Institute For The Future

Hack the Story: Edit Your City

The city of Redding, California needs a new narrative. In a March 2014 Gallup survey about community well-being, Redding ranked 187th out of 189 cities. A recent Wall Street Journal piece called it the third most miserable city in America.

These rankings suggest some real problems, to be sure. But they also mask some of the vital cultural activity that is underway. So a group of civic hackers led by IFTF Research Director Rachel Hatch assembled this past Sunday as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. Their goal? To hack the story of Redding, starting with its Wikipedia page. This lightning talk at Sunlight Foundation's TCamp shows how (begins at 45m15s):

Less App Development, More Narrative Development

This particular approach to civic hacking--less app development, more narrative development--is at the forefront of what could be a larger trend across National Day of Civic Hacking sites. As reported in the Redding Record Searchlight:

“What was happening in Redding was so special I thought it was worth the three-and-a-half-hour drive (up from the Bay Area) to attend,” said Ali Llewellyn, a project manager that oversaw the National Day of Civic Hacking, a two-day series of civic hacking events held in 100 different cities last weekend.

“Our community is based on thousands of civic hackers all over the world, and the Redding group was the only one to look at its own community,” she said. “Everyone else was building technology to support individual agendas, but Redding was the only event out of 124 that said, ‘look, we all come from this place, so let’s look at how our narrative is affecting ourselves and our future potential.’”

Llewellyn said she expects to feature Redding’s event in the national follow-up report, which generally highlights about 10 notable events from around the country. She said unique approaches from city events in years past had caught on and spread.

In addition to Redding's use of Wikipedia, other communities are leveraging wiki-based tools like LocalWiki to similar effect. LocalWiki is a grassroots effort to collect, share and open the world's local knowledge. 

From editing the Wikipedia page for Redding, California to populating a LocalWiki in Providence, Rhode Island, the call to action is clear: Edit your city.

As Jamais Cascio points out in IFTF's 2014 Ten-Year Forecast research on the future of cities, "Cities are the fundamental technology of civilization, and have been so for nearly 12,000 years." With civic hacking, that technology is being disrupted.

Open Source the Process

The National Day of Civic Hacking team from Redding is committed to open sourcing this approach to #hackforchange.  The event was designed to:

• Build a literacy of the commons via the 5 Pillars of Wikipedia
• Get smart about authoring & editing, with advice from a former wikipedia administrator who lives in Redding
• Co-create a vision for how to hack the narrative of Redding
• Check for bias by auditing contributions to avoid puffery
• Edit the Wikipedia page for Redding, CA
• Acknowledge that it is the nature of Wikipedia (and commons of all kinds) that others will edit their work
  
  

For More Information

• Read Hackers Targeting Redding's Image Draw Attention of National Organizers (Redding Record Searchlight, June 2, 2014)
• Watch Hackers Aim to Rewrite Redding's Story (KHSL-TV, June 1, 2014)
• Read We Should be Hacking Our Own Image by Rachel Hatch (National Day of Civic Hacking blog, May 30, 2014)
• Listen to Hacking for Community Good with Intel's Brandon Barnett, Second Muse's Nick Skytland and IFTF's Rachel Hatch (Jefferson Public Radio, May 30, 2014)
• Read Hacking #Redding Aims to Start Reshaping City's Image (Redding Record Searchlight, May 7, 2014)
• Watch Hacking #Redding (Redding Record Searchlight, May 7, 2014)

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Photo Source: localwiki.org/about/