule of thumb is to work closely with the target community, using the mediums and approaches they are most comfortable with.

Internet Access and Literacy

Access to the internet has expanded rapidly in recent years, with internet-connected computers available in most libraries, schools, homes, and workplaces. However, the level of access, speed of the connection, and quality of the computers range widely. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, as of December 2009, 74% of Americans are online. Over 90% of individuals with college degrees, or from households with incomes over $75,000 are online. However, a majority — 60% — of the poorest households with incomes less than $30,000 also use the internet. Although narrowing in recent years, a racial disparity remains: 76% of Whites, 70% of Blacks, and 60% of Hispanics say they use the internet. The most noticeable demographic gap in usage is by age: 93% of people 18 to 29 years old use the internet, versus only 38% age 65 and over. Aside from gaps in overall usage, the speed of connection and capiabilities of the computer connected vary widely. As of February 2010, 65% of American adults had broadband access at home. With the release of the National Broadband Plan this year, the Federal government has made increasing broadband access and speed a national priority.

In addition to technical access, internet users range widely according to their online activities. Professionals seeking to engage community should seek to find out what activities their users are most comfortable with, and what types of technical barriers (such as plug-ins or speed requirements) may exist. Email is by far the most popular online activity, used by 89% of all internet users. Also popular is using search engines (88%) and using maps for driving directions (86%). Less widespread are watching videos (62%), sharing photos (46%), creating a blog (15%), or using a virtual world like Second Life (4%).

Mobile Phone Use

Ownership and use of mobile phones has expanded rapidly in recent years. According to an industry trade group, wireless phones have achieved a penetration rate of 91% in the U.S., with 22.7% of households relying on their mobile phones exclusively. Increasingly these phones contain sophisticated functionality including cameras, internet browsers, and the ability to run applications. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found in April 2009 that 56% of American adults had used mobile phones to browse the web, and “On the typical day, nearly one-fifth (19%) of Americans use the internet on a mobile device, up substantially from the 11% level recorded in December 2007. That’s a growth of 73% in the 16 month interval between surveys.” The survey also found that more Black and Hispanic respondents than whites reported using the internet through a wireless device. In the developing world, access to mobile phones is often much more widespread than access to the internet.

Media Literacy

Finally, different forms of media (text, video, audio) correspond with different types of literacy related to both creating and consuming media. Given the influence of the mass media, many communities are sophisticated consumers of audio and video content. The availability of low-cost digital still and video cameras (such as the Flip) and audio and video editing software (such as iMovie or Garage Band on the Mac) have promoted the expansion of digital authorship skills.

Creators of textual materials should be conscious of their audience’s overall level of literacy and familiarity with technical or specialized terminology. Increasingly, governments are seeking to ensure the materials they produce are written in clear, jargon-free language. This trend is known as the “Plain Language” movement, and the Center for Plain Language provides a variety of materials on the topic.

Finally, every internet user has visited a webpage that is unusable due to coding errors, confusing layouts, or hard-to-read colors and fonts. Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s book, Prioritizing Usability, provides an excellent introduction to the principles of web usability. In addition, websites seeking to maximize their readership by the disabled should follow the Section 508 requirements, to ensure that it can be accessed by users using specialized assistance software. It should be noted most government websites are required to follow the Section 508 standards.

Approaches

Each approach to engaging community is being affected by new media and technology

1. Participatory Design

Technology can be used to democratize the creation of plans and designs through easy-to-use, low-cost design software such as Google Sketchup, and to accelerate the cooperation of participants. With visualizing tools, people no longer need to rely on designers to show them what a potential building design or form regulation will look like. Google Earth provides a way to view a large database of geographic information, and Google’s 3D Warehouse makes available a wide variety of 3D models for amateur designers to view and manipulate.

Next Stop Design – This project is an example of crowdsourcing in planning. Citizens submitted designs which were discussed and voted on to select one for a bus stop in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Future Melbourne – This project allowed citizens to help write the city plan for the city of Melbourne, Australia. Their “Post Implementation Review” report summarizes the project, which occurred in Summer 2008.

Local Motors – This project is the world’s first “crowdsourced” car. The overall aesthetics was selected by a design competition among submitted entries. The company’s fan community then collaborated on designs for smaller details while the company procured a high-quality engine and electronics, an approach that Wired magazine argues “allows crowdsourcing to work even for a product whose use has life-and-death implications.”

Barcelona street redesign – As Barcelona’s first attempt at participatory decision-making, citizens are asked to vote directly on two design alternatives for a major traffic artery, with a third “no change” option. Some are applauding this move while others fear that opening up such decisions to an untrained public will produce poor outcomes. While simplistic, this example shows the fundamental conflict between process and outcome; is it “good planning” to favor one over the other?

2. Advocacy + Community Organizing

Advocates and organizers have more tools than ever to communicate with communities and put pressure on the powerful. Although there are many online-only advocacy efforts, many organizers stick to the tried-and-true methods of meeting with people face to face. Advocacy organizations use a variety of technology tools to push out messages by email, text messages, and telephone. Some, like MoveON.org, have moved from “broadcast” models to more participatory models by creating forums or meetings for members to meet each other and discuss issues. Although Meetup.com espouses no particular ideology, many candidates and causes have used it (or similar, private systems) to enable widely dispersed supporters to connect face-to-face for local meetings.

The success of political candidates to integrate technology with more conventional approaches of campaigning continues to be an area of development. One of the best examples was Barack Obama’s campaign, which allowed supporters to donate funds, find like-minded supporters, and even organize events through a sophisticated campaign website. Another innovative use of the campaign was a text messaging system which would tell supporters of events and volunteer opportunities in their area, as well as a system that empowered supporters to call swing voters from their computer at their own convenience.

Advocates and organizers can use media in a variety of ways. Short documentaries can highlight a problem or topic for a broad audience. The New York City-based group Streetfilms have used short documentaries to explain complex transportation planning concepts and advocate for greater attention to pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit on city streets. Storytelling and video can personalize issues and provoke dialogue, as well as empowering participants. InsightShare works with local communities to empower community members to collaborate together on videos about local problems. The videos are then shown to the entire community to provoke discussion, and can be shown to other communities and decision makers. According to the group, their work is less about making videos, and more about how the portability and accessibility of the medium can be used to encourage community dialog.

Groundcrew – A Boston-area entrepreneur has developed a “platform for location-based connecting and organizing.”

Personal Democracy Forum – A leading conference and organization focusing on the influence of technology on electoral politics in the US.

New Organizing Institute – A training and educational organization with a wide variety of materials focused on organizing skills using new technology, including social networking, email, fundraising, and electoral data.

InsightShare – An organization dedicated to building community and creating local change through participatory video.

Tools: MIT’s CoLab has created a Media Menu for community organizations to use in their organizing. Democracy in Action is a tool that is helpful for electoral organizing or advocacy campaigns, such as targeted email blasts, chapter and volunteer management, fundraising, etc.

3. Consensus Building

The consensus building approach seeks to develop consensus resolution to difficult policy problems through a deliberate approach of organizing and moderating a series of face-to-face meetings. Prof. Larry Susskind discussed some of the ways technology and media has been used to enhance consensus building during his class visit. These include: the use of email to share documents and coordinate meetings, creating a website for large consensus building processes, and enabling live video feeds of meetings.

More broadly, a variety of technologies can be used to support face-to-face meetings. Electronic keypads or polling devices can allow moderators to seek instantaneous feedback on policy proposals. Computer terminals can allow small groups to manipulate sophisticated computer models, or report back findings for later analysis. Most importantly, technology can ensure good meetings aren’t one-off events, and can keep participants engaged after the event concludes.

AmericaSpeaks 21st Century Town Hall Meeting – The nonprofit AmericaSpeaks has developed a format for a large-scale meeting that involves keypad polling and other technologies to facilitate large-scale dialogue and discussion.

PlaceMatters anyWare Planning – The nonprofit PlaceMatters has been a leader in integrating technology with public meetings. Their anyWare planning system includes touch-sensitive boards, polling technology, and electronic meetings.

Scenario Planning – A variety of planning processes combine sophisticated analysis tools with multi-stakeholder input and discussion. The Orton Family Foundation has pioneered the creation of CommunityViz, a sophisticated GIS-based analysis tool which has been used by community groups to create community plans. Their website contains a number of case studies. Another popular system is the What If? software program created by planner Richard Klosterman. Finally, the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative’s Everglades Project, headed by Prof. Mike Flaxman, applies GIS analysis to a consensus-based stakeholder process.

4. Capacity and Knowledge Building

Technology has been most transformative in capacity and knowledge building approaches, directly providing communities many of the tools that were once only available to planners and large organizations. As cities open up datasets on public spending, land use, environmental sensing, crime, and other urban phenomena, citizens have more tools to visualize and understand this information, and to build evidence for reform.

Washington, D.C. has released dozens of datasets to the public, in the hope that people in their spare time will come up with useful, innovative applications that could enhance quality of life. In order to encourage the creation of these applications, the city hosted two “Apps for Democracy” contests where entrants competed for small cash prizes and publicity. One app reveals bike routes and bike theft patterns in DC, another shows late night crime activity around nightlife areas to help people return home safely. More and more cities, as well as the federal government, are following suit, releasing datasets and relying on the public to make them useful and engaging. These initiatives include the DC Data Catalog, NYC Big Apps, toronto.ca/open, San Francisco’s DataSF, and the Federal Government’s Data.gov.

In addition to supporting new forms of data sharing, technical tools can support internal knowledge management within an organization. Email can coordinate team activities, online collaboration software can be used to author documents and pool knowledge, and full-fledged project management systems like Basecamp can store data and facilitate collaboration. Many of these tools are free, easy to learn, and become more useful as the number of users grows. Wikis perhaps best represent this democratization of institutional wisdom, allowing anyone to write and edit rich content for an information resource that everyone can access.

Beyond the democratization of organizational tools, technology is changing the basic ways we gather data. Tiny sensors integrated into street furniture, vehicles, and even our phones allow us to “see” the city in real-time. Armed with smartphones, people can act as sophisticated sensors themselves, reporting on both the mundane and the critical while providing geotagged photos and video as evidence. And beyond this, phones and Internet devices can be passively tracked to reveal the movement of people, information, and objects previously unseen. MIT’s SENSEable City Lab is experimenting with collecting, analyzing, and returning this data to citizens in several ways:

  • Trash Track – “Smart dust” sensors track movement of trash in real-time.
  • Copenhagen Wheel – Sensors in bike wheels capture biking behavior and air quality.
  • New York Talk Exchange – Phone and Internet data show how local communities are connected to countries around the world through flows of information.
  • Wikicity Rome – Cell phone tracking shows movement of buses and large crowds, and volunteers capture and report on cultural events as they happen.

The aforementioned SeeClickFix and Citizens Connect enhance everyone’s awareness by providing both citizens and officials with the shared vision of every other person in the city. Ushahidi takes this a step further by marshaling the efforts of both “eyes on the ground” and volunteers from around the world to rapidly collect crisis information and translate and map it for rescue workers to act upon.

Strengths and Critiques

Digital technology is particularly effective in collecting and distributing information from a variety of sources. It saves us countless hours of organizing and cross-checking data, allowing planners to spend more time on “human-centered” activities like face-to-face meetings. Just as computers and the Internet have made private enterprise more efficient and individual workers more productive, media technology enhances the capabilities of planners, organizers, and volunteers.

By lowering the barriers to these tasks, technology empowers individuals to do things previously only possible by skilled professionals. The traditional “organization” with a pyramid structure is no longer necessary to generate broad-based action. Media technology also lets us quickly visualize complex issues. Tools exist today to map out social trends over time and space, and make the abstract suddenly intuitive to the public and to policymakers. Furthermore, the ability to freely access and present data as evidence of problems firmly places power back in the hands of groups with limited resources, as Cedar Grove Institute did by demonstrating discrimination in infrastructure support using GIS.

While computers and the Internet can certainly save us time on certain mundane tasks, this might be missing the point of community engagement. One of the reasons advocates and organizers devote many hours to working side-by-side with members of communities is because this builds trust and camaraderie. Time shared is often a necessary investment to earning trust; technology may not achieve this any quicker.

Furthermore, face-to-face communication remains one of the best means to conduct debate and make decisions while maintaining trust. Computers can facilitate this with video conferencing, but still cannot make it obsolete, and the costs of substituting remote communication for in-person meetings may outweigh the benefits. Likewise, no computer can reproduce aspects of human judgment, such as empathy, that help guide people to agreement and consensus.

Finally, any use of technology should take into account the distribution of hardware, access, and literacy across society. Although significant gaps remain, the rapid expansion of access to the Internet and mobile phones mean thoughtful uses of these technologies can reach more than ever before. The belief that the benefits of technology exceed the potential inequities that could result drives technologists to seek new ways to engage communities.

Analysis and Future Directions

At each point in history, professionals seeking to engage community have utilized the cutting edge technology of their era, whether the printing press, telephone, or website. Instead of looking to the past to understand the use of media and technology to engage communities, we instead look to the future. The models of social coordination possible are influenced by the communications and media technology of the era. In this report, we seek to describe how new technologies enable new forms of engagement and organization than previously possible. In short, we argue technology can make a difference.

In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky argues that because Internet technology reduces the costs of social cooperation, it enables new forms of organizing that do not require conventional formal organizations. We think this trend means organizations will not cease to exist, but rather that their definition and form are being challenged. Much more than creating new “tools” for existing organizations, technology changes the landscape of social organization itself, enabling new forms of short-term, interest-based organizations.

It is not just the scale of formal organizations that is shrinking; the time scale for public participation is shrinking as well. As information technology accelerates and we have nearly instantaneous access to answers for just about any question, public discourse is accelerating as well. We used to think of government action as a series of projects and initiatives, like the Big Dig or Rudy Giuliani’s war on graffiti. Citizens would bring attention to a problem, officials would recognize that problem, design a solution, and implement that solution, at which point citizens could either demand further action or move on to the next problem. The time scale of this feedback loop could be months or years, as it takes time for public outcry to accumulate and gain sway in policy discussions.

However, many cities are trying to make this process nimbler and more responsive, using technology to understand the needs of citizens in real time, rather than once an election cycle. SeeClickFix and Boston’s Citizens Connect are bypassing bureaucratic inertia, often directly sending citizen requests (through text messages and photographs) to the public works crews who can address them. Such tools also provide fast, relevant two-way communication, allowing government to provide service alerts to those most likely to be affected or to request confirmation of reported problems. However, these tools interact with government like a corporation, providing services to individual citizens. Technical tools make possible a more participatory relationship between citizens and government.

The analogy here might be to steering an oil tanker. Traditional models of public engagement assumed that any attempt to change the course of public policy (the tanker) would require a long, sustained, and focused grassroots effort. This necessitated organizations with hierarchies and a degree of permanence to achieve the scale that could “turn the ship.” However, the future of community engagement may lie in more organic, ad hoc movements; this “many hands” approach could see thousands of individuals taking initiative to “nudge the ship,” in a less directly coordinated but no less effective manner.

Another analogy might be the electricity infrastructure of a region. Rather than build a new power plant or enact blunt universal rationing/pricing schemes, which take time and create new inefficiencies, why not build a smart grid that lets people individually harvest energy and shift resources dynamically to where they are needed at that instant? Likewise, large foundations may give way to microfinancing (see Kiva and DonorsChoose), and large mapping software companies like ESRI may give way to open source projects like OpenStreetMap. A nimble, “augmented” government could respond much more quickly to community needs, obviating the need for semi-permanent groups focused on long-standing deficiencies.

The City of Manor, Texas is experimenting with technology to improve community participation and town services. Through “Manor Labs,” they’ve developed a system that directly solicits ideas and votes on ways to improve city services from individual citizens. Those who participate receive “innobucks” that can be invested in projects of their choice, thus rewarding participation with further influence. The value of this system is providing planners and citizens ways to come up with and support promising ideas, and to reward public participation in a way that encourages repeated engagement.

Experiments in re-organizing relationships between citizens and governments can be analyzed from the perspective of democratic theory. Since ancient Athens, democratic theorists have stressed the individual participation of citizens in a democracy. The large nation-state made it difficult for citizens to be involved beyond voting, except perhaps through institutions like citizen juries. Technology, especially interactive technologies enabling many-to-many communication, support participatory democracy. Other theorists have stressed the importance of public deliberation. Online deliberation, like offline deliberation, often falls short from meeting ideal forms of dialog.

However, groups like Minnesota’s E-Democracy.org have proven it is possible to have polite, constructive discussions of civic issues online. They achieve this through a set of community principles that includes several ground rules: use your real name, no more than two posts per day, be civil, no threats, keep private responses private, and more. In addition, each “issues forum” creates a “charter” document specifying ground rules, roles, and community expectations. These deliberate documents are similar to those sometimes used for face-to-face discussions (such as during consensus building). We think these rules indicate that the medium enables previously impossible communication (due to logistics), but communication that can be informed by democratic principles.

As public discussion begins to shift predominantly to the online world, many worry that the quality of discourse will deteriorate and people will lose the ability to cooperate. Yet, modern gaming environments provide evidence that groups of people, physically separate, can engage in sophisticated cooperative projects. An interesting case study is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft. Observers of the game note that the majority of online discussions between players focus on “social knowledge construction” and often play out like academic discourse, with players sharing experiences, citing evidence, and testing competing theories before reaching consensus on the best way to succeed in a mission.

More generally, new research on online deliberation argues that it differs from face-to-face interaction in important ways, and has unique positive benefits. For example, participants need not all engage in dialog at the same time and place, and with proper moderation may result in more equitable participation among participants.

The most profound effect that digital media and technology could have on community engagement is the gradual shift in social behaviors and expectations that a generation of Internet users has come to rely on in daily life. People may simply come to expect that all government data be accessible, all public spending traceable, all neighbors easily contacted and polled, and every policy open to collaborative editing. They may expect more responsive institutions and a vibrant public discourse because they are already experiencing these in the online world.

Bibliography

At the heart of building community is the effective and authentic engagement of members of a community in planning and design.