Although AI is rapidly gaining popularity, we know there are some blind spots where the new technology won’t immediately apply.
One of these is the municipal world.
Having seen this happen first-hand, I can say that going to local government offices in the United States to deal with even minor zoning or permitting issues can be frustrating for anyone.
Not to mention projects like storm water quality and road maintenance and figuring out how to fund your local fire department and police department, and the bigger picture. That's why we're seeing so much centralization, because a lot of these smaller local offices don't have the resources to run them well.
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And it seems likely that one of the factors holding back local governments is a lack of access to the same AI tools being used en masse by innovators in the private sector.
I found this from Munivers, where the author (Elizabeth) talks about the specific challenges of local government.
The first is “lack of budgets and resources” – money is often an issue – but the second is resistance to change, as city officials are often volunteers or locally elected and may have views that get in the way of effective technology adoption. (If you've ever seen four or five octogenarians arguing about whether to use tablets, you know what that looks like.)
The third challenge is legacy systems and infrastructure, and the fourth challenge is around privacy and data governance.
The fifth challenge cited by the authors is “lack of technical expertise.”
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So I want to analyze a talk by Russ Wilcox, who attended a few recent events and spoke about other challenges facing local government.
His testimony showed that turnover was often a problem, and he spoke of “knowledge erosion” where skilled personnel leave the team at the end of their careers and their knowledge is effectively lost to the municipality.
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As a result, he described people “guessing” about things like the interpretation of zoning documents.
He also noted that many procedures are deliberately obfuscated and that the legal language needs to be sorted out by experts.
Of course, local government needs to be official in nature, but it doesn’t need to be opaque to the general public, nor does it need to be so outdated that it can’t be used for multiple purposes.
In a sense, in the worst case scenario, some of the turnover is caused by inefficiency.
Working in an office without the right tools and trying to maintain quality is demoralizing.
Wilcox goes on to explain how some of these features work:
“There has to be a better way,” he said, suggesting that when AI is eventually deployed, the payoff could be significant.
To quote Wilcox:
“What we can do is act as a smart digital archive, where artists can go to any municipality in the world and find documents that aren't in our database and turn them into an easily searchable database.”
“What we're looking at is the global impact of modernizing a city from the ground up. We're not going to lose information anymore because someone leaves. By storing that information in a centralized database, we're saving developers a lot of time and resources, and we're increasing accessibility and collaboration for accountable policymaking and preserving the historical record. So when someone leaves the city, there's no longer a knowledge gap.”
Wilcox also speaks to the power of using unstructured data.
I recently blogged about how more powerful multi-core processors can help AI examine unstructured data such as informal letters and documents.
This is not trivial. It's a game changer for everything from local government to, say, fraud investigation. Unstructured data lives on social media, in other areas of the web, and in print, and doesn't get the attention it deserves. Now that we have the technology to read and understand it, the benefits these applications can bring to us will grow exponentially, not just in business, but in local government and in our personal lives.
For example, Wilcox talks about users having access to chatbots of famous ancient thinkers to guide them further on their journey or transfer ancient records into modern systems, and points out four main areas of potential impact.
Save time and resources
Accessibility and collaboration
Preservation of Historical Records
Transforming local government
These are all valuable things, and we can see how they can work together to strengthen local government and what these agencies can do for their residents.
Certainly, change in local government will come sooner or later, but as Wilcox and others point out, change takes a long time, and many municipalities are far behind in adopting it.
