Cupertino DailyHow Cupertino Wins with Community Partnership Governing
As the home to tech giants HP and Apple, Cupertino occupies a unique place among approximately 19,000 cities in America as a major employer for innovating companies. But Cupertino also challenges not unlike many other cities, specifically, how to offer more services with declining tax revenue.
There’s a new movement afoot that helps answer this question: community partnership governing. In short, it’s the idea that citizens are no longer passive players in the governing process.
We hope everyone feels motivated to vote, but for many, that is the extent of their civic participation. What more could one do and how can we measure the success of civic participation? Thankfully, we have a good idea of how to measure civic participation courtesy of the National Conference on Citizenship which, in August of 2009 released their annual report, America’s Civic Health Index. The report looked at the state of civic engagement in America that reflects the impact of the economic crisis. They found that 72 percent of respondents saying they have cut back on time engaged in civic participation. But they also found that Millennials who use social networking sites for civic purposes are, on average 17% more likely to actively engage in civic participation in their communities.
So, the question is, can we increase civic participation, lower the cost of governing by instituting community partnership governing? The answer is definitely yes.
One California Tech Startup, CitySourced (www.citysourced.com) has the solution when it comes to addressing urban blights like potholes and graffiti. Urban blights are some of the most noticeable and costly problems that a city faces. Take for instance a study by Law Enforcement Journal (09/2005), which estimated that in the United States the annual cost of graffiti abatement programs is estimated between $10 and $12 billion. In just the mass transit industry, the cost of vandalism is growing by 11 percent a year, according to a survey sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration.
Urban blights also have a “hidden” cost. They are often the incubators of larger crimes. George L. Kelling and Catherine Cole, authors of Fixing Broken Windows (Free Press, 1998) identified a successful strategy for combating crime and vandalism is to fix the problems when they are small, such as burned out street lights, graffiti, etc.
But cities still face the challenge of having to identify the problems. This is where products like CitySourced come in. CitySourced focuses on real time mobile civic engagement. If you have a smartphone (very common in a tech-city like Cupertino), you can download the app on your iPhone and take a photo of a problem and submit it directly to City hall, complete with the GPS coordinates which are automatically captured because of the nature of a smartphone.
City Governments in these economic difficulties are cutting back on services and are looking for more ways to lower cost of managing their city by outsourcing or using technology to do more with less. To fix these problems, we need to empower citizens to be partners in community governing to easily report them when they are small in nature, in real time, as they see them (so it’s accurate), not later on when they are likely to forget.
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