Notice how well the alternatives are displayed, the number of helpful city staff available to answer questions, and the friendly demeanor of the participants.
Well, maybe we haven’t learned everything we need to know about designing good community decision processes from Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies, but they offer at least a few important lessons:
- They are genuinely engaging.
- They offer a tangible sense of accomplishment with every milestone achieved.
- They become increasingly sophisticated and challenging over time, which tracks well to community decision processes around complicated issues like budgets, school reform, and climate change.
- They are seriously fun.
It’s easy, when architecting a community process, to fall back on conventional approaches: expert presentation followed by open mic, self-guided open house, post alternatives online and solicit comments. These types of approaches might satisfy legal obligations, and they might even satisfy a community’s political requirements, but they don’t necessarily produce genuine engagement in the decision-making, they don’t necessarily tap the depth of a community’s expertise and creativity, and they don’t necessarily produce a politically durable plan that is actually implemented.
Note: We don’t recommend using Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies as an actual model for a community planning process. We suspect that the use of slingshots, suicidal birds, explosives, and projectile weapons will not improve the quality or outcome of your planning effort.
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