Privacy and data controls have been in the spotlight this week, along with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who testified in front of Congress Tuesday and Wednesday. While online rights are coming into question, it’s worth considering how those will overlap with offline rights and civic engagement.

The two may initially seem completely separate, but democracy itself depends on information and communication, and a balance of privacy (secret ballot) and transparency. As communication moves almost entirely to networked online technology platforms, the governance questions surrounding data and privacy have far-reaching civic and political implications for how people interact with all aspects of their lives, from commerce and government services to their friends, families, and communities. That is why we need a conversation about data protections, empowering users with their own information, and transparency — ultimately, data rights are now civic rights.

While the US still lacks such data standards, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), scheduled to take effect in May, demonstrates a path toward reliable online privacy balanced with transparency. This combination effectively enables Europeans to know what information is being collected on them and provides a simple process for how to remove that information.

As Zuckerberg noted in his testimony to Congress this week, it’s worth having a conversation about applying the GDPR in the United States.

There’s plenty of documentation on how the GDPR will affect the practices of consumer-oriented companies and journalism. But the social sector also needs to take note. From civil society organization to think tanks, academia, and philanthropy, these rules will have important, unexamined implications and opportunities outside of Europe.

Though the issue isn’t sparking marches and mass protests, data rights should not be left to a few technical experts — or representatives with no tech background. Because data rules affect everyone in different, unequal ways, we need full, informed democratic participation of everyday people. After all, this may be one of the most fundamental choices the US will make over the next decade.  

What exactly is the GDPR?

The GDPR is a set of data protection laws designed to enable uniform regulations across the entire European Union, in part to end cumbersome regulations that differ across member countries. It was approved by the EU Parliament in April 2016 and is set to take effect in May 2018, after two years of transition time.

The GDPR is first a legal bill of rights for personal data. Before companies can process personal data, the law requires them to receive explicit consent from users themselves, separate from other terms and conditions. This type of active consent is in contrast to the standard passive consent that consumers typically have with their data. According to the GDPR, personal data includes everything from email addresses and bank details to posts on social networking sites and medical information. And unlike the more narrow definition of personal data in the US, the GDPR definition extends to any linked data, as well as any organizations that process data.

With these regulations, the GDPR is aiming to foster better practices for designing systems with privacy in mind from the outset. For example, public agencies and companies that process large amounts of data must now appoint a data protection officer (DPO).

Second, the GDPR fosters greater two-way transparency between a user and the collector of data. For example, if a data breach does occur, a given organization needs to report it within 72 hours. If individuals’ personal data is at risk, they, too, need to be informed. One of the most exciting aspects of the GDPR is the concept of “data portability,” which empowers consumers to have a clear record of their personal data so that they can choose if and how they want their data to appear. GDPR also offers a “right to be forgotten” — if someone wants their data removed from an app or company, now it can be.

Finally, in order to implement these ideas, the GDPR has teeth — organizations that breach the regulations can be fined up to 4 percent of their annual global revenue (up to roughly $21.7 million). And these penalties would not stop at European borders. Legally, the GDPR applies not only to organizations located in the EU but also to any foreign organization that supplies goods or services to EU citizens. Therefore, even companies based in Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas, need to comply or face the fine.

Why it matters

These questions will not only impact the private sector or organizations that think of themselves as data collectors in the more traditional sense. The GDPR will broadly address data issues that a variety of sectors across the globe will have to tackle head on — and government, political institutions, and civic engagement should not be exempt from this list. As a result, the norms and implications of the GDPR could also impact the civic fabric underpinning democratic institutions themselves.

First, as companies are considering the ethics of their data collection, it’s worth considering how these problems might also apply to governments. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is collecting vast amounts of sensitive data from citizens, including using biometric devices to track public sector employee job performance. China is amassing large amounts of data on its citizens, including ranking them on their “social credit.”

The principles of GDPR — limited control and data collection transparency — will become even more important as citizens increasingly need to turn over their data and digital identity in order to receive government services.

But even outside the government itself, we’re seeing that companies’ data policies can have huge political impacts, meaning how data and the political process intersect is just as important. As the 2016 election reminded people, data is not just trapped in the cloud; it influences real-world behaviors, political decisions, and institutions. Users having more control over where their data goes is an important part of regaining some democratic, citizen-based power.

How to best incorporate citizen power into the tech space is a difficult question, however. Ultimately, our governments and tech companies now face a balancing act between opportunity and protection. On the one hand is the tech-utopian vision of our digital lives ushering in new civic opportunities for democratizing access, knowledge, and community. On the other hand, the GDPR is a top-down approach calling for greater regulation by “experts.”

These sectors raise huge challenges. Addressing this issue will have to find a middle ground between these two — and civic participation should play a role in defining citizens’ democratic future.

Tapping into civic energy in America

What could a golden mean in the US look like? Is it possible to take principles of the GDPR and apply a more community based, citizen-centric approach across states and localities in the United States? Could a US version of the GDPR be designed in a way that included public participation? Perhaps there could be an ongoing participatory role? Most of all, the questions underpinning data regulation need to serve as an impetus for an honest conversation about equity across digital access, digital literacy, and now digital privacy.

Across the country, we’re already seeing successful experiments with a more citizen-inclusive democracy, with localities and cities rising as engines of American re-innovation and laboratories of participatory democracy. Thanks to our federalist system, states are already paving the way for greater electoral reform, from public financing of campaigns to experiments with structures such as ranked-choice voting.

In these local federalist experiments, civic participation is slowly becoming a crucial tool. Innovations from participatory budgeting to interactive policy co-production sessions are giving people in communities a direct say in public policies. For example, the Rural Climate Dialogues in Minnesota empower rural residents to impact policy on long-term climate mitigation. Bowling Green, Kentucky, recently used the online deliberation platform Polis to identify common policy areas for consensus building. Scholars have been writing about various potential participatory models for our digital lives as well, including civic trusts.

Can we take these principles and begin a serious conversation for how to translate the best privacy practices, tools, and methods to ensure that people’s valuable online and offline resources — including their trust, attention span, and vital information — are also protected and honored? Since the people are a primary stakeholder in the conversation about civic data and data privacy, they should have a seat at the table.

Including citizens and residents in these conversations could have a big policy impact. First, working toward a participatory governance framework for civic data would enable people to understand the value of their data in the open market. Second, it would provide greater transparency to the value of networks — an individual’s social graph, a valuable asset, which, until now, people are generating in aggregate without anything in return. Third, it could amplify concerns of more vulnerable data users, including elderly or tech-illiterate citizens — and even refugees and international migrants, as Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst recently argued in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

There are already templates and road maps for responsible data, but talking to those users themselves with a participatory governance approach could make them even more effective. Finally, citizens can help answer tough questions about what we value and when and how we need to make ethical choices with data.

Because data-collecting organizations will have to comply abroad soon, the GDPR is a good opportunity for the American social sector to consider data rights as civic rights and incorporate a participatory process to meet this challenge. Instead of simply assuming regulatory agencies will pave the way, a more participatory data framework could foster an ongoing process of civic empowerment and make the outcome more effective. It’s too soon to know the precise forms or mechanisms new data regulation should take. Instead of a rigid, predetermined format, the process needs to be community-driven by design — ensuring traditionally marginalized communities are front and center in this conversation, not only the elites who already hold the microphone.

It won’t be easy. Building a participatory governance structure for civic data will require empathy, compromise, and potentially challenging the preconceived relationship between people, institutions, and their information. The interplay between our online and offline selves is a continuous process of learning error. But if we simply replicate the top-down structures of the past, we can’t evolve toward a truly empowered digital democratic future. Instead, let’s use the GDPR as an opening in the United States for advancing the principles of a more transparent and participatory democracy.

Last December, the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council voted in an 8-5 decision to privatize sidewalks, as recently reported in NextCity. After a long process to develop a safety plan for the city’s Westport entertainment district, an area with dozens of bars and live music venues, the council decided to turn over the sidewalks to a neighborhood business consortium.  

The business group, in turn, will contract out security of the two block entertainment district to a company that handles security for Major League Baseball, with the costs paid for by the Westport business owners. If the city ever wants to buy back the land, it will cost city taxpayers up to $132,784.

Jane Jacobs wrote in the The Death and Life of Great American Cities that for city streets, “there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.”

But what happens when public space itself becomes privatized? People have documented the rise of the curb as a commodity — which now provides a surface for different types of activity, like ride-sharing meeting spaces.

In 2016, America’s 25 biggest cities collected nearly $5 billion in car-related revenue. As unappealing and uninteresting as curbs may seem, they represent crucial infrastructure and space for public use. And beyond revenue, there are far-reaching consequences for democracy when public spaces become privatized.

One thing you may not think about when walking through cities is: Who is responsible for goods we typically consider “public”? Since the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s, there has been an increasing devolution of federal power to states and localities. One downstream effect of the assault on government was an increasing reliance on third-party governance — a network of private, nonprofit, and philanthropic organizations to do the public job typically associated with government. Don Kettl calls this the “interweaving of the Public Functions and Private Hands.”

And that devolution trend isn’t changing anytime soon. Especially as states and cities will receive decreased revenue as a result of the Trump administration tax bill, there will be even more reliance on this network of actors to deliver core services that emaciated local government budgets can’t fulfill anymore.

Like curbs, sidewalks have traditionally been a public space — built, maintained, and regulated by the government — making them available for use by any citizen, resident, or traveler who may pass through. At this point, sidewalks are usually taken for granted, something we use but don’t often consider.

Privatization of that space would look very different: In Kansas City this spring, people wanting to use the sidewalk in the Westport area will have to pass through metal detectors, show identification, and have their bags checked before entering the entertainment district area between 11 pm and 4 am. Unlike public police, who cannot screen for weapons in public spaces, the private security guards can.

The aim of privatizing was to address crime. The council passed the ordinance specifically in response to an increase in gun violence over the past year in the Westport district: Between January and October 2017, there were 65 gun-related offenses in that district alone; in comparison, 2016 saw only 16.

Two tensions: freedom to carry versus freedom to party

In the case of Kansas City — where the state legislature has voted to give Missourians the legal right to carry a concealed weapon with few restrictions — that freedom to carry, at least as defined in Missouri law, is in tension with the freedom to publicly gather whenever, wherever.

In 2017, Missouri began allowing people to carry a concealed weapon without a permit with Missouri Senate Bill 656. The NAACP has expressed concern about racial profiling in the privatized section of Westport. “We are afraid that when people are searched or get into the Westport area that, based upon looks or based upon suspicion that people will be further searched, there is the possibility they could be detained,” Rev. Rodney Williams explained.

There will be civil rights observers stationed at the security screenings. But private contractors may not receive the same civic training as public officials. And the very presence of screeners could create fear of ill treatment and thereby dampen who chooses to come out and spend their Saturday night in Westport, just as barriers to voting deter even those who have the required ID or proof of citizenship. This could potentially make public spaces less public and less equitable. And the policy creates a new precedent for surrendering public assets to private companies in the name of security or convenience.

It may also make Westport safer. Bouncers and metal detectors may make Westport feel — and, in fact, be — safer and less prone to gun violence. But if so, cities will have to think not just about the immediate problems at hand, but about the consequences of addressing them through privatizing public land. In Kansas City’s case, limiting the right to carry a concealed weapon might be more effective than limiting who can walk on a once-public sidewalk.

Hollie Russon Gilman is a fellow at New America’s political reform program. She is also a lecturer at Columbia SIPA, a senior fellow at the Beeck Center, and a former White House open government and innovation adviser. Gilman is the author of a book on participatory budgeting and a forthcoming book on the current democracy crisis in America.  

The relationship between citizens and government is changing. The first 10 days of Donald Trump’s presidency has been a reminder that citizens’ thirst to have a voice in their democracy spans the nation’s cultural, partisan, and ideological divides. In his inaugural address, Trump thundered, “We are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people.” The past two weekends have seen millions demonstrate in Women’s Marches and large crowds gather at airports and in downtowns to voice their discontent over Trump’s draconian executive order regarding immigration and refugee policies.

Beneath the acrimony, everyone seems to agree that citizens need a greater voice in our democracy. But both sides face a common challenge: Neither the marchers nor the president they detest have articulated a coherent set of mechanisms to translate their passionate rhetoric into concrete initiatives, programs, or policies that actually empower citizens.

How do we bring citizens into democracy? Americans were accustomed to a longstanding model: institutions and their leaders as the stalwart of democracy. Not even a week into Trump’s presidency, many folks are left wide-eyed with the realization that our civic institutions are not going to work without consistent citizen pressure and activism to protect them. At a time when citizens’ faith in institutions and democracy is at all-time lows; we each need to be vigilant and actively engaged.

Civic engagement is not just for creating better policies but also for reinvigorating democratic practice — this is an underlying condition of our current political dysfunction. There are tools from our democratic “arsenal” to support this new relationship between Americans and their government. Regardless of how we proceed, this is going to take work, and there isn’t a panacea. The new dynamic between the government and citizens is not going to fix itself. It is not going to be fixed by a new policy or a new government official. There is now no choice but to engage in a multigenerational project to reinvigorate American democracy.

First, individual citizens can hold power to account by bringing new and relevant facts into the public light. People can serve as watchdogs, activists for truth, and monitors of governance. Individual people can serve as more credible truth tellers than other parts of society that are viewed as beholden to special interests or lobbying. From photographing police violence to tracking public documents online (e.g., through the Freedom of Information Act) to ensuring that elected officials maintain their campaign promises, individuals can become purveyors of truth and put pressure on institutions and elected officials.

Take, for example, India’s Mumbai Votes, where information crowdsourced by students and activists on elected officials is viewed as credible and reliable information, often in contrast to biased paid news. In an environment of declining institutional trust, there is a vacuum of facts. Individual people empowered with a smartphone or even a microphone can be the purveyors of truth and can leverage that information to hold government accountable.

Second, citizens can revitalize the power of diverse community-based organizations. For a long time, these organizations weaved the vibrant fabric of America civic and communal life. Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings about early American life included the potency of civic associations for strengthening democracy. One component of these organizations was the ability for people to come together across different ideologies and beliefs.

Today these organizations are no longer as vital, diverse, or powerful as they once were, and American democracy has suffered as a result. There has been much scholarship on the decline of civic associations in the United States. Now is the moment to reengage with civil society organizations — not just passively donate every year. Instead, actively participant in local chapters of a national group or a neighborhood association.

Civic organizations are not a monolith. There are some that are filled with people who share the same preconceived views, while others may have less homogeneous ideology. Given the changing relationship between citizens and government, now is the critical moment to form nontraditional alliances and more deeply engage with people with dissenting viewpoints. The goal is to strengthen critical civil society institutions, not just to feel reaffirmed. Building tolerance for peaceful dissent and disagreement toward shared democratic goods, which transcend any one person, is a critical building block for reinventing the relationship between citizens and the state. 

Finally, across our 3,007 counties there are participatory options and new partnerships between government and the people to work collaboratively as co-producers of public goods. For example, Central Falls, Rhode Island, which is Rhode Island’s only majority-Hispanic community, was the first city in Rhode Island to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The city government decided to try something new to engage the community around a shared project.

It partnered with Citizinvestor, a crowdfunding and civic engagement site that is similar to “Kickstarter for governments,” to launch a civic crowdfunding campaign, one of the first in the United States. Local residents were active participants in every part of the process: identifying the area for fundraising; pledging their own dollars; and collaborating. Examples like this are occurring across the country where citizens are empowered not merely in a consultative or advisory role, but are given a real role in public decision-making.

Another process gaining momentum across the country is participatory budgeting, a World Bank “best practice” in democratic reform to give residents a portion of public money to decide how to allocate. Last year, community residents allocated more than $60 million across the United States through discretionary funds of local officials, since the process started in 2009 with $1 million in discretionary funds in a Chicago ward. Perhaps we can learn from instructive international examples in Brazil or in Paris, where €100 million per year is allocated through the process.  

Strengthening the relationship between citizens and their government requires tireless energy, vigilance, and creativity. By design this requires new experiments. Charlotte, North Carolina, won a Knight Cities Challenge for a project called Crown TownHall, which offers direct one-on-one opportunities for local public city officials to have an in-person conversation with a member of the community. This requires time on behalf of both citizens and their public officials. Deepened relationships can develop even with just a 10-minute conversation.  

It is going to take unprecedented work to rebuild the civic fabric and reignite the civic associations that have been the hallmark of America. Many of us feel fired up, angry, or worried about the direction of our country. The way to move forward begins with sustained civic activity, one conversation at a time.

At the end of this week, the U.N General Assembly will vote on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the next decades. The SDGs will replace the Millennium Development Goals, which expire at the end of 2015. The SDGs are a set of goals and targets on international development that range from eradicating poverty, building sustainable cities, and combating climate change.

The SDGs will attempt to change international indicators on typically discussed policies like poverty and climate change, but they will also have an unprecedented new goal: to create “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.” This goal builds on the democratic innovations that have been taking place around the globe over the last decades.

These goals are not just feel-good developmentalism. They may be our best hope to reverse the growing distrust of political institutions all over the globe. Global trust in government institutions is at historic lows. According to Edelman’s 2014 analysis, “Trust in government fell globally 4 points to an historic low (44 percent) making it the least trusted institution for the third consecutive year.” In 2014, nineteen countries — including Sweden, India, the U.K., China, Ireland and Mexico — experienced declines in government trust over the last year.

But, in all four corners of the world, something has been bubbling. In particular, a wave of civic innovations has emerged to change the relationship between citizens and the State. People are leveraging digital tools and communal ingenuity to re-engage in their civic lives and work toward models of more participatory governance. Examples range from residents civic crowd funding for public works or taking photos of neighborhood issues and reporting them directly to elected officials. And change may be in the works.

Cities all over the world are leading the way as incubators for ideas to engage citizens in a variety of governance opportunities. A movement to empower citizens at the local level to be effective contributors in policymaking is on the rise, and many of the most promising democratic innovations occurring overseas.

From Brazil to the world

One notable example of democratic innovations is Brazil’s Participatory Budgeting initiative, which combines principles of deliberation and democratic decision-making. It gives citizens direct control over portions of government spending.

The initiative first emerged in the state of Porto Alegre in 1989, where citizens now decide how to spend about 20% of the city’s budget, or an average of $71.5 million every year. It has since spread to more than 2,500 localities. In 2005, at least 50 European local governments had started experimenting with participatory budgeting. In 2014, Paris implemented the largest version of participatory budgeting in Europe: the municipal government has set aside €426 million to be spent between 2014 and 2020 based on the decisions of residents.

Participatory budgeting is also now showing up in U.S. cities – A Chicago alderman turned $1 million dollars of his discretionary menu money in Chicago directly to residents, and asked them what they wanted to do with it. In 2014, New York City allocated $32 million through participatory budgeting. The process continues to grow, with cities from Long Beach, CA to Cambridge, MA adopting it. Even the White House has pledged to support the process. While in many places the funds put into participatory budgeting represent a small fraction of an overall budget, the process itself represents a radical departure from status quo budget decision making.

In the past few years, similar initiatives have emerged both at the global and national levels:

• In 2011, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States created the Open Government Partnership, calling for more open, transparent and participatory governance over the world. This partnership between civil society and government has grown to include sixty-six members so far.
• The Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge has recognized cities both domestically and internationally, helping to lift best practices in places as diverse as Athens to Philadelphia.
• Across the globe, cities are adopting innovation units, as captured last year by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the UK’s Innovation Fund, Nesta:
• Created in 2012, the Seoul’s Innovation Bureau taps into resident expertise to generate solutions to community problems. For example, it created the Generation Sharing Housing service, which matches elderly people with spare residential space with students in need of rooms who are willing to help out with household tasks such as grocery shopping.
• Denmark’s MindLab, is an innovation unit to engage business and citizens to develop new public sector solutions to policy challenges in education, employment, and government services.

Governments all over the world are trying to engage citizens, and foster transparency and participation. The goal is to crack open democratic processes that used to happen behind closed doors, and give people a stake in governing.

Looking ahead

It is too soon to tell how the SDGs will play out in the future (some might be skeptic about the guarantee that more participation yields better governance), but there are already exciting signs that including a provision in the SDGs that calls for more participation in governance can have a ripple effect on the local and global scale. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network, housed at Columbia University, is already paying attention to that. The group will be convening and working directly with mayors, civil society, and research universities to develop a timetable and playbook for implementation.

But one thing is certain: the SDGs will create a window of opportunity for clear, goal-oriented policies that will strengthen the quality of democratic practices around the globe. This is a chance for leaders to work together in diverse localities from Rio de Janeiro to Boston. By scaling up all these governance opportunities and democratic innovations, diverse stakeholders, from civil society, philanthropy, government, industry, and academia, will have the tools to overcome the various challenges and constraints that influence governance around the world, and foster effective transparency and accountability on a global level.