Exploring The Future of Public Engagement with MIT's Ceasar McDowell

All right, TGIF. Joe and I are back for another episode of In Case You Missed It. So what another great week it has been. I'm really excited about this one because we're gonna be diving into the future of public engagement. And when I think about that, I kind of thought back to my time in government. And about 10 years ago, I met an individual that was remarkable, that was pushing the envelope with public participation, finding interesting ways to use technology, but focusing on digital equity inclusion as a part of it. And so I'm excited that today we're going to be joined by Professor Caesar McDowell. He's a professor of practice of civic design at MIT. He's also the associate head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He's also the associate director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication and chair of the Master in City Planning program within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. There's so much more that goes into Caesar's background, but Here to break down this topic today, we'll be joined by Professor Cesar McDowell. Cesar, so great to see you. Thanks for carving some time out.

Oh, I so appreciate it, Dustin. It's good to see you. It's been such a while. And Joe, good to meet you.

Nice to see you too.

Absolutely. So I kind of set the stage with your background, and our paths crossed when we were both looking at trying to challenge the norms of public participation. But maybe in your own words, love to hear a little bit more about what you're working on these days at MIT.

Yeah, you know, the majority of my work on this issue now is really grounded in this new center that I started called the Center for Constructive Communication. We kind of like to say that we're trying to design tools and methods and systems that can connect rather than divide us to create a little healthier society. And I think, as we all know, that, you know, a lot of our work began and grew out of some of the work around social media, the way social media has kind of splintered us as as a society. I should say, actually, the truth of it is it kind of revealed some of our splinters in the society, uh, and then amplified them. I think that's kind of more of the truth. But even if it wasn't for social media, I think, uh, what we realize is that, uh, something has changed in our country, and such as something has changed in democracy, uh, across the world. And the best way I like to describe it is that right now in most of our places, we're living among the most demographically complex set of people who've lived together, and we have neither the infrastructure or process in place that can support that kind of public to do what a public needs to do for a democracy to work. And the primary work of a public is to be in relationship with each other and collectively make judgment. Okay, that's what the public needs to do, but our systems that we have grown in this country in particularly are really started from the very beginning to— were designed on the notion of exclusion or who wouldn't be included, right? And we keep trying over the years to make them a little more inclusive, a little more inclusive. And I think the space we're at now is we got to design some new things. We've got to start from the beginning with some first principles. And one of the first principles that we're starting with is the notion that what we call the kind of ancient knowledge that we know, that people in small groups talking together can actually learn to trust each other, can be honest with each other. But the problem we have is it doesn't scale, right? The knowledge and what happens in one small group conversation doesn't scale. And so we, in some sense, have been working on that problem. And we've created a mechanism for actually doing that, to honoring the integrity of small in-person or online conversations, and then the ability to have what happens in those conversations shared to the extent that people want to share them.

So you've been at the forefront now of redefining public participation, civic infrastructure, and much more, like Dustin said, really pushing the envelope. Can you share a little bit more about your work in this area?

Yeah, there's a number of things we've been, you know, that I've been involved in over the years. One of the first, I think Dustin will remember this, is we came up with this thing what we call the Civic Design Framework. And the whole point of this framework that we've been working with communities around is that as people are trying to think about how to do new forms of engagement, we've kind of created a framework that helps them through that process. And it's kind of in 2 parts, right? So one part is getting people to recognize the kind of conversation they actually want the public to be engaged in. I think all of us have been in this space where, you know, we get asked to come into a public meeting like, imagine a new Austin, right? And you get in the meeting and you have 3 options to choose from. Well, that's not imagination work, right? That's something else. And so what we've done is kind of created this framework to help people think think through what we say are the really 6 kinds of conversations the public needs to be involved in. You know, the first of those is actually framing what the issue is and then moving from framing it to ideation and from ideation then prioritizing among those ideas and then choosing which of those you want to do. Then the conversation about how we implement and then how we monitor. But, you know, and the reason why it's important to know that because each of those really require you're asking the public to actually engage in a different cognitive function. I mean, you know this yourself. If you're sitting down to frame out an issue, that's very different than actually being in a process with people and you're trying to ideate and imagine something, right? So if you don't know what kind of conversation you're going to have people in, you're not going to design it right. And then the other thing we realized that kind of given our complexity, there are some principles that we should actually be bringing into the design of any kind of conversation we have. And those go from everything from designing from collaboration to designing for, uh, what we call designing for the margins. And I can say a little bit about that and the whole notion of designing for healing, because most of our public processes, uh, I like to say that everybody's suffering from the trauma of being in a bad public process, both the people who are organizing it and the people who are participating in it. And so we need to figure out how to help people have a way of acknowledging that and healing that. I don't mean these have to be therapeutic sessions, but sometimes just a recognition that something might be— there may be a little pain there helps people to engage more.

Yeah, absolutely. One thing that has always fascinated me about where we intersected originally too was just the notion of engaging the public and designing systems that collect their feedback in a way that's meaningful. I'd love to get your take. Neo, Thinking about kind of the leaders that might be listening to this livestream or the recording of the podcast thereafter, what's the value of redesigning these systems and collecting that input and really focusing on everyone and not just kind of how the system was initially established?

Yeah, that's a really good lead-in, Dustin, for me to talk about this real principle that I really believe in, this notion of what we call design for the margins. And the reason I use that frame is Normally when we go out to design something like an engagement process or other things, we kind of say, how do we design this so it fits for the people who are mostly at the center, right? And what that ends up doing is really continuing to marginalize the people who are at the margin, right, who are at the edge of that. And what's important about the people who on the margin that's not working is that they really understand, they have deep knowledge about what isn't working in the system, right? The ways in which it doesn't work. And if we don't bring their experiences into really understanding what we're trying to change, then we will continue to repeat the same problems over and over again, just in different ways, right? It'll look like we've done something different, but the same thing is happening, you know, over and over again. So you— and you see this all the time, you know, I All of us have kind of, you know, watched something happen, you know, uh, what was the latest thing? I can't even remember which company it was. They just made some faux pas on around a diversity issue in a product, and it's kind of like, really? You know, you say, really, in 2022 you're still doing that? And part of it is because, you know, if we don't have a way to have other voices, right, at the table, and that doesn't necessarily— when I say at the table, I don't necessarily always mean in the room, right, physically in the room.

Yep.

But that knowledge is there, those sets of experiences are there for us to realize, you know, the complexity or how a particular issue manifests itself in the world, we won't be able to solve for that, and we will continually make the same mistakes. So for me, engaging the public on one end is is about better understanding things. But the other part of it is, if the public's not connected to itself, then it's really hard to implement anything, right?

Right.

Because that's really where the work is. I mean, that's who this is all being done for. You know, we have this notion of we the people, and we have to figure out how to put the we back in that, right? And, you know, and that we are that, right? I kind of stay away from this, from the notion of citizen Because I think that's a political understanding of what that means. I think it is about the people who live in a space together and work in a space together being able to be part of shaping what happens in that and us being able to really understand their experience.

Cesar, do you have any advice or tactics for those government leaders that are tuning in in terms of how they incorporate that into their thinking? You said, hey, the people don't necessarily have to be in the room, but What are some advice that you may want to share?

So, you know, Joe, let me say one little thing about that because I think government officials are also really kind of— they're in a predicament, right? So one of the predicaments they have is that sometimes they have to be— they have to implement processes that are regulatory around engagement that actually aren't helpful, right, for what they're trying to do, right? And so, for example, you've got to have a public hearing and people get 2 minutes to speak each. And that's how we're going to hear from the public. And all that does is set up a situation where everyone's frustrated, right? And so there's the regulatory process that people have to go through that— figuring out ways to change that and open that up and figure out how we can be more experimental around that is going to be really important. But the first thing I would suggest people do is, if I go back to that system I said before about the different types of conversation, is don't be afraid of inviting the public into framing the issue as you understand it. you know, before you actually start to say what it is you're dealing with. We did this in a project in Boston several years ago around public— around transportation. And, you know, transportation is a highly technical issue, right? People are worrying about, you know, you have the T's and you have the buses and you have schedules and you have— I mean, it's just like, it's a very complex system. And, you know, the tendency is to say, well, we're going to give people, you know, the opportunity to say where they think a bus stop may be, uh, or things like, you know, we'll just— we'll control that because we know they're frustrated and there are only certain points that they can really have any influence on anything. And so we'll go out with what, you know, we think the goal should be and just get some input on them. We can actually— working with the transportation department, uh, they decided to do a public engagement process was just the opposite. And the way they did it, they went out to the public and just asked one simple question. What's your question, right? What's your question about getting around Boston in the future, right? That was it. And fascinating is by asking people to donate a question, right? That was it. Donate your question about getting around Boston in the future. Anyone could participate in it, right? Because everyone has questions about the thing, you know, about their experience in the city. And so they did public forums where people could do it. They did online things they could do it. They did little cards at grocery stores. They just did all kinds of things to collect up all these questions, then organize the questions to a set of themes, and then have public meetings where they invited people to say like, there's a, you know, we have 500 questions in this area. If this is one of the things that interests you, come to this meeting. Let's talk about it and understand why that question is And from that whole process, they actually— the city established the 10 goals that would guide the way they would go about doing transportation planning. Now, would the transportation planners have gotten there anyway? Maybe. Maybe they would have got 8 of them, right? Maybe they would have gotten all 10 of it. But what happened this time is they had a whole public that they didn't have before with them on this plan before they started even thinking about, you know, design possibilities or how to prioritize things. They had a whole part of the city that was really already attached to, engaged, and invested in the work. Yeah, so start from the beginning.

No, I mean, that's right on. And I remember, you know, back to some of the collaborations that we had. I mean, when you think about problem identification, if you if you ask people to frame a problem, you know, you're going to get a bunch of noise. But the simplicity and the beauty of saying, what's your question, actually helps surface, you know, what are the real issues that are here, which I thought was just such a beautiful hack on the system. And it was just a, you know, flip, a redesign of an existing way of looking at things to kind of get more meat on it. So as you look at cities like Boston and others, I mean, who's doing it right? You know, we— Joe and I often get, you know, who are the most progressive cities that are out there in the country? But You know, are there campaigns that have stood out or, you know, other programs like what you did in Boston that people should look at as models of the future of public participation and engagement?

Well, that's a really good question. So I think there are a lot of examples of people doing parts of it right. And I want to say parts of it right because it's really hard, right? There was a— I'm trying to think what the name of the campaign is that just happened in New York. Ask New York, I think it was. And there they had, you know, a really good way for people to kind of name issues that were up for them. And I think that was a, you know, so you can see a lot of examples of that happening around the country where they get people to kind of post things they're interested in or concerned about. But as you just said, Dustin, that creates a lot of noise, right? Because you're actually having people identify not with their possibility but with what's wrong, right?

Yeah.

I think real engagement has to start with the notion of, you know, what's the possibility? So the piece that people are struggling with the most is, I think there are 2 things that— I'm going to say 3 things that folks are really struggling the most, and people have parts of these. And part of what I think and what we're seeing, technology can actually be an asset in helping stitch together these things in a different way. One is One is the problem of scale, right? How do you cut across different neighborhoods? And the other part of that scale issue is, uh, you have to have an analog and a digital system that work together for collecting information and engaging people. And this is a really hard problem, right? So if you have an online system where you're collecting information and then you have an offline system where people are putting up stickies, How do you get the information about the stickies back to the people, the online stuff back to the people who are doing stickies? And how do you get the sticky information to the people who are online doing something else, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so you kind of created this little division. And so that's one of the reasons we say, you know, let's go back to what we know people know how to do. And they know how to sit in conversations with people in small spaces, right? And so folks who are doing that, and there's a lot of that going on right now where people are really crafting I think, excellent ways to bring people not only who are different than each other, but sometimes people who you think, you know, in the community, oh, they belong to the same community, they'll think about this issue the same way, and you— and they don't, as you know, right? There's more complexity and discord inside of the communities that we say, uh, sometimes than there is across communities. And so what we're able to do and what we think you know, the technology can do is really kind of act— not aggregate, because aggregate's the wrong way, because when you say aggregate, what you're ending up doing is kind of summing some stuff up, making it simpler so that you can share it. But what we're able to do in the Real Talk work that we've been working on is actually share, create— we have a system that allows people to both tell their stories Have the nugget of their experience kind of captured, and then have a way for people to say, this is what that's about in a code system, and then put that into a central system where people can search it and hear it, never losing the authentic voice that a person has, right? Because soon— this is part of our problem is the translation, right? So you can have these really powerful conversations with people in small meetings, and then what comes out of it is a report. Right, that so-and-so said something, and majority of them say this. We did a project around the selection of the police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, and there, with a set of these small conversations and being able to kind of lift up these narratives, we were able to kind of create a report that named some of the issues that people had but didn't just put them out in terms of issues, about their experiences. And then in the report if you click on, you know, we could say so-and-so said this, but if you click on that person's name, you actually hear them say it, right? We're not interpreting for other people, right? That's what we don't want to do. We want people who are at the decision-making end to actually have to confront, right, the complexity of what the public is holding. And so not filter it down for them. So these are the problems I think that people This is what I mean by people I think have certain parts of the problem solved, figured out, but this connecting it together, having a system that's actually going to flow from the intimate conversation all the way down to the decision-making and trying to keep the integrity of that voice and that experience through that process. And we have one approach to it. Others may be dealing other approaches, but I think That's the space that we need to work on in this country.

On our pre-call, we talked about the pandemic stalling certain things, accelerating other things. Did the pandemic create any long-term impacts or behavioral changes related to public participation that public leaders may take note of?

Well, one of the things that I found around the pandemic, it actually I want to say not demystified, that's the wrong way to put it, but it put more people who weren't necessarily used to doing it into the kind of digital space, right, to be able to get online and talk about things. And, you know, mostly through Zoom and other things like that, not through texting systems and stuff like that, but actually using Zoom to have conversations. And, and people actually appreciated it. It kept a lot of things moving, uh, and kind of, I think, therefore really allows us to imagine ways in which we can actually use kind of video technology, uh, in small groups and as a tool for actually scaling and connecting people. Uh, so I think that's been one of the benefits of it, Joe. The other thing of it though is, uh, as we came out you could see people's hunger to be in this, in real space with people, right? And to get back to the place where they are with people. But I think we've increased the number of people who are able to switch between those things now, right? And to have some comfort with that. Not saying we're all there, but, you know, that is now a valuable tool. 3 years ago, if you had said, I want to do a public, you know, engagement campaign and we're going to use Zoom as a component, you know, people would have just said, yeah, right, why waste your time, right? 'Cause not very many people were gonna do it. Now it's an integral option, right, to have in place as a way of making it possible for, you know, for people to engage. So I think it's changed the game quite a bit.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I think we're at a point too where, you know, now you've got even council members that can join meetings that they wouldn't, you know, if they were gonna miss a meeting, they could join via Zoom and actually share their input on things too. So it's kind of encouraged public participation on both sides. So now let's shift and talk about AI because we were just talking about ChatGPT before, you know, we went live. But, you know, when you think about AI and kind of everything that's happening in that domain today and what everyone is saying about it, how do you see that impacting the future of public participation? And, you know, negative aside, I mean, there's of course all the negatives that it can be used for, but are there any positive elements that you think that these technologies can be applied for that you're currently doing today to help in that public domain?

Well, I can tell you one that we're, we're, we are clearly investigating now, and I think it's going to accelerate our work. So when we do these conversations with people, one of the things we do is we transcribe them, and the audio and the transcription go hand in hand. And now with ChatGPT, we can start to explore the question, well, can we start to automate right, the translation and the kind of pre-coding of what's happening in the conversation, but not let that be what gets finalized because you still want humans in this space. So we're thinking about these tools as Deb Roy, who's head of the center, says, as power tools to help for human understanding and sensemaking, right? And so with ChatGPT, what's really powerful about this is it could allow us to do this in multiple languages really quick, right? And that, as you know, an engagement process, that's a real barrier, right? How to deal with the multiple languages that we have, right? And particularly if you then want to have conversations in Creole and you want to have conversations in Hmong and you want to have conversations in English and you want those all to come together, how do you do that fast and quickly? Can you have a system that helps you learn across those that can then begin to suggest or create a pathway for people from the community to do their own coding, to say this is what these things are about, or to— and to help organize that material so it can be more public. So I think there's some real power in it, uh, but even in using that that way, you know, there's, you know, all the negative things that are there we have to kind of guard for, right? Um, I was, you know, we're— I think we're in a conversation about this today, and I think the thing we're realizing, us, you know, some of the students who are working on this, is that we are probably going to be in the space of building little fixes to things that we find and investigate and evaluate and find, okay, here's a little problem here, let's figure out a little patch, a little fix that we can add on top of this. to allow things to be a little better. So for example, uh, you can imagine, you know, one of the things with ChatGPT, with the outputs from ChatGPT, is that it can read pretty nice and be pretty eloquent. It may not be true, right?

And yeah, minor details.

Yeah, look at me, some minor detail, right? But, you know, and so you're reading through the thing and it could be— but, you know, it raises a really interesting question of how, you know, how well can it represent not just different perspectives but different communities and different ways of understanding the same issue, right? And so what if it can't do that? And you can realize its generalization is really missing, you know, how someone from community X, right, would understand that question and reply to it. So then what's a fix, right? What's a little fix that we could put on top of that that could actually begin to work on that problem? But there are a lot of those that are going to be out there, right? You know, it's not going to be a perfect tool. There's going to be a lot of things that we're going to have to do. But I think the key in all of this, in the AI and a lot of the tools that are out there now, is If we use the concept that these are power tools that need to be in the hands of human beings who are making the end decision, right, we would never take a— we wouldn't— basically, we would never take a drill and just put it on automatic and throw it on the street and see what it actually puts a hole in. We wouldn't do that. And so in some sense, we need to do that with AI, right, is to put it in the hands of people who can learn how to use it purposely and intentionally to do the right thing with it. and help them build the things that they're trying to build.

Cesar, along those same lines, what's on your research agenda for the rest of 2023, and who are you looking forward to working with?

Oh my goodness. Well, there's a lot. Our center is involved in a lot of things, so I can't even cover all of it. But I'd say that the 2 things for me that I'm particularly interested in right now In our work in Boston, we're really trying to understand and really start to build out what does it mean to actually try to build a whole new civic infrastructure for the city, right? And actually creating a set of practices that everyone is doing who's actually doing community engagement. So to have a common thread around all community engagement processes. So we don't have to keep going back to the same communities, the same over and over and over again with different people asking the same questions, looking for the same information. And that this would allow us not only to, uh, know and learn and have a systematic way of listening across all communities, but also have a way of actually benchmarking stuff over time. Because if you have a database of experiences of people in Boston and you're starting to implement policies, you would expect then if you're doing something right, over time those experiences would shift. they would start to look different, they would start to sound different, right? And so it's another way of knowing how effective we are in actually listening to and responding to the public. So that's, for me, Joe, that's the thing. How do we do that, right? And it's not only a technical problem, it's a human dynamic problem because it requires getting organizations and individuals to be able to trust each other around the handling of those stories and those narratives. And So we're looking at— I guess that's the best way I could say that in relationship to what we're looking at is how do you build a data trust system at the community level that's really grounded in people's narratives and stories?

The easiest question that we have for you today is just where our audience can go to learn more about your work and maybe how they can plug in or engage with you from a partnership standpoint.

Oh, they should join us at ccc.mit.edu. And I want to say one thing about the center, which is really important to know. We actually have a partner organization, a nonprofit called Cortico, and we really— they become our deployment tool for the work and research that we're doing. So if people reach out to us, we will get them connected either with us or with Cortico or whichever makes sense for actually helping them work.

And you also have a podcast?

Yes, we do have a podcast. Yeah, this podcast is in its 3rd year. It's really looking at these issues. We call it We Who Engage, and it's really interviews and talks with people who really are about kind of improving the way we engage with the public.

Awesome. Cesar, thanks so much for joining us.

Well, thank you, Joe. It was great to meet you. Dustin, it's really great to be here with you again. We need to do something else together soon.

Yes, we're long overdue.

So, yes, have a wonderful weekend, everyone.

Okay, take care. Bye-bye.

Yeah, thanks.