# WeWork Talk Outline

Using deliberative democracy to re:imagine NYC housing.

## Objective

* Build engagement in NYC Housing
* Showcase our work

## Audience

* Researchers
* Architects

## Todo

- [x] Move images into Dropbox — vTaiwan & Chia Hua [CS]
- [x] Add Luisa videos to Dropbox - [CS]
- [ ] Send an abstract to Rachel [DN]
- [x] Add images from original slides [CS]
- [x] Intro
- [x] How have we come to this crisis?
- [x] Systems background
- [x] Sunflower [CS]
- [x] vTaiwan orid
- [x] vTaiwan polis
- [x] viable systems breakdown slide
- [x] Current Project [CS]
- [x] Background on issue [CS]
- [x] vTaiwan stakeholder meeting [CS]
- [x] vTaiwan successes [CS]
- [x] Video editing [DN]
- [x] Quote slide (deliberative democracy) [DN]
- [x] Lu Chia Hua / Facilitation [DN]
- [x] Watchout / Accountability [CS]
- [x] Re:imagine w/Deliberative Democracy [DN/CS]
- [x] Next Steps [DN]

**If Time**

- [ ] Replace "district" map. It is the CB's not Council Districts

## Outline

### Intro (call card)
* Who we are
* About company

### Current project
We are working to bring deliberative democracy models to inform city decision making and to connect organizations and districts around NYC's housing crisis to solve it in a more effective way.

### Video-Mildred or Lousia [NEW]

### Background on the issue [NEW]

* Why is this issue important?
* "Quote on importance of dwelling" (look into Tadao Ando)
* Global crisis (pull up something from UN or McKinsey reports)
* Housing affects everyone, not just about affordable housing for income classes
* AMI caculation
* illegal de-regulation of rent controlled/stabalized housing
* Rezoning (small businesses, grocery prices, bars&restaurants)
* Pentland's social diversity metrics, perhaps
* infrastructre can't sustain the change
* right now, the housing issue has reached to a humanitarian crisis level in the public housing system and the city's only solution is privitization (add more to give a sense of urgency and tie this to the end of NYC)

### How have we come to this crisis?
* System is broken
* show the current structure
* talk about community boards
* talk about city council position

### What is a viable system
* intro to cybernetic management
* balance of top down/bottom up processes
* designing a viable system
So how do we design viable systems

The first principle for designing viable systems is what’s called requisite variety. This top down/bottom up balance that we talked about needs to be explicitly baked into the process

To achieve this balance we need adequate channels. For example — tools and methods to pull in feedback directly from citizens and then digests this information in a way that can be processed/actioned/dealt with by the administration.

Transducers point to the importance of “communicating the message” — eg. effective framing of content and translations are key

We have been inspired by Taiwan because they have built a viable system..

### Taiwan: deliberative democracy models
> Deliberative democracy is a form of democracy in which deliberation is central to decision-making. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule [NEW]
* All parties can reach all parties
* Stakeholders can effectively communitcate with each other

* Taiwan experiments as a working examples of civic partcipation at scale
* vTaiwan Process — vTaiwan, brings people directly into governance and helps lawmakers implement decisions with a greater degree of legitimacy
* The process is public at every step
* There is no pre-set time limit. As many rounds as it takes to solve the issue
* The process is an efficient process, issues that were dead-locked for years were solved within months
* 2-6 months
* complex issues get resolved
* Uses the ORID deliberation method and a facillitator (a person who conducts the process) as it’s backbone
* Issues can be raised by citizens or goverment. All proposed issues are posted online and open to comment
* Once an issue has been selected for deliberation, facts are gathered by soliciting information from citizens, stakeholders, experts.
* They then use Pol.is, an AI facilitated surveying platform to probe further. Results from Pol.is are brought into the in-person stakeholder meetings. The in-person stakeholder meetings and livestreamed with remote participation via chat.
* Finally, the Government either follows the consensus that comes out of this process or explains why it can't.

We think that a process like this will work very well at the community board meetings, which is where citizens bring their concerns to the administration.

The weak point of this method is engaging citizens at scale — easier for digitally savvy citizens to engage, citizens have to go to the govt as opposed to govt going to the citizens.

* Lu Chia Hua: Engaging citizens at scale [NEW]
* At the center of this method is training citzens to host deliberation meetings around issues (local org leaders, NGOs, any citizens interested in the issue)
* Here, facillitators design the content and deliberation process based on the needs of the issue and the audience they want to reach (e.g. they can use ORID or other methods, they can use the language that the community is most confortable with)
* Once the facillitors are trained they go out into the community and host deliberation meetings that gather the feelings of the community, bring the community to deliberate and come to a combined resolution around the issue.

Not all people can engage digitally or in-person with the community board meetings. The facillitors of this process can take the outcomes of this deliberation process to the community board meetings, thus bringing in more voices.

### Accountability and dissemination [NEW]
Another channel is Watchout — Taiwan media group that works to empower people to participate in politics more.

* livestreaming legislative processes to make sure of transparency
* open data initiatives
* build tools to make participation easier
* host events that allow for citizen participation
* disseminate information in understandable way
* characters
* comics
* baseball metaphor (hold legislators accountable)

by supervising government openness and transparency they also act as an accountability or regulatory body

### Deliberative Democracy to solve/re:imagine housing/rezoning issue in NYC [NEW]

How can we use deliberative democracy processes and accountability (the lessons we have learned from taiwan) to re:imagine a crucial issue in nyc housing: rezoning

Rezoning is one of the major ways in which NYC neighborhoods are destabilized.

rezoning - a change in land use codes to allow/disallow new types of development on the land

e.g. changing the height-restrictions on buildings allowing for high rise luxury buildings

* Right now, every stakeholder comes up with their own plan
* district leadership come up with their own rezoning plan (often one that favors the real estate developers) and community come up with their own (e.g. the Chinatown working group plan in District 1)
* this creates a deadlock and a lot of fighting
* To tackle complexity of this issue, plans and process must include all stakeholders, from the very beginning

Now let's see how we can use deliberative democracy models to build a rezoning plan that reflects all stakeholder priorities from the beginning

* Lu Chia Hua process - Facilitator training
* find the people that are already doing the work
* allow them to pull from their networks
* key: people who are deeply invested in the housing issue
* Workshops to train facilitators
* Facillitators go out into their disctricts host deliberation meetings to surface citizen concerns and solutions around rezoning
* each group comes up with a

* vTaiwan - process for legislation

using information from the previous stage
* seed polis
* identify stakeholders
* orgs research their community and bring info to the stakeholder meeting

at the meeting itself..
* layout of space
* 2 hour meetin with clear schedule/agenda displayed
* livestream component
* online chat component
* conducted in english
* note taking/live translation (multi-lingual)
* slido for questions

To make sure that the outcome of the deliberation process turns into action, we need to hold the representative accountable.

Accountability

* We've started Talk to NYC — community run multi-media platform, disseminates info, promotes transparency and openness.
* repository of info (peoples database)
* surveys
* discussion
* stories
* pictures
* evictions
* protests

* ideas for fixing the housing crisis
* Community Rezoning plan
* Green Building
* eg. Chile generating own power
* Co-op administration
* Residents take care of building admin
* Green roofs
*

Next steps [NEW]
* We plan on bringing the experts in Taiwan to NYC to provide training on these methods.
* We are building connections with district representatives to bring in the deliberative democracy methods
* We are expanding the Talk to NYC
* service learning and education toolkits for youth, seniors, and interested community members
* how do you build a platform that's run by the community?