Can We Solve Public Problems Anymore?
We can. But “Public entrepreneurship” as it’s been celebrated for the last decade has been too much about the entrepreneur as opposed to the public.
Just over ten years ago, three public servants working for Boston Mayor Thomas Menino founded the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM). The office’s name came from Menino, whose long tenure was marked by how closely he engaged with his beloved city. A Boston Globe poll in 2009 found that 57 percent of the city’s adult residents had personally met him. The term “urban mechanic” came from Menino’s constant attention to the nuts and bolts of city management, from getting trees planted to streets plowed. But in the hands of Nigel Jacob, Chris Osgood and Mitchell Weiss, the new office aimed to bring innovation to city government, drawing heavily on concepts and talent then rising from the tech sector. It was the first of many similar offices that hoped to harness new tech and new forms of public engagement to improve city life. In 2014, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation, highlighted 20 such government innovation teams around the world; a similar survey today would no doubt find hundreds.
Some of MONUM’s early projects included StreetBump (a mobile app that gathers information about the city streets using the smartphone’s motion sensors), Adopt-a-Hydrant (a system that encouraged residents to take responsibility for shoveling out fire hydrants after heavy snowfalls) and using Textizen (a system for collecting resident feedback by text message) to engage Bostonians in the Imagine Boston 2030 visioning project. Not all of these efforts were breakaway successes—the early rollout of StreetBump was criticized for how the tool tilted toward more wealthy neighborhoods where drivers were more likely to have smartphones, and Adopt-a-Hydrant efforts have had mixed responses from the public, as civic technologist Mark Headd described in a 2016 article. Both StreetBump and Adopt-a-Hydrant have been deprecated, while Textizen—which was a Code for America fellowship project—was acquired by GovDelivery.
But the core importance of MONUM was how it sought to change the culture of urban government. It was where Boston’s managers were encouraged to try new things and take risks. Now Mitchell Weiss, one of its three original founders, has written a new book, drawing on that experience, called We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems. Weiss, who left MONUM in 2014 to go teach public innovation at the Harvard Business School, centers his book on this urgent question: “Can we solve public problems anymore? Can we do new things?” If you are involved in govtech or civic tech, you will want to read this book.
Weiss was a true believer in the promise of open innovation, inspired by the rise of projects like NASA’s Clickworkers experiment and Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia. “I had a crazy thought that if we could try open innovation in Boston, we could change the city; and if we could change the city, we could change the world,” he writes. That said, We the Possibility is more a call for hope than proof that it’s possible. Given that cynicism is usually its own reward—if you don’t believe change is possible, it won’t happen—it’s never bad to make the case for hope, especially as a younger generation keeps showing up, making demands for fundamental shifts, and a new administration devoted to the idea that government can work for public benefit takes the reins in Washington. But We the Possibility is a bit too starry-eyed about “entrepreneurship” for my taste, and over the course of the book it seems Weiss’ post at the Harvard Business School may have blinded him to the problems that a generation of tech entrepreneurs bring with them when they try to attack the lumbering ways of bureaucracy or democracy.
It’s true that government at all levels is slow to change, and often for bad reasons. “If we had a new idea around here, it would die of loneliness,” Weiss quotes Mayor Menino as saying. There are all kinds of cultural reasons that government bureaucracies ossify, and Weiss unpacks them with understanding. “Probability Government,” the kind of government “that does what’s pretty sure to work, but leads often to middling, mediocre outcomes,” needs to be supplanted, he argues, by “Possibility Government,” the kind “that pursues efforts that only might work, which means…they probably won’t work….but a few that succeed transform our lives and our society, ideally for the good.” Possibility Government is Weiss’ frame of choice, and it’s the kind of term that should help his book sell well in the Business/Innovation section of the airport bookshops aimed at professional travelers looking for an easy-to-read guide to the topic. It should get him a TED talk. But as a guide to innovation, it leads in contradictory directions.
Weiss’ perch at Harvard has given him access to many interesting civic entrepreneurs, and the best part of his book are his portraits of people like Jimmy Chen, who quit his job at Facebook to do a fellowship with Blue Ridge Labs in Brooklyn, a civic tech incubator focused on the needs of the bottom 20%. That’s where Chen and his team did the early work engaging food stamp recipients that led to the launch of Propel, which makes tools to make the safety net more user friendly. “A twenty-five-year-old male has technology to meet his every whim,” Chen says to Weiss. “But who is building the technology for the fifty-year-old single mother on food stamps?” Weiss appropriately situates Chen and Propel as an exemplar of the “user-centered” or “human-centered” design process, and argues that government won’t come up with better ideas unless it embraces listening to the needs of its constituents, along with welcoming the ideas and lived experiences of outsiders.
But which outsiders? The kind of people that Bloomberg Philanthropies is comfortable with? Or that tech VCs are backing? The difficulty with the whole government innovation sector is in how it has all too often in fact been a pathway for new exploitative and extractive actors to “disrupt” their way into existing public-private ecosystems, wowing urban administrators with promises of “solutions” that will make life more convenient or make public services more efficient, with the tradeoffs hidden or denied. In his zeal to move the culture of government to embrace risk-taking and experimentation, Weiss sometimes loses sight of who government is supposed to serve. After all, unlike the private sector, government has to serve everyone—including the less fortunate—while businesses can cherry-pick which customers they want to focus on.
The Question Is: Who is Driving Change?
That zeal for Possibility leads Weiss to applaud civic leaders like Mayor Bill Peduto for welcoming Uber to Pittsburgh in 2016, giving the company free reign to develop autonomous vehicles on its roads in exchange for $1 billion commitment to develop a robot-car test track in the city. Even after that move blew up in Peduto’s face when an Uber autonomous vehicle killed a pedestrian in Arizona two years later, Weiss still applauds him for embracing change. “We should be judicious about cutting new things off before they have started,” he writes. “On balance, we should start at ‘possibly might be okay,’ rather than ‘probably won’t.’ We can be against regulation at first and then for it.”
Well, maybe. The question has to be who is driving change, and whether public authorities really have the capacity to evaluate new ideas when their budgets have been starved for decades by the politics of austerity, and the financialization of the economy has put so much power in the hands of private capital. These are not issues on Weiss’ radar, so the kind of “public entrepreneurship” that might lead to structural shifts in the economy itself doesn’t get any attention in his book. (It’s not like those stories don’t exist—just ask the people behind Fight for 15 or the National Domestic Workers Alliance for starters.) And since economic power converts into political power so easily in America, this makes We the Possibility far too bright-eyed about the prospects of a new generation of what he calls “tri-sector entrepreneurs”—people with experience in government, private industry and the nonprofit world—stepping into leadership.
Weiss’ example of one such tri-sector entrepreneur couldn’t be more telling. That’s one Bradley Tusk, who he builds his chapter on “inventing democracy” around. In New York City, Tusk made his mark managing Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 re-election, having served earlier as communication director for Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer. He is infamous for having been Uber’s first lobbyist, and for helping mastermind the company’s successful entry into the city. When, in 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to limit the number of Uber drivers entering the city, the company, with Tusk’s help, activated its customers with a “de Blasio” feature on its app threatening long wait times if the mayor had his way. De Blasio capitulated. Tusk tells Weiss, “The reason ridesharing is legal in all the jurisdictions in the U.S. … is because over time, a couple of million people weighed in with elected officials, and that won the day. What that said to me, is that if you give people the tools to advocate from their phones, they will vote.”
Weiss pivots from that quote to describe Tusk’s effort to push mobile voting, using a blockchain-powered app called Voatz, on cash-strapped states like West Virginia, where his philanthropy funded a pilot effort using a little of the fortune he got from his Uber work (he got paid in stock, reportedly worth around $100 million). To Weiss’ credit, he notes that many cyber-security experts like Joseph Lorenzo Hall of the Center for Democracy and Technology have trashed Voatz as a “horrifically bad idea….It’s not something we should throw to the [venture capital] wolves or allow bleeding-edge technologies to mess with, without serious and deep inquiry and interrogation.” And the rest of his democracy chapter focuses on less sexy but much more valuable efforts to secure the electoral process from interference, like Protect Democracy’s VoteShield project.
But is Tusk really the kind of tri-sector entrepreneur to hold up as an example of Possiblity Government? He is certainly a man of many talents and assets. In addition to Tusk Philanthropies, there is Tusk Strategies, a political consulting firm, founded in 2011. It has worked for many corporate clients including Comcast, Google, Walmart, AT&T and Pepsi, and among its current clients is Andrew Yang, the tech entrepreneur and ex-presidential candidate. Tusk Ventures, which he launched in 2015, invests in start-ups, and as Mike Isaac reported in his superb book, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, that’s where Josh Mohrer, who ran Uber’s New York office, landed after the ride-sharing giant’s scandals became public. (That NY office, Isaac notes, was “infamous for its bro-culture.” He also reports that during the anti-de-Blasio campaign, Uber employees delivered boxes labeled “1,000 PETITIONS” to the Metropolitan Taxicab Commission that were actually full of water bottles, but the local press missed the subterfuge. Mohrer also got caught by a reporter using Uber’s “God View” tool to spy on her movements.)
Ultimately, We the Possibility falls short in not recognizing that while government needs to be more open to change and new ideas, real change is more likely to come from those who are actually dispossessed and their organizations, than those claiming to work on their behalf. If we need “tri-sector” leaders their on-the-ground experience should come from the social change sector, not the nonprofit sector. “Public entrepreneurship” as it’s been celebrated for the last decade has been too much about the entrepreneur as opposed to the public. Which is not to say that there isn’t a new generation of important ideas and policies being brought to government—it’s just that the vectors for these innovations aren’t the Harvard Business School or Silicon Valley. Big, risky ideas like the Green New Deal; structural shifts in the organization of work, like unionism or platform cooperativism; alternatives to the “unicorn” model of start-ups like Zebras United or the “exit to community”; new models of democracy like participatory budgeting and new demands on government like reparations and reconciliation—these are all innovations in how government may work and how the economy may be structured. They, more than apps that tell us when the next bus is coming, demonstrate that we still live in an age of possibility.
On the Other Hand
A problem with the “inmate management software” used by the Arizona Department of Corrections is preventing the release of hundreds of people, Jimmy Jenkins reports for KJZZ, because it can’t interpret current sentencing laws that are supposed to enable nonviolent offenders to earn early release credits. Internal whistleblowers have been raising the issue internally for more than a year, but prison administrators haven’t acted to fix it. “We can't find people to get them into the programs, and after they complete the programs, we still can’t get them out the door,” a source said. “These people are literally trapped.” Other modules in the software that are supposed to track inmate health care, head counts, inmate property, security classification and gang affiliations also aren’t working. “We have put people in cells together who are in conflicting gangs without realizing it,” a source said. “We can’t keep the right medication with seriously ill inmates when they are transferred to a new unit. We’re putting people in danger.” As of 2019, the state Department of Corrections had spent more than $24 million contracting with IT vendor Business & Decision, North America to build and maintain the software program, known as ACIS. Business & Decision is a subsidiary of the France-based Orange Group, which likes to say that it is building a company that is truly “human inside.” Indeed it is.
Odds and Ends
Don’t miss Erika Hayasaki’s tour-de-force on “Amazon’s Great Labor Awakening” in the New York Times Magazine.
Blue Tent’s Trip Brennan has an in-depth profile of Win McCormack, the reclusive banking heir who bought The New Republic from Chris Hughes and has been steering it left since then.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg overruled his own staff’s decision to ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in April 2019, because he didn’t consider him a hate figure, Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman report for Buzzfeed. This decision delayed the company’s efforts to remove other right-wing militant organizations, like the Oath Keepers. Lovely.
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