Why Government should Stop Supporting Civic Tech Startups
…and Let them be the Support.
When talking about democracy and asking the question “how can government support civic tech startups?”, many people think about creating tools for engagement and participation. It is crowded, and frankly, levels of governments already have access to many tools that can help them reach people, engage people, and simply be open to conversations.
Milieu Cities works at the municipal level. Many practitioners are eager to engage with residents but their workflow prevents them from doing so. Most of the time, it is because “they have always done things a certain way”. For example, a master plan is reviewed every 4–5 years to keep up with the developments happening in an area. That’s the “best practice”, but nobody questions if it is still “the best”? The rate cities are changing is drastically different from when this practice was anchored as standard across the profession. In today’s cities, one moment we have pedestrian-centred neighbourhood, and the next day we have a “smart city” pilot just a few steps away from our door. Of course the municipal departments can react to these changes through a piecemeal and market-driven approach like development applications. However what happens when years later, people have to face the consequences of decisions that clearly lacked foresights? In the startup world, parts move a lot more rapidly. Most of the time, tomorrow is a brand new day. A startup has to work with the fact that everything can change, including the path to reach a goal.
Running a startup is like playing dodgeball. A player have to evaluate the situation constantly and act fast. That’s probably the best way of describing the Agile method. Sometimes a project lead will find project team wandering and loosing sight of the end goal. Sprints allows them to get out of the nitty-gritty and look at their projects from a system level again. If a project is 12 months long, they might go through more than 20 sprints and possibly even more violent fights with their peers to keep their project from completely missing the target. It is a mechanism to take the team into a habit of being self-critical, and eventually work the problems out with the big-picture in mind. It is a method that lets the team test and find where a solution may fail before it goes live. It pushes people to start asking themselves “am I doing the work that can get us to the goal we have set up?” instead of “am I doing it right?”. Being right takes people all the way to finishing the work by the deadline, but it doesn't mean they will reach their goal. Admitting a mistake looks very bad, but if one have to choose from small mistakes that can help gaining clarity in finding a path to the goal and doing everything right with the risk of completely missing the goal at the end, which one is more desirable? The first option sounds pretty compelling, right? After all, those mistakes are only experiments that gave out answers that are different from the original hypotheses.
Surprisingly, I have seen most people choosing the latter. Doing everything right gets them their paycheques, because they have done nothing wrong — they “followed the procedures”. “The procedures” enabled an environment where people don’t have to take ownership of their works. “The procedures” give people the opportunity to walk away from their responsibilities as professionals if something do go wrong. In startup world, if you built something, you own it. Nobody gets to walk away from responsibilities.
If civic engagement is applied as a procedure among other procedures, it does not carry significant meaning. Civic engagement should be critical and detailed. That neighbour who hates all developments in the city probably have bigger frustrations that she never had the chance to share. Civic engagement is not about 60% people agreed to option A and the other 40% agreed to option B. It is about patching people’s opinions together to form a better view of the ecosystem without knowing what this ecosystem look like ahead of time. The more information used in constructing this simulated view of the ecosystem, the less ambiguous the situation will be. This view not only allows government to make tough decisions in a changing world, but also see the ecosystem in a perspective relevant to its constituents. It is not very different from a high school science project, where the students are asked to run a bunch of experiments to find out the composition of a “mystery substance” the chemistry teacher gives to students by observing the substance’s behaviour. We have done this in school, but why are we not applying the same techniques in governance? Can the procedures be flexible and derivative? Can the procedures allow more speculations and experiments?
Back to the question: “How can government support civic tech startups?”
Grants, accelerators, innovation hubs, cultural shift, hiring young people… you name it. The “procedures” are catching up.
Now that I am reflecting on the question, I think the question might be a misleading one.
Startups and government are not to contradicting sides. The way startups and government can help each other is with mutual understanding. Civic tech startups should have the opportunity to “engage” with government about their needs and limitations in ways alternative to lobbying. Not just startups, citizens should have opportunities to ask questions in ways that are not bounded by “civic engagement procedures”. Frankly, the mechanism for citizens to intuitively as questions is not as mature as the mechanism for government to ask citizens “what do you think?”.
How can government support civic tech startups?
- Stop asking the question as if the relationship is linear.
- Stop pointing specifically at “civic tech” startups. It is like the petty type of startups promoting social value and civicgood but can’t seem to prove monetary ROI or staying cashflow positive, because obviously it needs support.
Every entity is just a smaller component within an ecosystem. Civic Engagement is not connecting two dots with a line — it is a network. Civic tech is not a new kind of tech, it is the same tech that helps people work more effectively and be liberated from daunting repetitive tasks and daily hurdles. Civic tech is not a different tech than the tech that drove movie rental stores around the world out of business. If the amount of travelling to a public meeting for an average citizen to share their opinion is off-putting, inevitably there is an opportunity for tech to make the experience more desirable. If managing 14,000 entries of public feedback is making a public servant’s day difficult, there is an opportunity for tech to make this person’s day more delightful. In fact, a customer satisfaction team in retail has already found tech solutions to manage their 14,000 customer feedbacks and report the results to the product team regularly. Normal tech can 100% solve challenges facing government, but normal tech startups don’t know about these challenges. In addition, the lengthy sales cycles (including wanting to see results before paying for services received) and watertight evaluation criteria keep startups away. Startups simply cannot afford to interact with government in a client-customer relationship because of the rigidity of government procedures, namely procurement.
My perspective as a civic tech entrepreneur/normal entrepreneur? Letting startups be actively involved in finding solutions for challenges facing government is the best way government can offer “support” — even if it means to break procedures and step into the scary world of being agile. In other words, be vulnerable when necessary and let others support government is probably a better way for government to support startups.
Interested in knowing more about the ups and downs of civic tech companies? There’s a report by Knight Foundation.
Thank you for reading. :)
