Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 52
Interview with Lt. Governor of Michigan Garlin Gilchrist II on Public Interest Technology
Government digitization, the digital transformation of government, Civic Tech, or GovTech—in many cities the current state of municipal apps and websites feels like this work is still taking only baby steps, but the concept of digital government is old enough that it could enroll in college.
Even if your city’s digital presence may leave opportunity for improvement, there are sparks of insight around the world. Estonia has led the way with nearly 50% of their citizens now voting online through a secure system. Or consider the case of Singapore’s, where a “digital twin” model of the island enables unprecedented levels of coordination and analysis for planned developments. Taiwan flexed civil society and government muscles to use technology in their response to the COVID pandemic. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom has largely replaced technical consulting firms with its own in-house Gov.UK team building effective, user-friendly websites for tons of public functions. USDS is doing something similar here at home.
One of our goals in the Urban Technology program is to send a graduating student into public service for each one of their peers that ends up working in the private sector. Why? Because structural racism will not be dismantled by consultants. The climate crisis will not be solved by companies without the coordinating power of government. It’s unreasonable to expect government to perform to 21st century standards without 21st century skillsets and perspectives.
In celebration of this being our 52nd week of the newsletter (🎉 a whole year!), we asked Michigan’s Lieutenant Governor (and U-M alum) Garlin Gilchrist II to help us explore the potential for better government tech. 👇
Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, written by faculty director Bryan Boyer, to explore the ways in which technology is reshaping urban life. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction.
🏖 Programming note: After this post we’re taking a summer break and will be back in September. By the way, if you noticed that we skipped last week, that’s because we had (small) floods and lost power. Again.
Interview with Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist II
This interview was conducted by video conference in May and has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
BRYAN BOYER: We ask everybody this question: what's your favorite city and why?
GARLIN GILCHRIST II: My favorite city is Detroit. This is easy. Part of it is because I was born here. I lived in the city for the first half of my life, second half of my childhood in the suburbs, [then] went to Seattle after University of Michigan, lived there for four years, lived in DC for five years. I wanted to come home to build my family and build my future because the city made me who I am. This is where my foundation is, and that foundation I thought was valuable to instill in my own children. That foundation is one of determination, almost defiant determination, because we're used to things being hard. Hard people can do hard things, if that makes sense.
I've always appreciated that ethos in the city. But also, there's a creativity that's always existed in Detroit and ideas that have been birthed here have literally changed the world. Whether it's in heavy manufacturing, culture and music, art, some of the most important ideas in the world have come from this place. And then the third piece, you [talked] about that ‘bias toward action.’ One of the reasons I think people are so proud to be from Detroit is because Detroiters do stuff. We do things. You'll never be lonely in an airport if you go there with a Detroit Tigers hat on. You'll find somebody else who's from Detroit who will want to talk to you about it. I started a whole organization called Detroit Diaspora back in 2011 for that reason. So that's why it’s my favorite place. It's why there was no other place I wanted to choose to build my family and my future. I came home on purpose to do that here.
BOYER: Detroit is not just a place that invented the automotive industry, but also a place that's given birth to Motown and techno. As a term “urban technology” is not limited to just mobility, so for the future of the state of Michigan what are the other areas where technology can make a big contribution that is felt on main street, in the physical realm?
GILCHRIST: Mobility and mobility adjacent technologies are going to be very important. When we're talking about all sorts of opportunities around connected infrastructure being deployed conscientiously with privacy in mind, things like that will be really important. But, I'm excited about infrastructure broadly.
I want everybody to be connected to the internet. Let's just start really simply. That is the most enabling infrastructure we can invest in. This is something I've cared very deeply about since being a freshman at Michigan, doing my first college research project on internet access, or lack thereof, in parts of the city of Detroit—on the East side in particular.
Thinking about it now, we have a generational opportunity to expand access to the internet. Literally, this is the biggest chance for us to expand access to the internet since the internet was invented. We can do that now because more people understand how important and critical it is to everyday life. We will have an unprecedented amount of federal resources coming into Michigan and other states that will help to not only build out the infrastructure, we can innovate when it comes to affordability programs, and we can create pathways to digital literacy for all people. I want Michigan to be a leader in that space and it's something I've taken a leadership role in here in the state of Michigan. Our communities, our neighborhoods, are stronger when they are better connected, both intraconnected and interconnected, so we need to invest in that.
I've always been fascinated by the mechanisms that people use to communicate, and maybe this is the community organizer in me. The mediums that people choose to communicate, once they become ubiquitous, become powerful politically. You saw this with everything from the radio, to the telephone, to text messaging. I don't know what that next medium is going to be, but I'm eager to find it. And I think that there's no better place to invent or to prototype that than in Detroit.
BOYER: How do you think about helping the state position itself as being able to govern urban technology? What are the opportunities there?
GILCHRIST: This is a chance, I think, for the state of Michigan to show some leadership. We are a leader in the nation when it comes to the amount of connected infrastructure that we have deployed. We have more miles of connected highway in Michigan than any other state, by a lot. So thinking about what the implications of that connected infrastructure are for people… first we have to start with a person-centered viewpoint. I've always appreciated Steve Jobs' description of the computer as a bicycle for the mind, because it sets the primary thing as the mind, not the bicycle. The person, not the technology.
From a governance standpoint, we need to think about what people own, or what are people responsible for, and then how they can have control over the technology rather than technology controlling what people do. That's the starting point we need to take from a policy and government standpoint.
The values that fall from that can then dictate conversations around privacy, memorandum of understanding, and how data is shared between public and private entities. But those data governance questions are ones to be answered. I'm looking forward to working with the FCC that has begun thinking about this a little bit, especially with the new administration with the acting chairwoman [Jessica Rosenworcel on] how those questions can be answered more thoughtfully, about the connections between those questions and the various cybersecurity risks that are raised by having a much different threat model with data that's flowing through public infrastructure systems. This is a conversation to be had, and one that I'm eager to have Michigan play an important leadership role on, hopefully as a model for the rest of the country.
BOYER: Often when we talk about things like data privacy, it's really about protecting things from going wrong, meaning the only way you can win is if nothing fails. Can Michigan or the City of Detroit build approaches to data governance that the community accepts as not just sufficient, but genuinely protective?
GILCHRIST: Yeah, and that person-centered viewpoint is [what’s needed]. Again, who are you designing the policy for? The policy shouldn't be designed for a technology company, right? Policy is designed for people. Streets are for people, policies are for people. I think if we have that approach, it'll help us envision the way that people interact, and then the policy or regulatory framework needs to be responsive to the way that people interact, and that will make sure that we're starting from a good place.
BOYER: Are you sure that you studied engineering and not design?
GILCHRIST: I'm a hundred percent sure.
BOYER: The way that you talk about engineering resonates with how we describe design in Taubman College’s Urban Technology program. We think about it as centering the needs of people, and figuring out how you deliver on those needs, without assumptions about what they should be doing. To accept them as they are and as they come. That's what makes it fun, because it usually also makes it harder!
GILCHRIST: Absolutely. The classical frame of engineering is that it's problem solving, and that is true. The way that I think about it is you're solving problems for people. At the end of the day, people want and need to do things, and so the job of an engineer should be to enable people to do things that they want and need to do. And so, the people that have needs come first.
BOYER: Okay, then we have found a point of difference! I think about design as problem finding; choosing the right problem to focus on….
GILCHRIST: That's fair. I think they are inextricably linked.
BOYER: I'm guessing that even though you're a very busy man, you still make time to pay attention to what's going on in the tech world. What are you most optimistic about or excited about from a technology perspective in the next three to five years?
GILCHRIST: It's true, when I read news every morning, I read tech news before I read political news. I guess I'm always going to be who I am in that regard. I alluded to it a little bit earlier, I am truly enamored by the way that we evolve and find ways to communicate. The evolution of social platforms is something that will forever be interesting to me because it is marginally predictable, and so that's very exciting.
I am also intrigued by [artificial intelligence piece but] I almost feel like AI is a misnomer because, really, what is it? It's a bunch of brute force things that try to imagine all the scenarios. The stuff that's more interesting is anticipatory rather than artificial. Most of this technology is built upon good or bad heuristics, and so I'm interested in what are the ways, or who are the people, the researchers, the companies that are thinking about how we can actually improve heuristics, which are always going to be imperfect. That kind of problem finding, if you will, is often what's going to unlock the new kind of use cases for this tech. So, I'm curious about that, and it is not a hard thing, but it cuts across a lot of different potential technologies or deployments or whatever. That's the piece that I'm most interested in.
BOYER: Because of the perceived complexity of technological systems, there can be a lot of concern about new things like 5G, for instance. What would you say to skeptics? Are you optimistic about technology or the possibility of technology, as we've been talking about it here, and how do you help people see the optimistic side of things?
GILCHRIST: I absolutely am optimistic about it because I think that progress is going to happen. So, I do think the inevitability is a good thing, not a bad thing. People will always seek to press and evolve technology and I think the question needs to be, what are we going to do with it? How are we going to relate to it?
The same thing that energizes me about politics energizes me about technology. Technology is the result of the work and imagination of people, just like politics and political systems. They are [both] the outcomes of groups of people coming together and making choices. What's empowering about that from the political perspective, is that a different set of people can make a different set of choices, if you want to see something be different.
In terms of what ultimately happens with technology, I see that as being a question of participation. Who has access to the tools to be able to act upon what they can imagine from a technical standpoint? That is why, to me, making those types of tools, platforms, [and] connectivity, more available to more people who have more broad life experiences, who have different backgrounds, et cetera, that's going to lead to the more interesting things coming from the technical space.
BOYER: What would you say to an aspiring young designer or engineer who's thinking about their career—how would you encourage them to think about public service or the public sector as a place for them to apply their abilities?
GILCHRIST: As someone who had never considered [public service], or certainly didn't consider that when I was on campus, I didn't ever think about working for the government, let alone, being an elected public servant. My path to this was quite winding.
When I came home to Detroit in 2014, I [started] working for the city government in Detroit. [Previously] I worked at Microsoft, the biggest tech company in the world at the time with a billion customers in the fastest growing business in the history of the company. So, I was kind of in a place you wanted to be but I wanted my work to touch more people. Microsoft scale wasn't enough. I wanted to touch more people and when I thought about it, the only entity that by definition touches everyone, is the government.
No company is going to have everyone as a customer, no nonprofit will have everyone as a constituent, but the government literally is supposed to serve everybody. So when I wanted to come home and I wanted to do work that was impactful for every person in Detroit, the capital ‘C’ City of Detroit—the government—was the entity where I needed to work in order to have that kind of reach.
For folks who are ambitious about their ideas touching and impacting the lives of the maximum amount of people, the public sector is the place to do that. So I would encourage people to consider that. And I'm not saying you got to do that right out of college, but I think it's something to consider if you truly want to have maximum impact, as far as the number of people who are available to you to reach.
BOYER: Thank you so much for your time.
GILCHRIST: Thank you, Bryan.
Links
✊🏾 Artist ann haeyoung has been researching the IBM Black Workers Alliance which was part of a movement in the 1960s to bring more responsibility to the tech industry. Pieces one, two, three, four.
🚋 This “tourist transit guide” to Detroit’s city and country trolly rides is a gem and the thread, started by a UM Urban and Regional Planning student, includes another nice map from 1904.
✂️ Section Cut is a “virtual conference for Practice Operations professionals across Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Interior Design, and Engineering” hosted by Monograph.com, (cofounded by Taubman College alum Robert Yuen btw)
🏚 A recent paper examines the relationship between AirBnb listings and neighborhood crime and found that the listing of homes on AirBnb has a greater linkage to increased violence than the presence of increased tourism. h/t Deb Chachra
🕰 Sara Hendren contributed an excellent opinion piece to the NYT recently that asks, how could changing perceptions and use of time improve city life and public spaces?
This week: Met with ArtsEngine, a unique disciplinary connector at UM. Planning of various stripes and in various text sizes. Summer is over in what feels like tomorrow and we’re still coming to terms with it. 🏃