The 311 Podcast

S2 E3 - The Evolution of the Town Square with Kate Burns

• Kate Burns • Season 2 • Episode 3

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Why government organizations must build digital trust.

Today, my guest is Kate Burns. Kate is the Executive Director of MetroLab Network, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that connects local government organizations with universities to bring the latest in scientific research and innovation to the living lab of communities. MetroLab is a partnership ecosystem and runs projects to discover, implement, and scale innovative solutions for local government. Kate has a background in municipal government and in policy, and she's passionate about thriving cities and communities. She worked in Kansas City and Seattle, so understands the many different types of communities that are striving to adopt digital and innovative technology.

Kate and I decided to wrestle with a timely challenge for cities. The evolution of the digital town square. As social media platforms shift in ownership and purpose and as the audience starts to fragment across many separate platforms, it's becoming less clear where the digital town square will be in the future. What was once a common expectation—that journalists, administrators, politicians, and citizens could mingle freely and share ideas and concerns—seems to be eroding or at least changing.

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Recorded in January of 2025

This is a show about the people that make digital public service work. If you'd like to find out more, visit northern.co/311-podcast/

We're going to keep having conversations like this. If you've got ideas of guests we should speak to, send us an email to the311@northern.co.

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Paul Bellows:

This is The 311 Podcast. And I'm your host, Paul Bellows. This is a show about the people that make digital work for the public service. If you'd like to find out more, you can visit northern.co that's, Northern dot C O. Today, my guest is Kate Burns. Kate is the Executive Director of MetroLab Network, a Washington, DC based nonprofit to connect local government organizations with universities, to bring the latest in scientific research and innovation to the living lab of communities. MetroLab is a partnership ecosystem and runs projects to discover, implement, and scale innovative solutions for local government. Kate has a background in municipal government and in policy and she's passionate about thriving cities and communities. She worked in Kansas City and Seattle, so understands the many different types of communities who are striving to adopt digital and innovative technology. Kate and I decided to wrestle with a timely challenge for cities. The evolution of the digital town square. As social media platforms shift in ownership and purpose and as the audience starts to fragment across many separate platforms, it's becoming less clear where the digital town square will be in the future. What was once a common expectation--that journalists, administrators, politicians, and citizens could mingle freely and share ideas and concerns seems to be eroding or at least changing. Here's my conversation with Kate Burns on the digital town square. Kate, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here.

Kate Burns:

Thanks for having me, it's good to be here.

Paul Bellows:

Kate, I wanna get you to talk about just a little bit about who you are and the organization that you run in the U.S. out of DC. It's a really interesting organization. I've read everything you've put on the web so far. I've been pouring through it. When I came across MetroLab, I was really fascinated and I plan to use some of the work that you've released with some of my clients and some of my work'cause there's some just excellent work on dataset classification models and some really deep thinking has gone on there. I'm wondering how did you get into this role? What was your journey here? And then tell me a little bit about the origin story of MetroLab and what MetroLab has been doing in the community.

Kate Burns:

I think a maybe easy way to summarize who I am as a person is a nerd that likes and hopes to make a difference. I walked outta college with a journalism degree, worked at an engineering firm and nerded out on infrastructure for about five, six years. Then I went to law school and, knew almost immediately I wanted to work for a local government. I had the fortunate opportunity to intern for the mayor of Kansas City. Right when I started, I was asked to write memos on a whole bunch of new things, including this new company called Uber, who showing up in our city, and I just really took to it and started thinking about how our laws as a city could either support innovation and where we wanted to move things forward with our smart city project with Cisco at the time, or also prevent some of those unknown harms that these new potential services, could have, so, how do we ensure background checks, those things? I worked for the mayor of Kansas City for three years as an innovation policy advisor on short term rentals like Airbnb and Uber and Lyft. After that did similar work for the mayor of Seattle, Washington, where we worked on data governance, surveillance, Uber and Lyft, again, and in different ways, more from the sort of workforce perspective. And that entire time I was a part of MetroLab and MetroLab was started in the Obama White House, with their smart city announcement to grow town gown relationships between cities and Universities, around emerging technologies. So, we had a lot of local partnerships, letters signed, mayors, and university provost to work together on emerging tech. MetroLab served as the national consortium for that effort. Since that time, we are a full standing nonprofit for almost six years now and really support changing the relationship and dynamic between cities and research. Not just from around emerging technology, but on all issues that pertain to cities. So affordable housing, mental health, digital connectivity. We really want to infuse our local governments with science and research, and we do that by a lot of our partnerships with universities. It's been an honor to serve in this role at MetroLab. I've been here for three years now and continue to just really nerd out on some city issues.

Paul Bellows:

You did j school to law school to local government policy. You are a nerd. I like it. This great. Yeah.

Kate Burns:

Yeah.

Paul Bellows:

And we wear it proudly.'cause it's good to be a nerd. I love it. One of the best things I ever heard, I was doing an interview with the city planner for the City of Edmonton, where I live, and we were discussing a project It was sort of research oriented conversation. I remember at one point he sat back in this chair. We were talking about the complexity of cities and massive surface area that, you know, cities, we're a mile wide and an inch deep. That burned into my brain. It's just cities are this, massive surface area of services, and there's so much going on. And cities do so much with such scant resources. They're some of the most innovative organizations, or certainly can be when things are going well and when you have strong leadership. So, I love what MetroLab has been about. There's a conversation that that you and I decided we were gonna have today,'cause when we first started talking, like, we can dive into your data classification model, dataset classification. There's some really interesting things that are fascinating to me, but I pitched you another conversation and that's what you went for, which is why I knew we were gonna enjoy talking to each other. I want to talk about the town square. We plan to release this podcast episode in January of 2025, and we're at a really interesting moment in public discourse. Where I think the places we go to have conversations have changed radically. It's not that we had this thing for time immemorial and that we've just recently lost it, but something new got introduced just recently, which is the concept of this digital town square, this place we have big conversations, where we have international conversations, where we hold people to public account. We can leverage things like shame to hold bad actors to account, and where it's really cultural and social pressure counts. And it really seems like that has changed radically in the last year, we had this thing and it felt like a public utility, a public good and feels like that slipped away or it's slipping through our fingers in some way. I'd love to hear from you, like Twitter was, a place where people felt like there were open, transparent conversations, and in January of 2025, at this moment in time, it just feels less so. I'm curious in your network with the clients you work with, whether it's university or municipal, local government, what are you hearing and seeing from the people that you work with in terms of this emergent place of dialogue that just seems to have become a different thing and distributed to multiple different platforms. The focus has gone, the commonplace seems to have disappeared. People have changed their behaviors and gone to different places. What are you seeing?

Kate Burns:

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it because I'm kind of obsessed with the question of how are people getting their news and I think that it's not just, where can we have a conversation with each other, but how am I getting information, and how do I give someone else information, and it's been changing for some time, especially with social media. That really changed, how local governments talk to their communities. There was somewhat of hesitancy of is this the space for us? And then it was. I personally, when I was working in a city hall, relied on it to connect to my peers in other cities. I got to hand select,for better or for worse, who I was following directly. I followed journalists directly, rather than going to someone's news site. And so at the time felt like I had a really tailored experience in addition to other news sources. And I think what's really happened is algorithms have changed the input output of how we think of it. I think that's really something that has changed the discourse and what I'm seeing no longer is it really, am I having the same experience as you are Paul on Twitter? It's been really more catered for us in different motivations and different reasons why. I think it's, looking at how we think of these digital conversations in a, it's in a few ways. Especially for cities and counties and thinking of how do I talk to my constituents directly, so my resident base, but it's also how am I good at my job? How do I know ideas to take from other places, how do I know where other people have tried something gone wrong? And that's gotten a little trickier. I think people are whether it be'cause of algorithms whether it be because people have left certain platforms And I think that is a debate in and of itself is should we have one place where everyone goes to, or is it a healthy conversation to have many? I don't know.

Paul Bellows:

It's interesting that you went straight to news there's also been an enormous change. You look at just the consolidation in newsrooms over the last two decades. I'm gonna date myself here, but in the 1900 and eighties when I was first becoming media aware, there was such a thing as local news and you would hear stories about city hall and the local zoo and that frustrated construction project, and. the person who had triplets. Most news was local stories. There was a local paper that interviewed City Hall and talked about local sports team and talked about like local arts scene. And then there was this section called national. And then there was a section called international, right? You could read about what was happening in the world, but I think now the predominant feed of news is global. And it's very filtered based on which particular networks I choose to watch. So there are very disparate experiences of news. And I know that's true in the US And it's also true where I live in Canada, that there are very specific editorial biases around different media networks, and they own the entire channel. Even just 15 years ago, there were two independent entertainment newspapers in my city. Now there are zero. There were two major newspapers in my city. Now there's one that is about a quarter of the size and gets the feed from Toronto. And then there were about six news outlets and now there are just a couple. Again, it's editorial control is outta my region. It's sort of a nationally mandated editorial strategy. So news has changed. We don't even get access to the kind of news that we used to have. You went to J school, one of my good friends who is a full-time journalist now works at a travel agency. He can't find work. There just isn't work for journalists anymore'cause we're not producing news. The economy of news has changed. From a journalism background, how do you watch that unfold?

Kate Burns:

Yeah, that's tough. Local news is so vital to so many ecosystems all over, and there is a few journalism theories about the news over time. And people's trust with it. So when people were explicitly trusting the news when it was really only print mid 20th century, people trusted what they read. It wasn't just here's to think about. But here's how to think. And then it shifted to where there was some questioning of the news, but it really informed the topics of the day. It told me what to talk about with everyone else. So, even those theories are evolving. Everyone is a creator now, but there are different standards to that. There are journalistic standards before you publish something with anonymous sources versus someone who, is not necessarily a journalism institution on publishing news. So I think, that is the proliferation and just the amount of things that could qualify as news is overwhelming. And that is a thing in and of itself as to what's cutting through all of this news now to what I want to read. My guess is that with the trends that we're seeing, I do think that there's going to be more value into printed papers again, because an algorithm cannot touch my physical copy of the news. I'm gonna read exactly what's on it. And same with books. We thought when, online books was gonna, crash the book industry and it hasn't, because I think there is some value there and I think what we're gonna see is some rearrangement of what the value is in terms of news and what I can trust. So I anticipate that what might make some sort of return is the good old fashioned homepage of a website with a printed version of something where an algorithm cannot touch it. I think that, the development of AI is kind of the opposite. So algorithms are really based on personal context of what I anticipate you are going to read based on what I know about you. There's a lot of debate about how much or lack of context that AI has. Especially with cities in the work that MetroLab has been doing with our AI task force. There is some concern from cities over the ability to read context. So what the word safety means to me might not be safe to you. And there's no way that AI can discern that. In part of our world and where we're getting news, there's too much, almost from the algorithms input, but with AI and where we see increased use of that, there's not enough. And how do we marry that.

Paul Bellows:

Also there's a really interesting moment where, what AI appears to be doing is, and I agree with you that AI, at least today, at a current generation technology, is not very good at understanding me as a person necessarily, but that may continue to evolve. We'll see, that's certainly the promise of the tech overlords is that this is what's coming, but we also then were talking about more of a hyper personalized experience, which actually takes me a step back from the town square, so, if AI continues to like, so we have algorithms and then we have AI algorithm, which is a whole other layer of striving for personalization. This move to personalization actually takes me farther away from differing opinions from people who disagree with me from critical thinking, the more that the algorithm the tailors to me, the less critical thinking I'm asked to do as an individual and the fewer places we have those common conversations happening. I do agree with you, I am optimistic that eventually It's like I can have a lot of junk food at Christmas and eventually I'm like, I'm gonna need a salad now, like in November, or January, I'm gonna eat a salad and I'm hoping that in terms of like intellectual property diet, people are gonna start to need salads, of just, TikTok is great and I just really need to read a book now. Coming back to that concept of the town square, and that place in a city where the neighbors I might disagree with, the people I may not be aligned with, the people who have maybe a very different vision of the city and our community and I come together to hash out those ideas and hear common voices, and to hear common thought, and to maybe even hear from the institutions themselves. I'm curious as publishers, as communicators, as you are talking to your clientele, your community members, what are they attempting to do? Where are they finding success and where are they struggling?

Kate Burns:

It's a great question. Community engagement is always top of mind. I think for local government. it is how can I be better at it, how can I ensure what I am doing is with and for my residents. And that it's hard. It takes work. There are different structures to it, we've seen cities where they have a centralized communications department or every department is left to their own communication efforts. And while that seems like a nuance, it's really important to have a conversation about how people are talking, at least from the city hall. There's some really great lessons learned in best practices that we know of, like, go to where the people already are. Neighborhood associations that are having convenings, you should go to them and not have them come to you. You should try and have community engagement opportunities that are not during working hours. Across neighborhoods, across the whole city, and these things take budgets, they take capacity, they take trust. This is a moment, this is a moment for government right now with trust that they can do with the services that they need to do and that they want to do, and they're gonna do it in partnership with their residents. I think having that two-way opportunity is, really key of not of knowing when to seek feedback and then returning it. So, for example, there's a lot of, engineering projects that have to go to community design boards or have an open comment period, and that design of an engineering project is 80% 90% done, and it's really just Hey, does this look okay? When are the opportunities from early on in, in not just infrastructure projects, but how cities are really thinking about public space, for example, like the physical public space, the digital public space. How can we talk really early about what that can look like to serve a lot of our residents. So, we're not just meeting every Thursday at 2:00 PM where people who know when that meeting is taking place and have the time to participate. But I can really hear from the single mom who has an opinion but can't show up. So I think, I think we need to keep experimenting. and putting our poker in the fire, whatever you'll call it, the iron in the fire, in as many places as we can and come back to our community as often as we can. I think that really we need to just continue resourcing that, we need to continue pressing upon that, there's a lot of digital work that is really important. There's also, snail mail is used quite a bit. For example, with resident satisfaction surveys, coming from Kansas City, proud, proud Kansas City-ian, and they have a 30 response rate on their snail mail in the mail. eye paper resident satisfaction survey, which is great.

Paul Bellows:

30 percent. 30 percent enormous.

Kate Burns:

Yeah. It's enormous. And really a way to find out how your city is doing from the residents themselves. What I'm really honing in on, I think is the conversation experience between local service provider and their residents. I think that there are other town squares to think about, like how residents can talk to each other, how they can learn and think about their needs and then bring that voice to their city hall. And I think that there's a lot of really interesting work to do there.

Paul Bellows:

Since it was introduced to me last year, I've been obsessed with this publication called the Ed Edelman trust barometer. They're a comms agency and they do an annual survey. They've done a Canadian focus survey for 2024, and I'll share the link in the show notes for folks that want to pursue it. it's fascinating, they do this annual trust barometers, they call it, and it's really looking at trust in public institutions. Their findings were, and I don't think this is a surprise, that in 2024, trust was at an all time low, in institution specifically, people got their news through social channels more than official edited published channels, so authority has been diminished, and trust in institutions is just rock bottom. But they also had a recipe for institutions for starting to remedy that and approaching it. They said, the number one starting point is learning to listen to people, and then learning to respond effectively to what they're actually thinking, feeling, saying. And that aligns with what you were just talking about, and I love the example of Kansas City. We live in this digital age where we're supposed to have magic technology for everything. A piece of paper in the mail is about as old school as it gets. But it, you know, a 30 return rate, you know, I'd be curious, for you, like you're in DC at this point, but you're a Kansas, Would I say Kansas City-ian?

Kate Burns:

Yes.

Paul Bellows:

Okay, great. I got it right. First guess. Okay, Good. Good. What do you see as outcomes in a community? What is the social capital of trust? What has that allowed Kansas City to do, that maybe as a, now, a resident of DC or wherever you live, municipally there close to DC that you may or may not be seeing in that community. I'm just curious what you can actually see as a measurable outcome when trust is built through good communication.

Kate Burns:

The best I use this example all the time from years of that resident satisfaction survey consistently, every year residents told us I am dissatisfied. With roads and infrastructure, I'm dissatisfied. And so the city did a great job. There were some really innovative leaders to do this. The mayor, the city manager, folks that ran our city program, that said, you have told us you don't like this. You're not satisfied. We wanna pass a bond to get you new infrastructure. And it overwhelmingly passed because we showed the residents you are telling us this, a way for us to fix this is this path and it overwhelmingly passed. There's two other examples, I have. One, is as we were really starting to figure out what we wanted to do with ordinances around Airbnb, VRBO and the like, I was able to see a lot of the 3 1 1 complaints related to it. As a policy wonk, I was looking for things like increase in crime, or impact on market value, things like that. And overwhelmingly the response that we got was my neighbors and Airbnb hosts, and I just don't like it. And to me, it was really hard for me to quantify that data point. And it taught me such a lesson that that is a value statement in and of itself. It's not, you know what I mean? It was different than what I was anticipating. and at the heart of zoning and all that. And so it really made me think about how to take in trust and feedback. The other, and last example I'll say is, a common thorn in the side of conversation for local governments is bike lanes and putting a bike lane removing parking, and small businesses rightfully wondering, what is the economic impact going to be to me. And I think it's a muscle that we need to continue to build efficiently. And together is, I think it's on local governments to tell the story, to build that trust. So there is a great project. MasterCard did some economic reporting. In New York city on an area where they closed the street completely to be bike and pedestrian only. And from their research, they could see that it was an increase in a few million dollars to the businesses that were there, they saw increase in economic growth because of the closure. They could specifically nail it down to that. And I think that's just like how Kansas City said, you're telling us we don't like this passage Irvine. That's the same thing of small businesses. You're against these bike lanes, but look at this. you actually we've got data to show you that it can increase your business. And so I think, there needs to be some openness to residents who saying, I just don't like it. I think that there needs to be some data behind, we understand this might be a hard change, but we really have the facts to show. this will actually have better outcomes. And I think that's where trust and listening can really start to build. Which brings this full circle of data classification, which is we need to bring our open data. We need to have proof points. We need to be able to back up the arguments. The bike lanes thing happens in every city that I know. I don't know a city that isn't having this argument right now. As you look at alternate forms of transportation and, economic disparity and people's differing needs and different points in life, students versus seniors versus working parents. We all have different needs for transportation and bikes are an essential part of that network. I love street fight, the book, just talk about the impact in New York city of Shutting down car traffic and every measure of life improved, essentially, when they did that, like happiness improved, economic output improved, local business growth improved, and congestion improved the quality of traffic improved because fewer people were driving, when you know, when you, but without data, without evidence that that's a hollow argument, and people will fill a void with whatever information seems most obvious to them. There's something else you talked about that I think is also essential to the concept of the town square. The concept of the institution needs to learn to listen to and respond to people with effective communication, data backed communication, evidence-based communication. But you also brought up peer-to-peer communication. The town square is a place where we meet our peers. We hash out what we want for our neighborhood. We hash out what we want for our block. And I actually, I love the point about the Airbnb feedback of, I don't like it'cause I don't know the people that are living next to me versus I know the people that are living next to me, they have been there for a while, I can have a relationship with these folks versus they're strangers, they won't be here tomorrow. And I think there's something really interesting in that as well, just as the human creature, the way we behave and what we prefer and how we like community, we like neighbors, we're a social creature. Where have you seen that working, whether it's an analog process or a digital process? Communities enabling or finding ways for people connect to one another. Is that something that lives in your realm of experience? I think it really depends. I think from the peer-to-peer network, maybe starting there from cities. That took a lot of learning on how different cities were staying with that example of short-term rentals. How we were approaching that, because there are arguments on both sides of that. For example, if a city is suffering from blight and there's abandoned homes, arguably Airbnb can be the way, and VRBO and short-term rentals can be the path towards investments into homes and revitalizing neighborhoods. So you could counter with, I, you may not like this on this level, but it will actually improve the long term value in public placemaking for your neighborhood in the long run. Having that sort of venue to have that conversation is really important. I'll tell you where it gets really complicated and harder is with things. The longer it takes for you to explain something, the harder it is to have communications on it. AI is there. And that's what we've seen with our data governance work.

Paul Bellows:

Yeah.

Kate Burns:

In the US The laws around privacy are generally what the reasonable person expects. And it's like my favorite thing. I wish I had more time to write it on this. The law acknowledges that if I'm in a phone booth with four walls and someone hears my conversation, my privacy has been violated. But if I'm in a restaurant and an open booth and I'm, and you and I are talking and someone hears us, it's different. It's we're in an open environment. The hard part is that I maybe as a citizen or resident that doesn't use technology. I don't actually know what my phone can do. I don't know what therefore expect in terms of my privacy being violated. And so I think there's a lot of level setting that needs to happen. And that's takes time. that takes, a lot of work and venue findings. So all to say to talk to each other. Both from a, someone a policymaker to their residence as well as a policymaker from one city to another. All of that is changing and we hosted a round table, a closed round table on AI. And I asked everyone, I said, how are you all finding the latest news on what's going on with AI? And 75%, our number one response was conferences, in person convening. So we're seeing a real influx of in-person convenings, newsletters, and audio, like this very opportunity, really be a more trusted source of news. I think that all of those are interesting. The convening one is there's a barrier in terms of money and time to participate in those conversations. it's changing and I think there's some work to do.

Paul Bellows:

It does come back, to cities, the mile wide and an inch deep, just doing so much with so few resources. I know from my colleagues in municipal government, the idea of traveling to conferences is challenging to get travel budget approved. It's not always a good look. I went to a conference. We flew someone to Miami. We flew, oh, my, c my, my tax dollars are going to flying. People around for these junkets. No. This is actually professional development for the people who run our city, which is essential, but it's a hard thing for a citizen to hear, especially when, as you say, that there's a pothole. There's a, that traffic light hasn't been fixed. Why are we spending money on airfare and conferences, but it's so essential to develop the public service, and to have professionalism in the public service. But that's a hard message to deliver to folks. It'd be, with the change in the digital town square, just the fact that we do, we had a place where it felt like everyone was gonna go, where we could have these open conversations where we could curate a network. It's less true now. There are multiple places. It's harder to find your community, but maybe that drives us back to in-person. Maybe that drives us back to more analog. Maybe that drives us back to digital versions of analog activity. Maybe that's where we go next. More grassroots organizing, more people talking to people.

Kate Burns:

Right.

Paul Bellows:

That, that could the outcome here, which isn't the worst outcome.

Kate Burns:

It's not, I think they, I think we will find a way. I think we're I think not to get political, but I think either side of the fence, like the election in the US in November, 2024 made a lot of people say, huh, how are people getting their news? How are people talking to each other and I think there will be some sort of concrete changes to come from that of how people are talking to their residents and what you were saying earlier, Paul, where trust is with government generally, the mayor of Oakland got recalled, this last election. and so we're seeing, at the local level as well as in this post Covid era, we're learning all together how we're talking to each other and even how we're working together. What is return to work? looking like? How are we actually our day to day economies shaking out like that is still, the dust is still settling. I think that after the election then is, more or less expedited, been a catalyst to figuring that out. That was really some sort of results I think often about what if the election had gone in different ways, on, on every level. Would we have had this big question mark of how are these conversations, communications, doing? I dunno. And that just goes to of how powerful elections really are and what they teach us.

Paul Bellows:

I have to declare recency bias be because I just last night finished Malcolm Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point. He talks about 25 to 30 percent being the critical mass number. If you can bring 25 to 30 percent of people to a belief or an idea, that shifts the Overton window. That that is where the cascade starts, the avalanche of belief or ideation starts. And it is interesting that we live in an era where we have these social platforms that appear to be neutral at one point, not suggesting that they have been weaponized, but to say they can be weaponized, and they can be used for very specific purposes to bring a set of ideas forward to, and again, you hear an idea enough and it becomes valid through repetition. That, that's just how we are as a species. this is just a known human bias of, if I hear it enough, I start to give it validity at the very least. And we can make ideas real. So ideas get made real and people vote based on those ideas, and then you look at a poor local government saying what is my toolkit here? I need to listen. I need to communicate, a paper newsletter feels, brittle in the face of global, multi-billion dollar social networks and the algorithm and the amplification effect, but boy it's the tools we have. I'm curious, do you see folks, finding a middle point? I'm a technologist at heart. I'm a nerd. I don't believe technology contains the answer to anything. It's just, by definition, you still need to bring your why to it. Do you see anyone who's finding new ways forward, taking maybe the Kansas city model of just a really effective newsletter with a 30 response rate and finding a digital corollary to that type of an action is anyone winning in that space, in your network?

Kate Burns:

That's a good question. First let me say I read something the other day and I hope to find it, to, to credit it, that says, overwhelmingly, local ballot initiatives are successful. So like the G.O. Bond, like things to fund schools, and I find that really interesting. Like people believe in their communities and they understand money is being taken out for this to go into this, my community, and I think where things have gotten really interesting is that national story when things go up to different levels of government we also saw a lot of split tickets in the US of where, there was a divide between the presidential outcome and the state or congressional outcomes of a certain locale. So I think I think there's a shift in understanding there. In terms of, who's really doing a great job of talking to their residents, I think everyone, I don't know if anyone would tout us. like I've done it, I've reached the mission. I've reached the best way to do it. I think everyone is really trying to find it. and It really depends how you define success In terms of those outcomes. I'll give you an example, In Seatle, we had our surveillance ordinance. We were the first city to pass a surveillance ordinance on the local level. And what it did, it required city council to pass approval of procuring legislation that qualified as surveilling someone And so that was a high threshold, a high barrier to do and it required certain. and It was rep, it was also retroactive on technologies. We had already procured that qualified as surveillance, of which we had 29. So we had in legislation specific community engagement requirements, including in-person requirements, and we held those across the city. The large majority of the technologies that qualified as surveillance were used by police, and a lot of our experts that came to speak on the technologies were uniformed police, and the dynamic that immediately created was stifling in the room and people had a hard time talking about it. In one viewpoint you could say, look at Seattle. They are actively creating opportunities for the police to talk to their community about the technologies they're using. But what really happened is we did not have that many people show up. And the conversation was probably a little, not little, but edited especially based on your relationship or perception of how the police are doing in your city. We continue to try and talk to cities across the country and across North America to say who is really doing this? Who feels like you're getting some response from your residents, but I think it is, truly, a moving target.

Paul Bellows:

Which doesn't surprise me. I would love to say that in my network, I'm seeing, people who have just thrived in this space, but it is just absolutely greenfield right now of how do we do this in the digital space? I feel like cities have gone, they're still in web 1.0 in terms of the metaphor of how the technology works. And I'm not a deep believer in 1, 2, 3, all of this like just the metaphor, we have this one way published, but how do we listen to people digitally? That does feel like a bit of a, an emerging frontier of how can we gather information? Maybe we find opportunities in AI. Not to say we hand over ownership of listening, but to say just synthesizing, feedback, like looking for patterns, kind of like analysis tools. We have generative AI, which are the latest flavor, but just simply just machine learning, neural networks, the ability to analyze large volumes of data. Maybe there's hope there for us too and some opportunity as well. MetroLab is a network for listening. It is a network for communication. It's a network for people to hear each other. You're doing this thing that we're talking about here that we've said needs to happen. And so I'm really grateful for the work that MetroLab does. Like I said, I'm already a customer of your work. I'm already gonna be borrowing and amplifying and citing and referencing, and pointing back and encourage to people to join. But really grateful for some time with you today. Just as we're wrapping up here, what makes you hopeful right now in in terms of what you're seeing? What are you energized by heading into 2025 here? There are some dark clouds in terms of trust in public institutions. Where are you seeing rays of sunshine?

Kate Burns:

I love this question. What am I hopeful for? I think that the last 10 years of civic innovation and all that it has meant including some of the cities doing their first chief innovation officer to thinking about digital equity plans. I think it is better positioned us for this moment. I think that we are in a moment, we are in a moment of technology disruption. I think AI is like we're back in the 1990s where someone just created the internet. I really do. Like it's gonna disrupt education, how we get jobs. How we perform our jobs, all of these things. And so it is a 10 year disruption and I'm hopeful that local governments are empowered and have really amazing people within them to move this movement forward, especially as, I think the political future in the US is on a week by week basis up to see what is to come and to see what changes will be made. But one thing is guaranteed is that there will be change. There will be change. The thing that I would counter to that is that there's a lot of hope and belief in cities that are being our laboratories of change and that. Secretary Buttigieg has said, now more than ever, we need to look at safe cities. I believe that a hundred percent. And that is to say that is the level of government in the US that gets the lowest, amount of resources, as you said, right? It's the low, the smallest budgets, the smallest amount of staff. And so I think it's a call to everyone inside city halls, if not to universities. To figure out how to support these service providers, these policy wants, who wanna do good, how do we all do it together to help empower these service providers who have taken the last 10 years to really think about innovation and government and think about these disruptive moments so that we can really figure this out together. And I have been so fortunate to meet this network of innovators and I am hopeful because of them.

Paul Bellows:

I am hopeful because of you, Kate Burns. Thank you so much for joining us.

Kate Burns:

You're welcome. Thank you for having me!

Paul Bellows:

Let's continue to amplify the things that are important, and it's the irony is we hear nonstop news about federal issues Most of governance, most of what affects people comes from cities, comes from local government. The vast majority of the work happens at the local level. And that's what we need to start turn, turning a spotlight on. So thank you. Thank you for sharing with us today.

Kate Burns:

Thank you Paul.

Paul Bellows:

Thanks so much for listening. Kate and I could likely have talked for hours about this topic, but some of the themes we did get to included: The concept of a digital town square has shifted in the last few years. And cities are struggling to deal with a more fragmented platform ecosystem. Two. The availability of local news and community oriented news has changed significantly in the past decade so information diets are shifting. Three. Trust in local institutions has been eroded. And community engagement tactics need to shift as well. More analog approaches can be just as valuable as high tech approaches. Four. Peer to peer communication and community building is winning the day. But this can be challenging for institutions who may be cut out of the communication loop. And five. This is a time of disruption, which means both danger and opportunity. Institutions need to learn to listen and respond, not just broadcast. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kate Burns. Please do subscribe to the 3, 1, 1 podcast and follow the mini conversations we're going to be releasing throughout the coming year. I'd like to thank my colleagues who work with me on this podcast. Kathy Watton is our show producer and editor. Frederick Brummer and Ahmed Khalil created our theme, music and intro. We're going to keep having conversations like this. Thanks for tuning in. If you've got ideas for guests, we should speak to send us an email to the311@northern.co. The public service is about all of us. And when it's done, right, digital can be a key ingredient for better world. This has been The 311 Podcast. And I've been your host, Paul Bellows.