I recently had the chance to attend Epicentro, an innovation conference hosted by the Mexican state of Jalisco in a bid to loft the city of Guadalajara into the class of ‘Innovation Capital.’ There’s something real here. People I spoke with from across Mexico’s technology sector genuinely believe that Guadalajara is one of the top cities for design and technology, after Mexico City (which, at a population of ~9 million, will be difficult to dislodge). Building momentum, there will be a drone festival shortly following Epicentro. Guadalajara doesn’t yet have rules around drones, so it should be fun.
The conference was billed as a ‘festival’, and the organizers lived up to the spirit of that word. Along with large keynote speeches and heavily-attended workshops, Epicentro included two massive outdoor public concerts. The goal here, which I admire, is to invite the city to participate in the festival and make the various innovation initiatives part of their own experience. There’s often a yawning chasm between those of us who feel the agency to redesign society’s institutions and the public at large, many of whom are often unaware the redesign is happening. For this reason, I was heartened that Epicentro’s organizers, including Cristina Yoshida Fernandes, Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship Coordinator for the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology, are directly addressing this gap. They set out a broad public invitation to participate, a completely gratis schedule, and strategies to bring people in to deeper engagement on the city’s path forward. One channel for advancing citizen engagement is to invite people to join citizen communities on issues they genuinely care about: traffic, health, education. There are 28 such communities.
The venues spilled across Guadalajara, including the university, a LEED-certified innovation tower (MIND), and a community-built and managed Hacker Garage. The Garage was actually a family home until the local developer community converted into a hackerspace. It still has a small pool in the backyard.
Each day there was a core theme underlying the talks and workshops, and I was pleased to see not just a day dedicated to Smart Cities, which is no longer too rare, but also an entire additional day focused on Retos Públicos (public challenges). This phrase is in keeping with the idea of “shared challenges“, and may even better describe the work we do than the broad descriptor of ‘civic tech’.
Friday, in one whirlwind day, with a voice hoarse from cheering on the luchadores the previous night, I gave a keynote talk and led a four-hour workshop. The talk followed GovLab’s Dinorah Cantú Pedraza in her native Spanish. I flexed my high-school Spanish to share some of the ideas behind our work at Microsoft Technology & Civic Engagement. The main theme was that technology has given us, the people, new abilities to actively participate in designing society. Our democratic institutions were designed in an era where the bleeding edge of communications was Thomas Jefferson’s polygraph, a composition tool which allowed him to write duplicates of each letter he sent and maintain the equivalent of an outbox. Individuals have been empowered by technology, putting us in an awkward relationship with our institutions as they’re unable to channel or benefit from our energy. The result is that we must upgrade our democracy, and we must do so collectively.
After the talk and a quick lunch with great people and strawberry-jam-covered quesadillas, we ran off the to Hacker Garage to facilitate a 4-hour civic design workshop with the Codeando Mexico and Codeando Guadalajara teams. The backgrounds and age ranges of participants were the most diverse of any workshop I’ve ever facilitated. Beginning with active issues the participants cared about, we worked from concern to solutions to plans, with an emphasis on social discovery and community involvement throughout. Dinorah made a surprise appearance to constructively critique the projects and help them connect to existing efforts.
One fortunate coincidence that I will attempt to replicate at future workshops: Codeando Guadalajara had a weekend-long civic hackathon scheduled for only a couple of weeks following the workshop. This gave participants, almost all of whom were new to the idea of civic tech, another clear way to get more deeply involved and to continue developing the initial prototypes they produced together.