Civic Innovation: a New America-wide conversation

Are community tool libraries (shared work equipment, like that pictured above) a civic innovation? Image by slobikelane.

As part of our new approach to civic innovation, we recently gathered together staff from across New America to unpack and explore the intersections between "civic," "innovation," and our core programs. In addition to introducing the Civic Innovation team’s work to the rest of the organization, this roundtable was an opportunity to practice what we preach and dig into an interdisciplinary understanding of what innovation is, where it’s found, and what it’s social impact potential could be.

The session began with a popcorn  brainstorm around the words “civic” and “innovation.” Our goal was to get concrete about terms that all-too-often fly around without reflection, to identify common themes, and spot differences in interpretation. Some comments from our colleagues around “civic” include: collective action, local focus, and positivity (or, at least, “less cynical” than concepts like “politics”). “Innovation” implied: creativity, new techniques, and lost value due to overuse. Both terms also inspired commentary on public activity and problem-solving and an equal focus on both process and platforms that support these activities.

We then dug deeper, asking each participant in the roundtable to come up with a few examples of “civic innovations” that they knew of in general, in their field, or that they wanted to see in the  world. The results were fascinating, spanning election monitoring platforms, public education itself, and some uses of yarn bombing, a form of street art that involves wrapping object with yarn, currently at use in DC to unify neighborhoods. (Get a glimpse of what yarn-bombing looks like in Melbourne, Australia below.) When one of our colleagues offered the web app “I Paid a Bribe” as an example, another countered that bribery itself might count as a way a community might respond to an unresponsive economy. 

Low levels of trust in government were expressed as a critical challenge to civic innovation, for while civic innovation does not necessarily require direct engagement with government, trust impacts how and whether governments can participate in community activity (and whether the community will participate in innovations attempted by the government). Other themes highlighted include activities that make previously closed systems open, support collective and networked activity, improve public processes, and create tangible social goods.