Digital Tools for a Responsive Government: A Report for the NYC Civic Engagement Commission

Columbia World Projects (CWP), an initiative of Columbia University, in collaboration with the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and the New York City Civic Engagement Commission (CEC), hosted a series of meetings with the goal of providing high-level expert counsel to the CEC on how, if and when digital tools might be employed to better engage New York City’s communities and enhance government responsiveness to the needs and concerns of residents. Considerations of equity, responsiveness, and transparency lay at the center of these discussions as well as a keen concern for how other cities have used digital tools, seeking to understand the conditions under which such efforts succeed or fail.

The CEC was established by a ballot initiative to revise the NYC Charter and approved by voters in November 2018. The Commission is charged with the task of advancing participatory governance in four areas: shaping participatory budgeting processes, partnering with community-based organizations and civic leaders, developing a plan to enhance language access at poll sites by the 2020 election, and providing assistance to community boards. This collaborative effort seeks to assess possibilities for using digital platforms to realize this mandate.

Between May and August 2020, CWP convened experts from academia, community-based organizations, government, philanthropy, and the private sector to advise the CEC on uses of digital technologies to strengthen civic engagement over the course of five separate but interrelated meetings. Broadly, each of these discussions sought to provide insights around how the CEC might build digital points of connection between New York City’s diverse communities and government with the aim of enhancing the civic power that residents might wield while also cultivating more responsive structures of government. These conversations, taking place in the time of pandemic, attained even greater urgency given limits placed on in-person activities.

The first meeting, held on April 3, 2020, examined the norms and values that undergird civic engagement and how the pandemic might serve as a source of stress on usual practices of civic engagement. The second meeting, hosted on June 15, 2020, gathered experts from Europe to gather learnings from civic engagement initiatives across multiple European cities. A third meeting, held on July 22, 2020, was animated by the CEC’s adoption of Decidim, a digital platform built for enhancing participatory democracy, and explored good practices the CEC might adopt to create sustained communication and responsiveness on the platform. In addition to these meetings, CWP formed two additional working groups, each of which met once. The first surveyed the landscape of existing, relevant technologies; the second sought to identify metrics to measure civic engagement.

This report summarizes key insights from these conversations. It is organized into four parts. The first explores fundamental concerns that might guide NYC agencies seeking to enhance digital civic engagement. The second outlines actionable steps and recommendations specific to the CEC’s launch and implementation of the Decidim platform, a digital platform used by a number of governments across the world for civic engagement purposes. A third section offers recommendations the CEC might pursue that will complement efforts reliant on Decidim, as resources allow. The fourth section, the annex, contains lists of participants present at each of the discussions followed by biographies of all participants. As the convenings were held under Chatham House Rule, views have not been attributed to individual participants, even as this report aims to express areas of consensus and points of disagreement among participants.

View and download the paper here.