As we prepare for our May 22 FullConTech, the WTIA team has been immersing ourselves in all things civic collaboration, collecting great engagement and innovation stories and talking to community leaders who are working to inspire more people to get involved and put their ideas toward collaborative problem-solving.

One of our favorite blogs on this topic is City Inspired, “a little platform with big ideas” that came to life in 2016. James Keblas, who works with ShareGrid, started the site to highlight ideas that are “brave, different and creative” and make communities better. Short and focused on measurable impact, City Inspired stories come from around the world and showcase the power of everyday pioneers who take small steps to make a big difference.

Here are highlights from my conversation with James Keblas about why civic engagement matters and what he hopes to achieve by sharing stories.

AM: You started City Inspired as an email newsletter that quickly grew to having 18,000 subscribers, and now you have a website with a global orientation. What made you decide to take on this huge project?

JK: I care deeply about community and finding solutions, and I was thinking about how I’d solve Seattle problems if I were to run for and serve on the city council. I started looking at how other communities solve problems, wondering, ‘What can we learn?’ One thing I came to see was that we need to be humbler in our approach to problem-solving and collectively build on each other’s work I was inspired by what I discovered, by the work that was going on around the world. And “inspired” is the attitude I’d want city officials to have.

AM: It’s interesting that you say that one of the biggest things you learned from the stories you collected was that we need to be humble. What’s the role of humility in problem-solving?

JK: Humility means having willingness to learn from others, not thinking ‘we’re the smartest people in the room.’ There are lots of great ideas out there. It’s up to elected officials to go out and find them, use them, and share them. We forget that the average person on the street is walking around with a head full of great ideas. How do we empower citizens to create solutions? There’s enormous power in solving small problems rather than always trying to tackle the big problems.

AM: What’s your vision for City Inspired? What’s the impact you want it to have?

JK: I’d like it to become the Sports Illustrated for cities, that we treat urban planning as we do celebrities. But to get that kind of cultural engagement, we have to change the way we talk. That’s part of the vision, that we help create a language and approach to civic problem-solving that’s simpler, human, not academic. It’s ‘street talk,’ ‘everyday person talk,’ without all the legalese. We want City Inspired to become a media platform that inspires people to care about urban planning when, before, they never thought they would, like Freakonomics, which made economics human.

The direct impact of this would be for governments to expand their methods for getting people to help them solve problems. Right now, when governments have a problem and need solutions, they put out RFPs, which are complicated, hidden, and make it too easy to work only with people you know. One of our goals is to disrupt that. We want to get government officials thinking about ‘unconventional,’ to dismantle the traditional RFP process and engage more people, more young people. One way to inspire citizens to want to solve problems is for the government to make it easier for them to do that.

AM: Was there an experience in your career that made you think differently about problem-solving?

JK: I worked on the “Commercialize Seattle” campaign that was launched in 2013 to attract commercial production to Seattle. We started the project with the goal of attracting film production to the area, just like every other region, but when we focused instead on commercials, everything came together. That project taught me a lot about how governments should work:

• Play to what people are doing – don’t try to change them. Understand their behavior, follow the deer trail, and be where people are. There’s a great TED talk about England and France trying to expand the Chunnel to reduce travel time by 15 minutes. This would have cost millions and millions and dollars. Why not, instead, make the travel time more enjoyable with WiFi, comfortable seats, and good food? It’s a much cheaper solution.
• Explore novel approaches. In the Chunnel example, everyone first went to the obvious solution, the way to make the journey better was to make it shorter. But there were other choices.
• Don’t go with first gut. We always go first to “make it faster, stronger.”  But what do people really want?
• Avoid bureau speak. Like “food deserts.”  That’s not how people speak. Use real language.
• Don’t focus on “educating.” One example of this is promoting the value of healthy food. Don’t educate people on food. That’s not what they need. It doesn’t solve the real problem. Invest in giving them healthy food.
• Get into people’s habits. Understand how people actually behave, create solutions that fit, and find small opportunities to change behavior.

 AM:  How do you harness great ideas from everyday people? 

JK: Show examples of everyday, common solutions that came from ordinary people. Show ‘this is possible. That’s what inspires people to say, ‘I have an idea.’

AM:  What are some of the best stories you’ve come across since you started City Inspired?

JK: At City Inspired, we only talk about things that are happening, not ideas. We want people to say, ‘If they can do that there, we can do it here.’ My favorite stories are about people solving problems in the most basic ways:

• Sao Paulo, Brazil. The city wanted to increase literacy and subway use. They gave away 10,000 books for free at subway stations across the city. With each book came 10 free subway trips. When the ten trips had been used, a reader could exchange the book for another and get more trips.
• Taiwan. The country needed to combat winter blood shortages (donations dropped in winter). This was a problem that was causing people to die. The country had tried the usual bureaucratic ways to encourage people to give blood. It was artists working with an ad agency who had a solution. They hired choral singers to sing in shopping malls and other public spots, giving big, beautiful performances. The group would do a heartbeat that would slow down, and choir would sing a flatline. Singers held up signs about people dying because no one was giving blood. And there were blood trucks at the event. Artists created this idea, not bureaucrats. You have to let people into the process of creating solutions.

AM: One of your criteria for posting a story is data. What’s the value of data and measuring impact?

JK: You need to know what’s working and what’s not. But that takes honesty. It is okay for us to fail as long as we know why and how we’re going to do things differently going forward. The more we do that in our government and our community, the better our solutions are going to be. Governments rarely talk about measurable outcomes when they propose programs. They tend to talk about activities, like, ‘We’re going to build more houses,’ not results, like ‘This program will house this many people.’

AM:  What’s the #1 thing you’d tell people who want to get more involved in solving community problems?

JK:  It’s okay to fail. Everybody fails. What matters, what people care about, is how you handle failure, what you do next.

To learn more and get involved in civic collaboration, register and join us for FullContech on May 22 at Seattle City Hall.