WRITING YOURSELF INTO
GOVERNMENT POLICIES
A Conversation with Mark Elliot about Participatory City Planning
by Katy Asher
In 2008, I had the opportunity to speak in Mark Elliot’s art class “Collaboration Commons” at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia, about my work with the art group, The M.O.S.T. Since that time, I’ve kept an eye on Mark’s work as he began to meld his PhD research on collaboration and the internet with the realities of city planning with Future Melbourne, a participatory 10-year planning process for the city of Melbourne, Australia. Below, Mark fills me in on what he has been doing over the past couple of years, discusses the more subtle implications of collaborative city planning, and describes how the ability to participate doesn’t always equal an opportunity to be heard.
Katy Asher (KA): I’m working with some other artists in town who are interested in starting up a bi-monthly or quarterly publication based on themes of interest to us. The first theme is collaboration. I studied your work during my MFA program and thought it was really interesting, so I wanted to include something that had to do with you in this issue. When I first met you, you were just finishing your dissertation, Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration. I wanted to ask how you got to the place where you decided you were going to develop a dissertation on collaboration itself.
Mark Elliot (ME): Sure. The project started with an interest in what I call “composing collaboration,” in other words, treating collaboration as a medium, whereas it’s typically treated as a method or a means to an end. How can the process of collaboration, the consideration of people’s involvement and the tools that often support collaboration be pulled together to ensure a good outcome, and often, a very specific outcome? I found a lot of gaps in knowledge. Specifically, I couldn’t find a general theory of collaboration. It just didn’t exist. That spurred me to build my own conception of it via reviewing existing literature around collaboration. What I found was a little bit of information in art, a little bit in education, a little bit in science, a little bit here and there. They were all fairly limited in their scope of consideration and thus their application because they were all so focused on their subject matter. I began asking what, in the context of this existing literature and my experience, does collaboration really mean and how can I build some sort of theoretical framework that would be useful in implementing it in the future?
KA: Something I noticed and was surprised about when I read through some of your research were multiple references to research about drone software and/or people trying to make flying armies, information that was super militaristic.
ME: Yeah.
KA: That was a surprise to me, because often times you have collaboration coming across in this more touchy-feely, humanistic fashion. It shouldn’t have been so surprising, maybe.
ME: Right, especially if you consider that the military complex of most nations is typically the most funded, has the most well developed R&D programs and is fundamentally about coordinating and organizing people, even if it is in their destruction. (Laughter)
KA: Since the time of publishing your dissertation, you’ve started Collabforge. How did you get started with your first project, Future Melbourne?
ME: I got a phone call from the manager of strategic planning for the city. He said, “I’m in charge of the city’s ten year planning process. As part of my duties, I need to ensure it’s collaborative and builds upon the best tools and knowledge we have available today. I’m trying to find a collaboration expert. I can’t find any body except for you, and you’re in town – would you like to have lunch?” That’s really where it started. To his great credit, he was really inspired by Wikipedia and wanted to do something like that, or draw up on that.
We developed a project with the City that had four main stages. The first was mapping their existing planning process, then reengineering that process from the perspective of my research on how to make it more collaborative, and identify what tools to use. The next stage was an internal collaboration phase where we brought together the city planners and all of their internal stakeholders around an internal drafting phase. The third phase was opening up that same approach to the public and the final phase was an evaluation of the entire project. I started a company so that the corporate veil protected my personal interests and that evolved into Collabforge.
KA: I have been looking at some of Collabforge’s clients, and am interested in trying to link them to various projects taking place in Portland. For example, in Portland we have something called Civicapps.org. People can use it to geo-tag potholes and send pictures of them to the city for repair, or find bus maps, food carts or bike parking across the city. Do any of Collabforge’s projects work this way?
ME: I think that would fall under our general area of expertise. That whole area is increasingly being called Gov 2.0 – the Web 2.0 thing being applied to government. Most of our clients are government, and when they come to us, they might be thinking, “Yes, we need a website,” or, “We need an App. We need something.”
There’s a bit of a tension in there in that typically our clients are thinking with a “tools” focus, which could be an app or a website, or what have you, whereas we’re thinking about the underlying principles. Whenever we’re figuring out how to go into a project, we have a standard approach of thinking: people, then process, and then tools. We acknowledge that tools are very important. They’re our big levers in society, typically, but no tool really gets properly implemented or implemented at all unless there’s an underlying process in which we engage in articulating that tool. Often the tool and the process tend to blur in our minds when we use it. We don’t realize that they’re actually separate. If people don’t value those processes or don’t understand them or don’t see how they fit into their lives, they’re never going adopt them and the tool isn’t going to be used.
KA: So, what did Future Melbourne look like to a citizen who wanted to participate? Did it look like Wikipedia?
ME: If you go to http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au, the site looks like it did during the first phases. The main sections of the site are People, Creative, Prosperous, Knowledge, Ecocity, and Connected. If you’re a registered member, you can click on any of those pages. An important aspect to keep in mind with the City of Melbourne project is that there weren’t any public engagement opportunities taken away from the standard 10-year planning process – the wiki website process was just added to it.
KA: So there were also typical town hall meetings…
ME: Definitely. The reason for Melbourne’s focus on the online component was that the major demographic of the city was Gen-X or even a young Gen-Y bracket. They had research showing that the group of people that who lived and worked in the city were much less likely to turn up to town hall meetings and were more interested in engaging via online channels. That was a big impetus for it, but they didn’t want to expose themselves to criticism for excluding people, so they didn’t take anything away. They also trained key people for teaching citizens how to use the site, set aside dedicated work stations at the public libraries, engaged community groups to come in for working sessions where they learned how to use the site and engage the subject matter, and had facilitators who could go straight into the site and enter the feedback. There was a bit of a mix.
KA: I was talking with a friend earlier today about your work. We talked about community conversations around the future of an abandoned high school in his neighborhood. He noted that received paper flyers for town hall meetings and also had access to a blog and email surveys. He remarked that the town hall meetings were mostly attended by people of an older demographic who owed homes. On the other hand, the blog and email surveys were widely used by younger folks who were renters and wanted different outcomes. He thought that using the Internet was a great way to get more information and community engagement.
ME: That makes me think of something else. One of the underlying outcomes of from Future Melbourne is that the input that we received through the wiki as opposed to town hall style input or email submissions was that the wiki input was prioritized much much more anything else. There’s probably a fairly simple reason for that. If you imagine editing an article in Wikipedia, the article changes, but you don’t really see who changed it. You don’t even necessarily see the change unless you are the town planners who were checking the revisions. So, suddenly you are really focusing on the materials’ merit, not who contributed it or why they contributed it.
There are even more subtle impacts. For example, let’s say some material got changed, and is sitting there for a while, then somebody reads through that material and it gets moved to somewhere later on the page - or even gets deleted. Even if it gets deleted, it impacts the flow of the content.
One of the biggest prevailing attitudes for planners out there is that public consultation is just a pain in the ass. It’s a box they need to tic and then they move on. The traditional approach of submission is almost designed so that it can be ignored. (Mimicking a planner) “Ah yes, I’ve received that and accounted for receiving your submission and it’s in my spreadsheet. I’ve ticked the box that said I have considered it.” That doesn’t mean it’s ever going to be integrated. It probably isn’t going to be integrated.
KA: And that’s something you noticed as it was coming about?
ME: The opportunity is really for something more akin to participatory democracy as opposed to representative democracy. You can participate in the stuff that governance is really made of: policies, strategies, plans, written stuff that people have to be held accountable against.
Have you come across the work we’re doing with Southern California Association of Governments, SCAG? Here’s a link: http://scag.ca.gov/. It’s the redevelopment of Southern California’s transportation plan, starting with bicycles and pedestrian lanes. We developed a site and a process for how to engage the community. I think it will be launched in the next couple of months. Their hope is that this will go well on the bike and pedestrian front, and then they’ll continue the approach throughout the entire transportation plan.
KA: That’s totally exciting!
ME: In my mind the value proposition is so high for this type of community consultation because it’s not just about, (laughs), what they call in the business ‘voluntary compliance,’ which is that if people are involved in the planning process and feel like they have a stake in it, shared ownership, they won’t be enforced or coerced to comply. It also means that it’s much less costly to implement.
There’s also what we demonstrated with Future Melbourne, which is that you just get better outcomes. Subject matter experts from all over the world contribute who have motives in promoting their own interests and identity, adding lots of value. The town planners never conceived that they would ever even have wanted that value or could have ever afforded that value – they’re getting it all for free.
For example, on Future Melbourne, if you go to the search page, and search “Helsinki,” you’ll come across “bicycle lanes in Helsinki.” Somebody, we don’t know who this person even is, said, “Oh, you want to address bicycle lanes in Melbourne? Here is a submission about how they did it in Helsinki.” It’s extraordinary! Nobody asked for that. Nobody even would have realized that a report on how Helsinki did it would have been valuable to Melbourne, let alone could have afforded to commission that report. So, it has an amazing value and it’s in context. So when you read through the bicycle section, there’s a link that takes you to the submission.
Sooner or later, this approach has got to become more widely adopted but how long will it take?
KA: Right. Just a few seconds ago, I was wondering if you get examples of the opposite of this? Do you run across people spamming or trolling the site who want to remain anonymous and keep returning for their own agenda?
ME: Not yet. There are two main dynamics at play, the nature of engagement and the maturity required for this type of engagement. The nature of engagement has to do with who will even find out about one of these kinds of planning projects to begin with. Once they do, they have to be motivated to read through a site like Future Melbourne, find the best point of entry, the ideas that they want to express in relation to the existing ideas and then engage the technology. That filters out a lot of people. The only people participating were, by and large, the people who had a lot of motivation to do so.
In terms of maturity, as this approach becomes more widespread, I expect to see something akin to swarm lobbying taking place, or lobbying transforming to capture the opportunities presented. People with lobbying-oriented interests as opposed to, say, community welfare interests haven’t yet grasped the power of being able to go and edit the plan. Once they realize that if they just did that consistently and effectively from lots of different perspectives and getting lots of different people involved, the system will need to develop immunity against that. This hasn’t arisen yet.
KA: Speaking of filters, it seems to me that the format of commenting on blogs is less complex in terms of filtering people out and encouraging them to figure out where to put their viewpoints in context.
ME: Sure, and the blog format, an online forum or discussion forum, would, from my framework, fall under cooperation instead of a collaboration process. The traditional consultation process also falls into a cooperative process. They’re aligned, which means that people can only submit disparate, individualized, fragmented little bits and pieces that aren’t actually integrated with anything other than the conversation. All of those conversations can be ignored in some respect. The only significant change is the “open” factor, in that those comments have come out of the black box of sending an email or sending a letter, or, even a town hall can be a black box, ultimately. That is a significant change, but at the end of the day…
KA: …Who’s going to do anything with that, really?
ME: Yeah, exactly.
KA: I have one last question. If everything you are working on came to fruition better than you can imagine it, how would you see this work changing the architecture of our city structures, our governments? How do you see this changing the structure of public participation in our society?
ME: One of the main things that this work does is make ideas and information more accessible. It connects ideas, information, people and opportunities to one another in a much more agile and dense fashion. As humanity evolves, we have more and more ideas and information to make sense of in our heads. We also have many more people and opportunities to engage with than 100 or 250 years ago. What does that mean? I hope that it means increasing our overall intelligence, really. To make it a bit more concrete, what I would expect to happen if, say, city planning was increasingly drawing upon this approach, is that, suddenly you’d have this ecosystem of ideas that would be common across a variety of planning sites. Someone promoting his or her nifty carpool idea in New Zealand could contribute to Future Melbourne. You’d have transnational swarms contributing to the city plans all over the world where they’ve never done that before.
I’d extend that by way of asking how people and communities share information and collaborate together. I think we’re seeing a really extraordinary thing with recommendation systems, for example “you’ve purchased A, B and C, so you might be interested in purchasing D.” Imagine that you had 50 planning wikis across the US with some common standards the plans could fall into. Your city plan could recommend things to you! Or, if you were contributing to Future Melbourne, you might get an email saying, “This particular city is doing planning around carpooling. Maybe you’d be interested in contributing there.” From a city planner perspective, the message would be, “We can see that you are redeveloping bike lanes in your city. Here are the articles that have already been drafted in other city plans around bike lanes that you might be interested in drawing upon.” This is simple stuff, but a logical conclusion that means increased awareness, intelligence and capacity.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 11:09PM 
