Students to Somerville Mayor Curtatone: Separate Happiness from Hedonism and Citizenship from Demand-Making

This post by Harvard Kennedy School student Sudeep Doshi recounts the fourth session of a Cities, Technology and Democracy Study Group at Harvard Kennedy School hosted by student groups Tech4Change and the Regional, State, Local, and Tribal (RSLT) Governance Professional Interest Council, along with the Ash Center. The session featured Jorrit de Jong, Lecturer in Public Policy and Management, and Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone of Somerville, Massachusetts. The group discussed how measuring citizen wellbeing, scaling technology-based innovations and increasing tech equity could enhance public engagement in the city of Somerville.

By Sudeep Doshi

On the afternoon of April 28 2014, Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone of Somerville led an interactive workshop with graduate students and community members to discuss how scaling technology-based innovations and increasing tech equity could enhance public engagement in the city of Somerville.

Mayor Curtatone is serving in his sixth term as Mayor of Somerville and has been widely recognized as a leader in implementing innovative solutions and embracing data-driven governance, including the city’s SomerStat initiative, which uses data to evaluate and improve the efficiency of city services. Mayor Curtatone is also credited with using data-driven decision making to shift Somerville away from fiscal crisis and towards its highest-ever bond rating of Aa2.

Titled “A Call to Action: Tech Equity and Public Engagement in Somerville,” the session marked the capstone event of a four-part study group Cities, Technology and Democracy. Over the course of the semester, participants explored how new tools can empower citizens and help create “smarter” cities. They also wrestled with the tension between broadening technology-based solutions and widening the divide between citizens with access to technology and those without.

Mayor Curtatone started the session by explaining the philosophy behind Somerville’s Resident Happiness and Satisfaction Index. The index is based on a biennial citizen survey (2011 and 2013 were the first two survey years) that uses three different collection methods — city-wide mailing, random-number dialing, and web-based surveys. While the long-term policy influence of the index is still taking shape, it has already informed specific decisions such as allocating more resources to the Traffic and Parking department (the top citizen request for improvement to date).

This pioneering choice to track citizen happiness — the first municipal wellbeing effort in the nation — was motivated by the limitations of traditional data in assessing why citizens choose to live in a place, why they may want to leave, and whether they would recommend it to someone else.

As Mayor Curtatone said, “When you become a mayor and you are running a municipality, you want to manage for results. Some mayors will say: ‘my budget’s good and my bond rating’s great, we’re in good shape.’ Well I challenge you: would you move to Somerville because I say we have a balanced budget and the best bond rating in twenty years? Is life really worth living there? Can you raise your family? Can we enable collaborative creativity? If we can understand well-being and cultivate that, you become more productive, and it makes for a more cohesive community.”

In the second part of the session, Mayor Curtatone tasked the study group participants to think of ways to build on the well being index and to engage citizens with more complex processes and systems. “We’re going to become the first community that maps out our systems that drive policy”, Mayor Curtatone said. “How do you get people to embrace this and get excited about this?”

Participants discussed how lessons from other study groups could apply to this quest for mass-sophistication, including making the government more responsive to citizen needs, thinking about participatory budgeting in complex environments, and applying new tools to enable civic action.

This cross-cutting view of technology and democracy in the urban context was on display as participants reported back preliminary recommendations to Mayor Curtatone. One group pointed to competition as a catalyst for civic participation. For example, investing in an idea-generating competition to improve happiness between the city’s school districts has the potential to straddle both tech-savvy populations (with an online platform) and older citizens (with an offline corollary).

Students also emphasized the benefit of developing a more nuanced definition of well being as something that encompasses resilience and grit in addition to happiness. As one participant stated, “You ideally want to separate happiness from hedonism and citizenship from demand-making.”

Another idea was to interview not only citizens who currently resided in Somerville but also citizens who had moved away. Even if the operational complexity makes it difficult to do across the board, this would allow Mayor Curtatone and his staff to develop a more balanced view across the life-cycle of a resident, and to minimize the risk of a confirmatory bias in survey results.

In receiving these recommendations, and a number of others, Mayor Curtatone underscored the need for continued curiosity to build strong communities. He also reminded the group of some of the practical boundaries of engaging people in this type of process. Survey fatigue among citizens, limited resources to expand surveys, and the goal of building an index of repeated questions will all limit how much the city of Somerville can reasonably implement in the short term.

The discussion was moderated by Professor Jorrit de Jong, Lecturer in Public Policy and Management and Academic Director for the Innovations in Government Program. The ideas recommended by the students and the potential of replicating a well being index elsewhere will help inform a new collaboration between de Jong and Mayor Curtatone on cities, democracy and innovation — as part of the Mayor’s appointment as a Senior Fellow affiliated with the Ash Center.

Sudeep Doshi is a dual MPP/MBA candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. His primary research interest is how different organizational cultures impact the likelihood and quality of data-driven governance.

Filed under Cities, Innovation, Participation, Representation, Technology

Originally published at www.challengestodemocracy.us.