Impact Case: Knowsy
Team Contract
Expected level of achievement and effort for each team member (what grades do you expect to get? How much time do you plan to put in?)
We aim to get an A with a reasonably high effort from each member. We have an expected time of ten hours a week per person.
Personal goals for each team member (building a great app? learning a particular skill?)
Lucy: Putting together a product ready for users (i.e. design details are reaching industry standard).
Julia: Practice going through the full design process and improve my team coding skills.
Brian: Creating something useful while learning more about design. I also want to incorporate something cool related to real-world problems.
Yuebin: Further develop full-stack application skills, and develop a project that can both enhance and reflect design concepts learned.
Frequency, length, and location of team meetings
Weekly 1 hr team meeting with TAs: determined by this when2meet on Zoom, and 1.5 hr meetings during class time at the student center (twice a week).
How quality of work will be maintained (reviewing each others’ code? team review meetings? pair programming?)
One branch Pull Request: to pull into the main branch, two other team members must approve the pull request. During team meeting time: review each person’s code, and with the remaining time after meeting objectives are met, attempt group coding on a difficult task that week.
How tasks will be assigned, and what to do if deadlines are missed
Tasks have internal deadlines. Group setting as soon as assignments are released (WEDNESDAY) we talk, write down ALL tasks for the week, and distribute to even workload. Communicate status in advance of internal deadlines.
How decisions will be made and any disagreements resolved
In the initial vote, everyone must vote, each side speaks for three minutes, and then the final vote. If tied, then another 5 minutes of discussion. If tie then random. Decisions will be made if 3/4 person support is achieved.
Draft Impact Case
Currently, civilians are disconnected from the development of their neighborhood’s laws and infrastructure: 1.) civilians are not only uninformed but also 2.) civilian opinion is often not used to inform the decision-makers. Resolving the disconnect between civilians and city development is critical to meeting the needs of residents equitably and more sustainably, mitigating negative trends like gentrification, urban sprawl, etc.
Our solution to this problem is a user-location-based forum that allows users to post about and track development projects and legislation in their vicinity.
We believe this platform is a good solution because it provides a one-stop place for individuals to engage with the built environment in their community, specifically through healthy discussions with a vocal and active base of community members and an intuitive process to move a concern into an in-person actionable (petition/rally).
We could directly measure local election participation in correlation with Knowsy usage to prove that Knowsy is a good solution to the current community's indifference to local development projects. Similarly, we could measure “community satisfaction rates” to show that the app causes users to learn more about their community and increase involvement.
List of Interview Roles and Potential Interviewees
- Urban Planning Expert: professor of Urban Planning at MIT
- Community Leader and Sustainability Expert: professor of engineering and climate and sustainability organization management at MIT
- City Researcher: field researcher at NTUT in Taiwan
- Potential User: university student in the state of Florida with no major interest in urban planning
Research Findings
Engagement is Important and Feasible: Low local engagement occurs because of a lack of incentives and language/accessibility barriers, which can be a form of exclusion, says the Region Plan Association (RPA) in their 2017 report (RPA is a not-for-profit consultant group that recommends policy to the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area with historically high impact). The decisions about land use, school policies, and budget allocations directly impact all citizens, but it's often residents of low-income or people of color who have different needs that are the most neglected. Efforts like participatory budgeting (where community members decide what improvements to focus part of the budget on) improve engagement by increasing motivation. These efforts should be expanded along with increasing citizen input by sampling in local decision making would be minimal-cost ways to improve local engagement. (http://fourthplan.org/action/public-participation)
Engagement is Low but People are Interested: A UK civic data collection app Commonplace reported that in the UK, despite high interest in getting regular updates about development projects (71% of respondents said yes), local engagement is low: 27% of those surveyed participated in a planning decision, and even less attended the relevant meetings. They outline the main barriers to community engagement as the following: citizens don’t trust developers and leaders, non-tech-savvy citizens find websites/platforms inaccessible, and most citizens are unaware of development issues. 5 barriers to community engagement: and how to overcome them!
Current Community Input Methods are Ineffective: In a flagrantly titled Atlantic article (“Community Input is Bad Actually”), writer Jerusalem Demsas writes that the process for sampling community opinion is bad because of selection bias (i.e. those who choose to speak are not representative of the community) and the losers are louder than the winners (i.e. beneficiaries of a policy are less likely to respond retrospectively to a policy than those negatively impacted). These errors come up in any qualitative study; however, in a high-impact, busy organization like the local government, forums become yet another obstruction that bogs down progressive policies and projects.
Current Apps and Their Gaps:
- Nextdoor: is a social media/forum app for neighbors to share events/news and connect for help and exchange. Users are primarily neighborhood residents; also public agencies, businesses, nonprofits, and brands looking to engage with those residents. The gap: although it enables community members to organize at the local level, Nextdoor is diluted by a focus on everyday living topics. [https://nextdoor.com/]
- coUrbanize: is an app that creates channels of communication between the community members and the official developers of a city/real-estate project, allowing comments to aggregate online as an alternative to hosting an in-person city-hall event. The gap: the app maintains the existing power dynamic (ie. community members can only provide input on projects created by gov/developers who thus have control over the topics of discussion). [https://www.courbanize.com/]
VSD Analysis
- Non-targeted Use (stakeholders): City officials and real estate development firms could use the app to find out which community members oppose their development projects to target them and suppress their influence. To avoid this, the app could require users to register with their real names but then allow them to choose a different display name.
- Indirect Stakeholders (stakeholders): Indirect stakeholders may include other community residents who don’t use the app (due to lack of technology or other factors) as well as municipal government officials or city planners and development companies. As all residents of a community would face the impacts of the discussions and advocacy that community members on the app engage in, it will be important to remind users that their words have real-life consequences and that content on the app may not fully encompass all the voices and perspectives in their community.
- Political Realities (pervasiveness): the app is composed of unmoderated (no established authority user) forums that may be dominated by political party affiliations of America’s two-party system. Neighborhoods can be majority one party, or evenly split, both of which risk the oversimplification and “extremification” of the debates that come with a two-party system. To avoid such polarization, the app should encourage users to think of multiple/personal opinions about topics and not present/emphasize user party affiliation.
- Choose Desired Values (values): Some of the core values that we hope to implement within our app are community and democracy. From our interviews, most people feel disconnected from the community they live in, strictly because they don’t have the resources or information to be aware of their surroundings. Our solution addresses the problem by providing a more inclusive space where community members can more easily interact with each other online, with a simple and intuitive UI. In terms of democracy: the benevolent side effect of building a space that provides local information is that people can actively discuss and advocate certain projects. By allowing democratic discussion and polling on certain issues, we hope to encourage local community members to think for themselves about civil/development problems around their areas and raise concerns if needed.
Interview Plans and Key Lessons
Interview Plans
For the interviews, we wanted to have diverse points of view across many different professions. Thus, we created two sets of interview questions: general and expert interview questions. We hoped to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the problem and more clarity regarding our impact case. For our general questions, we planned to ask interviewees about their experiences living in their cities and neighborhoods: how engaged they were with their surrounding community, whether they had participated in any local advocacy efforts or projects, what their experiences and feelings were regarding changes in their neighborhood or city, and how they stayed updated on local news and legislation.
For our expert questions, we also aimed to ask our interviewees about the overall process (and best practices) of community engagement in development projects, what obstacles they had observed that prevented people from being more active community members, and how they thought community discussions could be made more organized and productive.
Summaries of Key Lessons
Overall thoughts from interviewees:
The expert interviewees shared that people stay engaged with local issues and are more active in their communities when they feel that they are being listened to and that they’re interacting with others in meaningful ways (i.e. the feeling of belonging proceeds actual involvement). They explained that currently, people usually don’t stay involved/informed throughout the whole development process; rather, they only pay attention at the beginning (sending an email to a city official) and the end (when final decisions are being made) of the process.
The City Researcher interviewee also explained that one of the driving motivations behind creating extensive software for city planning and city development is access to information. Specifically, within Taipei, where they are based, one of the possible reasons that there may be a lack of participation or engagement with the community is because the mechanisms—or the means and methods of doing so—are very limited, and governments usually expend minimal effort to keep the public in the loop about ongoing legislation or development projects.
Finally, the Potential User interviewee discussed how they thought that most people in general wouldn’t care about urban planning or development unless the projects or legislation had direct effects on their daily lives. They explained that they believe most people have short attention spans; unless information is spoon fed to them, people may not go out of their way to understand local urban planning/legislation.
Gaps and opportunities to create value:
One of the main gaps that our interviewees identified was the lack of a centralized place for city residents to easily find and engage with information about developments in their community. This manifests into an opportunity to present city legislation and development project information in a user-friendly platform so that people who may not be as familiar with the subject can understand and discuss with one another more easily. Furthermore, one challenge in facilitating organized and productive community discussions is getting everyone on the same page since residents have varied levels of understanding of the situation (due to different amounts of knowledge as well as that knowledge coming from many different sources). In particular, the Urban Planning Expert interviewee emphasized the importance of providing people with basic information and context before discussing the details of a project or initiative. An opportunity to create value is by making the platform a one-stop resource that brings together many different pieces of information for users to interact with and share with one another.
Additionally, our expert interviewees explained that extensive community engagement during decision-making processes isn’t always a requirement / standard practice and is conducted by asking community members for comments or feedback. This presents an opportunity to create value by enabling residents to voice their thoughts without having to be asked first. Finally, one particular challenge in increasing community engagement that our Potential User interviewee highlighted is to cater to specific problems that a user might be interested in partaking in, as they felt that there is no incentive for users to participate in urban planning/legislation that does not affect them. Thus, this presents an opportunity to create value by implementing a location-based urban tracking system that mostly presents users with content that is relevant within a certain mile radius.
Revised Impact Case
Currently, civilians are disconnected from the development of their neighborhood’s laws and infrastructure: 1.) civilians have busy lives and self-centered priorities (as the Potential User explained), 2.) civilians are not only uninformed (as the Urban Planning Expert described, residents often lack basic facts and context) but also 3.) civilian opinion is often not used to inform the decision-makers (see Atlantic article in Research findings). Resolving the disconnect between civilians and city development is critical to meeting the needs of residents equitably and more sustainably, mitigating negative trends like gentrification, urban sprawl, etc.
Our solution to this problem is a user-location-based forum that emphasizes the geographical proximity of a development project to the user’s residence by using a map interface and enabling users to post about and track development projects and legislation in their vicinity.
We believe this platform is a good solution because it provides a visualization for how projects affect the user by proximity (which incentivizes the user to read, learn, and get involved, addressing the gap from the RPA article in Research findings), and builds a vocal and active base of community members through regular/informed discussion, and provides, as a feature, an intuitive process to move a concern into an in-person actionable (petition/rally). By putting together a one-stop platform that crowdsources and consolidates information about the community from its members, we believe this app addresses the problems mentioned above, as it streamlines the process of community engagement for ordinary citizens by helping them learn about and focus on content that matters most to them.
We can verify Knowsy's effectiveness in addressing the community's apathy towards local development projects by conducting a direct analysis of local election participation alongside Knowsy usage. Additionally, we can leverage key metrics within the app, including user counts, user growth, user contributions, and geographical reach, to evaluate the platform's influence on community growth and community building. Furthermore, assessing “community satisfaction rates” in specific locales will emphasize the broader impact that citizens have after they have become more engaged in their community.