Citizenville

The optimistic case for government using technology to improve services and political participation

Gavin Newsom, the current Governor of California, wrote Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government in 2013 while serving as the Lieutenant Governor of California.¹ As the subtitle hints at, the book is optimistic and forward looking in how government can successfully harness the power of the Internet to better engage with citizens. 

I read this book for the first time about five years ago but picked it up again recently. While it is a decade old and can cynically be seen as an out of touch love letter to the unifying powers of social media pre Cambridge Analytica, Rohinga genocide, and January 6th, the overall message resonates. And I believe is worth examining in greater detail. 

What’s in this post 

1. A summary of Citizenville’s main points on how the Internet can improve government. 

2. A look at how Newsom’s message a decade later - how has it played out? 

3. What’s next? Is the message still relevant? 

In a sentence, (1) Newsom is optimistic about the disintermediating power and usefulness of the Internet for citizens in relation to government, (2) this government-techno optimism has not played, and (3) there are plenty of opportunities for what could be next, but it would require a different approach to government and technology. Citizenville’s message is very much still relevant. 

1. Citizenville - What’s it all about 

Newsom opens the book with a question: 

Why is it that people are more engaged than ever with each other…[on the Internet] but less engaged with their government?²

This question leads him to examine the collaborative and social nature of Web 2.0, social media companies (remember, he wrote this book when Facebook was cool). In this collaborative age of the Internet, people should be able to interact with their government in a non-hierarchical manner that can allow for a two-way exchange of ideas, needs, and services. Citizens have a role to play in democracy that can and should be more collaborative. 

As an example, similar to the game Farmville, what if citizens could earn rewards / points for completing actions in the real world for the community they live in? Citizens can help provide solutions and engage with the community around them. Think of this as a beefed up version of Nextdoor with less gossip, more substance, and some gamification. 

The book explores five themes that should guide governments when thinking of harnessing the Internet to interact with government: 

1. Transparency: Government data and the actions of agencies must be transparent to citizens.

2. Enable citizens to build: Incentivize and enable citizens to use this data to build useful technology to better society and improve government. 

3. Adapt for digital natives: Recognize that younger audiences are more fluent in technology and thus have different mediums of communication. Government should adapt to meet people where they are and how they communicate best.   

4. Allow people to bypass government:Citizens can help solve problems that used to require top-down, government driven answers. That is no longer the case and government should encourage citizens to solve problems on their own.

5. Entrepreneurship in government: Technological change should enable government to be more entrepreneurial and think differently about how it operates.

There are a number of examples that Newsom points to at the time of writing that exemplify these five principles: 

• The town of Manor, Texas encouraged citizens to suggest innovations by awarding fake currency, “innobucks,” for each idea suggested. This currency could then be exchanged for real rewards to encourage citizens to take a more vested interest in the governance of the town. 

• Rep. Darrell Issa’ created an open-source citizen legislative tool called Project Madison, where people could log on and edit legislation online. 

• California’s BudgetChallenge.org where citizens can take a pass at balancing the state budget, while weighing the trade-offs of different priorities. 

• Votizen provided a social network for voters to engage on various policy issues. 

• Brazil’s use of participatory budgeting - a process where community members have input as to how to allocate part of government/communty’s budget. 

• New York City appointing it’s first Digital Officer, hosting a hackathon and creating an open-data API platform to allow developers to build apps on top of city data

The list goes on. It is notable in its breadth and depth for two reasons. 

First, it shows that technology can be a multiplier for effective citizen action and change on a local, state, and federal level. There is an acute need to level up how government interacts with its citizens, and Newsom finds examples of that happening in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

Second, it is hard not to notice that despite this optimism, there has not been a Cambrian explosion of civic tech reinventing government in the past decade. Which is worth exploring in more depth. 

2. How has the vision in the book fared in the last decade? 

Citizenville is a call for more civic engagement. More technology. More collaboration. The book drips with optimism, in a good way. This vision does not track well with the past decade for social media generally or for politics. And certainly not for putting those two things together. 

Social media did not fare well in the last decade. Leaving aside its political impact for a second, there are myriad examples of social media contributing to low self-esteem, online bullying, decreased mental health, and shortened attention spans. Discussions on these topics are pervasive in the press, so I won’t dwell on them here other than to say that social media is much less the unabashed paragon of progress that it was promised to be when Newsom wrote Citizenville. There are many instances and examples of social media being a positive force for change but the overarching sentiment is negative.

Looking at government, public trust in the institution remains low today. Newsom acknowledges this challenge in the book, and even sympathizes with the sentiment behind the Tea Party’s intent of changing government for the better. Partisan bickering, infighting, and ineffectiveness all drive citizens to look at their governments without much love. 

Newsom attributes the apathy and distrust of government to the fact that institutions have not leveled up as society changes:

“The way people approach authority has completely changed, yet the structure of our institutions has stayed exactly the same.”³

The bureaucracy remains monolithic and the world only accelerates creating a gap between the reality most people face, their expectations and needs, and the ability of the government to provide services. This reality is painfully true still. The provision of government services and engagement with citizens has not changed dramatically in the past decade. 

Understanding why this is the case is a complex problem, but a few things are worth noting: 

• Governments are not incentivized to constantly innovate. The Framers of the Constitution designed the American legislative process to be deliberative and slow. While this process hasn’t actually stayed the exact same in 250 years, Newsom’s overall sentiment is correct.  

• Managing problems is different than solving them - As Newsom laments, government officials seek to manage problems, not solve them. This dynamic comes from the problems that government takes on as well as the incentives for the actors in the system. 

• Government’s version of the “innovator’s dilemma” - Politicians and government officials change with elections, but the overall system of government is stable. That’s the point! But unlike the private sector where companies compete, there is no competition for governments as organizations. Again, this is good thing from a societal stability standpoint (peaceful transfers of power is a hallmark of succesful democractic government), but it also means that there is less change overall, which includes positive change.

• Technological progress is accelerating. Which only magnifies above three points. 

And the impassioned call for change in Citizenville does not change any of the above dynamics. Many of the examples of innovation that Newsom points to excitedly are no longer around. Innobucks don’t exist anymore and Project Madison is defunct. These projects were just that, projects. Social media did not fundamentally shift how citizens engage with their elected officials or the provision of government services. Yes, there is more one-on-one engagement on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites but this engagement is not a step change in how government interacts with its citizens. The system of engagement is largely the same. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly isn’t the government app stores, innovative politically oriented social networking, or passionate civic engagement en masse.⁴

The combination of social media and government in the past 10 years also did not create a utopian vision of service provision and citizen political engagement. These communication tools fueled the rise of President Trump as a candidate, his election victory over Hillary Clinton, and his failed attempt at tampering with the 2020 election results. By eroding the centralized messaging power of the government of the past and the more traditional means of communication (television + newspapers), social media created a faster and unanticipated disruption to how politicians approached the political arena. But changes in technology driving novel and disruptive communication styles is nothing new (the mass communication of Luther’s 95 theses due to the invention of the printing press).  

So while one can cynically look back at the last decade and point to multiple instances of social media not being a force for positive political change, this isn’t the point that Newsom was making. And arguably the fact that was negative outcomes was because government did not adopt itself well enough to the new reality. 

Provision of government services did not substantially improve with more technological tools. The existing political process was mapped onto new technology without shifting how the institutions of power wanted to interact with citizens. Without adapting to the new reality proactively, the political process suffered from a version of civic Calvinball: a lack of organization led to an anything goes approach. And those who are less squeamish about violating rules and norms have seen a lot of success.

Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson

3. So, is Citizenville’s message still relevant?

Can technology put more power into the hands of people by changing the way governments interact with their citizens? The promise of incorporating technological change into government is flipping the top down, hierarchical and bureaucratic structure into a more two-way dialog between the governed and the structures governing them. This shift is what Newsom pushes for in his book. Decentralization can help strengthen the commonwealth. The point still remains true. And is even more important today. 

Government services need to evolve to use technology better. And government itself needs to adapt. The five themes of transparency, allowing people to build with government data, adapting for digital natives, decentralization of problem-solving, and entrepreneurship in government are all still important. 

Politicians, pundits, and academics focus on the degradation of democracy, of democratic backsliding, and of needing to restore democratic practices. If anything can be learned from Citizenville and the events of the past 10 years, it is that the democratic process and provision of services should adapt to the changing technological reality in order to strengthen the polity. 

It is a “yes, and” situation. Democratic government needs strengthening AND that should entail using technology in a positive manner. Not acknowledging the shifting reality will mean that not only do people not benefit from better service provision, but the political process continues to suffer. Good or bad, this reality means that Citizenville is still incredibly relevant. The question remains will anything change?

1. Lisa Dickey helped write the book. For ease and consistency this post will refer to Newsom as the author.

2. Citizenville, page xi.

3. Citizenville, page 10.

4. See page 232 for the list of things that Newsom hopes for can come from a more utopian vision.