Harnessing Technology for Effective Co-Governance

Collaborative governance—or “co-governance”—offers a model for shifting power to ordinary people and rebuilding their trust in government. Co-governance models break down the boundaries between people inside and outside government, allowing community residents and elected officials to work together to design policy and share decision-making power. Cities around the world are experimenting with new forms of co-governance, from New York City’s participatory budgeting process to Paris’s adoption of a permanent citizens’ assembly. More than a one-off transaction or call for public input, successful models of co-governance empower everyday people to participate in the political process in an ongoing way. Co-governance has the potential to revitalize civic engagement, create more responsive and equitable structures for governing, and build channels for Black, brown, rural, and tribal communities to impact policy-making.

Still, co-governance models are not without challenges. The hierarchical and ineffective nature of our current governing structure is difficult to transform. Effective collaboration between communities and politicians requires building lasting relationships that overcome deep distrust in government. So far, effective models of co-governance tend to be local and community-specific—making it critical that we share stories of success and brainstorm ways to scale.

In this series, we share stories of co-governance in practice. For this interview, New America’s Hollie Russon Gilman, Sarah Jacob, and Alexander Fung spoke with Oscar Romero, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the NYC Civic Engagement Commission, about technology and community engagement. Romero’s work focuses on leveraging technology, innovation, and global partnerships to increase participatory democracy and address urban inequality across low-income and underrepresented communities in New York City. Oscar leads Diversity in Tech NYC, an annual event to discuss key challenges to improve diversity in the tech industry. As an NYC public servant, he served in multiple emergency response taskforces on topics such as preventing tenant harassment, preventing child abuse online during the COVID-19 pandemic, and providing mental health services for newly arrived Ukrainian refugees.

Can you tell us more about how you think about how technology can help in the challenges that communities are facing?

There are many areas for opportunity where technology can support and augment the provision of services across the city. Over the last five years, I’ve worked at multiple city agencies on inclusive innovation programs, and the key was always to start by creating spaces for communities to self-identify their needs and priorities.

Only then, we could explore the role that technology plays in the issue at hand. For example, in my previous role leading NYCx Co-Labs, we created community technology boards in neighborhoods that face different forms of systemic inequality.

In Inwood and Washington Heights, one of the big challenges identified by the board was around the provision of mental health services that were not culturally competent to meet the needs of diverse communities. The content around mental health in Spanish was limited and was not particularly targeted to the specific needs of Dominican immigrants. This gets combined with a bigger problem, which is that access to mental health services practically means access to insurance, which is related to employment.

Presbyterian Hospital in Washington Heights manages most of the cases for depression and anxiety in the area. That location is also considered a federal mental health service shortage area. We also know that Latina teenagers have the highest suicidal ideation rates in the city. So you put all of those things together, and you realize that the systems that allow you to have excellent access to mental health services are fundamentally broken. And then here is the opportunity that technology can offer in terms of education, skills, and understanding. What does a stressor look like in you? How does it feel to be depressed? How does it feel to be anxious? What is it that you can do when you feel like this; what are the techniques? How do you listen to your friend when your friend feels this way? Where do you take your friend if they have suicidal ideation? If we can create culturally competent content that represents diverse communities, then this content could be shared through different technological mediums. And that could actually address some of the lack of services that we’re seeing in these communities.

How about your work around participatory budgeting: What does that entail, and what are the challenges that you face?

In the context of participatory budgeting there were basically two challenges. On the one hand, we try to get just ideas from people on what problems they see. How do they go about solving those problems? Where do they happen, and then who is affected by those problems? The clearer the problem statement and your strategy for how you want to solve it, the more actionable that idea is. On the other hand, once you get all of those ideas through something like a survey, we have created what we call Borough Assembly Committees. Each one of these assembly committees will be composed of people that came to our evaluation session, so if they wanted to apply online they could send an application.

We hosted 523 sessions over the fall, and we hired 82 community-based organizations that made this available in more than 12 languages. And in total, we engaged 12,344 New Yorkers in that idea generation process. They submitted 4,139 ideas. Most of the ideas that we generated were generated through workshops where people could actually discuss them and have a dialogue versus staying online, alone.

People then applied to the assembly committees. These assembly committees met five times for two to six hours from December to February. In these assembly committees, people got a subset of the 4,139 ideas, so they got 1,085 total. And then they were divided by borough and Taskforce on Racial Inclusion & Equity (TRIE) neighborhood. As an outcome, 38 ballots were designed, one for each TRIE neighborhood and one for each borough. A total of 208,000 ballots were cast by New Yorkers throughout the voting phase.

Integrating an open source software with the cybersecurity practices of New York came with a bunch of challenges. At the end of the day, you have to make strategic and informed trade-offs. You want to make a product that is user friendly at the same time that it aligns with broader standards.

And finally, getting language translation services was very challenging. There are a few companies that promise they will help you translate everything. They can be pricey and challenging to audit for quality. City governments can be very progressive when it comes to how they frame their values and discussions until you talk about language access. When we talk about language access, they can become conservative and exclusive

How do you reach out to communities, especially those with lower political participation?

We partnered community-based organizations based on the following tiers:

• Citywide demographic partners
• Borough partners
• TRIE neighborhood partners
• Single session partners

For the citywide demographic partners we hired organizations that work specifically with youth, veterans, older adults (seniors), people with disabilities, people with lower English proficiency, justice impacted individuals, LGBTQIA communities, and public housing residents.

The other approach was to focus on geography. We had the borough partners as well as the TRIE neighborhood partners, which would focus on serving one or several of the communities hardest hit by COVID we identified through the task force of racial equity and inclusion during the pandemic. Those neighborhoods have become a guiding post in terms of where you see a lot of the consequences of systemic inequality in New York City.

We also worked with what we called “single session partners” that were not required to have a 501c3 status. You can find more information about the process here, and see the list of organizations that we partnered with here.

Finally, we also did social media campaigns or events at shelters and subway stations, and we did televised interviews. We try to do all sorts of things to prove our reach with various degrees of success.

How do you balance security and privacy in your systems, while also leaving the process as accessible as possible?

There are so many angles to talk about around cybersecurity that have an impact on this. For example, one of the original ideas of this community was that every project had to be open for comments. We were hopeful, and also perhaps a little naive, in how we expected community engagement to happen in the comments section. Any major newspaper has a whole team who works on managing the comment section. We discovered that having comments as a feature requires lots of tech support and moderation. And I think that is something if cities don’t properly scope, then they end up being completely covered by spam. So local governments have to ask themselves: Do I even have the resources to support a more open dialogue space? Technically and also in terms of content management?

What were some accessibility challenges you encountered when you launched the online platform?

In partnership with the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, we audited the website. We found lots of opportunities for improvement despite the fact that the tool we use—Decidim—is up to W3C standards. We are currently working through those things like making sure that navigation is done in a way that people who are visually impaired on the screen readers can work with it. Then another challenge is how to create content for different platforms and different devices, like Google Chrome versus Safari, or on a desktop versus an iPhone. And then also languages; that is another whole level of complexity for digital accessibility in products. It gets complicated. I see it as an area that always requires improvement, one that we are certainly working on.

What do you see as the biggest challenges at the intersection of civic engagement organizations, government, and technology?

Civic engagement organizations were designed before the internet, when information and communications technologies were not what they are today. That carries a lot of consequences. The way that people engage with governments is not as sophisticated as how they engage with day-to-day practices through technology. To give an example of the issues that implies: What does it mean for government agencies to have social media campaigns, given the state of social media companies? How do we position ourselves to provide social services to vulnerable communities in the context of profit-driven and extractive mediums? However unfair or privatized those systems are, they have changed how people engage with each other. And at the very least, government should be aware of how to think about that. In many cases, that doesn’t happen.

The other big problem is salaries for people who work in civic engagement, at least in the context of New York City, have lower salary thresholds than policy designers or technologists. Therefore, if you need somebody that is tech savvy, it may be difficult to hire that kind of person.

New technology uses lead to new problems that are not always already codified within the responsibilities of government agencies. For example, during the pandemic the cases of child abuse online increased dramatically across the board, because you had more children and adults than ever online. And there was not a distinct city government agency that had the responsibility to come up with a strategy to protect children online from these types of abusers when it happened in new spaces, like, for instance, in the context of group chats in video games. So at the time we created a task force to identify strategies across all city agencies that shared responsibilities to protect children.

This again brings us back to the importance of hiring young, technically savvy staff and to proactively identify new challenges. I think that the notion of developing a technical capacity in “traditionally non-technical” government agencies that can critically think about these issues is already progress.