Ferndale Snow Heroes: A Citizen Interaction Design Project
Winter 2018 | Citizen Interaction Design (SI 538) | Ferndale, MI | Hannah Bauman | MPP 2nd Year
I really had no idea what to expect from my first School of Information Class. As a public policy student, my familiarity with anything computer-based is limited to statistics programs and Microsoft Word, and part of me was worried I wouldn’t understand half of what the professor or the other students were talking about. What if they used coding lingo to explain ideas, or all nodded in agreement as the professor worked out some complicated equation on the board? I entered the North Quad classroom trepidatiously on the first day, very aware that I was entering unfamiliar territory as a total outsider.
It turns out I had nothing to worry about, and my experience with Citizen Interaction Design (CID) was one of the most rewarding of the whole semester. The class (SI-538) is designed around the idea that technology, in all its forms, can be a useful tool in solving information problems for governments. Think about all of the problems that a government has to consider, ranging from how to pick up everyone’s garbage to how to educate everyone’s children; how to ensure that its citizens have access to parks, and libraries, and how to support a fire department that can be there quickly if something goes wrong. The coordination of these services is not simple, and it takes not just money and coordination but also systems and tools that can help the whole process run smoothly. And that’s where our class came in--we were each assigned a group of partners and a project that we were going to use our time and energy to think about and hopefully solve. The projects ranged in scope and difficulty, but the one I worked on was often the one that elicited the most knowing groans--sidewalk snow clearance in the wintertime.
Everyone in Michigan understands the annoyance that snow creates for half the year. Uncleared sidewalks are not just a ticketable offense, they prevent children from getting to school, pose a safety hazard to residents, and can damage relationships between neighbors. Our partner in the city of Ferndale, Adam Loomis, wanted us to explore how the city could increase the rates of sidewalk snow clearance without increasing the use of punitive fines. For residents who are elderly, disabled, injured, or simply out of town, a snowy sidewalk is not just an inconvenience but an insurmountable barrier, and our task was to figure out how to help fix that.
So we got to work! My teammates were three amazing women who fully represented the interdisciplinary approach that CID hopes to foster: Lindsay Brown, a Master’s of Health Informatics student, Juliana Lam, a B.A. in the School of Information, and Saskia DeVries, a dual MPP/MSI student, joined forces to help tackle the problem of snow clearance in Ferndale. Over the course of a semester, we traveled to Ferndale many times, met with Adam and other Ferndale stakeholders, and over countless hours were able to leverage our experience from our various degree programs, the input we got from the Ferndale community, and the lessons we learned in class to create Snow Heroes--a website that connects residents in Ferndale who need help clearing snow with the “heroes” who volunteer to help them.
While our solution is web-based, it is built off of the community spirit already present in Ferndale, a place where a neighbor with a snowblower will often clear the whole block to save his neighbors the trouble. In fact, the residents of Ferndale were already communicating in their forum on Facebook to help each other with snow clearance or request assistance for people they knew who needed help. During last year’s winter, for example, they created a Google Sheet that was shared countess times where people could share their address and ask for help with snow removal. Our work built off what what was clearly already present in the community, eliminated the privacy concerns created by the shared spreadsheet, and provided a streamlined and consistent place to both volunteer as well as request help with your snow clearance. The creation of the website does not absolve Ferndale residents of their responsibilities for clearing their own sidewalks, it simply acts as another resource for those who need it.
While of course we hope that Ferndale will implement our website next winter as one potential solution to the problem of uncleared sidewalks; it may sound cliche but the process of working on this project was just as valuable as the solution itself. Through this type of hands-on, consulting-style class with an interdisciplinary focus I was able to work outside of my comfort zone on something that I care about: finding ways to make government work better for the people it aims to serve. In policy school, it can be easy to forget that the problems we work on every day are bigger than a STATA sheet or a government report, and that problems as seemingly insignificant as snow removal can pose a huge issue for the quality of life in a community. Ultimately, what I learned was that in spite of my fears about a class outside of what I knew, every school across the University has the same mission--to improve the lives and experiences of people, no matter where they are.
I really had no idea what to expect from my first School of Information Class. As a public policy student, my familiarity with anything computer-based is limited to statistics programs and Microsoft Word, and part of me was worried I wouldn’t understand half of what the professor or the other students were talking about. What if they used coding lingo to explain ideas, or all nodded in agreement as the professor worked out some complicated equation on the board? I entered the North Quad classroom trepidatiously on the first day, very aware that I was entering unfamiliar territory as a total outsider.
It turns out I had nothing to worry about, and my experience with Citizen Interaction Design (CID) was one of the most rewarding of the whole semester. The class (SI-538) is designed around the idea that technology, in all its forms, can be a useful tool in solving information problems for governments. Think about all of the problems that a government has to consider, ranging from how to pick up everyone’s garbage to how to educate everyone’s children; how to ensure that its citizens have access to parks, and libraries, and how to support a fire department that can be there quickly if something goes wrong. The coordination of these services is not simple, and it takes not just money and coordination but also systems and tools that can help the whole process run smoothly. And that’s where our class came in--we were each assigned a group of partners and a project that we were going to use our time and energy to think about and hopefully solve. The projects ranged in scope and difficulty, but the one I worked on was often the one that elicited the most knowing groans--sidewalk snow clearance in the wintertime.
Everyone in Michigan understands the annoyance that snow creates for half the year. Uncleared sidewalks are not just a ticketable offense, they prevent children from getting to school, pose a safety hazard to residents, and can damage relationships between neighbors. Our partner in the city of Ferndale, Adam Loomis, wanted us to explore how the city could increase the rates of sidewalk snow clearance without increasing the use of punitive fines. For residents who are elderly, disabled, injured, or simply out of town, a snowy sidewalk is not just an inconvenience but an insurmountable barrier, and our task was to figure out how to help fix that.
So we got to work! My teammates were three amazing women who fully represented the interdisciplinary approach that CID hopes to foster: Lindsay Brown, a Master’s of Health Informatics student, Juliana Lam, a B.A. in the School of Information, and Saskia DeVries, a dual MPP/MSI student, joined forces to help tackle the problem of snow clearance in Ferndale. Over the course of a semester, we traveled to Ferndale many times, met with Adam and other Ferndale stakeholders, and over countless hours were able to leverage our experience from our various degree programs, the input we got from the Ferndale community, and the lessons we learned in class to create Snow Heroes--a website that connects residents in Ferndale who need help clearing snow with the “heroes” who volunteer to help them.
While our solution is web-based, it is built off of the community spirit already present in Ferndale, a place where a neighbor with a snowblower will often clear the whole block to save his neighbors the trouble. In fact, the residents of Ferndale were already communicating in their forum on Facebook to help each other with snow clearance or request assistance for people they knew who needed help. During last year’s winter, for example, they created a Google Sheet that was shared countess times where people could share their address and ask for help with snow removal. Our work built off what what was clearly already present in the community, eliminated the privacy concerns created by the shared spreadsheet, and provided a streamlined and consistent place to both volunteer as well as request help with your snow clearance. The creation of the website does not absolve Ferndale residents of their responsibilities for clearing their own sidewalks, it simply acts as another resource for those who need it.
While of course we hope that Ferndale will implement our website next winter as one potential solution to the problem of uncleared sidewalks; it may sound cliche but the process of working on this project was just as valuable as the solution itself. Through this type of hands-on, consulting-style class with an interdisciplinary focus I was able to work outside of my comfort zone on something that I care about: finding ways to make government work better for the people it aims to serve. In policy school, it can be easy to forget that the problems we work on every day are bigger than a STATA sheet or a government report, and that problems as seemingly insignificant as snow removal can pose a huge issue for the quality of life in a community. Ultimately, what I learned was that in spite of my fears about a class outside of what I knew, every school across the University has the same mission--to improve the lives and experiences of people, no matter where they are.
