Future Here Now: Digital Public Engagement Learning Lab at NPC
Coming soon
Hey all. Just wanted to let you know that I will be leading a Learning Lab at the National Planning Conference in Denver, Colorado in two weeks. The topic is Digital Public Engagement — the American Planning Association identified that last year as one of the most critical skill upgrades that urban and community planners need.
As many of you know, digital public engagement (and better public engagement, generally) has been one of my areas of focus going back nearly 20 years, now. I’ve designed and run all sorts of public participation and feedback events for all kinds of clients…. and largely quit doing that kind of consulting nearly 8 years ago. Since my primary mission is to increase people’s agency to impact the life of their community, I was really uncomfortable with the kind of box-checking, meaningless and hypocritical work I was being asked to do under that banner.
So I’m excited to be returning to this topic, excited to get to do another Learning Lab after the great experience focused on entrepreneruship ecosystems in 2023, and excited to see some of you there! I’m also hoping to launch a new book titled Online Public Engagement right about the time of the conference… more on that soon.
The Learning Lab will happen on March 31 at 10:30 AM (if you’re attending, check the schedule for the location). I will try to share more as we get closer.
To prepare for that, here’s a section from that unpublished book’s introduction - telling my personal story of why online public engagement became so important to me. The kids I mention are now in their 20s, but I still remember… acutely.
Talk to you next week!
Why am I writing about this?
That’s a question that I think any author should answer, so that you understand where that person is coming from and whether they are probably worth reading. So here’s the thumbnail sketch of my story.
I usually identify myself as an urban planner and economic revitalization specialist, but my undergraduate degree is in education. I was trained to teach high school and middle school English, and because of where I went to college and when, the teaching methods that I learned made heavy use of a technique called small group collaborative learning. The theory behind that approach is that people understand information and engage with it at a deeper level when they figure it out for themselves, and when they do that work of figuring it out in partnership with a small group of their peers.
In the couple of years that I taught, my classrooms were generally very loud and chaotic-looking, but it was pretty clear that the students “got” the material in a much more meaningful way when I could use those methods than when I was stuck having to lecture because of time constraints.
Like a lot of young teachers in my generation, a combination of lack of good jobs and frustrating bureaucracy led me in search of my Act II by the time I was 23. After about eight years of doing historic preservation work, I did a masters in planning and went to work for a consulting firm. Soon I found myself managing comprehensive plans, and since my masters concentration was in economic development, I can admit today that I wasn’t going into those plans with the usual enthusiasm over land use densities and zoning implications.
What I did relate to almost immediately was that whether or not a comprehensive plan did anything constructive (like gain enough support to be approved by the city council) depended on whether or not the community’s residents, business owners and the like understood what the plan was intended to achieve and played an active role in supporting it.
So I decided that getting the public as actively involved in the planning process as possible was the best way for the clients (and me) to end up with a success story.
Since the last time I was responsible for managing the activities of a group of people had been in a middle school classroom, I ended up adapting the methods I had used with 13 year olds to steering committees and auditoriums full of adults. And it worked surprisingly well. Well, perhaps not that surprisingly.
At about the same time, I became the mother of two small boys. Between a demanding job and the usual chaos of a toddler-driven household, I became a pretty avid technology adopter. A lot of people who are knowledgeable about digital tools have a background in programming or IT, and they tend to get excited about the gee-whiz elements of new apps and platforms. I don’t know how to program and am generally suspicious of gee-whiz. I became a relatively early adopter of digital technologies for a very basic reason:
I was overextended, over-scheduled and overwhelmed, and anything that could let me get something done faster looked, in all seriousness,like a lifeline.
So when people tell me that they don’t think that communities need to use digital technologies to engage with their residents, that it’s too hard or too complicated or too risky, and it’s good enough the way it is, and we’ll get to it eventually, maybe, my first reaction is not to think about GitHub or Javascript or CSS.
My first reaction is to think about all of the hours I wasted in my clients’ council meetings waiting for the two minute update I had to give. Or the town hall session I ran one evening where no one my own age showed up at all.
Or the sidewalk that I wanted to be installed in my neighborhood, that wasn’t, because a few people protested at a meeting that I couldn’t attend… because I was either working or chasing a loud and cranky toddler that night.
As I’ll articulate more in a later chapter, we need digital public participation not because it’s cool or convenient or it makes our town look like we know what’s going on.
We need digital public participation — good, thoughtful, meaningful digital public participation — because we need the insight, the feedback and the wisdom of the huge cross section of people who cannot or will not fit the 19th-century public meeting model. That's the model that we lean on unreflectively when we assume that the people who didn’t come to the 7 PM Tuesday Open House… well, they’re apathetic. They’re disengaged. They just Don’t Care.
They might not care. Or they might care a lot. And they might have a valuable insight, a new solution, a way to make your community better that you won’t know about without them. If you can’t hear from them, you don’t know what you have missed.
So that’s why I have paid so much attention to digital public engagement over the past many years, and why I have researched and written about these platforms, and used them in my own work.
And that’s why I hope you picked up this book. Thanks for doing that. I hope it does you good. And I hope it makes your community a better place for everyone.