APPROACH

The City of Detroit’s Mayor’s Office applied to Code for America with a focus on issues related to blight and vacant properties. With an understanding that Detroit has an active and effective base of citizen groups, we approached our engagement with the municipal government to ultimately support and better connect government with the work of community-based organizations. In February, we performed a wide-ranging needs-finding assessment, meeting with over 200 city government staff, community leaders, nonprofits, technical assistance providers, local foundations and individuals. In doing so, we gathered information to narrow our scope to focus on access to information and increasing community group capacity.

KEY FINDINGS

City in CrisisThe City of Detroit has experienced massive budget cuts over the past decade, concentrated most extremely in the past few years. In our time working with the city alone, the Mayor’s Office imposed a 10% pay reduction and laid off 1,000 city employees. We did not escape the impact of these cuts — in fact, we had planned to work with two alternate city contacts (laid off the day before our arrival) prior to finding our current champion, Karla Henderson a Group Executive in the Mayor’s Office. Beyond actual layoffs, we encountered a cultural climate where problems and fears were amplified: risk aversion, scarcity of resources, and a general attitude of skepticism toward three newcomers who might be out to either

replace jobs, or re-design the system without your job in it.

The budget crisis has had its greatest negative impact outside City Hall. Reliable garbage pickup and bus service is scarce, recycling non-existent. Broken street lights, 60,000 city-owned vacant properties, roads in extreme disrepair, and the elimination of in-person police force at any police station plague this city’s quality of life and introduce new barriers to basic personal safety. Dwindling city services combined with a history of governmental corruption have established extreme distrust in civic institutions by most Detroiters, regardless of background or race.

Civic InnovationDespite the immense challenges Detroit faces, no accurate summation of the City should exclude the overwhelming energy, commitment and value derived from citizen-led groups and their actions. It is critical to build upon and support the existing efforts to improve the gaps where government is not meeting citizens’ needs, the connections between existing groups doing good work, and to better facilitate repairing a broken relationship Detroit has with its citizens.

Vacancy and blightAt a basic level, many problems that community groups and city employees face are connected to vacancy. The City of Detroit currently owns a massive surplus of vacant or abandoned property which often cause many of the public safety and quality of life issues that affect Detroit. Currently, it is not easy to understand how to buy property or even know where city-owned property is for sale online.

PROJECTS

Our defined project areas seek to directly address our the three identified areas of interest:

LocalData Increasing Capacity of Community Groups with Data

We built a mobile data collection platform that is expanding to cities across the country. This tool has catalyzed and supported the existing work of community-based organizations and residents’ ability to capture and visualize neighborhood-level data, and to meaningfully engage with city government.

We piloted LocalData with a partnership between the City of Detroit’s Planning Department and Wayne State University to document and map commercial properties in the city. A graduate planning class quickly surveyed over 9,000 properties in just six weeks. The group found the mobile interface to significantly increased their capacity to document information at a large scale.

Our second pilot involved Vanguard CDC -- a smaller non-profit community development organization which completed a survey of residential properties. All told, volunteers collected information on over 1,000 residential parcels.

Thanks to support from the Knight News Challenge, we will be bringing LocalData to four other cities in addition to Detroit in the coming year.

LocalData continues to be an open source project. Our code is on GitHub. The mobile app is built on HTML5, JavaScript,

and Leaflet, and the backend uses Node.js and PostGIS.

http://golocaldata.org

TextMyBus Access to Transportation InformationWe partnered with the Department of Transportation to create Detroit’s first public transit API, and provide an easy-to-use, text-message app to get accurate information to riders.

When we started in January, there was no way for citizens to track real-time bus arrival and departure time in Detroit. This is a critical need for residents who rely on the bus in Detroit. Harsh winters, dark streets and long waiting times in dangerous areas create a serious public safety concern. Missing hours or days of work due to spotty

bus service costs individuals their jobs. Allowing citizens to have a heads-up on when they need to leave their house to catch the bus has the potential to impact thousands of the most vulnerable citizens in Detroit with simple technology.

The CfA Detroit team launched the Text MyBus service in September 1st -- the first day of school in the City of Detroit. In conjunction with Mayor Bing’s support of the federal Safe Routes to School initiative, we launched the service with the White House Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2) representative Portia Roberson, Detroit’s Chief of Police, CEO of Detroit Department of Transportation and the leadership of the Detroit Public Schools.

In addition to strong support across city agencies, we were happy to deliver a successful service. Since launch, we have processed over 140,000 inbound messages from 7,700 unique users. Approximately 550 people use the service daily, a number that increases every week.

All told, TextMyBus received positive press, in contrast to the typically neutral-to-negative tone of Detroit transit-related articles. We have begun to reshape public opinion toward transportation networks in Detroit and ultimately have nudged DDOT toward thinking about city service provision in terms of user experience. More substantially, DDOT was previously the 2nd-largest agency in the US without open transit data; now they have open transit data that includes real-time data, putting them ahead of many agencies.

Long-term SustainabilityPerhaps the most challenging aspect of this project was to ensure that the service would outlive our time in Detroit. The SC2 representative was particularly central to

our strategy to secure longer-term funding. Though Detroit generally and DDOT particularly are experiencing devastating economic circumstances, we were successful in partnering with leadership to reallocate funds within an existing FTA grant to dedicate necessary funds for the next two years as part of $2 Million set aside for regional transit that didn’t reach development.

Our StrategyOver the past six months we’ve worked hand-in-hand with the Mayor’s Office and DDOT to expose the internally-tracked data. Although they have been regularly publishing static schedule GTFS data, they had no external interface for real-time information. In a landmark move, the City of Detroit opted to publish real-time transit data, which is now available to developers to build on top of. We decided to build a demonstration app on this data: the text messaging service riders use today.

We also co-hosted an apps challenge called Apps for Detroit, calling on Detroit-based web developers to build innovative tools on top of the city’s newly-opened datasets. In just two weeks we received 15 submissions, three of which were transit-related apps. One of the challenge winners, DDOTInfo, developed a low-cost solar-powered screen to display real-time arrival data at stops or local businesses built with Raspberry Pi computers.

PartnersThis project was a success because we had a broad set of partners in the city and at the federal level. We worked most closely with DDOT and the Mayor’s Office to open the transit data. But this project would not have happened without support from the White House’s SC2 Initiative, which was critical to negotiating a budget with the

Federal Transit Administration to make this project and other transit improvements possible at DDOT. We additionally partnered with the Detroit Police Department as well as the Detroit Public School system around the launch to get the word out. Detroit’s most vulnerable populations are often those who rely most on the bus system. In support of the Safe Routes to School initiative, we distributed information and hosted students to try out the new service on their first day of school.

TechnologyWe’ve exposed the scheduled and live data (routes, stops, arrivals, etc.) through the OneBusAway interface. Developers can use that to build phone apps, live maps, live signage, or whatever else they think of. We use the exact same interface to build the text messaging service, which is our way of quickly reaching a broad set of riders. Providing the live data in a usable way helps ensure that the experience can become richer in the future without a reliance on any one organization to develop new technology. We successfully achieved support from executive governance to publish this data, and as a result, two entries for the Apps for Detroit Challenge made use of the underlying transit data API that we set up! These innovative takes leveraged previously unavailable data. The use of existing, open source software also garnered national attention for Detroit’s civic technology movement.

http://textmybus.com

Side Lot Program City-owned Property Sales & InformationThe City of Detroit currently faces a massive surplus of publicly-owned property. Currently, it is not easy to understand how to buy property or even know where city-owned property is for sale online. By exploring digital solutions with the City’s Planning and Development Department, we are working toward a more transparent, streamlined and friendly customer experience for city residents and city staff.

http://hampelm.github.com/sidelots/

Apps for Detroit Connecting web development community to the CityWe launched a two-week app challenge for developers in the Detroit area. As part of our mission to connect community groups and technologists, we invited local nonprofits to submit challenges. We paired over two dozen challenges with five new datasets from the city -- including real-time bus tracking information. Judges from local media institutions, nonprofits, and the City are reviewing entries for their focus on local issues and technical achievements. Grand prize winners were flown to San Francisco to represent the Detroit tech scene to technology and civic leaders.

http://appsfordetroit.org

Brigade Engaging civic energy around technology and open dataWe’re supporting local civic hackers and technologists. A leader of CfA Brigade in Detroit has stepped forward and already helping to bridge the gap between community, technology, and cities.

http://brigade.codeforamerica.org/

)PARTNERS

Acknowledging the existing channels of trust and effectivity in Detroit’s social landscape, we focused our efforts on working with both public and private partners to carry out project development.

GovernmentMayor’s Office Planning and Development DepartmentCity Planning CommissionDetroit Department of TransportationBuildings, Safety Engineering & Environmental Division

Media & TechnologyWDETDetroit Free PressHuffington PostOmnicorp DetroitLoveland TechnologyDetroit Venture Partners / M@adison BuildingTechtown

AcademicWayne State UniversityUniversity of Michigan

Non-ProfitMichigan Community ResourcesData Driven DetroitVanguard CDC

Top: At the 2012 A#ied Media Conference

Bottom: Karla Henderson, City of Detroit, and Vince Keenan, publius.org

EVENTS

Our team has held several successful community-building and information sharing events with local partners. Here’s a snapshot of each of the events:

Urban Geek Drinks Meetup February 2012

As our first introduction to Detroit, we held a very successful mixer to gather employees from City Hall, local technologists and anyone interested in urbanism to learn about the mission of Code for America, meet and greet the Detroit fellows and ultimately meet each other in an informal setting. Hosting this event with Jerry Paffendorf (Loveland Technologies) who is both an ex-Bay Area technologist and a leader in community organizing and the arts in Detroit allowed us to interface with over 75 individuals, including representatives from the Mayor’s Office, the City Council President Charles Pugh, Department of Planning and Development, Ford Motors, the Detroit Department of Transportation and many others.

Property and Technology Workshop February 2012

We invited dozens of experts on vacant property, technology, community organizing, and data to talk about the intersection of property and information technology. Representatives from local nonprofits lead breakout discussions on public data, housing speculation, and the application of technology in Detroit to solve these issues.

Prashant Singh, Code for America, and Naomi Patton, City of Detroit

Jim Xiao, of Detroit Venture Partners at Property and Technology Workshop

Apps for Detroit Challenge Kickoff June 2012

At the Apps for Detroit kickoff, we presented challenges from nonprofit to local developers, activists, and City representatives. Over 75 community members attended our event at Signal-Return Press, a new storefront for printmaking funded in part by the Knight Foundation.

Allied Media Conference June 2012

We attended the Allied Media Conference, a gathering of hundreds of organizers, to “share tools and tactics for transforming our communities through media-based organizing” hosted annually Detroit. We presented on the Civic Hacking for Self Governance panel, hosted a Code for America table in the exhibition area, and connected with civic media experts from Detroit and around the nation. Web developers at Signal-Return Press for the

Apps for Detroit kick-off

Code for America Team Detroit with Knight Foundation’s Rishi Jaitly and Mayor Dave Bing