[1st-mile-nm] Civics for a Digital Age

[Richard Lowenberg]

The Atlantic has a review of Anthony Townsend's new book,
worth recommending on this list, for a broader view of
ways to think about our broadband networked communities.
I recommend the full article, and the book, at the links below.
RL
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Civics for a Digital Age

September 19, 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/civics-for-a-digital-age/279829/
Author: Jathan Sadowski

A new book, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a 
New Utopia, by Anthony Townsend, a research director at the Institute 
for the Future, provides some guiding principles we might use in to 
direct “smart city” development. Townsend sets out to sketch a new 
understanding of “civics,” one that will account for new technologies.

1.	The commercial success and cultural ascendance of the Internet lends 
an air of inevitability to the idea of smart cities … we should never 
default to smart technology as a solution.

2.	Community-owned broadband is one of the best investments a smart 
city can make.

3.	Build a web, not an operating system.

4.	Smart cities need to be savvy about what data and service 
infrastructure they own and what they give up to private interests in 
the cloud.

5.	Yet the most powerful information in the smart city is the code that 
controls it. Exposing the algorithms of smart-city software will be the 
most challenging task of all. They already govern many aspects of our 
lives, but we are hardly aware of their existence.

6.	How can we harden smart cities against [crises], and ensure that 
when parts of them fail, they do so in controllable ways, and that vital 
public services can continue to operate even if they are cut off?

7.	Organizations and governments should “provide cities with incentives 
to share, and designers with advice on how to build systems that can 
solve local problems and be reused elsewhere.

8.	Smart-city designers will also need to be transdisciplinary -- able 
to think across disciplines inside their own minds.

9.	Figuring out how to harness real-time data and media to think about 
long-term challenges is one of the most important opportunities we must 
exploit.

10.	Crowdsourcing with care means limiting its use to areas where 
government needs to mobilize citizens around efforts where it lacks 
capacity, and there is broad consensus over desired outcomes.

11.	The consequences of disconnection go beyond just a lack of access. 
Connection is the means by which people will participate in civic life, 
not just actively but passively as well.


Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, 
by Anthony Townsend
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393082873/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER


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Richard Lowenberg, Executive Dir.
1st-Mile Institute, 505-603-5200
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
www.1st-mile.org  rl at 1st-mile.org
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