Govlaunch Podcast

Playful Engagement Part 1 of 2: D.C. Office of Planning and American University's Playful Cities Lab team up to share how playfulness is the key to building the engaging cities of tomorrow

Episode Summary

Part 1 of a 2 part series on how a local government is working toward more playful engagement to help drive creativity and build trust with their community. Joshua Silver from the DC Office of planning joins me, along with Dr. Benjamin Stokes, Founder of the Playful City Lab at American University. We tap into some methodologies around more playful engagement and how you can leverage some of these strategies for your own engagement with very little budget.

Episode Notes

Citizen engagement is top of mind for many local governments. And it should be. Local governments continue to grapple with communications strategies around COVID and the vaccine, are working with tightening budgets and are continuing to face pressure to innovate at the same pace as private sector companies. And building and maintaining trust with your community is key.

Interview with Joshua Silver, Lead Planner for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships for the DC Office of Planning and Dr. Benjamin Stokes, Founder of the Playful City Lab at American University.

More info: 

Featured government: Washington, D.C.

Episode guests:

Joshua Silver, Lead Planner for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships, DC Office of Planning
Dr. Benjamin Stokes, Founder of the Playful City Lab at American University

Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.

Episode Transcription

Lindsay: (00:05)

Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Community engagement is top of mind for many local governments, and it should be local governments continue to grapple with communication strategies around COVID and the vaccine, and are working with tightening budgets while continuing to face pressure to innovate at the same pace as private sector companies. Building and maintaining trust with your community is key. So today we're going to talk about how a local government is working toward more playful engagement to help drive creativity and build trust in their community. Joshua Silver from the DC office of planning joins me along with Dr. Benjamin Stokes director of the Playful City Lab at American University. We'll tap into some methodologies around more playful engagement and how you could leverage some of these strategies for your own engagement with very little budget.

Lindsay: (01:15)

Thank you both for joining me today. Can you each quickly introduce yourselves and share a bit about your role, Josh, I'll start with you.

Josh: (01:23)

Hi Lindsay. My name is Josh Silver. I'm the lead planner for strategic initiatives and partnerships at the DC office of planning. And thanks so much for inviting me to participate in today's Govlaunch podcast. I'm excited to hear from Dr. Stokes and join him in this conversation and share this with your audience. A little bit about my role and responsibilities. I think that my role is somewhat unique in the context of local government planning. I serve really as the office of the DC office of plannings, chief builder and cultivator of external partnerships and relationships. And much of my job is really centered on innovation and testing ideas to advance our organization's mission, different projects and or priorities. My responsibility is really focused on shaping and implementing place-making and public space planning efforts in thinking about how to optimize design deliver projects and programs that highlight neighborhood identity, um, enhance civic life, and really importantly, strengthen community cohesion and experience.

Lindsay: (02:20)

Exciting. And you Benjamin?

Benjamin: (02:23)

Hello, great to be here. My name is Benjamin Stokes and I am the founder of the Playful City Lab at American University where I am an assistant professor. And I also teach game design in our game design center. So we are one of the top ranked game design schools for masters students in the world, according to the Princeton review. More importantly, we bring, uh, an interest in cities and place to game design, which I think is a really interesting emerging area of practice for games. Everyone knows that games are, are an enormous part of our culture are an enormous industry on the entertainment side, in terms of AAA of course, sports are already huge in cities with things like neighborhood parks or stadium, but the idea that we might use some of the energy of game design in other areas, it's really been catching on a lot in different ways in the past decade, whether it's catchy terms like gamification or whether it's deeper ideas, um, like, uh, actually thinking about games and the way that games work as we design our civic engagement systems and public events. So that's a really fun part of my work is doing research around games, teaching students around games and working with amazing city governments, including right here in DC.

Lindsay: (03:43)

Josh, in terms of how DC has traditionally approached engagement around planning. I imagine it's pretty consistent with other local governments with a combination of in-person consultation surveys, et cetera. Recently, though, you've made the shift to get away from this same old and try some more creative forms of engagement. Can you talk more about what prompted this and share an example or two of some creative ways DC planning has engaged with community early on with this vision?

Josh: (04:10)

Yeah. Great question. I would say the engagement approach in the district of Columbia is consistent with other local governments. And as you said, you know, using a combination of the in-person meetings and of course because of COVID, we've become increasingly reliant on surveys more so I would say than ever, ever before. We do things too where we've often supplemented our engagement with neighborhood or site walk tours of different places like that. Today's conversation is not to suggest that planners and designers in local governments should deviate from these traditional approaches. Um, in my opinion, there's still critical need for community involvement using those methods, but most like most things there's opportunities for really improving how we engage our communities. I think at this point we know what our pitfalls and our challenges are of applying our traditional community engagement approaches. So how do we innovate and how do we think outside the box? Um, and one of the applications that we found to be extremely useful, uh, in the district of Columbia includes the integration of something called creative placemaking and creative placemaking into our community planning efforts. I could do an entire podcast about creative placemaking work, but in short, I'll say for those that are less familiar with the term creative place-making, or I like to think of it as a movement, um, you know, for the DC office of planning, we really define it as this arts and culture forward platform through which the DC office of planning engages community and plans by creating experiences that connect people and inspire action and creativity, and really celebrate our neighborhoods.

Josh: (05:34)

And so for the last six years, uh, we've been using creative placemaking and it's really provided or served as an important nexus for how we conduct our community engagement. And so the application of creative placemaking to community planning efforts is really demonstrated in our work increased participation and importantly, the involvement of community members who might not otherwise participate in these traditional community meetings or, or want to, or have the time to take a survey or attend a meeting. And one thing that's really inherent to create a place-making is the notion of play. And credit placemaking projects that I've been involved with include things such as public space activation with games and activities that force people to make decisions in some instances about specific things about their neighborhoods. Videos that people interact with, or form opinions about. In these examples, creative placemaking has really served as a proxy for helping engage community stakeholders in the development of our community or neighborhood planning.

Josh: (06:30)

I also want to make one less obvious, but important point about play and gaming and city planning, um, and simply put it makes planning and community engagement fun. And that's something that is really important. I think we take for granted let's how do we make something fun? And, you know, people are generally happier to participate. They're generally we found that they were more generally happy to give and or share, uh, information, um, when we're applying this creative place-making approach and, you know, including a game component in the engagement also really has demonstrated it adds this element of authenticity, um, to our process. It allows people in the video example, I just cited, it gives them an opportunity to see themselves in the engagement. And it's not just the government person like myself, who is writing on a board, what I'm hearing or I notebook, or your it's just, you're not just a statistic in a survey.

Josh: (07:17)

And so being seen, I think in this and using play is really important. And finally, the thing that I like most about play and gaming in engagement is what happens after the engagement is done. From my own observations and discussions with community members and other stakeholders who have participated in these things, people tend to remember the game or the experience, and often more in a positive context. Um, and so they continue to discuss what has happened at the meeting or how they chose to make that decision, um, that they did. And they just speak more positively about sometimes difficult or contentious topics or subjects.

Lindsay: (07:51)

Community, and citizen engagement have consistently been our top searches on Govlaunch since the start of the pandemic and well into 2021. As you know, we just wrapped up a six week series on leading citizen engagement tools in the space to help these local governments navigate the demand for more digital services to engage. That said, a lot of the work we're going to talk about this week and next is cultural, really a mindset shift in how we're even thinking about engagement. As you put it last time we spoke DC is part of this larger playful cities movement. Can you explain that more?

Josh: (08:24)

Sure. Yeah. The district has been intentional about integrating play into its policies and planning efforts. And there's sort of two things that I'd like to hit on as it relates to that. Um, one is from a policy perspective and the other is really from an actual on the ground project. From a policy perspective, the office of planning has been engaged in a multi-year process, um, to amend the city's comprehensive, or some people call it the long range plan for the district of Columbia. And as part of that effort, we've included new information about play in the, in the comprehensive plan. Um, and there's a section in our comprehensive plan in our urban design element, which is kind of how our, at one of the pieces of the plan called play everywhere. And I have to give credit to my colleagues in the design division for really developing this particular piece of it. But, um, it's even playing a bigger role now, as we do more engagement in our committees, but the play that the point of the play everywhere, um, part of the comprehensive plan is that play is a universal experience about bringing people, different people together. And, you know, it's about helping children learn and promoting better physical and mental health for all residents. And those are the things that we aspire to do with the communities that we work with as planners, as designers.

Josh: (09:27)

When play is really thoughtfully designed in the public realm, it creates enriching or memorable public spaces and facilitates interactions and community building among residents of diverse backgrounds and ages. And that lends itself back to our community engagement. But we also know that we have more work to do, and in encouraging, play in public spaces requires these policies and these actions, um, that can address multiple challenges, whether they be physical or even regulatory challenges. 47% of district households, um, have difficulty accessing playgrounds within a quarter mile of their home. And so the comprehensive plan includes these policies and actions, um, to help make play in the district more frequent and importantly equitable. 

Josh: (10:07)

And then finally, a project that we've been working on called playable art. Um, this is a partnership between my office and the DC office of planning, as well as the district's commission of arts and humanities. And we've been engaged in this multi-year partnership to design and fabricate and install, playable sculptures in neighborhoods that have limited open or green space or access to recreation spaces or centers. And so we've completed this installation of these three playable art sculptures. Um, and if I could, I would love to be able to show them to you right now, but I can't.

Lindsay: (10:37)

You've engaged with a local university to help make engagement more playful in DC. How did the DC office of planning connect with the American University game center and how has this relationship evolved?

Josh: (10:49)

Yeah, the connection was, uh, through an event that, uh, Dr. Stokes was involved with where some of my office of planning colleagues, um, were able to attend. That really started the point of connection and getting our agency to begin to think about, well, you know, what is this gaming and what is play all about and how can we leverage this? How can we be using this and going back to what we talked about earlier about thinking outside the box, um, and through subsequent conversations and sharing some, some ideas and some information, we realized that, um, there was an opportunity for us to, to collaborate and partner together with an in the district, a university. So Dr. Stokes and I started having a number of conversations, um, exchanging some ideas, um, and kind of building up a one another's knowledge actually about, um, kind of the work that the office of planning was doing and what we kind of were envisioning, um, for a playful partnership, for lack of better terms. From there we began to establish our partnership, um, and start to be able to work together in a couple of different initiatives.

Benjamin: (11:49)

Yeah. It's been a fascinating journey. Um, I think that the university perspective is partly about bringing some, not just rigor, but also taking the idea of play seriously. Um, just an example of this, if you were to go back to 2000, that was not a time where you could get a PhD in game design. It's not a time when traditional disciplines would have accepted that as a serious area of study. Um, but things have really radically changed. And I think it's partly because we've had to step back from how close games are to our culture and our hearts, uh, in the history of human society. There is no culture that doesn't have games as part of their culture. Quite often we separate out serious work and things like planning where we have to make big decisions from play, which sometimes we say that's an affair for the children, but of course, if you were actually to go and look at how games work and look at very high levels, one of the things that differentiates, I think, high performing companies and government agencies, uh, is that they give themselves some room to be playful.

Benjamin: (13:00)

Even in some of the least expected places, there are some great case studies of how the military has actually, uh, used scenario planning in playful ways, which is basically doing games about what if we went here with our army, or over here with our army to, to think about the future. Um, and I think that that's act, they're actually history in this, in major corporations, in big parts of our federal government, but at the city level it's been really hit or miss. Uh, there were some efforts in the 1970s as part of, um, the, a number of different movements to engage different offices in the city with each other, and build empathy, to do things like gather in gymnasiums and have, uh, the head of police role-play as the head of the schools and the school district head, uh, be somebody who, uh, played the role of the mayor.

Benjamin: (13:50)

Um, this idea that we need empathy at a systems level that it's about where you're embedded in a decision making perspective in a system is something that I think games do better than anything else. Games at that, at that approach are almost like a simulation, but with a playful perspective that lets you relax a little bit and not just try to reinforce or double down on your biases. They help you actually open your eyes and think about a different point in the system. I think that this past summer, with all of the, uh, intense pressure on cities to think about police reform, um, and to think about how protests are part of accountability around, uh, police action is such an interesting moment to say, is it just that we demand some changes in policy or do we also need different empathy about what does it mean to be a police chief versus, uh, doing social work versus mental health services versus DC's effort to change this homeless shelter?

Benjamin: (14:44)

Because the truth is they're probably related in some way. And this kind of systems thinking is actually at the heart of how games work, um, games use rules to structure play. Uh, and I think that the interesting thing is we come into a digital age, is that quite often, uh, we are trying to think about how to structure things that didn't seem structurable. Uh, we're, we're using code to structure how people move through streets. Uh, we're using AI to try and structure, uh, what, where we're going to invest in, in, in, uh, all sorts of interesting ways on the private sector and increasingly in government. And so I wanted to give this kind of frame to play to first show that it has a long history, but that we have cultural blinders to taking it seriously. Uh, and once we start taking it seriously, we realize in many ways it's already here, but here's the last point. We often don't have the language to take it seriously in our professional training.

Benjamin: (15:39)

And even people that play massive numbers of hours of games don't necessarily have the critical vocabulary to talk about them in ways that are actually productive. And this is essential when we're translating it to city work. So when we're thinking about bringing playfulness into planning into placemaking, um, quite often, especially at higher levels, we don't have that kind of training. It's not part of how we train planning professionals, for example. I would argue that it is especially important as we head into an era of, of what we've talked about is things like smart cities and engagement, because there's such a pull towards the kind of efficiency mindset, um, which doesn't intend to be this way, but happens to be actually very exclusionary of play. And in that way, it actually undermines public engagement and undermines participation. A lot of our smart city systems are built for city government, and they are anti engagement. They undermine engagement. They, they are alienating to the people we want to be engaging. Uh, so I think that more than ever, we need to be taking some of the ideas of play seriously. And, and for me, it's been so fun to work with Josh because he'll just call me up out of the blue and be like, did you hear this weird article?

Benjamin: (16:48)

Or do you want to help us out with this project that we're doing next week? It's been a great back and forth. Similarly, I'll pitch him on things all the time. He sent me something from the Knight Foundation. I was like, Oh, I know people there, but they're doing this interesting thing with Pokemon. Go looking at how cities are actually reappropriate in the game and making, changing the rules, changing the content, doing big partnerships, um, a hundred thousand people events involving Pokemon go. And I, and I am getting a grant from them. So thanks Josh, uh, getting Knight Foundation funds over to the American University Game Center. Um, we, we were flown out to San Jose, uh, to Philadelphia. I went to Akron, went to Boston, looked at, uh, how a bunch of different cities were repurposing Pokemon go for things like placemaking, uh, things like moving people across specific cultural neighborhoods where they wanted more exchange.So it's, it's partly about that kind of mobility of people that, that play can do. Uh, but it's also about that idea of place as a kind of social construct, how do we tell the story of place that brings people in? So it's been a really fun journey with the DC office of planning.

Lindsay: (17:50)

And can you explain more of what you all do at the playful city lab?

Benjamin: (17:53)

Yes. Our lab is focused specifically on play at the local level. Um, and this is universities often work, uh, you know, five years into the future. We're thinking about what's the next area of growth. Um, the playful city lab looks at the fact that things like Pokemon go, uh, are, are arising as a possibility and have opened a new conversation with city government. They're still let into the government like, wait, wasn't that a fad, is Pokemon go actually no 2020 Pokemon go earned record revenues. That is still very much here. It is just not in the headlines. And a lot of folks in government have kind of tuned it out, stopped paying attention, but actually these games are still, they are massive economies. They are drivers of how people are organizing their behavior.

Benjamin: (18:41)

Our lab, both studies, uh, commercial games at large scale, and we study the making the kind of design of play, uh, and how digital and physical systems can intertwine. Um, we're really interested in how we can kind of democratize the game design process to help more cities, uh, engage in building playful systems. Because quite often when we build a digital system with like a contract to a big agency, the procurement agencies are not at all built for doing things in a playful fashion. Again, this is a little of like the smart cities and how we build like efficient systems versus people that do play.

Benjamin: (19:16)

Almost all the playful stuff that cities are doing is with whiteboards and totally analog. And as soon as it becomes digital, it like sucks all the play out of it, which is ironic because the games industry is a massive digital space. There's so many people that are doing digital things with play, but not city cities mostly like suck the play out anytime they go digital. So I think it's a really interesting challenge for us as a university and kind of innovation center to build products, to work with different partners and think about, well, when can the digital and physical start mixing and little ways. Ironically, sometimes when we work with, with city government, uh, the first step is to help them legitimize the analog things they're doing as having real impact, because sometimes what happens is they know that they're important and they've invested in them, but they don't talk about them in the same breath as the, as the things that, that are accomplishing hard, measurable outcomes.

Benjamin: (20:06)

This is true with a lot of engagement work. It's, it's harder to measure engagement work and play is definitely on that side. So it's part of just the challenge with engagement, but playful stuff again, because we tend to put it with kids. We measure it in terms of playgrounds and we measure in terms of stadiums, but we, we lose it a lot as a, as something we invest in as something like a playful way to do data collection at a farmer's market playful, why would we advise the best in the playful strategy there? How would that work? Uh, and so I think this is legitimising the analog play. And then thinking, how does that relate to digital strategies, uh, for both conversation among between residents digital strategies for data collection, digital strategies for, uh, sharing and circulating stories, uh, about place, uh, digital strategies for having residents contribute in some way to the digital side of our cities and the data profile that we're all building as part of investing in place. So there's a lot of different sides to what play can be. And our lab is interested in moving that conversation forward at the intersection of physical and digital.

Lindsay: (21:06)

Local governments listening in are going to be at varying stages of engagement and communications ranging from very basic to extremely complex. Let's start with an easy example of how we should be looking at gamifying engagement or making engagement more playful as governments, maybe using some of these strategies you'd recommend already without even knowing it.

Benjamin: (21:25)

Yeah, well first, just a tiny terminology note on gamification. Um, this has actually been like a movement, which I'm, I'm kind of like doing battle with, so pardon me, Lindsay. I have to put on my battle helmet for just, just a second here. The term is partly gotten some credit, uh, in, in marketing circles as something where we can add points and add badges, and then suddenly people will do what we say, uh, like what we'll add points and people recycle more, or they'll use less electricity, or we can get them to fill out a survey by five points for every survey item. It turns out that while there are some people who will do anything for points, that's a small number, but there are people who will do anything for points. A lot of people actually find those systems manipulative, uh, that they're very transparent.

Benjamin: (22:10)

Uh, th that it's clear when somebody is trying to get you to do something and it actually builds resentment. So I want to raise just a quick, quick flag that gamification, where it's, where, where it's defined as I'm going to add game-like features points, and leaderboards actually has a lot of backfire examples. If instead, you, you genuinely build a playful spirit, which sometimes doesn't have points and doesn't have badges. So it is not about making everything about points, cause that's not actually the definition of a game. A game has playful challenges. It has feedback loops and has uncertain outcomes. You don't know exactly what it is going to going to happen. We can talk more about that, but you asked about, what's a kind of easy example. Well, I would say that there's two paths to this one is to encourage playfulness cause a bunch of the effects of games come from the fact that it opens the space, this attitude of playfulness, um, and things like open streets. We're going to cut down, uh, shut down the street to cars for a day and bring out pedestrians being, bring out folks with bicycles. That's actually in the space of games. So a lot of kind of open street movements, a lot of creative placemaking, um, have this, uh, this, this approach. Um, one of the most powerful sets of effects that we see from games and in terms of public engagement for those is that they create the room to have conversations between residents. A lot of people that live on the same street with their neighbors actually start talking to their neighbors and things like a block party, right?

Benjamin: (23:40)

And they're at the city scale, there are often so many more neighborhood and block parties than people realize that happen. Thanks to city government. So I think of it as not as a means to an end, but it's actually the indicator. So I would argue a lot of city governments are doing this already. This is why you see governments with small budgets without out a lot of resources. If you think of it as an anchor, you're probably already doing some things in this direction. Um, let me go on, on the other side and just, just name one other example of how governments are doing a little bit, like with, with play games can also be a little bit more structural and tied to data. Um, so, uh, a really dry example, but an interesting one out there is that, um, most States and a growing number of city governments are offering parts of their budgets, tied to games. Can you balance the budget? And one of the reasons they do this is they say people don't empathize. They're always like, I need more money for my thing. My thing never gets funded, but they don't realize what are the trade-offs in that thing.

Benjamin: (24:38)

This is something that government complains about all the time. Our residents just don't get us. Um, but it turns out lecturing that at them never helps them get it the way they could get it is by trying it themselves. So one of the things that games as systems help us build is this sense of cause and effect by repeatedly taking an action and getting a little bit of feedback, Oh, I tried to do this to balance the budget that didn't work. I tried this, I tried this, I tried this. And a key part is that failure is part of that feedback loop, but it's, it's a safe failure. It's not, it's not like brutal failure. You're thrown out on the street. You lose your job as the city budget person. No, it's that you, you try to balance the budget so it's that you iteratively try to balance the budget 20 or 30 times. If you get people trying to eternally balance the budget of 20 or 30 times, you get really different outcomes in terms of how they have an intuition about what that budget means. So you can do this with a full on expensive simulation, of course. And some people probably hearing this immediately went to the digital and what's my million dollar simulation budget, but you can also do it with Excel sheets and even even more playfully, you can actually do this with, with blocks analog, like big, big, um, post-it style blocks of paper at a big community event. You can say, here are the different pieces and now I'm going to let each person come up. You can take, you can add something to the budget, but you got to take something else away. And when you take something away, they may react, Oh no, don't take that away.

Benjamin: (26:00)

So it has to have that feedback mechanism and the crowd watching you try to balance the budget. That's your feedback mechanism that I think is, is, is the kind of experience that playful systems can create. So again, I'm offering playful systems as one kind. The other is more of trying to get the playful spirit without the formalism of games. And those are the two ways I'd suggest it, that we think a little bit about games. I think cities can do both of these at some level of technology engagement. Both of them can be very technological. Both of them can be tech minimalists.

Lindsay: (26:31)

Getting back to your comments on gamification. I'm curious about your thoughts on community currency strategies as a way to boost hyperlocal, economic development and engagement.

Benjamin: (26:41)

I think it's a really interesting strategy. So, uh, the example I turn to for this, there was an alternative currency, uh, in Macon, Georgia called Macon money. Um, that was funded. They brought in some really heavy hitters, uh, from the game design world, uh, people that went on to Zynga world, uh, and made they made their big bucks there. But, but before they did that, they actually helped design this alternative currency it's in Macon. So it has the Otis Redding on the paper currency because he was from Macon. Um, so it has this kind of local pride sense. Here's the interesting thing, you get a half of the, of the make and money. Um, and you have to find the matching symbols as three symbols have to line up along the edge of the currency. And they split them along different zip codes, because they wanted people in like the historic African-American part of town talking to the newcomers in the college neighborhoods. So it was a town gown kind of divide, and the distribution of the currency was causing social mixing. In other words, there was a way in which the capital, the, the money as currency was being exchanged for a social currency and social capital. And, and this idea that you weave those systems together, I think is at a higher level of policy design than most of what we're doing for our tax rebates, our, our economic investments.

Benjamin: (27:51)

I think it's a great example of how we do build a sense of place and build social currency while we're also targeting specific businesses. So in this, if you could only spend the currency at local businesses and a pre-approved set, it allowed for a kind of micro-targeting of where the funds went. Um, and it also built a lot of the kind of social connections and awareness of what the campaign is and where it should go. So I think like for a certain set of investments, this is a better use of economic development funds, uh, than we often see anywhere in government. Uh, but it's still a playful approach.

Benjamin: (28:25)

I would say that most economic development groups in city government are not yet willing to touch this. And in fact, even in Macon, uh, the place that it was understood, it was a cultural project. It was designed as a cultural project, despite the fact that it was an injection of liquid currency, uh, on the order of 60, $70,000 that went straight into the economy. You can measure the economic effects, but it was still, the people were just like, Oh, I'm not sure we can talk about the fact that we actually boosted the economy through play. So I'd say we're not quite there yet, culturally, in terms of people being willing to, to, uh, actually stand by the actual outcomes we're seeing. So making Macon is the game Knight foundation actually helped fund that project as well. It's an interesting example on the more like serious investment side.

Lindsay: (29:09)

Yeah, I think you’d be interested - Darwin, Australia did a larger scale project very similar so I would get in touch with Joshua Sattler and pick his brain a little bit. We did a podcast with him and covered some of their work on Govlaunch. But Darwin, it’s similar to what Macon Money was trying to accomplish, but theirs is much larger scale and more recent. 

I’ll be back next week with Benjamin and Josh to continue the conversation about playful engagement. So stay tuned for an exciting follow on episode where we’ll talk projects underway in DC and takeaways for others looking to spur more meaningful and inclusive engagement by simply trying to have just a little bit more fun. I’m Lindsay Pica-Alfano, and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch, the wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe and hear more stories like this wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re a local government innovator, we hope you’ll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch Podcast.