Here comes the Civic Boom

In 2012 we had a mild winter in most of North America where roads are most likely to experience damage due to moisture under the surface defrosting with rising spring temperatures.   2011 was one of the worst years on record for road damage. Looking outside weather data at human data from SeeClickFix and Google Trends it looks as if 2013 will be just as bad as 2011 if not worse.

With 'Sequestering' and Fiscal Austerity' making the list of timely buzz words municipalities around North America will be faced with frustrated citizens looking for payout for their taxes in the form of asphalt patches.

Some towns and cities will respond with 48 hour turn-around to citizen requests while others will politely respond that resources are too tight to resolve the issue at all for the time being.  Some, though increasingly less, will snub their noses at constituent service as email boxes fill up and go unanswered as angry citizens shout at skygods via social media.

This is my favorite time of year. It separates accountable from unaccountable governments in a tight time frame with simple anecdotal evidence that government is working or not.  More importantly late winter is a time where citizens are engaging passionately about block level concerns.  This also presents a great opportunity for those looking to engage with citizens on a deeper level than potholes.  

At SeeClickFix we like to capture frustrated citizens, harness that frustration and point it towards engagement with feedback loops created by neighbors and governments.   This Spring will bring lots of new users who come to the platform to vent. In the following months they will likely engage with other content that helps build a better more citizen driven neighborhood, help a neighbor find a lost pet or actually resolve an issue with their own hands.  We've been optimizing this algorithm for neighborhood engagement for the past 5 years and every year it gets more interesting as the outliers on the platform become more common place and repeated across communities.

Bring on the potholes, good governance and great citizenship.

Got an idea? Want to Pitch It to win 25K?

A few years back SeeClickFix was launched into the stratosphere with the help of a competition called PitchIt.  Miles and I did some on stage tap dancing and we brought home a really big check for 25K.

If you are socially focused start-up who wants to change the world though new media than you consider pitching your idea at the wemedia PitchIt competition this year.  To follow are the details from the good folks at wemedia.

Got a big idea for a commerical or social startup? Bring it to We Media.

The 2012 We Media PitchIt Challenge is open to entries.

PitchIt helps would-be entrepreneurs turn their bold ideas for innovative digital media startups into something real.

PitchIt offers $25,000 in seed funding to each of two winners, along with online feedback and support from a global network of media, tech and social leaders, investors and digital creatives. We also connect our winners with a world-class network of mentors and advisers.

Hurry - the submission deadline is March 13.

To enter the challenge or vote and comment on submissions, go to: http://pitchit.ideascale.com.

A group of 6-8 finalists will pitch their ideas live before a panel of expert judges and the audience at the We Media 2012 conference on April 18 at Gannett, Inc., in McLean, Virginia. The public can also comment and vote on the ideas submitted online. The three ideas with the most votes will be named Community Choice winners.

Last year StartupSmart named PitchIt one of the world's top startup challenges. We're really not looking for fully formed startups. We're interested in brilliant ideas and people who can pull them off. If you've been sketching out plans for something wonderful, powerful and world-changing - or just thinking about it - then get going and submit your idea.

To enter the challenge or vote and comment on submissions, go to: http://pitchit.ideascale.com.

We can also use your help to spread the word. Here's a line you can copy-paste and tweet or share on Facebook:

Got a big idea? Bring it to the We Media PitchIt Challenge. $50k to help turn two big ideas into something real. http://ow.ly/8OI9U

PitchIt is sponsored by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Our partners include Ashoka Changemakers, a global network of social entrepreneurs, and Gannett, Inc., the US media company that publishes USAToday.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to attend the 2012 We Media conference on April 18 (which includes the PitchIt finals), register now at:http://wmpitchit.eventbrite.com.

John Sutter From CNN Believes You're a Lazy Citizen...Just Don't Tell That to a Tunisian Fruit Vendor

I'll get to the subject line but let me give you a little background first.

Our friends at the City of Boston's Office of New Urban Mechanics have been working on a really cool project.  Its an app that enables sensors in your smartphone to detect and report potholes when your car hits a bump.  There are some technical hurtles but Nigel Jacob and Co. at the City of Boston are not deterred.  They're innovating and we hope they succeed. SeeClickFix is the largest provider of the open311 endpoint and we think that this tool would be valuable to our client cities like Washington, Richmond, Raleigh and Oakland.  If connected to Open311 the value would scale instantly.

While the app is potentially great, John Sutter from CNN's coverage was not. Here's John's opening quote, "Here's the problem with the whole Gov 2.0 movement: People are lazy.
Plenty of apps - SeeClickFix among them - allow diligent, digitally minded citizens to snap photos of potholes and send them to city hall. But that takes effort and, let's be honest, it's not something many people will follow through with."

Its shocking that 1 month after Time Magazine named The Protestor "Person of the Year" a CNN reporter would still believe that citizens are lazy. He also uses no facts to justify that you are lazy. Regardless of that here they are: When Boston.com used the SeeClickFix map to document potholes in the Boston area in 2009 over 700 potholes were reported in the first week.  This was by citizens not robots.  There were tons of issues reported because people had not been given the opportunity to vent these complaints previously. Boston has since been connected to SeeClickFix via Open311, and though the Boston Globe has not done a pothole story recently with a SeeClickFix map, we imagine that if they did similar results would occur.

Regardless of the fact that over 1/4 million people have participated in creating content on SeeClickFix and people are clearly declaring an end to apathy John Sutter is missing the bigger point. Robots will never replace the value of SeeClickFix because the value of SeeClickFix is not acting as a pothole crowdsourcer. The value of SeeClickFix is empowering citizens to take part in the smallest parts of their democracy by connecting them to their elected officials and neighbors in a meaningful way.

As a side note I do agree that there have been a number of problems with the Gov20 movement which could be documented separately but they have nothing to do with citizens lack of desire to engage.   Most of those problems have to do with the overemphasis of access to data and under estimate the ability to create it.  We work really hard to encourage governments to lay some of their older policies aside to make it easier for citizens to effectively communicate with them and there are many great city leaders who have taken the lead on this as well. The idea that local governments want to hear from their citizens is a relatively new one. See Bloomberg's 311 as first big city example. People have been disenfranchised from participation for quite some time, but there is not indication to us that the 'laziness' is doing anything shy of going away.

I've gotten a number of emails from friends and users astonished at the silly quote. More than anything it feels really really good to know that John is wrong and we have data to back it up.   (And those of us who don't drive cars will still have a place to communicate with their government even if the robots take over.)

Comments on local news sites: Public Square or Public Sewer?

For years I have credited the New Haven Independent with the high level of civic engagement in New Haven. They report on content that is truly local and interesting and accessible in a way that makes me and many others want to be involved. Melissa Bailey was the first person I bounced the idea of SeeClickFix off of. Paul Bass and team have inspired citizens to participate in ways that I did not think journalists were really supposed to. For the most part they made us proud of the place where we live regardless of its many flaws.

But aside from informing us they also provided an arguably more valuable function. One that did not exist in print or broadcast. They gave us a public forum for civic debate. For years I loved commenting on the New Haven Independent and the cast of characters that would fire comments back. When I commented it felt constructive and I felt like my thoughts were contributing to the improvement of New Haven. For many of the commenters of the Independent the comments were social in the way that we felt we were doing something valuable for society not just for our connections to others.

Over the past couple of years however the comments section became less attractive to me. I wondered if it was just me getting tired with the medium or if it was something in the moderation.  Many times I was annoyed by the ridiculously politicized and cruel nature of the comments and many times I was just bored with the redundancy.

It turns out that I was not alone and Paul has decided as of today that the comments are off indefinitely on NHI.   I'd encourage you to read that article here: http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/time_out/  and comment 
and comment below here as you can not on the NHI.

Sadly I don't actually have any blog readers so the debate will likely be me and myself...but maybe that will be more multi-sided :)

Here's my take on all of this to fuel the conversation:

We have local news sites that do a horrendous job at creating meaningful debate by using poor algorithms for moderation. See WTNH.com. Those sites should kill their comment sections. It is not good for society and they need to shape up.

We also have sites like SeeClickFix which have had their trolls but have focused algorithmically to remove them. I think we've done a pretty good job but its really hard and we have the advantage of very topic specific content with a central goal of resolution. The site is constructive by design where WTNH is destructive by design. I won't comment further on that. You can form your own opinion if you own a television and visit their website.

And then there's the Independent. The Independent covers the tough policy level and societal level issues in New Haven and still managed to create relatively civil debate.  The problem here is that Paul and team are not computer assisted in their moderation as far as I know. They have content policies as we do at SeeClickFix but they depend on humans to be the first filter where other local sites with comments make the human the second filter.   I think that the Independent can go on with comments but they need a better algorithm. Algorithmic authority helps squash bias, if done correctly, and compensates for tired humans.

I hope that Paul and team will look for help to create this algorithm as it would be truly sad to lose the New Haven Independent to the folks who shamelessly and selfishly brought Paul and team to their knees with their hateful and destructive commentary.   If we can find a way to house people in real-life on our real-life public square, see Occupy NHV, I'm sure we can find a way to virtually house conversations in a civil way as well.

User Driven Design...faster

I'll be the first to admit that we have no idea what we're doing. We're learning slowly but, let's face it, there are no Cliff's Notes for building a local social network.  We had some good hunches and executed on them well enough but we'd like to be learning faster.  We are not mind readers and none of us have ran a large social web platform before.

Over the last three years we've taken on the humble task of making pothole reporting enjoyable and engaging. We have tried to structure an environment where we release every two weeks and measure accordingly.

We have played around with AB Testing before but nothing we have used has really had the power to change office culture or make us stealthier. We had been looking for a tool that would let us test our hypotheses quickly, settle tiresome inter office debates and build a more user friendly SeeClickFix.

A couple of months ago my cofounder Jeff Blasius discovered Optimizely and the team dove in quickly.  Optimizely has not only made it easy to test one interface change against another, it also makes it easy for someone on our team without web experience to modify the look, content and behavior of the site and deploy quickly and easily.
With Optimizely the new game plan is that we meet once a week to

1) Review the experiments that we were running last week.
2) Decide whether to kill, extend, expand or deploy those experiments site wide.
3) Pick the new experiments for the next week.

In the first week we are running eight experiments. A couple of the experiments are running on simple marketing pages. One experiment is on the homepage. One experiment is on an issue template page and a couple more are running on neighborhood or city homepages.
Some experiments are as simple as changing text. Some as simple as adding or removing a button to increase engagement.  In one case it includes removing a feature that countless hours have been put towards and makes us feel good when we visit our own website.

To follow is example of an Optimizely experiment and the process for running the experiment.

The Challenge: Reduce the bounce/exit rate on the SeeClickFix homepage.  By how much? By anything at all because the amount of energy that will go into the overhaul will be less time than it took to write this post.

My Hypothesis:  Simplifying the homepage will increase engagement.  Currently there is a map on our homepage that has some neat functionality that zooms around the world in near real time showing issues as they are being reported. There is also a big search bar that reads "Citizens Get Started."  Below the fold there are more links and recent blogposts and a link to our mobile app.   I want to do something that would previously have created a debilitating debate with the team. I want to drop the map that we worked so hard to make beautiful and functional. My goal is to focus eyeballs on the search box.  This is where the culture shift comes in. Optimizely is so easy and time-light that the only reasonable outcome to suggesting the dropping of the map is "lets just test it."

A little background on me before I jump into the explanation of the test: I was once a freelance web designer with strong HTML and CSS skills and limited knowledge of php and javascript.  I deployed code by ftp and have little experience with the terminal.  SeeClickFix is built in Ruby On Rails and I have never had access to a Git branch for our site.  I've been learning Javascript and the terminal in a great class at Yale aptly titled Hackyale, but I would not feel comfortable tampering with our current environment designed for the real engineers in the office.

Case Study

So here’s what happens when I open Optimizely:

           1)   I tell Optimizely what URL I want to tinker with and it pulls a view of that page into my    dashboard.

          2)   I Click on the big map that sits behind the location search bar and I select the ‘remove’ option. Goodbye Map!

          3)   I drag the search bar and its div container to a more central location on the screen and then I scale it up by 50%. Yay big search bar!

          4)   I Change the text from “Citizens Get Started” to “Report neighborhood issues and see them get fixed” I then add a little sub text that reads “Over 75K Issues fixed. Is yours next?” 

          5)   I have a little trouble picking a new background color to replace where the map was so I bounce it off a few folks in the office. We settle on a dark grey.

          6)   I name my new version and save it. I then play with a few other variations that play with keeping elements above or below the fold. For now I am not going to test those variations. Just a simple A/B test between the Current homepage and the simplified page. In Optimizely you can run a/b/c/d/e tests if you have enough traffic and time.

         7)   The next step is the scariest because it’s the most powerful and the easiest to do. It’s a big button that reads, “Start Experiment.”  Once I hit that button its off to the races. The test is live instantly and real users are proving my hypotheses right or wrong.  An even distribution of the two options is run and data is collected.  Entire time to go from idea to user testing: under 10 minutes.  If it had just been a simple text change: under one minute.

        8)   Within the hour I have enough data to tell me that my hunch might have been a good one. Optimizely is telling me that there is a 50 percent chance that my experiment will beat the baseline. It looks like engagement is increasing with the simplified page by 30-40%. Wow! All I did was kill a fancy feature and go back to basics.   Optimizely wants at least another 150 conversions before it can make a solid determination that my experiment is a winner but while I’m waiting I can create and run more experiments on other pages or line up the next experiment for the homepage if this one fails.

       9)   After a few days of running experiment “Homepage Map Drop” there is a 97.5% change that we are going to beat the baseline and we have a winner. Depending on when we look at the data the new page is increasing engagement by 25 - 30% 

Conclusion

We have only been on Optimizely for two weeks and we have run two experiments that show increased engagement over 30%. We have a few that do not have enough data yet and then we have a couple that only show a 3-5% improvement. But hey, 3-5% Improvements add up and Optimizely just bought us a whole bunch of time.   We also have an experiment that dropped a few links. It has been a point of debate for the past month. The hypothesis was wrong and engagement dropped 20% with that change, but we succeeded in answering the debate question and we can move on.

When you’re a start-up and burning cash it all comes down to how many cycles you have to experiment before you run out of the money that buys you the time. With Optimizely it feels like we have substantially slowed down time.

A couple of quirks and warnings for those looking to run experiments.

We have noticed some bizarre behavior in IE: run the cross browser tests that Optimizely provides. We also have seen some data that seems a little fishy. Without explaining too much about that make sure to check in with Optimizely support that your experiments are running properly. They have been very responsive in Twitter and email.