Civic Dashboard's first bloom!

i've been contributing to Civic Dashboard, a volunteer community effort to make the City of Toronto's municipal government easier to understand and participate in. that's pretty broad! we're still trying to figure out what's most needed. but here's some screenshots of our website to give an idea of what we've done so far:

we recently reached a milestone we've named Enthusiastically Shareable, so i'm sharing it here. enthusiastically! there's still a lot of rough edges, especially when it comes to explaining what the thing actually is, but like, look, we did a cool thing!

i'm going to explain what we've done, and what i've learned in the process.

what are we doing here?

and who even is we! civic dashboard emerged from the primordial goop of democratic frustration when our resident Big Talker gave a talk explaining why our existing tools are old & busted, and a surprising number of people said "where can i sign up to build the new hotness".

most of its contributors found out about it through the wonderful Civic Tech Toronto group and its weekly gathering. imagine a big group of nerds of all stripes getting together in-person and on zoom to jam about how to make their city better. you lucky duck Toronto!

at least 50 people have contributed to Civic Dashboard via code, design, research, writing, organizing, giving feedback, and more. folks kept showing up, and who wants to say no to an enthusiastic volunteer? we started capturing this mess for posterity in our Who Got Us Here post, but we're going to turn that into a regularly updated work log.

but we realized that with so many voices in the room, and everyone excited about building different things, we were never going to be able to come to a consensus about what to put in an initial release.

so we just decided that everyone could work on what they're excited about, we'd slap it all in one website, and figure out the details later! thus was born the many-tentacled monster that is the current iteration of Civic Dashboard.

there's a lot to unpack here, but what i'm most excited to talk about is the scale of our collaboration so early in the project!

how many cooks can a tech proj chuck

i've definitely had a bias towards believing that (certainly at first) a project runs more efficiently and effectively with a small number of focused contributors.

the tech world, and some might even argue the human storytelling instinct, runs rampant with tales of singular leaders, BDFLs, and 10x developers. but i've been thinking about an idea that first crystallized for me while reading People, Power, Change by Marshall Ganz.

he talks about measuring the success of a project not by whether it accomplished its goals, but by how the relationships and skills of of the community involved in that initiative have grown. a group that hits a milestone but is now burnt out and tired of each other has won a battle but is losing the war.

working on Civic Dashboard has definitely been helping me understand what he's talking about! but because this way of doing things is so new to me, i've been wondering: why is this working??

money ruins everything

in a funded environment, there are so many factors that can make collaboration and community building the wrong tool. if the project has to pay every contributor a full-time, eye-popping tech industry salary, there's a huge incentive to squeeze every last bit of juice out of every last little lime. and if you're contributing to something your livelihood depends on, it gets pretty hard to engage in a boundaried way.

but to be nakedly sunshine and rainbows about it, if you're all here to make friends, learn, and do something you love, things are better! people contribute to what they feel motivated and capable of doing: fulfilling as heck. when you want to take a break, you take a break: begone, burnout. if something flops, someone learned and grew, and nothing is lost: experimental abundance. there's a huge number of brains percolating on the project: oodles of ideas.

this stuff was preeeetty easy to accept. what was a lot harder to accept had nothing to do with money and everything to do with large-scale non-hierarchical collaboration: complete chaos ensued.

surrender to the unknown

so if you wanted to collaborate on a project, you'd get together and assign everyone roles. you'd build out a roadmap and plan priorities with each other, narrow down a scope, and come to a consensus on the right goals and methods to commit to. right? right??

not at civic dashboard 😎 we mostly have just worked on whatever we're excited to work on, and we merge and integrate our work when we feel like it, and that's worked really well so far while we've been in an early and experimental stage. the only alternative with so many contributors and so little time seemed to be a horrific design by committee process that no one wanted. i can't say it wasn't stressy for me at first, because i actually care about this thing and people were just going off willy nilly and implementing whatever they wanted!

the end result has been that we've gotten to try alotta tools, implement alotta features, and include alotta contributors! it's also true that no one has been able to control or predict exactly what direction things are going to take on a micro or macro level, which might not be the worst thing to accept no matter what kind of project you're running.

future challenges

i've painted a pretty rosy picture here, and everything's worked out in hindsight, but we haven't had to make any truly hard decisions yet. we haven't had to tear down or reject anyone's work. we don't know how we'll navigate a big disagreement on direction within the team. it's possible that some folks stopped coming because they disagreed, and that's not inherently a bad thing, but it'd be nice to talk about it! "just fork it" is definitely not the ideal solution from my perspective.

we've of course joked about the irony of having no decision making process within a project so focused on democracy. and i don't want to fall into the trap of the tyranny of structurelessness. so we'll just have to see how far we can drive this thing before the wheels fall off! stay tuned for updates :)