“I tried everything to try to get people more engaged in the life of their city: I did online town halls, I tried to digitize them through America Speaks so people could do voting on their top priorities, we did traditional town halls, but all this was remarkably disconnected to the vast majority of people whose voices weren’t heard,” said California’s Lt. Governor, Gavin Newsom. In his new book, Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government, Newsom attempts to reconcile that disconnect.

The word “Citizenville”, according to Newsom, is a riff on Farmville, one of the most massively popular online mobile and social games ever to hit the market. The craziest thing about Farmville was the expanse of player demographics: Unlike typical video-gaming demographics that parade the 16-24 year old male as the far and away frontrunner, social games like Farmville actually capture the 22-60+ audience, with women taking a 10% lead over men. That’s pretty close to a perfect demographic for citizen engagement.

While Newsom’s allusion to Farmville may have been, in part, the popularity level of the game as well as gamification incentives to keep people returning, there is no mistaking the fact that the reach, mobility, and interactivity level are precisely the attributes Newsom hopes to see government at all levels achieve in their citizen engagement efforts.

In Part 1 of this two part series reviewing Citizenville, we discussed two of Newsom’s five ways to connect people to government: Data must be open and useful, and, let the people solve the problems. That alone is a profound philosophy to run government on, but, like the seemingly trite allusion to Farmville, there’s a ton of meaning packed into the rest of the list.

1. Government must be transparent

“Government lacks trust, because we lack transparency,” said Newsom.

How is it that we’re still having this conversation? It seems so fundamental to a government once described by President Abraham Lincoln as, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” And yet, transparency continues to be a problem. Objections to transparency have ranged from paranoid anti-technology neo-Luddism to misguided worries of inefficiency to outright superciliousness: unfounded fear, completely inaccurate fear, and elitist condescension.

Granted, no one likes being subject to scrutiny by the public eye. While everything that people don’t like about oversight may be the very reason that we need it in government, transparency’s purpose goes far beyond being a tool to ensure ethical behavior: it is a necessary foundation for citizens to be able to help solve problems. Crime statistics, traffic incident information, public transportation data, procurement method information, and other data provide communities with the intelligence they need to have an informed, meaningful, and productive conversation. When governments provide this, the people feel and understand that they’re working with their government, rather than against it. Trust is born.

2. Engage people on their terms

Traditional means of communicating – in person, by telephone, by postal mail – may be available to everyone, but online engagement is far more popular.  Invoking gamification and mobility once again, Newsom says that an “Angry Birds of government” needs to be leveraged to drive up public participation interest. What good, after all, are tools for the public if the public doesn’t use them? Put engagement tools where the people are at: today they’re on their mobile phones, and on Facebook. Convenience is king; leverage it.

3. Add a new mindset to government – innovation and entrepreneurial attitudes

In the past seventeen years, I’ve worked with hundreds of governments to improve efficiency, openness, and responsiveness. Invariably, the most difficult hurdle to cross is a resistance to change. Often times, that resistance to change is because people don’t feel they will have support, or that they even have the right to make internal process changes to the grand institutions of governments.

Newsom says that government leadership must foster an environment of innovation, that new ideas and new implementations of technology need to be encouraged for meaningful Government 2.0 change to occur. Considering this, it should be no surprise that the most successful governments I’ve worked with are the ones that encourage innovation from the top down.

Criticism and a Challenge

The criticism of Newsom’s book has largely centered around his casual language style, his wide-eyed dreamer approach, and a misguided idea that Newsom’s endorsement of Government 2.0 is not a solution to the problems of politics, nor a method of making the people care about the issues that government is addressing.

It may be true that unless directly affected, people generally only care when it’s convenient to care. Capturing that convenience was the entire point of the book.

Finally, Newsom even takes his book beyond a philosophical exploration by creating a challenge, essentially a next-steps for taking a government agency, with some help and guidance by the non-profit Code for America, into a new world of meaningful citizen collaboration.

Related:

• Citizenville: Creating a Digital Town Square (Part 1)
• Government Innovation: New Tools for the Next-Gen Elected Official
• Citizen Engagement: Tools for Bridging the Gap