Capital Bikeshare Report

This report is based on the work of these students in the Virginia Tech graduate-level Urban and Regional Planning program, Alexandria, Virginia, during the Fall 2011 semester:
Natalie Borecki, Bradley Rawls, Darren Buck, Paola Reyes, Payton Chung, Matthew Steenhoek, Paticia Happ, Casey Studhalter, Nicholas Kushner, Austin Watkins, and Tim Maher.

The project was directed by:
Ralph Buehler, PhD
Virginia Tech
Assistant Professor
Department of Urban Affairs and Planning – Alexandria Campus

(Click on graphic to view full report) 

Examining Public Participation in ACTion Alexandria

The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech has entered into an agreement to partner with ACT for Alexandria to advance the design of citizen engagement platforms. Kevin Desouza, Director of the Metropolitan Institute, will lead a team of researchers who will work in collaboration with ACT for Alexandria personnel to examine public participation on the ACTion Alexandria platform. The team will look at how user interactions on the community platform can guide design choices that promote more robust forms of citizen engagement.

ACT for Alexandria is a community foundation founded in the the fall of 2004 by a small group of citizens who came together to decide how best to stimulate philanthropic giving to improve the lives of the most vulnerable in their community. The ACTion Alexandria project is a new citizen engagement platform which provides interactive tools that make it easier for residents to take a more active role in addressing community problems. ACTion Alexandria connects individuals to nonprofit organizations they want to support, but with a strictly local focus. Individuals have the opportunity to take action on behalf of nonprofits working to improve the community.

“ACT for Alexandria is excited about partnering with the Metropolitan Institute to further refine and grow the ACTion Alexandria platform as a model for others nationally,” said John Porter, Executive Director of ACT. Tracy Viselli, the Project Manager for ACTion Alexandria, added “the possibilities for this platform working with the institute are endless.”

According to Desouza, “ACT for Alexandria is a prominent player in the non-profit space. We are excited to partner with them to study the dynamics of public participation in action. The ACTion platform gives us access to real world scenarios of how citizens use technology to engage each other.”

This initiative will advance the work being done in Policy Informatics at the Metropolitan Institute. “Designing better collaborative and participatory platforms remains a critical challenge in the public arena. We are not only interested in this project from a research point of view but also from a design and policy point of view,” says Desouza. The Metropolitan Institute will be analyzing information on user behavior on the platform, designing experiments to test various strategies for increasing engagement on the platform, and contributing to the design of the overall platform.

Desouza explains, “Collaborating on this effort allows us the opportunity to make a difference in our community. The MI is based in Alexandria and we want to be part of the community. ACT for Alexandria provides an amazing array of services, from scholarships to leadership training. ACTion Alexandria is where the idea of community engagement meets the newest technological innovations.”

Metropolitan Institute Receives IBM Grant for Citizen Mobile Apps Project

Alexandria, Va., November 23, 2011 – The Metropolitan Institute is pleased to announce a new grant from the IBM Center for the Business of Government for our research project, Citizen Apps as a Democratizing Technology: Challenges and Opportunities for Federal Agencies. This project will be conducted as part of the institute's policy informatics portfolio with Kevin Desouza, Director of the Metropolitan Institute, serving as the Principle Investigator.

Most US federal agencies have embraced President Obama's vision for 1) greater transparency, 2) increased citizen participation, and 3) greater collaboration. A critical outcome of these initiatives is the willingness of federal agencies to engage with citizens around open-data initiatives and the creation of technology for solving public policy problems - 'citizen apps.' We are witnessing an increasing proliferation of 'citizen apps,' i.e. applications designed by citizens and developers to solve public policy challenges. Federal agencies are not only opening up data reservoirs, but are also incentivizing the development of citizen apps through competitions. In this research project, we propose to study citizen apps and the federal programs that fostered their creation.

Our research project will thoroughly inventory and study the range of citizen apps to understand the typology of the apps, the data they use, the problems they address, the motivation of the designers, the usage by citizens, and the impact on government and governance. We propose to discover and define the inter-relations between the government agencies, the app developers, and the citizens. While our focus will be on studying citizen apps generated out of programs commissioned by the federal government, we will also look at programs started by progressive states (e.g. New York, California, etc).

The results of the final report will benefit public sector government executives, public managers, and the public-at-large in several ways: 1) it will enable government executives to avoid common pitfalls when incentivizing citizen app programs (for e.g. placing emphasis on the frontend, i.e. the creation of apps, and ignoring the more challenging aspect of ensuring that the apps are diffused into the agency's work practices or to citizens); 2) it will enable public managers to understand the landscape of citizen apps, the motivations of citizens who create them, and the factors that drive their usage; and 3) it will enable federal agencies to better engage citizens into the policy setting process through supporting technology development thereby increasing the chances of more effective solution generation for policy problems.

Resilience of Citizen Engagement to Local Disasters Project

"Kevin Desouza, Director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, and Maggie Cowell, Assistant Professor in Urban Affairs and Planning, School of Public and International Affairs), have received a seed grant of $20,000 from the Institute for Society, Culture and Environment (ISCE) at Virginia Tech for a project titled 'Resilience of Citizen Engagement to Local Disasters: Studying the Emergence and Dissolution of Community Networks.'"  Read more about this article on the Metropolitan Institute website

Kris Wernstedt and Patrick Roberts awarded NSF grant to study use of climate science in rural America flood planning and management

"Kris Wernstedt, associate professor, Urban Affairs and Planning, and Patrick Roberts, assistant professor, Center for Public Administration and Policy, in the National Capital Region were recently awarded a grant in a National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Agriculture competition to fund a three-year project, Emergency Management in Rural America: Decision-Makers’ Use of Climate Science in Flood Planning and Management. The project will examine the obstacles to and opportunities for the use of seasonal climate forecasts in flood planning and management in rural areas of the United States"  Read more of this story by Barbara Micale