III. The City
San Antonio truly is a city on the rise. It's time to unlock its potential.
Brief on the State of the City
San Antonio is experiencing a growth in population size and an ongoing expansion of its boundaries through annexation surrounding land. A few key factors have led to an ever-growing need for city services, including an aging population, a deteriorating housing stock, and a struggling K-12 education system.
The city is home to many large corporations, but a lack of skilled local talent has stunted the growth of its high-tech sector compared to its northern neighbor, Austin. A recent growth in local tech and small-business entrepreneurship, aided by incubators like Geekdom and San Antonio’s extremely low cost-of-living have opened the doors to increased local entrepreneurship.
Internally, the city faces ongoing budget issues and continues to provide more services without sufficient increases in revenue. The longtime city manager, Sheryl Sculley, has consistently focused on improving customer service and uses customer satisfaction and service delivery efficiency as guiding metrics to set city strategy. This has allowed the city to maintain high quality services for residents, but has put a strain on staff and departments struggling to keep up with internal and external needs.
The city wishes to use its engagement with Code for America as a template for providing better, more agile service delivery and continuing its focus on providing excellent customer service while saving valuable taxpayer dollars.
1.7m
The San Antonio metro area population in the year 2000
2.2m
The metro area population in 2010, a big uptick in just a decade
7.8%
The total increase in population over 10 years
Downtown San Antonio's skyline. The city's core is an eclectic mix of historic buildings and modern skyscrapers.
SA2020: San Antonio’s Future
Departing Mayor Julian Castro convened a group of 5,000 residents in 2010 to discuss their vision for the next decade in San Antonio. The grassroots group identified 11 causes, ranging from neighborhood improvement to civic engagement, to see developed and improved by the year 2020.
The SA2020 causes provided our team with a foundation for our research. We pulled from the extensive research that went into these goals to help us focus in on a few cause areas, specifically around civic engagement and neighborhood revitalization.
IV. The Plan
Three key focus areas. An exciting mix of projects.
Our team has identified a number of focus areas we’d like to target over the course of our fellowship. Our engagements in each cause area range from application development to process improvement. Usually, each focus area has a key engagement and a few additional small projects we’ve worked on in that space.
The Hays Street Bridge, an 1880-era bridge renovated in 2010, accelerating the massive resurgence of the neighborhoods it connects.
Focus Area: Neighborhood Revitalization
Our research in San Antonio made one thing very clear: San Antonio loves its neighborhoods. The way people interact with their neighborhoods has a huge impact on the neighborhood’s viability and the quality of life it provides for residents. Well-kept neighborhoods with vibrant social scenes are highly sought after; their property values increase, and businesses build up around them.
We want to help residents come together and fix up their neighborhoods for themselves and the community at large.
Homebase
Background / Problem
San Antonio is 296 years old. It is home to many old neighborhoods in various states of revitalization. The homes and businesses in these neighborhoods face significant structural and visual problems, like crumbling foundations, leaking roofs and busted floors.
Difficulty accessing grants and incentives
There are many financial incentives available to property owners to improve their homes and offices/retail spaces. These grants have complex eligibility rules and are administered by a number of different organizations. It’s an opaque process that frustrates users.
Confusing permit and regulation system
The city has set down a number of regulations intended to improve the aesthetic of neighborhoods and ensure home improvements are done safely. These rules are poorly explained and almost impossible to navigate without expert help.
We visited many San Antonio neighborhoods to understand what problems residents faced in improving their properties.
Research
We discovered our problem through explorations of the cities’ most challenged neighborhoods and discussions with San Antonio residents who face significant hurdles in improving the quality of their homes.
Community partners, including SA2020, the Westside Development Corporation and others stressed the deep strain put on neighborhoods by crumbling homes. We discovered that structural issues like holes in walls and slipping foundations prevented homeowners from heating their homes in the winter and cooling them in the summer.
Homeowners told us of the difficulty they had finding the right contractors and navigating the rules to perform these projects. Many don’t have access to the cash to complete all the repairs required on their homes, and leave much-needed repairs for another time.
We went through various stages of prototyping -- from sticky notes to in-browser wireframes -- trying to tackle the problem.
Solution
Our project will make it easy to apply for permits, find grants, and pick the right contractors to work on home repair projects. We believe these three elements are the key to encouraging people to take the first step toward improving their homes.
In the long term, we’d like to see our tool used to revitalize neighborhoods and make residents proud of the place they live.
Our beta-release application walks users step-by-step through the process fix up their home.
First steps
We’re currently equipped to help homeowners get a few basic projects started by connecting them with the permits they need for the project. We’ve reformatted the current experience, which requires users to sort through cryptically-named PDF applications that arbitrarily group together different repairs. Our tool starts with the project -- users can select the repairs they want to complete, like adding a room -- and moves forward from there.
"I put $30k into this house and the contractor ran off with the money."
Kalia, a homeowner we interviewed while researching home renovation in San Antonio, told us about how confusing the system was.
Next steps
We are exploring a few possible next steps, including integrating our app with the city’s backend to allow users to send their permit application with the click of a button, and to easily track its status online. We’re also investigating how to catalogue available grants and create a standard application process for them.
Measuring success
Our key metric to test our app against is improving the number of home repair permits applied for in the core downtown area. This area is home to challenged neighborhoods, some in states of deep disrepair.
This metric was set forth by SA2020 as part of their Neighborhoods cause area, which is focused on improving the housing stock in San Antonio’s urban core and making the whole city a great place to live.
See it live
See the explainer website: http://homebasefix.com
Test out the app: http://app.homebasefix.com
Metrics for success
Metric: Annual number of renovation permits in urban core (inside 410 loop)
863
Baseline: The number of permits applied for in 2010
1k
Our Goal: The number of permits applied for by the end of 2014
Door Hanger Redesign
Background / Problem:
The city has placed a strong emphasis on improving the aesthetics of neighborhoods and ensuring work done on properties is properly permitted to promote safe, well-planned neighborhoods. The city uses code enforcement citations as the primary enforcement mechanism to ensure residents follow development codes and keep properties clean and safe.
The forms used by Code Enforcement officers to inform residents of violations are hard to understand and poorly formatted.
Poor forms and explanations
The current code enforcement process relies on poorly-designed door hanger forms that provide little context for residents on why they were cited with a violation and how to fix the violation. The city website does not have effective resources to help residents understand the municipal codes that are behind code violations, further complicating the process.
Research:
Our team rode along with a city code enforcement team from Development Services Department. The code enforcement officer’s main job is to go door-to-door and notify residents if anything on their property does not comply with city development and upkeep codes.
The Code Enforcement officers don't have it easy either. They use an outdated mainframe application to input violations -- often a frustrating experience.
If the residents are not at home when officers find a problem a door hanger is left with some information about the violation and a phone number to contact the code enforcement office.
A detailed look at these door hanger forms revealed a few issues:
• The language is hard to understand and is written for city, not for residents
There is no explanation of why confusing ordinances exist
• Website links are broken or lead to pages that are difficult to navigate
• The checklist or possible problems is too long, and provides little context for each issue
Solution:
We want to make it easier for the process easier to understand for residents by redesigning the form and language from their perspective. Specifically, we want the new form to:
• Explain to residents why they need to follow the ordinance
• Lay out a step-by-step guide for fixing the code violation
• Link to easy-to-navigate resources to learn more about the city code behind the violation
First steps
We have gone through a number of design iterations exploring better ways to present the information on door hangers. We’ve explored simpler-to-navigate forms that include all the violations and breaking forms down to include only one violation with in-depth details.
Relying on visual cues can help us overcome comprehension and language barriers.
We’ve also created iterations that simply improve on the information architecture of the current form, but keep many of the details intact:
Even reorganizing the form helps to make it easier to understand and navigate.
We hope to pair these door hanger forms with a simple-to-navigate website that breaks down each code violation, the city codes behind the violation, and to provide resources on how to fix the problem.
A simple companion website that can be visited on mobile and desktop can help explain violations further.
Next steps
Moving forward, we are planning to work closely with the code enforcement officers to put the test forms out in the field and see how to best explain issues to residents in a language they understand.
We’re also interested in working with the San Antonio website team to implement the web explainer improvements on the San Antonio website.
See it live
Explainer website: http://fix-that-problem.webflow.com/
Iterations on paper forms: https://github.com/Techzans/door-hanger-redesign
Titos, our team's de-facto gathering spot to talk with our friends in the surrounding community.
Focus Area: Civic Engagement
San Antonio stretches across 465 sprawling square miles. Its residents are a vibrant mix of cultures, nationalities and income levels. Its size and diversity make it a unique place to live, but also make it difficult for the city to stay connected with and understand the needs of large swaths of the population.
We want to help San Antonians feel more engaged with their government by opening up new channels for input into city halls’ day-to-day decisions. We also want to help residents feel more engaged and connected to the community they live in.
I Love San Antonio
Background / Problem
San Antonio is a town of die-hard fans. Residents love their city, their local taqueria and their Spurs. But public conversations often focus on negatives rather than positives. There’s always a place to talk about improving the city, but we wanted to make a space to talk about the things that make San Antonio a great place to live.
Research
San Antonio is rising up to claim its place as one of America’s great cities. In many ways, despite the size of its population, it still seems like a small town. Social circles are tight, families stay in neighborhoods for a long time and getting people to break outside their bubble can be difficult.
Still, the tide of change is rising. Residents love the laid back spirit in San Antonio, but they’re also embracing the influx of things to do, great food to eat and vibrant social events that are bubbling up in the city.
We wanted to tap into that spirit to give residents a way to talk to each other about what they have always loved about San Antonio, and to appreciate the new opportunities in the city.
"We aspire to be more. We have dreams and goals and leaders who say, 'Why not?'"
One resident's response to why they love San Antonio.
A few of the responses on I Love San Antonio.
Solution
I Love San Antonio is a public space to talk about everything that makes San Antonio a great place to live. Residents can post their musings about the Alamo City anonymously or sign them publicly with a twitter handle. The app encourages keeping responses short, so they can be tweeted out later by people who agree with the sentiment.
Measuring success
The application has received over 200 contributions since we deployed it. Residents’ love letters range from simple observations (“The people here are nice!”) to deep reflections (“Family, community, stable convergence of assets and initiatives forging a brilliant future. It’s got roots that are deep”).
See it live
http://www.ilovesanantonio.org/
200
The number of responses we received from residents who love San Antonio.
Talk to your Mayor
Background / Problem
San Antonio’s elected leaders have many channels open to receive feedback from their constituents. In addition to phone lines, Twitter handles and Facebook pages, officials host coffee chats, neighborhood meetings and walk the streets of their district to talk about needs and issues.
Not everyone can make it to these in-person meetings due to work, childcare needs, or other personal engagements. The passive forms of communication are often used by a select few with many specific concerns, but rarely invite general feedback from constituents.
Research
In our discussions with city council members and the community we found that very few people had frequent contact with their councilperson. Many did not even know who their councilperson was. There was no clear strategy across council offices for reaching out to the public and seeking feedback on specific issues. Most used a combination of email lists, Twitter, Facebook and in-person events. These channels still did not reach a large percentage of constituents.
We found that people were more likely to give input and feedback if it seemed easy to do so and if the feedback was clearly being taken into consideration for future decision making.
10
Council members who, in addition to the mayor, who represent San Antonio residents in local matters.
An early mockup of our landing page for the app, forked from the CityVoice repo.
Solution
We are in the process of deploying Talk to your Mayor (tentatively named), an app that allows constituents to call in, listen to a recording from their councilperson request specific feedback on an issue, and have a normal conversation to give feedback on the issue.
Going forward, we’d like to help the mayor and council easily retrieve data from these calls and form the calls into a meaningful snapshot of what’s important to constituents right now.
See it live
http://talktosacitycouncil.herokuapp.com/
Adopt-a-Dumpster
Background / Problem:
San Antonio has been struggling to prevent and clean up graffiti for many years. The city has a variety of programs in place to deter graffiti artists and to encourage residents to report tagging so the city can quickly clean it up. But, aside from a few infrequent programs, there are few resources directed toward helping residents clean up their neighborhoods.
A group cleans up a graffiti-covered dumpster in San Antonio. Photo provided by the City of San Antonio.
Research:
When we spoke with the council members representing southside districts, we heard one thing over and over again: graffiti is a major obstacle to cleaning up neighborhoods and getting residents involved in improving their surroundings. Graffiti is a major visual blight that distracts from the hard work being done to make the southside a safe, clean place to live.
$8b
The cost of graffiti cleanup each year to cities in the United States.
A basic interface to adopt and repaint your neighborhood dumpster, based on the Adopt-a-Hydrant application.
Solution:
Following the template provided by Adopt-a-Hydrant in Boston, we wanted to find a way get residents actively involved in cleaning up the graffiti that covers their neighborhoods. While some kinds of cleanup -- street signs, public park property, etc. -- requires intervention from the city to be done correctly, minor cleanup can be done by a resident with a bucket of paint and some spare time.
We’re working to empower residents to start by cleaning up a major tagging target: the large green dumpsters that businesses and the city use to collect trash. In partnership with Waste Management, the private garbage collection contractor, and the city’s solid waste management department we’re working to extract structured data on the location of these dumpsters to allow residents to adopt them, pick up a can of paint from a city supply locker and clean them up.
See it live:
http://adopt-a-dumpster.herokuapp.com/
What Does The Weather Rock Say?
Background / Problem:
During city residency in February a number of fellowship teams worked together to deploy simple, fun applications that showed the crazy winter weather going on in their cities. Many teams focused on whether or not it was snowing. We were in Texas.
Research:
Our research for this application was pretty simple: we talked to our city partner about the weather rock lore and heard a lot of conversations from people around town talking about the crazy weather.
95°
The average high in San Antonio during the months of July and August. It gets pretty humid there, too.
A look at the weather rock on a pretty hot day in San Antonio. They have a lot of those.
Solution:
Our application is a reflection of a long-running joke popular with the locals called the weather rock. If you want to know the temperature, look at the weather rock. If the rock is swinging, it is windy. If the rock is warm, it is hot outside. This was a fun project that pokes fun at the serious business of meteorology in a very San Antonio way that citizens can laugh at.
See it live:
http://www.whatdoestheweatherrocksay.com/
The City of San Antonio's data center, home to a massive group of servers that holds city data and powers applications.
Focus Area: Open Data
As part of our larger mission to improve city transparency and help empower an ecosystem of civic hackers to tackle local problems we’ve been focused on building an open data policy in San Antonio.
Background / Problem
The city has historically stored data in enterprise systems that are poorly documented, difficult to expose to the outside world and major blockers to cataloging and publishing high-value data sets. The city expressed interest at the outset of our fellowship in building an open data strategy, pointing toward the state’s open data policy that mandates publication of open data unearthed in the course of other business as a model.
We believe this effort will help the city become more transparent and allow residents to decompress and work on long-term city issues. We’re also excited to see how opening up data will allow the city to get a better perspective internally on how well they are accomplishing their goals.
Research
A number of efforts, including the Open Data Census conducted during CodeAcross, showed the city was lacking in publishing important open data feeds. But the census and other conversations also showed the city was very interested in offering up more data for the public to consume and use. Our city partners at ITSD are primarily worried about the difficulty of extracting and properly cleaning the data to ensure the city is not exposing important resident information to the world.
33%
The percentage of high-value datasets available to download on city-affiliated websites, per the OKFN Open Data Census.
The Texas Open Data Portal. We want to build a policy and publication strategy similar to Texas open data law.
Solution
We are in the early stages of discussing what a city open data policy would look like, what form it would take, and what an appropriate timetable for implementation would be. We’ve also talked in-depth about what kind of open data portal the city would like to use, and what the maintenance strategy would be for the portal.
Our open data efforts are in very early stages, but we hope to continue to expand our goals and get San Antonio on track to regularly publishing important data by the end of our fellowship.
V. The Culture
What will the city look like in 2 years? What about 5?
We're interested in helping create a sustainable culture of innovation in San Antonio. We think that looks like an engaged community that actively takes part in the government decision-making process, and a city that is open and reacts to the needs of the public.
Inside the city, San Antonio's ITSD department has made strides in the last 10 years to bring its aging infrastructure up to date, and build sustainable software that is easy to navigate. The next phase for the city is headed toward understanding the needs of citizens.
In a city that’s 60% Spanish-speaking, the city still needs to make adjustments to provide easy-to-access services.
Kyle Rames, a developer advocate for Rackspace, stands in front of a giant workspace at the company's San Antonio HQ. Rackspace has been a key part of building the tech ecosystem in the city.
The Brigade
In order to support civic engagement, we believe it is important for San Antonio to have a brigade of committed volunteers working on improving their city.
Before we started our fellowship in San Antonio, the city did not have a brigade. We believe the city has the potential to host a successful group of civic hackers that draw on the tech ecosystem growing in downtown San Antonio. This ecosystem is anchored by Geekdom, a coworking space where entrepreneurs, technologists, and developers help build products and companies together. The presence of cloud hosting company Rackspace also played a big role in expanding the technology sector in San Antonio and bringing first-rate talent to the city.
We met in February with potential brigade leaders interested in spearheading the effort to create OpenSATX, a local civic hacking group. We helped them brainstorm and plan their first event, CodeAcross, held in collaboration with Rackspace. We also invited everyone we met during our February research activities to join this event. We had a highly successful event that created momentum for the city and residents to work together to solve important local problems.
The brigade also had their followup hack night at Geekdom in May to talk about what they would like to continue working and building on.
It is great to see the continued momentum for our building a brigade, an essential goal for our fellowship. We’re excited to support a community group to continue the working on big issues facing San Antonio.
"Some of these projects may be picked up for use by city departments; others may find life as independent projects..."
Hugh Donagher, the brigade storyteller, writing about its future in the Rivard Report.
Events
We held a number events in San Antonio focused on bringing together local civic hackers who wanted to improve their community. We also sought to connect the city employees with community members who could give valuable feedback.
CodeAcross, February 2014
We planned and held CodeAcross and had 50 people attend and come up with many ideas for the city to work on. The event brought hackers and thinkers together to dream big about the future of San Antonio. The conversations between the City of San Antonio ITSD staff and community attendees were deep and serious.
San Antonio ITSD data manager Naji Tabet speaks with a CodeAcross attendee. Photo by Kara Gomez, OpenBook Studios.
Questions about data sets, internal software, the city’s mission and its processes were answered and dissected. The group brainstormed ideas for improvement and some offered their time and skills to help the city tackle projects. A census of open data available in the city came together in just a few hours. The survey was one of the most complete in the nation.
CodeAcross was a big opportunity for our fellowship team to sync up with the community and start tackling problems together. We were so humbled to see people from all walks of life come together to make their community a better and more open place.
50
Community members and government employees who came together for CodeAcross.
National Day of Civic Hacking, June 2014
We held the first National Day of Civic Hacking in San Antonio. We had 25 participants come together to complete the Talent Ideation Challenge, which seeks to create a platform for local freelancers to market their talent to community businesses.
A few interesting projects were started at the event:
Work for San Antonio
"Work for San Antonio" was built to match qualified businesses with city-sponsored projects.
SA Water
A group made "SA Water," an iPhone app that checks the city's aquifer levels to notify homeowners when they should water their lawn.
Participants at the National Day of Civic Hacking in San Antonio.
Moving forward
At both events, we were happy to see people from the community step up and take leadership. We were humbled to see people with no tech experience and those just starting out, working side-by-side and learning from each other.
We’re excited about building a local ecosystem of civic hackers who want to help their community. The San Antonio brigade is new and growing, and we look forward to surfacing more members and leaders of the brigade that will allow the brigade to grow organically and build momentum.
The San Antonio ITSD web team at a skill share session.
Skillshares
We brought together the city’s web design team a number of times for informal “Lunch ‘n Learn” sessions. Our team shared modern tools like a simple form maker to demonstrate how the city can build simple, easy-to-use web services without investing a lot of money or time. We also encouraged the web team to share their projects and interests to show off the hard work they do every day.
New Linkages
Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space for technologists and the entrepreneurial hub of San Antonio, is now moved next door the IT department. Our city partners have been in talks with our community partners, the 80/20 Foundation, to rent an office space at Geekdom. This will expose city IT employees to new people and ideas, and possibly help the city find local technologists to work on city projects and build capacity.
