DM Note #4 — Building Civic Tech: A new frontier of our work

This is the fourth in a series of DM notes that we write about the insights from our work on the ground, which follows internal learning sessions called the DM Downloads that are organized every two weeks or so. The aim is to make our practice more legible, for us as well as for you.

DM Note #4 is a reflection on a new frontier of our work: civic technology development, or how to make things in a complex world.

DM’s trajectory: becoming practical strategists and experimental developers

When Dark Matter Labs started in 2016, our provocation page presenting various visions around the future of civic infrastructures was the core of what we did, which made many people believe we were essentially a think tank. We are not not that, but we are a lot more too, especially as we grew and started crafting these civic infrastructures that we had first only imagined with various partners around the world.

Today, Dark Matter Labs is building a sort of ship, whose form and parts are being imagined, designed and assembled around the planet.

Sometimes, we start by making the systems we work with visible in order to analyse the pain points, underlying drivers and strategic risks of each domain. We build portfolios of experiments to show all the various interconnected ways we could intervene in that system. Out of all of them, we identify the experimental probes to which we can best contribute and work from these starting points to develop and iterate the best initiatives for the targeted domain as well as learn from the system we intervene in.

Most of our work fall into shared civic infrastructure missions (nature based solutions, spatial justice, mental wealth, etc.) around which we organize internally, in order to maximize our shared value internationally. And beyond each initiative and mission are the shared deep code innovations that we are designing across finance, contracting, data, policy, governance and more.

This is the dark matter our name refers to; the invisible structures responsible for producing the majority of the environment around us.

At that point of the process, our focus shifts from system overview to minimal viable products (MVP), which requires a totally different mindset, posture and process, to rediscover how systems work by now acting within them. This last part is a new frontier for us. It raises questions internally such as:

• How do we go from from system change mapping to MVP?
• How does this fit within and change our current practices?
• What is our added value in this sphere globally?
• What are the challenges with the rest of our work (different business model, ways of working, etc.)?

Civic technology development at DML

During our DM download on civic technology development, we discussed the need to build the right thing, as well as building the thing right. That is to say: making sure we are setting up partnerships, projects and explorations as places to answer key, difficult questions (as opposed to making a thing our research and modelling tell us we need to make). We talked about how this currently requires an organisational transition as opposed to purely looking at how to set up teams to build digital products. It is a mindset shift that we‘ll have to embrace.

The complex future states, theories and potential answers that we have been communicating to you in blogs and reports are just a starting point for us. We use these starting points to explore, test and iteratively build products/systems, based on the insights we gather as we go. And we’re not precious about whether our original theory was right as long as we achieve the outcome we desire. We look for commonalities that make our products/systems scalable and transferrable.

You’ve been reading about our theories and provocations in blogs. More and more, you’ll be able to see how we experiment with them and reshape them until they become actual things that you can see in the world around you.

What we are learning from some of the civic technologies in the making

Proof of concept or proof of possibility, prototype, experimental probe, pilot, MVP — what’s in a name? We are still exploring which methods of testing and developing are best suited for the kind of work we want to accomplish, and so these terms are being used here loosely for the moment. While we clarify our own glossary of terms. You can find how Nesta defines them here.

Futurefit — Proof of concept

This body of work looks at how we can encourage more collective forms of retrofit and energy efficiency measures, as a vehicle for Covid recovery and a more just, democratic climate transition

One of the key challenges of retrofit is a distinct lack of open and available building data — both in terms of basic information and in its energy performance. Here our ambition was to make an early proof of concept for an open retrofit data map, combining and cleaning existing public datasets, to show potential places for focus in a retrofit scheme.

Rather than viewing this as a top-down analytical tool, the aim was to give citizens more information about their buildings, and create a first step in encouraging the self-selection of groups of residents to upgrade their homes. Alongside this process we outlined a new collective service model for a multi-family apartment block to be able to retrofit their homes, reimagining the role of the administration de condominio could play in facilitating this process.

We’re currently working on the potential next steps of this tool with the Comune di Milano.

Nouveaux voisins — Prototype + Pilot

Building a platform to facilitate socio-ecological transitions and community-based climate action in private yards

We worked with Nouveaux voisins / New Neighbors to develop the prototype of a platform bringing together different functions (pedagogical, actionable, evaluational, financial, regulatory, etc.) to support and accelerate this socio-ecological transition through the aggregation of residential and commercial yards. Many of the functions were inspired by their pilot projects on the ground.

What we are learning by doing so far:

• Doing completely analog pilot projects, no matter how small, can help inform the sort of civic infrastructure required to support a broader movement and scaling model for the initiative (see example below from Nouveaux voisins)
• No matter how detailed your complex paper prototype is, moving it toward a minimum viable product requires to take a step back and test many assumptions in order to move from what felt like a complex integrated platform to what seems like a very basic one. And that’s ok.

Amsterdam CE — Experimental probe + pilot (in progress)

Understanding and unfolding existing legal structure of Dutch law and visualizing the articles and different connections to make them more transparent and easier to understand. With goal to make it easier for lawmakers to make the needed change and transition towards a just circular economy in effective time.

One of the aims of this initiative is to make laws and their articles to be machine readable and indexable, so it can be easier for lawmakers to see connections and people associated with each law. We are also exploring the needed culture and way of working to use and maintain the tool and its data.

Learning about the system by trying to change it through an experimental probe of what could be is the stage we are at here.

What we are learning by doing so far:

• Laws are tend to be complex and nuanced, it is difficult to label and index to a particular category. We have a created a decision tree to add the needed structure and using degrees and threshold measures to encode the minute details
• A regulatory dashboard is only one tool towards a broader cultural shift in how the administration functions, it cannot stand alone
• This is not the kind of project that can be done all at once; it requires a team to develop it iteratively to maintain it

TreesAI — MVP (in progress)

Trees as Infrastructure establishes nature as a critical part of urban infrastructure, alongside bridges, roads and rail, enabling investment, profitability and sustainability.

Currently trees and urban nature are just seen as maintenance costs in city budget sheets. We are trying to establish urban nature’s true value in terms of all the benefits they bring and their associated financial value so they can be maintained systematically.

What we are learning by doing so far:

• We better understand which data parameters are needed to give accurate calculations of tree benefits, and cities have completely different data landscape.
• There is big need for data informed decision making when it comes to nature based solutions
• Cities lack the budget and capacity to create and maintain the needed digital civic infrastructure required
• There is an abundance of existing open source tools, however the challenge is how to integrate them best to our needs and for the long term without reinventing the wheel
• Open source project does not mean that you just plug and play with it for your needs; it requires significant work and skill capacity in order to adapt it to the intended use

Moving Forward — Key Questions

As DM moves into the development of key civic technologies such as the ones presented above, it will require not only that we organize differently internally, but that we also work collaboratively internationally around some of the key following questions:

1. Because they will need to exist outside the specific domain of market and state, how do you preserve the public good independently of where the capital comes from? How do we subordinate capital to the governance for public good?
2. Public investments for this work are typically focused on what exactly is needed to do be accomplished. However, many of the challenges we face are too complex to know how to address them at the outset. How do we invent investment mechanisms for the discovery of the public good as we go?
3. We need very clear do no harm principles of how these civic technologies are developed, used, what frameworks they create and what the implications are. How do we do that?
4. It has been shown how many AI technologies replicate the biases from the data it was based out of. If we want more power in the hands of communities, how do we create UX and transparency to avoid creating unconscious biases in the behavioural economics it creates?
5. Maintenance of civic tech when it doesn’t have the security of the state of large private investment is a big challenge. How do we create open and transparent maintenance friendly tech without increasing rent seeking infrastructures for private capital?
6. How do we insure the sustainability and longevity of these services outside traditional institutional models of support?
7. How can we be open and declarative assumptions & references so as to create the hypothesis that the decision making can be interrogated and challenged and create accountability for stakeholders?
8. How do we construct new frameworks of accountability to all stakeholders, both future and present.
9. How do we build civic tech with open unitary modular blocks of value, adopting a modular design principle in which we subdivide a future system into smaller parts, which can and should be independently created, modified, replaced, or exchanged with other modules or between different systems.

Get in touch

If you enjoyed this 4th DM Note, please also read our previous ones, follow us on Medium for more to come and “clap” the article to show appreciation. And please feel free to reach out and share your thoughts on this as we continue to grow a community of interest / practice / impact around the world.

Jonathan Lapalme
jonathan@darkmatterlabs.org
Laboratoires de Matière sombre / Dark Matter Labs Canada

Gurden Batra
gurden@darkmatterlabs.org
Dark Matter Labs Germany