Cyber Democracy: �Inventing the Future of Local Government
Beta NYC Leadership Meeting (26 July 2017)
Claudina Sarahe (@itsmisscs) & Darshana Narayanan
Darshana Narayanan
Darshana studies human behavior at multiple levels and time scales: individual behavior, group behavior and behavior both in developmental and evolutionary time. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University. Her previous job was Head of Research at pymetrics, a machine learning, organizational behavior, gaming start-up.
Claudina Sarahe
CS is a creative consultant, speaker, organizer, teacher, etc etc.
She has worked in product development and team building for over 12 years. CS was a founding member of UNICEF Innovation Team. Past clients include PBS, Scholastic, Daniel Libeskind, Red Cross, and Casper where she built and scaled their front-end engineering team.
We are a citizen scientist collective that operates at the intersection of design & technology, behavioral sciences, and society.
We employ dynamic systems theories, analyses of social structures, and the science of design to transform organizations.
g0vNYC is working to bring a participatory model to inform city decision making and election processes and to connect organizations and districts around similar issues to solve them in a more effective way.
Community Board (50 members)
District Manager (1)
City Agencies
City Council (51 members)
Mayor (1)
Borough President & Boards (5)
Citizens (8.5 million)
Viable Systems Model
Stafford Beer, Management Cybernetics
TOP DOWN
ORG
CITIZENS
BOTTOM UP
VIABLE
ORG
CITIZENS
ORG
CITIZENS
- Ahmed El Hady Ph.D. Princeton Neuroscience Institute
VIABLE
ORG
CITIZENS
- Ahmed El Hady Ph.D. Princeton Neuroscience Institute
Designing Viable Systems
Requisite variety
Channels
Transducers
(e.g. framing of content, translations)
Short Term
Re-form lengthy Community Board process
Adoption of participatory processes throughout NYC politics
Open data and tools
Learning & Development toolkits
District residents elect their Community Board members
Long Term
Experimentation to understand what tools and processes could work to build a viable system.
vNYC Strategic Initiatives
Pol.is survey
Hackathons
Media
Train and build facilitators
Extend Pol.is to incorporate zip codes in order to look at data at all levels NYC (district, borough, city-wide)
Reach citizens and stakeholders via Facebook ads & local, physical advertisements
Make pol.is data open and accessible
Surface Pol.is data in election debates, events, and media
Objective
Reflective
Interpretive
Decisional
Human Led Facilitation
http://betterevaluation.org/en/evaluation-options/orid
Hackathons
Data Scientist + Journalists
open city data that betaNYC has been so instrumental in surfacing
�pol.is data
�NYC capital commitment info
Urban Planners &
Policy Makers
Researchers & Journalists
Government
Organizers
Share Data Openly
github.com/g0vnyc
Self Organizing
Simiplicity
Clearly defined objectives and goals
Reflection/
Retrospectives
Respond to feedback
Adjust and adapt assumptions
Tools & Processes
Impact Mapping
Work with you to bring new processes and tools to the community board (CIL project)
Hackathon partnerships
Releasing our data in the same ethos as your open data work
Experimenting with open tools
Partnerships & Collaborations
You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– Buckminister Fuller