cit⋅i⋅zen⋅ship  [sit-uh-zuhn-ship, -suhn-] –noun
1.the state of being vested with the rights, privileges, and duties of a citizen.
2.the character of an individual viewed as a member of society; behavior in terms of the duties, obligations, and functions of a citizen: an award for good citizenship.
When we talk about open government or transparency, there’s an assumption the goal is to change the behavior of various actors inside government. This is true, but transparency on a granular, day-to-day level, has an aspect that is much less discussed: the opportunity to change the perspective of citizens as well. It’s a chance to build trust, and to help citizens see their individual needs as part of a whole, in the context of a larger society. Let me explain what I mean by talking about some of the web applications we’d like to build through Code for America.
Today, in most American cities, when you report something that needs to be fixed (say, for instance, a pothole), your request essentially disappears into the machinery of the city administration. If you’re lucky, when the problem is fixed, there may be a message telling you so (or at least telling you that the city thinks its fixed, because sometimes the information you gave about the problem wasn’t specific enough for the city to know exactly WHICH pothole you meant). But in between, your request is invisible to you. The machinery itself is opaque, and obscures the path your request follows as it is routed to the correct department, prioritized, and eventually fixed. Thus the term transparency; we’re talking about a view into the process. At Code for America, we envision applications that allow you to see the status of your request at any given time, the same way you can track your Fedex package online in real time. You should be able to see not only which part of the machinery currently holds your request, but the other requests competing with yours for the scarce resources to fix them.
This transparency makes it possible to track how well the city is keeping up with requests, their performance over time, which neighborhoods are getting help first, etc. This is a good thing. But when you see the other requests in the queue and realize that your issue is one of thousands in your community, it’s not just the government who becomes accountable; you start to be held accountable as a citizen as well. At the very least, it can shift your perspective. It’s easy to complain that a broken light on your street hasn’t been fixed; if you could see a list of all the lights that weren’t fixed in your city, and see that a dozen people had complained that there had been a spike in crime under another broken light in another part of town and that people were really suffering because of it, you might you think to yourself ‚Äúhey, it’s more important to fix that light than my own.‚Äù This is a moment of citizenship, when the needs of the larger group take precedence over the individual’s needs. It’s also a moment of citizenship if you say to yourself, ‚Äúhey, the city should know that that light should be their top priority; I wonder if I could help write the software that detects the highest needs.‚Äù But whether you’re seeing your place in the larger community or actually trying to help fix the problem, neither is possible if the machinery is opaque. Governments may be afraid (though fewer and fewer are) to expose the inner workings and the laundry list of outstanding issues, but when they protect their constituents from that knowledge they are also discouraging them from practicing citizenship.
Transparency is a policy issue, but the rubber hits the road in software design. (Perhaps this is what Lawrence Lessig means when he says ‚Äúcode is law.‚Äù) The design of the web applications that connect citizens with government matters. It can promote or frustrate transparency; it can promote or frustrate notions of citizenship. It can also make you feel listened to or ignored. Think about how you feel when you raise an issue and the person responsible uses active listening to play back what they’ve heard and confirm that they’ve heard it correctly. Contrast that with curt ‚Äúokay, thank you, we’ve got it now‚Äù response. The latter shuts the door on you, the former tells you that your input is valuable and further input is invited. Software that plays back your input to you, and then invites you into the process of resolving your issue, helps you feel like a participant or a partner; it gets to the dual nature of citizenship: you have rights and privileges, but you also have duties. Transparency functions like a form of active listening, and its subtle effects encouraging citizenship are under-appreciated in the dialogue about government accountability.
cit-i-zen-ship‚ [sit-uh-zuhn-ship, -suhn-]
-noun
1.the state of being vested with the rights, privileges, and duties of a citizen.
2.the character of an individual viewed as a member of society; behavior in terms of the duties, obligations, and functions of a citizen: an award for good citizenship.
When we talk about open government or transparency, there’s an assumption the goal is to change the behavior of various actors inside government. This is true, but transparency on a granular, day-to-day level, has an aspect that is much less discussed: the opportunity to change the perspective of citizens as well. It’s a chance to build trust, and to help citizens see their individual needs as part of a whole, in the context of a larger society. Let me explain what I mean by talking about some of the web applications we’d like to build through Code for America.
Today, in most American cities, when you report something that needs to be fixed (say, for instance, a pothole), your request essentially disappears into the machinery of the city administration. If you’re lucky, when the problem is fixed, there may be a message telling you so (or at least telling you that the city thinks its fixed, because sometimes the information you gave about the problem wasn’t specific enough for the city to know exactly WHICH pothole you meant). But in between, your request is invisible to you. The machinery itself is opaque, and obscures the path your request follows as it is routed to the correct department, prioritized, and eventually fixed. Thus the term transparency; we’re talking about a view into the process. At Code for America, we envision applications that allow you to see the status of your request at any given time, the same way you can track your Fedex package online in real time. You should be able to see not only which part of the machinery currently holds your request, but the other requests competing with yours for the scarce resources to fix them.
This transparency makes it possible to track how well the city is keeping up with requests, their performance over time, which neighborhoods are getting help first, etc. This is a good thing. But when you see the other requests in the queue and realize that your issue is one of thousands in your community, it’s not just the government who becomes accountable; you start to be held accountable as a citizen as well. At the very least, it can shift your perspective. It’s easy to complain that a broken light on your street hasn’t been fixed; if you could see a list of all the lights that weren’t fixed in your city, and see that a dozen people had complained that there had been a spike in crime under another broken light in another part of town and that people were really suffering because of it, you might you think to yourself, “hey, it’s more important to fix that light than my own.” This is a moment of citizenship, when the needs of the larger group take precedence over the individual’s needs. It’s also a moment of citizenship if you say to yourself, “hey, the city should know that that light should be their top priority; I wonder if I could help write the software that detects the highest needs.” But whether you’re seeing your place in the larger community or actually trying to help fix the problem, neither is possible if the machinery is opaque. Governments may be afraid (though fewer and fewer are) to expose the inner workings and the laundry list of outstanding issues, but when they protect their constituents from that knowledge they are also discouraging them from practicing citizenship.
Transparency is a policy issue, but the rubber hits the road in software design. (Perhaps this is what Lawrence Lessig means when he says “code is law.”) The design of the web applications that connect citizens with government matters. It can promote or frustrate transparency; it can promote or frustrate notions of citizenship. It can also make you feel listened to or ignored. Think about how you feel when you raise an issue and the person responsible uses active listening to play back what they’ve heard and confirm that they’ve heard it correctly. Contrast that with curt “okay, thank you, we’ve got it now” response. The latter shuts the door on you, the former tells you that your input is valuable and further input is invited. Software that plays back your input to you, and then invites you into the process of resolving your issue, helps you feel like a participant or a partner; it gets to the dual nature of citizenship: you have rights and privileges, but you also have duties. Transparency functions like a form of active listening, and its subtle effects encouraging citizenship are under-appreciated in the dialogue about government accountability.
