On Tuesday, April 28, Tow Fellow Susan Crawford hosted a panel of civic tech advocates to launch a white paper titled “The Responsive Cities Initiative: What a University Could Do to Help.” The white paper was generated from a series of meetings hosted by the Tow Center in the fall of 2014, which gathered together government officials, fiber internet access builders, journalists, and others to discuss how a university center could help governments leverage technology to better serve their citizens.
Crawford opened with a call to action: the United States is destined to fall behind other countries unless civic leaders begin to value and implement fiber Internet access. Having fiber internet access is as different as having electricity was from not having electricity. With fiber, city governments could better serve their constituents in a myriad of ways. From better data, increased transparency, and innovative services, the end goal of fiber matches the ultimate goal of the fiber advocates, journalists, and city officials: to improve lives in communities.
Lev Gonick (CEO of OneCommunity), Brett Goldstein (Fellow in Urban Science, U. of Chicago, Board Member of CFA), Elin Katz (Consumer Counsel for State of Connecticut), and Oliver Wise (Director of Officer of Performance and Accountability for the City of New Orleans) joined Susan to offer their thoughts on how a university center could help, what is useful about the cross-disciplinary work that the university center will focus on, and the toughest problems that the country faces that could be addressed by the responsive city approach.
Gonick explained that there are four models for what a university center could do: creating a service model in which universities can discover fiber competencies, figuring out a faculty engagement strategy, generating an action agenda for students, and combining industry and philanthropy with sponsored engagement with industry partnerships. “We are facing real issues in our community, and how we attack them with fiber, with sensors, with data, and with representations of data is really the stuff that universities and policymakers need to be able to do together.”
Wise believes that the hardest problems facing our cities and country are resilience, income inequality, and trust in government – all which can be ameliorated with data science and increased transparency. He adds that data can help package and deliver to citizens services that they actually need. “When you’re in local government, you’re focused on the here and now, and addressing the needs of your citizens.”
Goldstein said that the problem that the government needs to solve is silos – something built from a very functional perspective, but problems that cities face today are actually cross-disciplinary. For example, crime isn’t just a police problem, it’s about everything from economics to schooling to garbage pickup. We need to accept the technology footprint that we have and the data from silos, but we need to figure out a way make sense of enormous amounts of data to solve problems.
Katz shared that in Connecticut, they have worked to create public-private relationships. It has helped in that the towns are looking for data, and need to explain to citizens why it’s important. At UConn, a group of business students is studying how fiber impacts communities. She also justifies investment in fiber internet access is that young people are growing up with the Internet at their fingertips, and expect fast, available Internet access as they grow up and a state that is future-oriented. The towns that she is working with are dedicated to providing an open-access network, and touching every home in the community – an example that other towns and cities would do well to follow.
What emerged from the conversation was the power of cities, and the need for more cross-disciplinary cooperation. A university center that sits at the crossroads of these concerns could create a diverse talent pool. It could also serve as a research center for how a city government can effectively wield technology to build stronger communities. The paper and the conversations that preceded it will provide a springboard for such a center to create more trust between communities and governments and improve cities as a whole.
