Here, I’ve often written about how tools and texts construct visions of citizenship, but I’ve been spending a lot of this year focused on actually making those tools and texts that construct better forms of citizenship. This policy brief, authored with my colleague Eric Gordon, lays out some specific ways to do that. Focusing on tools for reporting issues to the city, often referred to as CRM (constituent relationship management) systems, we discuss the existing state of these tools while also making recommendations for how to make them more engaging and more productive for civic life.

While this brief argues that a lot of government’s current use of technology are transactive and therefore lead to more shallow or thin possibilities for citizenship, it’s by no means limited to that (nor do governments–especially those like our New Urban Mechanics partners in Boston–necessarily want to limit citizenship in this way). By providing recommendations for how to get to deeper, more interactive forms of citizenship, hopefully this brief  also makes it clear that academic work doesn’t stop at investigating and illuminating what exists, but should try to develop ideas for how to improve the state of things when practical.

You can read the whole thing here, but there’s also a version translated into the great language of charts if you click through…

Developments in CRM systems