Could public meetings be better online than they were in person?

Some projects, like road safety improvements, need community vetting before they can move forward, but in-person public meetings can’t happen right now. What are governments doing? Are public meetings online worse, or better, than their in-person counterparts?

There’s a concern that virtual policy making could expose its own inequities due to the digital divide. On the other hand, we know that public comment in local policy-making is dominated by older, whiter homeowners. How can we make virtual public comment equitable — maybe more so than what we have now — and how can we sustain these measures for when in-person meetings return?

We posed these questions to our GGWash Neighborhood members and volunteers. Here’s a summary of the conversation. Please weigh in yourself in the comments. If you want to participate in these discussions, we hope you’ll join the GGWash Neighborhood!

How virtual meetings are happening

James Harnett explained what his Advisory Neighborhood Commission, Foggy Bottom’s ANC 2A, did in March to conduct its first meeting with a virtual component.

From a community room at the West End Public Library where we normally have about 35 attendees for our meetings, we had 140 people join us for some or all of our virtual meeting. That’s extraordinary. We will continue to track that trend as we conduct more virtual meetings.

Additionally, given our success at running a virtual meeting without much confusion over how the tool would work, or how commissioners or members of the public would be able to speak, I worked with the Council’s staff to help Tuesday’s legislative meeting run using our playbook.

Earlier this week, our ANC changed our meeting recording policy so that instead of requiring that someone FOIA or ask our Commission’s staff to send them a meeting recording (as has been the case for as long as I can remember), we are proactively posting them on our website for all to watch or listen to. I would also love to see our ANC start using the Stream to Facebook tool on Zoom for all our future virtual meetings to help engage more people.

Some suggest government should pause projects if it can’t hold meetings

There is no dispute that a stark digital divide exists in the region, with some people well equipped with technology and others struggling, especially for children to participate in distance learning in their schools.

The Untokening is “a multiracial collective that centers the lived experiences of marginalized communities to address mobility justice and equity.” It released a set of principles for activities during COVID-19, including principles like supporting delivery workers, making transit free, and stopping police harassment. Its first principle says, “Do not plan future projects at a time when equitable public participation is impossible.”

Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich suggested the county’s planning board only cover “noncontroversial” projects during the public health emergency, which “would effectively halt the development review process,” Caitlynn Peetz wrote for Bethesda Magazine. Elrich told the County Council that many people face technical or other challenges to participate, and he said, “The result is little, if any, participation by a distracted public.”

Planning Board chairman Casey Anderson pushed back on this request, telling Peetz that “stopping work on these important initiatives at this time will leave us unprepared for bouncing back from the current crisis.” He said that the board has been letting people testify by email, phone, social media, or recorded audio and video.

It’s worth noting, certainly, that Elrich, who’s tangled with the Planning Board many times in the past, would have preferred it authorize less development even before the coronavirus.

Jane Lyons noted, “the digital divide is very real,” and so praised the board for accepting testimony via phone as well as means requiring a computer. Payton Chung added that one recent DC Circulator planning document listed “demographic info about who contributed via various outreach strategies. Online had lots of rich white people.”

Or, do online meetings embrace people who couldn’t participate in person?

Meetings conducted predominantly or exclusively in-person can be a huge burden to many people. As Brendan Whitsitt pointed out, “this often leaves a less-motivated (but generally supportive and thoughtful) majority who are voiceless in the process.”

Alison Gillespie relayed her experience with a recent Montgomery County meeting where a refreshingly large number of people spoke languages other than English:

I just testified via phone to the MoCo council. They have a pretty good system set up. This was the first time they’ve used it as far as I know. There were SO MANY Spanish-speaking participants on the line to testify.

Councilmember [Gabe] Albornoz stopped the testimony at one point and said something along the lines of: does my heart good to hear so many people calling in who speak other languages tonight. … [Councilmember Nancy] Navarro also was behind getting a meeting about a year ago in Viers Mill out into the neighborhood, where many Spanish speakers testified on behalf of the need for traffic safety measures and the desire for amenities like bike lanes.

People of certain races and genders find more challenges

Gillespie said, “Local meetings are also sources of power for some outsiders. You show up, you can meet people, and meeting in person is a big deal for the elderly. On the other hand, it can be extra challenging for the disabled to get to a meeting in person.”

People of some backgrounds face extra challenges with in-person meetings. Joanne Tang said, “Usually being on the younger side and also being a [person of color] at meetings means that as an outsider, it can be hard to meet people at all. It’s really useful for some people and I don’t doubt that being visibly not white changes the tenor of an in-person meeting a bit …but sometimes it’s also just nice to be behind a screen.”

Payton Chung had a similar experience. He said, “I’m glad that no web comment form will allow anyone to shout me down mid-sentence with “YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR HISTORY, YOUNG MAN” (which happened at one hearing a block from home).”

On the other hand, women especially find their voices less heard on videoconference calls, even worse than the existing disparity, the New York Times explained. Chance Carter pointed to that, and summarized the issue as “women don’t get much of a word in and [people of color] have a hard time being seen.”

In-person meetings took up a lot of time

There’s also the massive time commitment associated with in-person meetings. Nick Sementelli thinks we should “burn in-person-only meetings to the ground.” He said:

To be an active member of my neighborhood, you basically have to go to a meeting per week. And they’re usually 2 hours minimum. If you miss one of those, you generally fall behind on where any given issue is, and the relevant players (electeds/community leaders) treat you with less seriousness for having not been a part of the conversation.

You can’t just come for the thing you’re interested in either, because the agenda is prone to change/speed up/slow down. And you can’t rely on meeting notes being comprehensive, and certainly they’re almost never available in a timely manner.

Online meetings could address some access issues by “letting people throw on a livestream while they’re making dinner and perk up when the relevant issue they want to participate in comes up, then having a full recording available right away would be a game-changer in so many ways,” he added.

How can virtual meetings be more equitable?

Governments, schools, companies, and others are experimenting and learning about online participation at a frenetic pace. There’s much we still have to do to fully take advantage of a new medium.

James Harnett recommended making investments in equipment and technology to help maintain these [virtual] connections after we return to meeting in-person. “I want to see our ANC record and live stream all of our future meetings and to provide opportunities for people that aren’t able to make it to our meetings alternate means of making their voice heard,” he said.

“To do so equitably is going to require much more investment from the Council in expanding the reach of DC Public WiFi, providing take-home laptops for K12 students and seniors, and providing captioning or translation services for recorded/live streamed ANC meetings.”

Alex Baca pointed out that to be more equitable, virtual meetings should be compatible and optimize for mobile phone participation. She said, citing a Pew report:

81 percent of Americans now own smartphones! It’s lower by age and uneven by income, but pretty even across race—and I’d be willing to bet that cell phone and smartphone access is much more comprehensive than home Internet or desktop access. (IIRC, a lot of households have skipped buying laptops or desktops and use smartphones as their primary means of accessing the Internet.)

Brendan Whitsitt suggested that “the best way to ensure representation would be to measure and report on representation. First, attendees would ideally not be anonymous. Registering an account with your real identity (like a blue check), would encourage better online behavior. Second, if individual accounts were verified with a physical mailing address, we could report on how many community members from a given SMD, for example, showed up for a meeting. Greater weight could be given to people who live in affected communities, and who are willing to speak publicly rather than anonymously.”

Is collecting a list of feedback not the only goal?

Maybe simply looking at the pros and cons of in-person or virtual meetings misses a larger discussion about equity in local government. Daniel Weir explained:

For local government, public input means in-person public input. Community feedback channels like letters and surveys are a necessary part of public input, but at the local level they aren’t enough. Local government means the streets and homes that people live in and move through, the schools that teach and feed our children, the services that keep us safe and help us be healthy.

Local governance is intimate. Sorting through these issues in any kind of honest, humane way means breathing the same air as the people whose lives will be affected. It means looking them in the face when they tell you what they hope for or are afraid of.

At least in Arlington, I think our elected officials and professional staff know this and are doing everything they can to protect this essential part of local governance. But it really is a struggle when breathing the same air is suddenly dangerous for everyone in the room.

The problem isn’t the need for in-person input or lack thereof, and it’s not even that in-person input grinds to halt during crises (which are, by definition, transitory). The problem is that the systemic inequities that permeate every aspect of our society in crisis and calm alike—things like systemic racism and the closely linked systematic overrepresentation of wealthy single-household homeowners—spread like mycelium into every possible channel of collecting feedback. The problem is that any institution that doesn’t actively and explicitly fight these things will eventually adopt policies shaped by them.

Thank you to our GGWash Neighbors for weighing in with their perspectives. What do you think can be done to get the best public input, offline or online?