Caroline Bruister presents winning ideas from Innovate Your State's Fix California Challenge, which received over 400 crowdsourced proposals. The top four include a California Legislative Transparency Act requiring 72-hour publication of hearing recordings, a blockchain-based constituent feedback platform called Place a Vote, and OpenGov financial transparency software, which 11 counties have already adopted.
Chapters
So as I mentioned, Innovate Your State, and I am happy to be working with Innovate Your State, as is Ali, who's in the back there too. So Innovate Your State was founded just about a year and a half ago. So we're a new startup, and we're a nonprofit, as I mentioned, dedicated to improving government outcomes and public participation. So how did we go about doing that? Well, we ran the Fix California Challenge last summer. It was an online crowdsourced challenge. Some former DU students actually participated in that challenge, which was really exciting. And when we put it up online, we really didn't know what was going to come out of it, to be totally honest. And we were very, very— I won't say surprised, but excited by the results. We got over 400 ideas, and a lot of them had to do— they kind of fell into 2 buckets. One— some of them were on the policy side, and then some of them were gov-tech and civ-tech, business, and nonprofits. So we actually selected 4 as our winning ideas. There were many, many more that came through that were pretty interesting, and I'll talk about the civic tech showcase that we— that highlighted some of those in a second. But the first 2 are on the policy side of things, and the first one, county modernization. has to do with that issue that we talked about at the beginning about the actual county lines. So there's 58 counties in California right now, and, you know, they're there for historical reasons, but they don't really reflect the regional economies, you know, right? If you've driven or if you came in from SFO, it's not like you passed the county line between San Francisco and San Mateo and saw some, like, remarkable difference. So there's a lot of decisions that could be explored to be made on a regional level that would— could improve things for citizens there. So an example of a region that might look different in the way that it was governed than kind of the Bay Area or Silicon Valley might be the Central Valley. You know, it really relies and has an amazing agricultural industry there. So the rules and regulations that would support that kind of business and that kind of economy might look different than what would support things here. So that idea was submitted, and we— and Innovate Your State is going to be looking into that issue. It really, you know, is a big can of worms, so we wanted to carefully focus and research on how things could be restructured and modernized. The California Legislative Transparency Act was actually submitted by a former state assembly member, Sam Blakeslee, down from the Central Coast, Cal Poly— or he is at Cal Poly now, but San Luis Obispo. I don't think we had any Central Coast folks here. But his idea would do 2 main things in the state legislature. So how many people have watched a video online in the last 24 hours?
Everyone.
Everyone. So it might surprise you that you can't get access to the state legislative hearings online. They kind of pick and choose which ones that they put up now. So this— it has turned into an initiative. It would require that all legislative hearings and floor session be recorded and be made online. Kind of a common sense thing for our generation, but we're kind of having to pull the state structure into 2016. It would also prevent what's called a gutten amend. Does anyone know what a gutten amend is? Poli sci? No, okay. So, at the end of— at the end of the legislator— legislative calendar, sometimes things get crazy. So imagine if you turned in a paper and then somebody, your professor, whited it out and just wrote their own words in it. That's kind of what can happen at the end of the legislative process. And so by requiring that the words be in print for 72 hours, it would provide better, greater transparency to the legislative process and hopefully better outcomes for citizens like us.
What is that called?
It's called a gut and amend.
Oh, gut and amend.
Yeah, like gut it. I didn't make up that term. So the second— sorry, second 2 ideas are on the civic govtech side. So Place a Vote is a really innovative platform that works with candidates who pledge when they run for Congress that they will listen to the voices of their constituents via this online platform. It's actually— it uses blockchain, so the same thing that Bitcoin uses, to verify that they are a constituent. So if I'm Caroline, I'm running for Congress, I say that I'm gonna listen to what my constituents say via Place a Vote, then I would go online and say, okay, well, what do they think about this, you know, marijuana legalization bill? Or, you know, what do they think in general about this issue? So it's a way of trying to connect— trying to bridge the gap and connect voters with what they're actually doing. And there are some candidates that are running using Place a Vote right now. OpenGov is a financial transparency software. And it helps local— mostly local governments give better information about their budgets and what they're spending money on to their citizens. And it also improves staff time, improves lookup requests for staffers on the backend. So what Innovate Your State did with OpenGov is we said, you know, we really think that this is a powerful tool for transparency and accountability. So we said for any new county in California that signed on, we would match their first year of expense for using the OpenGov platform. Since we know that one of the main hurdles for local levels of government especially is just that they have smaller budgets, and it can be— it's tough enough at the most innovative business office to get new software and to create change, but for some of these local governments, it's really hard. So we've actually had 11— right, Ali?
Yes.
Counties sign up now, so tremendous success, and we're tracking the results and whether this results in more people attending hearings or sending letters or just getting kind of more involved and understanding about what their counties are spending their money on.
How does it work? How does that translate for cities?
For the counties? So the county staff actually has to use their— they basically give them their financial information. They're already tracking all of this. But what they do, the OpenGov interface allows for the county of Yolo, which is an awesome county name by the way, to have a link on their website that shows I can click and say, all right, well, how much money is being spent on public safety on police in my county? And then I can click on that and I can get to how much, what are they spending on uniforms, for example? So however, whatever level you want to see that data, it's— exactly. Sure.
Is that using the blockchain as well, or is that just sort of information provided by the local county?
Great question. So that is not based on the blockchain. It's actually public information that is technically available upon request, but Raise your hand here if you've ever requested county financial information. Nobody? Yay! We got one. But the idea is making it available online in a customer-friendly way is really how government should be putting this information that is public information out there. We're all taxpayers, so we're all— we should have access to this information.
