Smartphones are transforming transit in cities all over the world, and city governments are struggling to figure out how to best manage the change. If the world was looking to New York City’s recently enacted legislation affecting for-hire vehicle companies, then there will be disappointment given that, once again, the city’s political establishment decided to impose an outdated regulatory regime on innovative firms, making life harder for thousands of new taxi drivers while raising the price of rides for millions of New Yorkers and visitors to the city. The law, enacted this summer, caps the number of e-hail licenses in the city for a year and also enables the city to impose regulations on the type of compensation structures offered to drivers.

Who benefits? Politicians argue that it’s existing drivers who received their taxi registration before the one-year moratorium on new licenses was implemented, but if you think they’re the primary beneficiary then there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

In reality, politicians got behind this legislation because they want to send a message to Silicon Valley, the startup community and their financiers: If you want access to the 8-plus million person New York City market, you’ll have to go through the local political class first, and that will cost you: in form of taxes, campaign contributions, lobbyists, and more.

True to form, the left and right have staked out their normal positions on this issue. For the left, it’s all about protecting the wages and rights of the less-than-10,000 existing drivers, even if that means higher costs for all New Yorkers and more obstacles for people who want to earn money by driving a car. For the right, it’s about protecting businesses and drivers from regulatory controls that will raise prices for consumers, even if that means facilitating the big business takeover of an industry that has been a source of wealth for independent individuals and small businesses in New York City for a century.

Like many issues involving new technology, we need to look beyond the left-wing or right-wing way to manage these technologies, and instead look to the “open source way.”

What do we want? Safe, convenient rides, with low prices for riders, high income for drivers, positive impacts on traffic, and data protection for everyone involved.

The best way to achieve these ends isn’t complex licensure regimes, quotas on new taxis, or putting more surveillance technologies in our cars or on our streets. Instead, New York City should do for its local cab industry the same thing successful industries do for themselves: standardize how information is formatted and exchanged between systems. This makes it possible for information from one app, like Uber, to be read, understood and interacted with by another app, like Lyft or Google Maps.

Making ride-hailing data more standardized and interoperable will have a number of benefits.

First, it aggregates supply and demand, which increases competition in the taxi market leading to lower prices for riders and more business for drivers.

Second, it gives riders and drivers more options, allowing them to use an app with the mission of benefiting New Yorkers instead of benefiting investors in giant tech corporations.

Third, it mitigates a threat many people fear: that Uber, Lyft, and other venture-backed ride-sharing apps are subsidizing their own cab rides to undermine the legacy taxi industry, and then once the legacy industry is dead, they’ll jack up prices. That strategy won’t work if New York City is committed to maintaining a system of its own.

The idea of establishing a “ride sharing” (or “e-hail”) standard isn’t new. It has been discussed and proposed by a number of people in New York City’s tech community for years, including Ben Kallos, a tech-aware City Council member who proposed it in a 2014 bill, and by Chris Whong, now the lead developer of NYC Planning Labs, who proposed it in a 2013 blog post.

Critics of this approach have claimed that the city doesn’t have the capacity to develop its own e-hailing systems, but that simply isn’t true. Generic apps similar to Lyft and Uber exist in hundreds of markets around the world. Even local cab companies in New York City have developed their own apps.

Creating an e-hailing system for New York City would likely involve a three-step process: (a) develop a “ride sharing data standards” body that would bring riders, drivers, city agencies, and app developers together to create specifications for how all taxi-hailing information should be formatted and exchanged; (b) develop and operate a basic, open source e-hail smartphone application that would use these data standards to, like any one of the dozens of ride-hailing apps available around the world, allow New Yorkers to request rides and drivers to fulfill those requests; and (c) create a city-administered server that not only processes information from the current city taxi app but also allows other ride-sharing apps to exchange their information with the server.

This approach would give Uber, Lyft, and other popular apps a choice: they can plug in to the city’s e-hail exchange server and share their rider and driver information with other apps – or go it alone and face the consequences of having less access to rider and driver information than their competitors.

This approach leverages the city’s considerable influence to produce a number of benefits:

By following established best practices from government digital service organizations and open source communities, this system could be produced quickly and inexpensively. And by open-sourcing an app and inviting other cities to use and modify the New York City code, we could join a small but growing community of cities around the world developing and sharing open source software (such as Madrid’s Consul project) that enables them to provide government services faster, better, cheaper, and in a more ethical manner.

The original meaning of “regulation” wasn’t the levying of taxes and fees to penalize innovation — it was to “make regular” through the implementation of transparent business practices and the adoption of standard operating procedures. That is precisely what New York City should be doing, and it can do so by modelling best practice behavior that challenges Silicon Valley (and its New York-based counterparts) to produce better products, for lower prices, in more responsible ways, with more respect for the rights of their users.

Any municipality can throw rocks at Silicon Valley by imposing taxes and creating obstacles to market entry, but few have the capacity and scale to challenge Silicon Valley by creating innovative products. New York City has that ability. Let’s use it.

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Devin Balkind is a technologist and nonprofit executive who works on civic technology projects in New York City. On Twitter @DevinBalkind.

Photo by BeyondDC

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How can democracies use technologies to strengthen themselves? Answers are emerging around the world, with the central theme being that technology can make politics more engaging, successful and legitimate by enabling people to become active producers of political outcomes instead of passive consumers. 

Devin Balkind writes about how technology can advance participatory democracy practices while citing policy-led examples in Taiwan and Madrid. Originally published in Education Update Online.

Devin Balkind: Democracy in the United States was established nearly 250 years ago when news travelled at the speed of a horse and real-time collaboration required sharing a physical location. Today, ubiquitous internet access, smartphones, social media, and online collaboration tools have transformed how we work, play and consume, but the basic structure of our politics remains the same.

The result is that during an era of massive innovation, our static politics have disempowered the public and made our representative democracy feel more like a “consumer” one. Parties are brands; politicians are products; and our job as consumer-citizens is to purchase “our” politician with our votes. U.S. media and education systems strengthen the notion of “consumer democracy” by obsessing over the theatrics that motivate people to vote instead of educating people about the issues, policies and processes that impact all our lives. The public is not pleased. Congress and the President’s approval ratings are at record lows, as are voter participation rates.

How can democracies use technologies to strengthen themselves? Answers are emerging around the world, with the central theme being that technology can make politics more engaging, successful and legitimate by enabling people to become active producers of political outcomes instead of passive consumers. 

Two examples of “participatory democracy” are taking place in Taiwan and Madrid. In Taiwan, the “vTaiwan” project encourages the public to participate in a multi-month, multi-phase “consultation process” where citizens give issue-specific feedback offline and online. They use that feedback to create their own legislative and administrative proposals, and the most popular proposal are ratified and implemented by the government. Over the last three years, tens of thousands of people have participated, resulting in more than a dozen new laws and administrative actions. In Madrid, city government built a platform that enables citizens to debate issues and propose legislation. If that legislation meets a popularity threshold, it automatically becomes law.

Surprisingly, there are few if any truly participatory political projects in the United States. While New York City has “participatory budgeting,” its many restrictions and limited scope makes it fundamentally different than the open-ended participatory processes practiced overseas.

New York City’s Public Advocate is supposed to be the voice of all New Yorkers. As such, it’s the perfect position to bring a technology-enabled collective decision-making process to our City. Since it’s democratically elected, the Public Advocate can give “participatory democracy” real legitimacy. And since it has consultative status with the City Council and many city agencies, the Public Advocate can bring the public’s will directly to the people who run our city.

I’m running for Public Advocate to put “participatory democracy” on the ballot in November. With your help, we can put the Public exactly where it should be — directly in charge of the Public Advocate.#

Devin works at the intersection of the nonprofit sector, the open-source movement, and grassroots community organizing to share and initiate best practices. He currently serves as president of the Sahana Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization that produces open source information management system for disaster relief and humanitarian aid. He is running for NYC 2017 Public Advocate.

Photo by transnationalinstitute

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In my work experience, I’ve seen prestigious nonprofit organizations and government agencies with tremendous resources at their disposal rendered useless in the face of overwhelmingly inefficient and convoluted bureaucratic processes. I’ve also seen activist groups with tremendous grassroots energy dominated, subdued, and balkanized by bureaucratic tendencies among their members.

I’ve met my fair share of people pursuing excellence within organizations — big and small — who have to quit (or are fired) because they’re too frustrated by the intractable dynamics they find themselves embedded within. They generally choose to go in one of three directions: pursue freelance work that allows them to serve clients directly, create a startup that they promise won’t fall prey to bureaucratic bloat, or join grassroots groups that never develop administrative capabilities. I’ve done all three and often tried to combine approaches to arrive at a scalable organizational format that doesn’t develop a mediocre bureaucracy but does have the ability to provide dependable, quality-controlled services. The best format I’ve encountered for doing this is a project-based “spokes council,” which the P2P Foundation describes as follows:

“The spokes council model allows for mediation between autonomous working/affinity groups, or nodes within the network, and the larger institutional body. … These collectives meet separately with varying degrees of regularity. Some groups are relatively inactive while new ad hoc groups may spring up spontaneously to face a particular challenge. Several groups maintain their own listservs and wiki pages.”

In my experience, there is one glaring problem with a conventional spokescouncil model — the “affinity groups.” Affinity is nice, but it’s a very broad reason for people to come together. At Occupy Wall Street, where I first encountered this organizing model, “groups” didn’t stay healthy for very long. They often lost their way, became unproductive, and hosted lots of  internal conflicts between members. Groups that formed around an area of interest (ex. visions and goals) became unproductive and collapsed much faster than groups based around an action (ex. kitchen). Interest-based groups attracted people who felt entitled to participate in decision-making processes both internal to the group and within the council as a whole, while action-based groups just wanted to get the meetings over with so they could do the actual work. Ultimately, a few dysfunctional groups ruined the entire council’s capacity to make good decisions.

Occupy Sandy, which took place about a year after Occupy Wall Street, worked a bit differently. We recognized the flaw in a council of affinity groups and instead organized a spokes council around projects. Project members, unlike group members, had to agree to maintain a membership list, vouch for their members, and articulate success metrics that the group had to meet to remain in good standing with the council. Those elements made a world of difference. The Occupy Sandy Project council successfully managed hundreds of thousands of dollars through a consensus-based process that, while sometimes contentious and stressful, actually succeeded in allocating funds to impactful projects in transparent ways that won the respect of myriads of people — from city officials to direct action organizers. I’ve been trying to translate this “project spokescouncil” approach to other types of organizations ever since, with some success.

Here’s how I’ve been applying these principles:

• Instead of creating an “organization,” create a charter that explains how to run a network.

• Instead of figuring out all the things you want your organization to do, find people already doing these things and invite them to join your network.

• Instead of creating a central administration to run the network, encourage projects to commit to performing the various functions needed to sustain the network, including administrative ones.

One of the great features of the project spokescouncil approach is that participating projects don’t have to agree on anything more than a charter. For-profits, nonprofits, cooperatives, coalitions, grassroots projects, and other groups can all coexist without forcing their processes on each other.

After Occupy Sandy, I became involved with the Sahana Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization that makes open source disaster management software. After serving on the board and advocating for the project spokescouncil organizational model, I was elected president to implement that vision. Before this model was employed, the CEO of the organization made the financial decisions. One of the goals of our organization was to develop a center that could be a powerful force for advocating for open source practices in the humanitarian sector. That type of center costs a lot of money, which meant we needed to bring in a lot of revenue to support its development. When funding fluctuates, as it tends to do when your business model is doing contract work for other NGOs, life can become very stressful and organizations undergo a lot of stress.

My approach was different. My first questions was: What is the minimum amount of expense we need to incur to keep the organization functional? That became the budget of the “Operations” project. Then we went to the main areas of activity within the organization, and encouraged the people doing that work to reframe it as an autonomous projects within the Sahana Software Foundation. That was easy for the open-source software project, which had a very clear output. It was a bit more complex for our other programs which combined research and implementation of technical systems to make change. After a few months of conversation around how the project could become more autonomous and defined, a new project was formed. Each project then created its own budget, and collaboratively determined who gets which portion of the funds to be spent.

Since we don’t have a CEO anymore, just a president who works part-time on the Operations Project, it freed up more money up to be collaboratively spent by other projects. So far so good. Our transparent, distributed, counter-bureaucratic process has become attractive to other open-source humanitarian projects that often find themselves either unincorporated or sponsored by a conventional, bureaucracy-driven organization. We can offer an organizational home that functions like an open-source project. We also offer a clear process that facilitates collaboration between member-projects while mitigating against the subtle power dynamics of conventional organizations and the bureaucracies that inevitably arise within them. Instead of having a bunch of folks with relatively ambiguous titles and hierarchies, we’re all equals representing projects in a council. That keeps things simple.

My dream is to add more open-source humanitarian aid projects, such as CrisisCleanup, to the Sahana Project Council, and to spread this organizational model to groups working in other sectors. If many project councils emerge, with similar charters and similar processes, then it will become much easier for projects to find the organizational homes they need, and it will also allow projects to move between organizations with ease. This last characteristic is key. Projects develop organically but organizations don’t. Organizations have inflexible budgets and staffing and have to worry about grant cycles and the politics of fundraising. Projects are different. They can be extremely responsive and flexible, and can pivot to meet immediate needs and transform to rapidly scale their best ideas. But as projects develop, they’re often pressured by their host organization to do so in ways that fit within the needs of the host organization. And moving a project from one organization to another is often practically impossible. But with a project council, projects have options and moving from one organization to another can be a breeze. Indeed, we might discover that, without the limitations and structures imposed by organizations, projects can become the core organizational unit of the production process of an increasingly networked world.

Imagine if there were a “project standard” that people could use to form and document their work, and then the project could seamlessly move between councils as conditions and collaborations change. Could this be an alternative to the bureaucratic organizational format that currently runs the world? We’re going to find out. Stay tuned.

Header photo of Occupy Sandy spokescouncil meeting by Devin Balkind. Cross-posted from Shareable.

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