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Smart cities sounds magical, but civic tech gets it done

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Louisville, Kentucky’s chief technology manager works with civic-tech innovators every day. That sounds to me like a good way to make a city smart. But that’s only the beginning.

First comes openness, and not just open data. Ed Blayney welcomes the innovators. He stands in stark contrast with the cold eyes and stiff silos some of them face when they come to offer a city helpful, usually free new technology.

It’s not easy for city administrators, says Blayney. “They have their nose down in their day-to-day work and you’re asking them to change the way they do their jobs. It’s not easy changing people’s minds.” Cultures, least of all in government, don’t change nimbly.

Imagine the U.S. Army. A few years ago, he was second in command of a 135-person infantry company for 26 months, including 12 months in Kunar Province, Afghanistan.

More recently, civic tech has given Blayney exposure to stuff he couldn’t get from government alone, he says. Just out of grad school with a masters of public administration, he joined the city’s Office of Performance Improvement and Innovation.

There Blayney, in a part time position, grabbed the tech ball that others in the office missed. He worked closely with the civic tech community which, he says, was already doing good work in Louisville but was still hungry for more impact. In his first year, Blayney and the civic tech gang finished three projects, he says, each with excellent effect. Another one of his early projects was partnering with Waze, making Louisville the fifth U.S. city to do so. With the Waze data, the city got new macro and even micro views of its traffic congestion and air quality. That led him to a variety of transportation projects.

“I see transportation as kind of the baseball of smart cities,” referring to the scouting innovations described in the book Moneyball about the Oakland A’s baseball team. That and some other data among the “tons” of unused data told him much more than others believed it could.

“‘Smart cities’ almost seems magical,” he says. “‘Civic technology’ seems boring and basic, and more approachable … To me, civic technology is the new civic infrastructure.” Civic infrastructure has become more than just roads, sewers, and streetlights.

What’s more, civic tech defines IT’s new role. IT’s role used to be making sure everyone’s computers and email worked. “Now its role is exploding beyond the walls of government.” It’s about the civic tech that’s permeating the community, whether it’s fiber or data-collection sensors. He says, “IT in 50 years will look a lot more like public works than a back office IT shop.”

How do we get there from here? It’s a long haul. All the new technology and data and the profound if subtle changes in how we think about it is a big challenge for everyone, for people in government and citizens alike.

“My job is to help us chart the course forward” for what he sees as the new IT. He uses various descriptors for his job — data science advisor, smart-city project manager, and “change agent for data and technology inside a government.” He says, “I’m a government person who does technology as opposed to a technology person who does government. That’s my job.” And if as the metaphor goes, data is the new oil, or technology is the new steam engine, or “smart” is the new “rich and famous,” he’s just sprung the gate.

“You have to be tenacious and cool to get stuff done,” he says. Now after four years, he says doors seem to have opened for him. “It’s just like I passed some sort of time in service.”

Though he doesn’t think people resisted consciously, he says, they might have thought the new technology and all that was some kind of a fad. He says, “This is not, you know, something that’s going away.”

MORE BY BLAYNEY See “We Need More Mad Scientists” on Medium. He describes what he calls a “mad scientist” approach for local governments. It includes, for example, using “fiction or narratives to paint a picture of your ideal community in 2050” — a tactic, by the way, that I find particularly interesting and hopeful. There’s also much more by him on Medium for any student of civic tech and smart cities. I recommend it.

Opaque top-down systems vs do-it-yourself

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I make the hour-long drive down to Silicon Valley with the help of Waze even though I know the way there. I use Waze because it rouses me from daydreams in time to take an exit. It’s always alert even if I’m not — and does even more than that. It watches, it records, and it remembers where I go.

That’s fine even though, for all I know, it sends all that data about me to China. I say that that’s the price of smart. I simply like the features. For me, like most of us, the bargain is acceptable.

But it’s another thing when we jump from a smartphone’s surveillance up a level to smart cities. Many people don’t even know what a smart city is. How much more does it observe, record, and store? Most important, what’s it do for me? What kind of bargain have my city administrators entered on my behalf?

A friend asked me, “What’s a smart city?” I give her the standard spiel about smooth traffic, sustainable garbage, on-demand this and that. She rolls her eyes. “Another top-down miracle,” she says in disgust. What’s it going to take to win her trust?

Though she uses data and “smart” devices every day, she rarely talks about data or technology — except to complain about tech support. She says, “I was on hold for 15 minutes just to have them tell me how to turn on the wifi.”

A second friend, a programmer, intuited a definition the first time he heard “smart city.” By day, he manages a buttoned-down crew of geeks in government who support black-robed legal wonks. His mind glides among data, technology, and public benefit like a breeze shifting course. His mind, and the group he talks to at work, likes structure and precedent. Just for fun, he doesn’t mind a wrench thrown in here and there.

Mention technology to the designer, and her mind grinds gears. I’ve learned to pivot into other visions, such as downtown parking spaces that beckon her car to leave the street and fly into a safe, warm slot forty stories up. She’s begun to dare me into letting my imagination fly away into brilliant, dreamlike cities. “Pretend you’re on acid,” she says.

The designer and the developer both find comfort in different views of “smart.” One imagines a world she doesn’t know, and the other imagines just an extension of what he does know. Either vision would include the typical benefits: efficiency, resiliency, and sustainability.

Even so, both betray uneasiness. They’ve both worked at large organizations where, for example, an email one afternoon announces a new rule to benefit “everyone.” Or a new email system to be rolled out that will make emailing “faster and easier.” Or fancy new proximity badges. For all the supposed benevolence, everyone dreads it. Such could be life in a smart city.

If smart isn’t to be stunted, such fear has to be mitigated. That, I think, can be done with openness: open data, open source, and benevolent policing to block malicious code. Let any skilled individual’s vision manifest itself in apps and whatever other data-borne stuff they want to make. Let the city be smart by making use of their smarts.

If data’s the new electricity, then let it flow. Give everyone the keys — and that includes making all data as open as possible. Let everyone in on it to be smart in their own way, following their own vision. I don’t know if that will do much to mitigate the scary, invisible hand that runs a smart city, but it’s sure worth a try.

This kind of openness and freedom to innovate on behalf of the public is what civic tech, or city hacks, is all about.

The soul of civic tech

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What’s “civic tech” got to do with a cheap Buddha statue that managed to stop people from dumping trash on a city street? Civic tech, after all, is technology used for civic benefits that usually entails data and software.

I thought of civic tech while I listened to the Buddha story on an episode of the Criminal podcast. “He’s Still Neutral” told a series of stories about what I suppose could be called “city hacks” — which sounds to me like the soul of civic tech.

Civic tech usually comes from the ground up. Unlike top-down, enterprise-scale smart cities laid upon cities by the likes of Google, Siemens, and Cisco, most civic tech is the work of lone coders and small ad hoc groups. These loners and groups see a problem and do what they can do fix it. Compared with the big guys, they work fast and loose, with little money.

The Buddha was done in the same spirit by homeowner Dan Stevenson. Even before placing the Buddha, Stevenson didn’t call the cops but instead negotiated one-to-one. He said, “I would probably trust a drug dealer more than I’d trust a cop.” The cops, he says, don’t seem able to deal with problems with common sense. “They have to come in with an army over someone selling drugs.”

The Buddha did it

The Buddha did have a good effect. The garbage stopped at the traffic diverter close to Stevenson’s house. Before, one pile of trash seemed to prompt more. So Dan Stevenson and his wife bought a Buddha at a local Ace Hardware. After about four months, someone painted it white. Soon after, someone placed an orange, then two, then gifts, then it was put on a pedestal, then given a house. Today, Stevenson calls “him” a “really top-drawer, cool looking Buddha.” Then Vietnamese Buddhists started gathering at the Buddha to pray. Dan has counted 70. Meanwhile, the drug dealing and prostitution disappeared completely.

Interviewer Phoebe Judge asked him, “Are you allowed to do this?” Stevenson chuckled. “It’s best not to ask before you do things because [the answer] is always no.”

A more under-the-radar project is by Guerrilla Grafters, a group across the bay in San Francisco. They graft fruit-bearing cuttings onto non-bearing, city-planted ornamental trees. The cuttings take hold and in time they bear fruit that’s free for picking and eating.

Parklets and fruit bearing limbs

Then there were the people who started parklets, a tiny public park made by extending the sidewalk into a parking place. The first one was in San Francisco, just sod rolled out and the parking meter fed every day, all day.

Most city hacks, and civic tech projects, get no permission. And many are discouraged. Many of the great discoveries throughout history never got permission to begin. The visionaries, the creative ones, the crazy ones go at it anyway. Many times they’re on to something, and then we’re all better off for it.

I heard these stories on an excellent podcast called Criminal, the episode “He’s Still Neutral.” Every podcast fan should try Criminal.