A New City O/S

The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Governance

Stephen Goldsmith, Neil Kleiman

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780815732860
• eBook ISBN: 9780815732877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Proposing an entirely new governance model to unleash innovation throughout local government
At a time when trust is dropping precipitously and American government at the national level has fallen into a state of long-term, partisan-based gridlock, local government can still be effective—indeed more effective and even more responsive to the needs of its citizens. Based on decades of direct experience and years studying successful models around the world, the authors of this intriguing book propose a new operating system (O/S) for cities. Former mayor and Harvard professor Stephen Goldsmith and New York University professor Neil Kleiman suggest building on the giant leaps that have been made in technology, social engagement, and big data.
Calling their approach "distributed governance," Goldsmith and Kleiman offer a model that allows public officials to mobilize new resources, surface ideas from unconventional sources, and arm employees with the information they need to become pre-emptive problem solvers. This book highlights lessons from the many innovations taking place in today's cities to show how a new O/S can create systemic transformation.
For students of government, A New City O/S: The Power of Distributed Governance presents a groundbreaking strategy for rethinking the governance of cities, marking an important evolution of the current bureaucratic authority-based model dating from the 1920s. More important, the book is designed for practitioners, starting with public-sector executives, managers, and frontline workers. By weaving real-life examples into a coherent model, the authors have created a step-by-step guide for all those who would put the needs of citizens front and center. Nothing will do more to restore trust in government than solutions that work. A New City O/S: The Power of Distributed Governance puts those solutions within reach of those public officials responsible for their delivery.

ONE

The Pivot to a New Government Operating System

The 2016 presidential election ripped away any pretense that citizens are complacent and satisfied with elected and appointed leaders in the United States. Although local and state officials take pride in the fact that trust in local government consistently ranks higher than in the federal government,¹ Americans’ faith in government as an institution is shrinking, dropping to 37 percent after the election, even as faith in nongovernment organizations and business increased, according to the highly-respected Edelman Trust Barometer.² Moreover, a dangerous trust gap between elites and most Americans is growing. Better-educated individuals who sit at the top of the income distribution reported much higher levels of trust in government than those in the “mass population.”³ With public demands for services continuing to exceed the willingness of people to pay for them—at least when delivered by the current system, which seems impersonal, expensive, inefficient, and distant—that gap will grow.

Fortunately, the societal and technological changes that contribute to heightened cynicism can also power the very transformation of government that will turn much of that cynicism into trust. This book proposes a new model, distributed governance, which pivots away from today’s measurements of how well public servants stay on task to, instead, rewarding them for reaching goals that improve the city, turning them from rule-bound bureaucrats to data-savvy problem-solvers. This model pivots from a City Hall that grudgingly doles out information to a platform provider that serves as the hub of city departments and outside partners. It pivots from concern for procedures to, instead, constantly addressing the needs of its citizens. At a moment when cities are, in many ways, asked to do more within an increasingly difficult environment, distributed governance offers transformative operational reforms that will produce better public services, which, in a virtuous circle, will create more citizen trust.⁴

To catch a glimpse of the future’s distributed system, look to New York City, which took on the creation—almost overnight—of one of its biggest government programs in a generation: a full-blown educational system to serve tens of thousands of four-year-olds before kindergarten. To build it, the city needed help from a broad array of stakeholders, from families to community centers to IT consultants.

In April 2014 Mayor Bill de Blasio held a press conference to say that the city had put together the funding, with state assistance, to allow New York City to establish a universal program called Pre-K for All, which would offer a seat to every child whose family registered for the program. The plan to help all children get off to a healthy start in life was highly complex, a mix of public schools that would be able to add a Pre-K program for the first time and changes to existing Early Education Centers at schools and community-based organizations across the city, requiring the integration of multiple service areas, actors, and approaches into a coherent whole.

City and education officials succeeded, and more than 50,000 students began Pre-K for All six months after the program was first announced. To get there, New York City agencies and nonprofit partners built a universal Pre-K (UPK) system to identify the right schools, teachers, and students and have them each in the right place, ready to go, by the start of school in September. De Blasio empowered his top aides, including a deputy mayor and a chief technology officer, to work across agencies to reach the goal. The effort involved 500 community-based organizations and other nonprofits, nursery schools, daycare centers, faith-based organizations, and public elementary schools across the city.

Knowing that it was entrusted with the care and education of four-year-old children, the administration assumed the responsibility of being the hub of a capillary system, providing absolute clarity about the basic parameters of the program, such as student academic evaluation. An expedited permitting process ensured without undue delay that each of the sites met health and safety requirements. The Department of Education created a simple and streamlined enrollment process so families could easily apply to programs in district schools or Early Education Centers. To allow parents to make informed decisions on behalf of their children, the city produced information on program quality and created systems to gather data once programs were operational that tracked students, measured progress, and held all providers accountable to basic standards. City administrators knew working parents might need not just a regular school day, but also daycare vouchers, often for a relative to watch their children after the Pre-K day.

With its traditional bureaucratic structure, New York faced mighty challenges stitching together Pre-K for All’s disaggregated parts. But the mayor’s directive was clear—tight and collaborative organization was essential, and the multiagency working group included such unlikely allies as the Administration for Children’s Services (the city’s child welfare agency), the Department of Design and Construction, and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Stacey Gillett, the former executive director for strategy and sustainability at the city’s Department of Education, remembers:

It really hit me how well we were working together when there was a press conference and the fire chief stood up and said, “Pre-K for All is my responsibility!” That was amazing and insane at the same time. To know that the Fire Department would do whatever it took to make sure new education providers met safety codes was what made the whole program work. Everyone knew that failure was not an option and that we all had to work together.⁵

Collaborations also extended to the data and information needed to start up a new education system. Luckily, New York had begun going down the road of data coordination for agencies involving children during the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Called HHS-Connect, the fledging system provided a starting point, but much of the necessary information remained scattered among an array of city departments, schools, and community organizations. To accelerate this process, the city paired a dozen city agencies with technologists at an all-day Tech 4 UPK brainstorming session for a new outreach platform.⁶

Throughout the process, the city had a user-centric orientation. This may sound trite, but it meant government functioning in a very new and different way. The customer-first approach was most visible in the way officials reached out to parents who were being asked to enroll their four-year-old children in a brand-new program. For Pre-K for All, New York City went far beyond the standard roll out of a new government program, where a program is promoted and then the assumption is people will take advantage of it. Once Pre-K for All was marketed, the real work began. Led by de Blasio’s campaign staff, the outreach team knew, just like with a get-out-the-vote campaign, nothing could be taken for granted.

“We just had to go knock on doors,” Gillett recalls. She went on to say:

What made it work were all these 20-something de Blasio and ex-Obama campaign staff working together with us education department bureaucrats. One weekend we needed to canvass citywide and no one knew how we would cover so much ground. Well, one of the young staffers stayed up late, used Google Maps and came in early the next morning with personalized walking routes for everyone. The administrators were [stunned], but it worked.

The same kind of customer-focused attention was paid to the small nonprofit providers. New York City had the daunting challenge of converting hundreds of small mom-and-pop nonprofits and childcare providers into fully certified Pre-K schools. This meant every time there was an issue with filling out an application for fire code safety or to meet specific health standards the onus had to be on government, not the applicant. Administrators—many for the first time—would go back and personally help applicants address any snafus. When many unsafe and unfit providers were eliminated, it was because they truly were not up to snuff, not just because bureaucracy got in the way.

This rapidly built Pre-K system was far from a slapdash effort. Overall, in the first year of operation, 92 percent of families surveyed rated their program as excellent or good, and the entire system continues to enroll tens of thousands of new children every school year. The implementation did bring some controversy; critics charged that the city unfairly required a counterproductive level of process detail from out-of-favor charter school providers, making it impossible for them to participate.⁷ Yet on the whole, Pre-K for All has worked better than most traditional service systems.

How did this overnight system come together so well? Because in the rush to tackle a major issue at scale, the city was forced to develop a distributed system that is customer-focused, has the speed and flexibility to find partners who could advance the effort, and gives those partners significant downstream autonomy, with nearly complete data sharing driving the entire system. And at the center, the city provides standards and guides teachers, curriculum, and overall systems operation with clear directives.

DISTRIBUTED, INNOVATIVE, AND OPEN

The hallmark of distributed governance is openness that supports deep and real communications, coordination, and connections across City Hall and a broad range of third parties, including residents, contractors, community organizations, local institutions, and nonprofit and for-profit organizations. In this model, the city serves as a hub for the civic work of these entities and its own agencies, leaving behind the strict rules and tight control of information that retards innovation and collaboration. By turning outward, cities can raise their trust and legitimacy in the eyes of residents, augment their data with more and better information to make smarter decisions, find new partners to deliver specific services in more efficient ways, and hear about and collaborate on exciting and new approaches to addressing urban challenges.

Establishing distributed governance will require a new operating system (O/S) at City Hall: a major reframing of public sector operations. For a smartphone or laptop, the O/S is the platform that supports the device’s basic functions and allows different applications to run, regardless of whether they were created by the company’s software engineers or an outside vendor. It is the underlying system that becomes noticeable to the user only when it isn’t doing its job well.

The hardware, software, and cultural infrastructure of the new city O/S will allow multiple parties to concurrently speak, listen, and learn about matters important to the quality of life in a community. Local government, in this new model, engages residents, employees, and external partners dynamically through a connected web that produces knowledge while enabling all the nodes in the system to be more effective on behalf of the common civic agenda.

What distinguishes disorganization or even a loosely connected ad hoc network from distributed governance is a socio-technical ecosystem that organizes information, its role illustrated in figure 1-1. The “technical” aspect of this ecosystem mines and integrates data from a wide range of sources then analyzes and presents the information in a way that is suited to support outcomes, share information, and serve administrative systems that support those who do the public’s work. The “socio” aspect is the new relationships, protocols, and expectations that create a collaborative, problem-solving approach. The new O/S is dedicated to constantly designing better user experiences for both the public and the employees tasked with supporting them and to “acting in time”—working at a speed that allows for preemptive problem-solving, concurrent processing, and a culture that values the time of residents.

Even the scale of New York City’s UPK success—with so many innovative elements working in concert—is still all too uncommon. Decades into the computer age, cities simply haven’t modernized enough. Although this book is not about technology, it recognizes that technological changes force, enable, and power the transformation to distributed governance and a new O/S. Amazing tools now provide promise to frustrated citizens and civil servants; mobile and cloud computing, GPS, data mining, digital platforms, and more could be harnessed to create radical new ways of delivering municipal services and running city government, if only we would let them.

FIGURE 1-1 Elements of Distributed Governance

These technologies have revolutionized the private sector, even for “old economy” firms like Caterpillar (CAT), a company that has been manufacturing heavy-duty equipment for a century. Today Caterpillar embeds sensors in its equipment to monitor fuel efficiency, idle times, engine performance, and location. Through a partnership with the sophisticated data scientists at Uptake, a Chicago-based analytics company, Caterpillar transforms massive amounts of daily data from those sensors into insights that optimize fleet operations with predictive analytics that allow operators to repair equipment before it breaks, reducing downtime and improving results.

The current design of government originated in the same era as industrial companies like Caterpillar, and a few principles from the company’s transformation can serve as signposts for cities. CAT had been accruing large amounts of data from its assets. The company was able to make the most of a network system when that data savv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Pivot to a New Government Operating System
• 2. The State of Innovation: What We Have and What We’re Missing
• 3. UX: Placing Citizens and Those Who Serve Them at the Center
• 4. Government That Acts in Time
• 5. The Problem-Solving Public Servant
• 6. Mashed Up Government
• 7. A New City from a New O/S
• Appendix: Implementation Guide: Strategies to Address the Ten Most Important Challenges to a New O/S
• Index
• Series Page