A Year in Reflection, 2020 in Review
By: New Urban Mechanics
Tags: Civic Technology, Local Government, Civic Innovation, Civic Engagement, Civic Design

Covid-19 Efforts

We’re always working to support, amplify, and further the work of our partner departments, and that was no different as the pandemic unfolded in Boston. In the early days, we aimed to be extra pairs of hands and ears to our colleagues who were responding directly to the crisis from the front lines.

We helped set up a few online resources via Airtable:

Illustration credit: Sabrina Dorsainvil

We delivered food to BPS families who couldn’t access meal sites. We provided tech support for weekly public meetings. We helped launch and manage the Rental Relief Fund. We scoured satellite imagery to identify unused parking spaces for health care professionals.

While these efforts were small in comparison to fighting the virus at scale, we were glad to provide day-to-day support that we hope made our colleagues’ work a bit easier.

Summer Fellow Projects

We hosted our first virtual Summer Fellowship this summer, which taught us a great deal about trying to virtually recreate “hallway run-ins” and the importance of having a long list of prompts for our daily stand-ups. Our cohort of seven civic adventurers rose to the challenge, supporting projects on the ground and in the digital realm. With additional gratitude to the departments that hosted our fellows, we thank:

If you have an hour (and a lot of popcorn), take a look at the recording of their final presentations here. [Password: 0igHg?Ns] Each fellow’s timestamp is noted above.

To Our Academic Collaborators

You helped us ask new questions. You pushed us to consider new perspectives. You brought inspiration and energy to our explorations. In 2020, we really needed those extra boosts. Thank you to all of our collaborators affiliated with institutions of learning, who put up with more than their fair share of Zoom headaches with us:

Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic

We wanted to craft a set of guidelines that could inform the future of our data collection and management infrastructure. We worked with students enrolled in the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic to identify some grounding principles we see as key to successful and equitable open data initiatives. These Public Data Principles were formulated to complement Boston’s existing citywide values and enacted policies, such as Resilient Boston and Boston’s Open Data Policy.

We worked with a second team of Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic students to develop standard legal language and document templates to operationalize our Public Data Principles in terms of how public data is collected, handled, and stored by City departments.

Wentworth

We partnered with a 4th-year architectural design studio at Wentworth Institute of Technology to collaboratively imagine future renditions of the iconic triple-decker on sites along Blue Hill Avenue.

This partnership allowed us all to learn about the socioeconomic and architectural history of how triple-deckers came to exist in Boston, providing us with tools to envision ways of reintroducing affordable housing options for residents today.

Brandeis

We partnered with a team of computer science students from Brandeis University and developed an application that could contain the locations of sensors throughout the City and display relevant information using a map interface. This application has not yet been applied to real sensors, but, it serves as a functional proof of concept. The app has the capacity to increase transparency in data collection for the City of Boston. (Check out the GitHub here: https://github.com/pitosalas/CoB_Transparency)

Emerson

In 2018 we released our first Civic Research Agenda. Since then we’ve had the pleasure of seeing a spectrum of people explore the questions posed. Students in this course, led by artist and educator Elisa Hamilton, approached the questions: How do people make decisions? and How can we invite

more people to be civically engaged? The results were prototypes for trust-building digital engagement and youth civic engagement strategies.

Boston Architectural College

In partnership with Boston Society for Architecture and the BAC’s Gateway program we embarked on a research projected centered on the “contested territory” of the Mass Ave/Melnea Cass area in Boston. This work has supported a process of mapping the city wide context and spatial relationship of recovery and homeless services for those navigating substance use disorders and the lack of housing.

Northeastern Scout Labs

We launched our second year in partnership with Scout Labs, picking up the well-organized pieces from Meghann’s summer fellowship project on civic participation.

Our partners at Scout Labs interviewed city departments, community groups, and residents in order to develop prototypes that would make digital (or “hybrid” digital-and-in-person) civic engagement more meaningful and robust. You can read their semester report here.

Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI)

In early summer of 2020, deep into the COVID pandemic, our partners at Emergency Medical Service (EMS) reached out seeking support on data management. While EMS has deep and rich data stretching back over years, their data management infrastructure was not set up to generate real-time reports on the number of EMS calls and cases by neighborhood

Our partners at BARI determined that they could help generate these reports and were able to quickly assign this work to a capable PhD student. Once a data access MOU was signed, the BARI team worked closely with the EMS and, within a matter of weeks, were able to generate the needed reports.

MIT

In the fall 2020, Professor Eric Gordon wanted to explore new models of governance which de-center the influence of the local government in favor of community decision-making. We participated in a semester’s worth of classes to explore, critique, and sharpen this idea. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the collaborative effort, called Boston Collaborative Governance Initiative, is moving forward, and MONUM will continue to stay involved.

Suffolk

We partnered with two classes of MPA students to explore how we might operationalize our aspirations toward becoming an antiracist organization within local government, assessing our past work, while also thinking about how we onboard new team members.

Looking Ahead

We can’t know what the rest of 2021 will bring, but we commit to meeting it with creativity, honesty, and justice. If you have an idea you want to explore with us this year, drop us a line at newurbanmechanics@boston.gov.