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West Sac Swipes Right on Citizen Engagement

West Sacramento’s mayor wants to fix civic engagement with an app that acts a lot like Tinder.

West Sacramento’s mayor wants to fix civic engagement with an app that acts a lot like Tinder.

Mayor Christopher Cabaldon was told he was “heretical” when he started bouncing ideas around at South by Southwest and the Conference of Mayors, he said. Cabaldon has been looking for ways to reduce the cost of civic engagement and increase the return on investment.

“They are doomed to fail but they also are utterly counterproductive when it comes to government effectiveness, citizen trust, social equity,” Cabaldon said.

Part of the system being broken is the length of time it takes to get projects approved. Cabaldon said it could take six to 18 months to approve permits for a tasting room or brewery, limiting the kinds of investors that can compete.

“Great things by real people never end up happening and you don’t even know about it,” because of “interminable, mind-numbing public hearings,” Cabaldon said.

The kinds of people engaged and attending meetings are also limited. Civic engagement takes time.

“We expect citizens to be paying constant attention to what it is we’re doing and the decisions that we’re making and to translate that into their own lives and to spend a lot of time participating in them,” Cabaldon said.

Citizens must look for opportunities to engage, by attending meetings, writing letters or making phone calls, he said. Most become engaged only on issues that are personally important to them.

“It’s deep engagement but episodic,” Cabaldon said.

So Cabaldon looked for other ways to put information in front of citizens.

“We started playing around with this idea of how do we get to casual and frequent engagement by citizens on their terms, where and when it is convenient to them, in frames and in context and in language that matters to them, that expresses things that are important to them, rather than drawing them into our arcane, governmental zoning.”

Calbadon was looking for ways to uncover what residents want, even when they aren’t sure of their own preferences.

“To some extent, we will be able to intuit from your casual and frequent swiping, what your underlying preferences and desires are, rather than trying to query you on things you may not be self-aware of,” Cabaladon said.

Building the app in-house is an inexpensive way to access more information. The app is location-based and shows pictures of different types of businesses and land uses for where a person is standing.

Without a commitment, based on a feeling or impression, users can swipe left or right on images that could be alternative ways that area is used. The images are coded with information that helps the city gather data about density, land use and residents' business preferences.

“Cities are not dates, but cities don’t engage in cognitive research and the sorts of things the private sector was trying to get citizens to engage with itself,” Cabaldon said.

West Sacramento is also interpreting data from other sources such as city complaint documents.

While a beta prototype could be released to West Sacramento soon, Cabaldon hopes to encourage others to use a similar, data-driven approach.

And there has been some success. West Sac has one employee spending some time building the app. Santa Monica heard Cabaldon’s presentation and ran with it. Santa Monica hired a firm to build the app to help with creating the downtown master plan based on residents' reactions to actual projects throughout the city.

 

Kayla Nick-Kearney was a staff writer for Techwire from March 2017 through January 2019.