Yule Heibel's Library tagged local_government →  View Popular, Search in Google

Excellent developments - blow some of the energy our way (to Victoria Canada) please...
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Pahlka thinks she can change what it means to work at city hall. "Right now, if you're a talented developer or designer, government is what you go into if you can't get a better job," she says. (...)

If the geeks do take over city hall, the result may be something like what's happening in the tiny town of Manor, Texas. (...)

"Manor has triggered a movement of municipal innovation," says Margarita Quihuis, a researcher at Stanford University, who worked with Haisler to cocreate Manor Labs. "It's changing the way citizens and government behave toward each other, from the adversarial atmosphere of a typical city-council meeting to the kind of friendly constructive brainstorming that might go on at a design firm like Ideo. We launched this with essentially no money. We're not talking about a New York City that has millions of dollars. If we can do it in Manor, that means 90% of America could do it as well." (...)

"One of my criticisms of gov 2.0 thus far is that there tend to be a lot of transit apps -- Where's My Bus," says Nigel Jacob of Boston's Office of New Urban Mechanics, a city-hall incubator for tech initiatives. "Those are good things, but we have a huge demographic of our city for whom their major challenge is getting access to high-quality food, or getting their kids into school. It's not so much that the developer community doesn't want to tackle hard issues, they just don't know about them." Entrepreneurs, he points out, are understandably used to solving problems for people like themselves, the largely upper-middle-class and educated. That's why Jacob's office is working to connect citizens who need help to the laptops of developers who can fix their problems, both online and through face-to-face meetings.
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gov2.0 fast_company city_halls local_government

A somewhat horrifying account by Bruce Katz on the fractured state of jurisdictional / municipal / state government in the US - and I thought the balkanized nature of our local (Victoria BC) government was bad! Katz lays out the benefits (such as they are) that come with intense localism, but his analysis of the drawbacks (far more numerous) really makes the case for amalgamation:
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There are benefits associated with intense localism. Citizens feel a closer connection to their local officials (although does anyone really know the boundaries of their local library district?). And, in theory, individuals and firms can shop around for the government that most closely matches their preferred mix of efficiency, service and taxes.

Yet the drawbacks of fragmented governance far outweigh the benefits.

Fragmentation keeps government weak. With the landscape chopped into thousands of municipalities and special bodies, most local governments remain tiny, nearly amateur concerns, unequal to the widening challenges of global competition, suburbanization, revitalization and economic development.

Many states are bedeviled by what David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., has called a crazy quilt of "little box governments and limited horizons." In geographical terms, little boxes ensure that in almost every region scores of archaic boundaries artificially divide areas that otherwise represent single, interrelated social, economic and environmental communities. Such divisions complicate efforts to carry out cross-boundary visioning, plan cooperatively or coordinate decision-making across large areas.

At the same time, with the vast majority of municipalities essentially small towns, many if not most have limited tax bases and struggle to provide even the most basic services.

Little box governments create a problem of scale. More and more the geographical reach of local and metropolitan challenges exceeds the reach and capacity of its governmental machinery.

Second, fragmentation increases the cost of governmen

amalgamation wsj.com metros bruce_katz local_government governance

Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
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You might call it a "P2P-to-people" initiative -- these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
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Yes!

wired_magazine mark_gorton open_source local_government urbanplanning cities limewire transportation

Article about American Solutions, "a national grassroots group based in Washington, DC, that was founded by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich but describes its Internet effort as nonpartisan, is preparing to launch a site that will, at first, allow people to enter basic contact information on all local officials. Then future users can enter their full nine-digit zip code to find the local officials who represent them."

wiki local_government open_source politics mit_techreview american_solutions

John Geraci's new project, DIY city. Well worth checking out: its aim is to figure out how we might use social and mobile apps to remake (or at least help) the city.

As Geraci puts it, "DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them."

Looking forward to seeing more from this.

diycity john_geraci local_government local_news cities

Interesting poins by Robert Niles, encouraging use of online technology combined with random sampling techniques to get public opinion front and centre, vs. having pundits either create or estimate the public mood.

local_government punditry public_opinion politics politicians robert_niles knight_foundation

More like this, please:

I so WANT this for Victoria: an online feedback tool to rate your city's councilors. So far available only for Toronto and Vancouver, but, one hopes, soon to expand to other Canadian cities.

PS: of course you can rate your mayor, too.
via Spacing.ca (http://spacing.ca/wire/2008/06/27/rate-your-councillor/)

local_government polls councillors web_2.0 democracy

Report by Royson James on 10th anniversary of Toronto's amalgation -- more negative (generally) than Christopher Hume's article (also in today's TorStar), but also full of useful info re. downloading by Province.

amalgamation downloading local_government municipal_funding toronto

Commentary (one of several in today's Toronto Star) by Christopher Hume on the 10th anniversary of Toronto's amalgamation. Hume has previously written cogently on the problems municipal infrastructure funding in Canada, and while it doesn't come up in this article, I get the impression that he doesn't want to join in fully with the chorus of complainers who moan about the evils that amalgamation has wrought. The key sentence, I think, is "We have gone to great lengths to empower the local at the cost of the civic," and *that* is something totally applicable to (as of yet) un-amalgamated Victoria.

amalgamation christopher_hume local_government politics toronto