The Politics of Participatory Technology

In March of 2022, a small group of us gathered online at Civic Tech Toronto to share concerns about the looming city budget, specifically about the way our money was being spent on public technology.

Civic tech meet-ups are informal gatherings for people to meet, work on volunteer tech projects together, and learn more about their community. In our early work looking at the city budget and technology, we discovered that spending on tech is on the rise, while most other areas are flat-lined, despite urgent needs emerging from the pandemic, the climate crisis, and the housing crisis.

This discovery prompted discussions about where these tech funds might be better placed. While the surveillant nature of technology is a well-understood harm, there is another angle to consider in government technology: opportunity cost. By investing primarily in privatised technology, what are the missed opportunities for both direct spending on urgent public needs and alternative ways of designing and developing technology to create new avenues of public value?

Reorganising Procurement to Shift Power to Communities 

There are two long-standing guiding principles for the public procurement of goods and services: the process to compete for public funds must be fair, and the goods procured must provide public value. What is not long-standing, however, is any expectation of scrutiny for government technology purchases (beyond the extreme cases of mismanagement that make newspaper headlines). In the absence of sustained oversight, billions of dollars, at all levels of governments, have gone into private technology products, and their maintenance, with little public debate.  

There is a clear lack of community control and influence over technology investments in Toronto and many cities around the world. To shift this norm, it’s important to identify the kinds of technology we do want to invest in or develop, which in turn raises some questions:

• What are the business models we want to support in terms of public and government technology?

• What kinds of tech should always be under public control, and what is fine to privatise?

• Do we want governments going into business with vendors to support product development?

• Rather than pour money into technology vendors, could we be investing differently, and more directly, in both our public service and broader civil society?

• Can we move public funds into mechanisms such as civic digital trusts? What are the legal and other considerations in play? How do we find politicians to take these ideas on and pilot them?

Amidst ongoing austerity, these open questions tend to default to further privatisation. The issue is multi-faceted, and rife with cultural challenges and problematic incentives in government. Cities worry that vendors may run for the hills should they be held more accountable by their community of users. Existing policies for social procurement aren’t often invoked when buying technology; procurement managers are rated on how many bids they get, and the speed in which they pull off a purchase. Public control doesn’t rate in this equation.

In order to push back on these norms, we need to develop political capacity to better manage public investments in tech, and to create different kinds of value. This requires more direct and frequent political intervention. And soon (now). 

Popularising the Language of Community and Public Technology 

In April of 2022, Toronto City Council adopted the Digital Infrastructure Strategic Framework. This was catalysed by years of political strife in navigating smart city conversations.  The framework, which includes the principle of digital autonomy, is both high-level and aspirational - it offers a theoretical approach for residents to have a greater say in how their technology is designed, implemented, and maintained.

In practice, however, most governments are beholden to their vendors. There are a number of organisations trying to change this, such as the Foundation for Public Code, and the Free Software Foundation of Europe, who run the catchy and clear ‘public money public code’ campaign. There are also initiatives such as Germany’s recently announced sovereign technology fund. Like sovereign oil funds, state interventions and control don’t mean the tech produced is a good idea. But they do offer up a different mode of participation in the politics of tech. 

These examples are part of a gradual cultural shift. The status quo is that most governments are interested in taking on less responsibility for their technology. Legacy public technology is often a mess, creating vulnerability for yet more private capture, with a particular focus on cloud-based solutions. The cure for under-investment in public tech is framed, by vendors, as an increase in privatisation. And cities are looking at software development as an industry they want to support in a range of ways, including being a test site for products. So where does that leave the residents and communities who pay for the tech, use it, and are used by it?

In ‘Maintenance and Care’ Shannon Mattern deftly identifies the dissonance between the way tech is currently sold to cities, with a side of economic development potential, and the reality of city life:

“Values like innovation and newness hold mass appeal — or at least they did until disruption became a winning campaign platform and a normalized governance strategy. Now breakdown is our epistemic and experiential reality. What we really need to study is how the world gets put back together.”

Civic Product Management 

Some of those elected to govern cities may have the political will to begin to transform their software ecosystem, and to grow public and community power in the process.  One way to do this is to support residents, community groups, and the public service in becoming requirement writers for our digital public infrastructure. This moves us from a place of passive defence and deference to vendors, to active authors and creators of the tech we want — and crucially, to make clear the tech we never want.

Writing requirements for software is not a technical activity; it simply entails asking what we want a piece of technology to do. Not how we want it to be built, but how we want it to work.

As it stands now, communities aren’t brought in early enough in the process to shape these conversations. So it’s worth asking, would it make sense to engage the public in technology design, much in the way that we do for a park or for a major infrastructure project? In urban planning in Canada, there are rules to make sure the public is consulted through meetings and communications about major changes to the cities we live in. This kind of engagement is mandated by law – would it serve us to borrow this idea for certain technology decisions?  

Community engagement between elections is a fundamental part of democracy. It is imperative that communities are funded and provided with the tools and resources to proactively engage in the design and governance of technology, rather than being constantly forced to defend against ongoing privatisation and surveillance. 

Public procurement procedures are a way to make this happen. They can evolve to support the findings and guidance in The Case for Community Tech report, and this can happen within existing procurement policy guidelines. Some key considerations include:

• Shaping and growing software markets that reward and fund organisations working in open source

• Widening the scope of these investments into other communities

• Building capacity to support the wide network of nonprofits, small businesses, and others in civil society who would benefit from these investments

• Creating migration plans to shift from commercial to non-profit codebases and models, and inventorying existing licences and commitments so the public can follow along with these efforts

Engaging community organisations in the design of software systems helps us grow the digital literacy necessary to refuse and shape public technology. The wide range of community groups in any city or town provide a strong counterbalance to one of the biggest dangers of all kinds of tech, whether for-profit, non-profit, or public: techno-solutionism.

Those who would reasonably oppose a proposal for the new or ongoing use of inappropriate technology far outnumber the anointed few who take part in the narrow conversations that drive these proposals into a reality. Therefore, a key challenge for the government is ensuring that those who partake in design and decision-making processes represent a wide breadth of diverse backgrounds. And this engagement cannot only happen when new services are created or designed - the engagement has to be maintained over time, constantly revisiting past decisions to see if they still hold or need to be changed and adapted, a critical part of ethics, in tech and everywhere else. Engagement must be ongoing, not a point in time activity. This is also known as participatory governance, and self-governance. The civic tech community is a natural place for more of this work to happen, and to help facilitate it across civil society groups. 

In ‘Delinquent Telephone Activity’, Rachel Coldicutt shares Michael Warner’s description of counterpublics as “spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poiesis of scenemaking will be transformative, not replicative merely.” Coldicutt explains ‘poiesis’ in a way that resonates with the activities of civic tech communities: “Poiesis is a fancy way of talking about the art and the act of creating, inventing — and it’s closely related to technique. Consciously making a scene that others can join in with.”

Politics, Money, and Argument 

This reflection starts and ends with the city budget. To have more successful and sustainable community and public tech projects, we must make the funding of maintenance and governance work a priority. Philanthropy may offer a compelling alternative avenue for funding, but it often replicates the same norms we see in government: a constant need for newness, and a lack of interest in funding maintenance. 

These issues are well known in the free and open source software (FOSS) world too. In “Community Product Development”, sadie mascis highlights the ongoing efforts to figure out how to share the scarce resources that are funded: 

“…we can see how resource sharing and documentation could provide places for people to go to access information in their development, design and workflow processes. These are things that would benefit from funding that would and could redefine sustainability in the context of volunteer and community work and creation.”  

Someone has to invest in the people and processes that make more community and public tech governance viable. That someone is us. Ultimately, public money belongs to the public and is under our control. As John Dewey cautioned about publics and their problems, communities within a city or town are many — they are not homogenous. Supporting an expansion of community and public technology requires skill sets that understand how to move through and facilitate difference. Living in the same city is not a shared culture. Shared culture has to be created. To do so we must value and invest in facilitating it. As Nasma Ahmed writes: 

“We need a foundation, an opportunity for people to engage in what access, participation, collective ownership and healthy communities look like in the digital space. This will allow for collaborative strategy building that could be decentralized in communities across the city. Our personal interpretations of the technology that surrounds us, or its purpose in the future, is based on our lived experiences.”

We need to move the funding of community technology — including consultation and ongoing governance — onto the political agendas of those seeking office. We need to get it into our public budgets. This is one of several ways to counter the innovation arguments that keep feeding public and community technology governance further up, up, and away, into the cloud(s).

On most Tuesday nights since March 2022, a small group of us have gathered at Civic Tech Toronto to talk and think together about public tech, budgets, and power. Should you want to join us one night please do, we’ve got a make-shift on-boarding document here.