New initiative looks to bring local government ‘to the 21st century’
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The Harvard Kennedy School’s Digital Civic Infrastructure Initiative will look to support research, case studies and civic tech tools for local governments who want to enhance how they interact with and serve constituents.
A new initiative looks to dissuade local leaders and constituents’ skepticism about artificial intelligence, and ultimately, enhance democracy through technology.
Amid the latest AI buzz gripping the nation, the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School announced the launch of its technology democratization initiative last week.
The Digital Civic Infrastructure Initiative will serve as a resource hub for local governments to access research, policy briefs and other digital tools to learn how to better use technology as a function of democracy and civic engagement for residents, Sarah Hubbard, associate director for technology and democracy at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, told Route Fifty.
The effort comes on the heels of a former Anthropic employee announcing his resignation from the major tech company earlier this month on a thread he posted to X, formerly Twitter, citing fears that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade” and that “[n]o other human activity poses this level of danger.”
About a week later, other tech companies OpenAI and SpaceXAI joined Anthropic in calling on industry leaders to slow down AI development over its safety concerns, sparking debate over the tech’s role in optimizing outdated systems and processes and its potential to perpetuate bias and harm toward communities.
While there are valid concerns about major AI systems’ impact on government and the public, there are “local governments who literally don’t have any tech staff or resources to build their own website,” Hubbard said, adding that the Digital Civic Infrastructure Initiative is “trying to bring them into the 21st century.”
In particular, the initiative is aimed at helping local officials improve government transparency, service delivery and resident engagement by exploring “opportunities for technology to help solve a lot of low-hanging fruit problems,” Hubbard said.
One early project is an interactive budget transparency tool that the Allen Lab developed with municipalities in Massachusetts. The open book tool enables users to publish data visualizations of municipal budget plans, line items and other expenses, and government users can use the portal to process capital expenditure requests.
The tool, which is free and open-source, originated from a local leader in Massachusetts, Austin Cyganiewicz, who now serves as town manager for the city of Sutton, Hubbard said. Cyganiewicz started using AI tools to build the budget transparency platform to address the fact that many small municipalities cannot afford to contract with vendors to adopt commercial products, and that it can be challenging to integrate external services with current or new systems within a government, she said.
“Today if you want to do any kind of public engagement and ask people what they think about a topic to then have that inform legislation, it takes so much staff time, so many hours and lots of money, and there are ways that you can use technology and some AI tools to help gather and sense make some of that public input at scale,” Hubbard said.
Plus, transparency tools like Cyganiewicz’s budget platform “can help support democracy and support how people are informed, heard and served,” she said, adding that such data sharing enables residents’ to effectively participate in public meetings and, more broadly, share their feedback with local leaders to drive decision-making.
The Allen Lab also published a report last month to coincide with the initiative’s launch that offers an overview of how cities across Massachusetts are leveraging digital tools to enhance decision making, service delivery and community engagement.
One of the report’s notable findings is that AI solutions are showing early potential for the local cities and towns that are exploring them, Hubbard said. Early solutions include AI-enabled chatbots for answering questions from residents, or internal staff and tools leveraged to draft transcripts, summarize meeting minutes or translate government communications.
Such findings will support the Digital Civic Infrastructure Initiative’s future efforts to overcome challenges in local governments that stymie residents’ participation in democratic processes, including outdated infrastructure, budget constraints and limited vendor availability, Hubbard said. The initiative also plans to expand its work and research to states across the U.S. as researchers continue to publish resources and tools.
There is “a lot of conversation right now about frontier AI systems and some of the risks they pose,” she said, but that the lab ultimately poses the question, “How can you use the technology for good?”