In many US cities, there is growing enthusiasm for harnessing the energy of volunteer technologists interested in contributing to the public good. But a project supported only by volunteers, who might have limited time to support a long-term project, can have positives and negatives.
Here, we walk through three lessons we learned from developing the Housing Insights platform in Washington, DC, in the hope that other civic technology projects can learn from our experience.
Housing Insights Tool
In DC, decisionmakers and advocates are fighting to preserve subsidized housing for low-income tenants. But they need data to identify which affordable housing projects are at risk, understand changes in neighborhood demographics, and inform their funding priorities.
As a member of the seven-city Civic Tech and Data Collaborative project, Urban–Greater DC and our partners — the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development, the DC Department of Housing and Community Development, and the Code for DC brigade — took up the charge to see how innovations in data and technology could support better decisionmaking for housing preservation. The project culminated in our launch of the Housing Insights website in November 2017, opening up essential data for affordable housing stakeholders.
The site was created in part by volunteer software developers, technologists, and civic-minded residents, brought together by Code for DC. More than 100 volunteers contributed over 2,200 hours of development time worth more than $84,000 to bring the project to fruition.
Lessons Learned
We spoke with Neal Humphrey, Housing Insights’ project manager, about coordinating a team of volunteers. Humphrey said he learned three key lessons about bringing useful civic technology to life (you can see his more extensive discussion of the development process here):
1. Project teams should engage end users early and often. By engaging early, project teams can better understand the problem and intended outcomes. The Housing Insights team used a human-centered design approach, conducting dozens of interviews to gain a better understanding of the needs of government and nonprofit staff making decisions about investments.
2. Project managers should plan for the “volunteer” mind-set. Volunteers can have unpredictable schedules that ebb and flow, and though people have the best intentions, life can get in the way. Volunteer-driven projects should accommodate turnover. Conversely, new contributors might join partway through the project, and managers have to bring them up to speed and integrate them into the work in progress. To address these challenges, Humphrey reduced the amount of background knowledge and onboarding time required to contribute meaningfully to the project and kept individual tasks as small as possible so that work would be incorporated into the main project frequently.
3. Start with the smallest possible scope. The scope of work can expand quickly, so investing planning time at the beginning can provide focus and put parameters on project work. Additionally, completing small increments of work can help volunteers test code and systems and build confidence before investing large amounts of time and resources. Structuring projects for rapid development spurts also encourages iterative prototyping, the ability to quickly respond to issues and improve the end product in intermediate stages.
Humphrey found that the tool increased volunteers’ awareness of urban policy issues. Volunteers with no previous experience in housing challenges engaged and learned about the complexities of urban housing issues and their impact on DC citizens.
The Housing Insights project is a useful case study of how citizens and volunteers can make a difference in public and nonprofit investment decisions in their city. It is just one example of how Urban works with local communities and forms cross-sector partnerships to creatively use data and technology to improve opportunities for low-income residents.
