CUTGroup Collective

Code for Miami is a Knight Cities Challenge winner for CUTGroup

Sonja Marziano

Today, Code for Miami, a Code for America brigade, was announced as a Knight Cities Challenge winner for their Miami Civic User Testing Group. The goal of the Miami Civic User Testing Group is “Ensuring that people building local government technology use real-world feedback throughout the development process by creating a user testing group that will identify user experience issues more quickly, while making websites and apps more accessible.”

As a flagship Smart Chicago program, the Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) has helped to establish sustained, meaningful collaboration with residents around data and technology. Code for Miami plans to implement the CUTGroup processes and methodologies laid out in our documentation, and we will be working with Code for Miami to help with the process of building a CUTGroup through the CUTGroup Collective.

We recently launched the CUTGroup Collective as a way to convene organizations and institutions to help establish new CUTGroups in other cities and create a new community to share and learn from one another. Smart Chicago’s CUTGroup and CUTGroup Collective have also been supported by the Knight Foundation through the Community Information Challenge Grant that was awarded last year to “continue to design, build and demonstrate the power of digital tools to the community and empower residents to use news and information to improve their quality of life.”

We look forward to work with and learning lessons from Code for Miami’s experience of building a CUTGroup and helping other cities also learn from those experiences.

Congratulations to the Code for Miami team – Rebekah Monson, Ernie Hsiung, and Cristina Solana!

CUTGroup Collective & The Opportunity Project

Sonja Marziano

Screen Shot 2016-03-31 at 3.52.32 PMSmart Chicago will be partnering with CUTGroup Collective members to help build CUTGroups in other cities and then conduct UX testing on websites and tools that use data that is part of the White House’s Opportunity Project initiative. “The Opportunity Project expands access to opportunity for all Americans by putting data and digital tools in the hands of families, communities, and local leaders, to help them navigate information about the resources they need to thrive.”

Our role is to help organize these CUTGroup events around National Day of Civic Hacking, a national event that “brings together urbanists, civic hackers, government staff, developers, designers, community organizations and anyone with the passion to make their city better.” Smart Chicago has hosted National Day of Civic Hacking events in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and has been a leader in the national planning.

This year, Smart Chicago is interested in creating lasting impact by focusing our time, efforts and resources on direct engagement with residents around technology through the CUTGroup model. All of this work will happen through the CUTGroup Collective, our effort to convene and strengthen organizations and institutions in cities to help establish new CUTGroups, and create a new community to share and learn from one another.

We will team up with developers who have built projects using opportunity data and match them with cities that are part of the CUTGroup Collective. We will then work together to design and implement CUTGroup testing in June as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.

We are excited to do this work, and look forward to creating better technology for residents on a national level. If you are interested in the CUTGroup model and being part of the CUTGroup Collective, please let us know by filling out this form.

If you have worked on an website or tool that uses opportunity data, and want to participate in CUTGroup testing, please fill out this form.

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San Francisco’s Public Voice Project & the CUTGroup Collective

Sonja Marziano

San Francisco's The Public Voice: City Service Design CenterThe City & County of San Francisco recently submitted a proposal in the Knight News Challenge: How might libraries serve 21st century information needs? for The Public Voice: City Service Design Center. The goal is to “make San Francisco Public Library a forum for the collaborative design of government digital services through a public user testing program.”

This is an impressive project that will create better tools and systems that serve residents by conducting usability testing and incorporating and responding to resident feedback.

Our Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) work is cited as an inspiration and the City & County of San Francisco will implement the CUTGroup methodologies laid out in our documentation to replicate similar success in San Francisco.

The Public Voice honors the CUTGroup’s pioneering model and builds on it with an explicit focus:

1) We focus on government services being redesigned as part of our citywide initiative to be “digital by default”. The Public Voice creates collaborative environments where public services are built “with, not for” the people of San Francisco.

2) We create structural relationships and feedback loops with agency digital product managers. Feedback and testing will be prioritized for products where feedback is highly actionable and impactful. Librarians assisting people in accessing government services in their day jobs are critical to this feedback loop.

3) We focus on accessibility for people with low digital literacy, non-native English speakers, and people with disabilities. We plan to implement the CUTGroup methodologies laid out in Smart Chicago’s documentation to replicate similar success in San Francisco.

The CUTGroup is a flagship Smart Chicago program to establish sustained, meaningful collaboration with residents around data and technology. We recently launched the CUTGroup Collective as a way to convene organizations and institutions to help establish new CUTGroups in other cities, and create a new community to share and learn from one another. The City & County of San Francisco are members of this network and are committed to sharing lessons learned from implementing CUTGroup processes in San Francisco with the entire CUTGroup Collective. We see immeasurable value from San Francisco participating in the CUTGroup Collective and communicating their lessons and insights to other cities.

Through the CUTGroup Collective, Smart Chicago is dedicated to helping the City & County of San Francisco implement best practices from the CUTGroup based on what we learned. In addition, we are excited to learn what The Public Voice project can teach us about building CUTGroup processes from within government and public libraries and see how that could help other cities implement similar models.

The Launch of the CUTGroup Collective

Sonja Marziano

Today, three years after we started the CUTGroup, we are announcing a new initiative called the CUTGroup Collective where we will convene organizations who are interested in our CUTGroup model to connect with each other, share information, and collaborate to improve what we know and the work that we do.

If this is something you want to be a part of, please fill out this form.

CUTGroup Test Discussion on Digital Skills

Smart Chicago started the Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) to engage with residents around technology, build digital skills, and conduct usability testing to ensure that technology being built for people, actually worked for the people they tried to serve.

We think this is a great step in establishing sustained, meaningful collaboration with residents around the data and technology. CUTGroup is a lightweight way to get people involved. The hope is once everyone is involved in this world, we’ll find new ways to innovate that we can’t possibly conceive at this time. 

-Dan O’Neil from the launch blog post for the CUTGroup, February 1, 2013

Over the last few years, the CUTGroup grew to over 1,300 testers, extended from Chicago to the rest of Cook County, and our twenty-fourth test will happen early next month. While we are growing in numbers, we continue to reflect and develop this program and our processes to be accessible to more people and have a greater impact in the technology we test.

The CUTGroup has been a leading example of civic engagement through UX testing, and many cities have expressed interest in our model or started their own CUTGroup. Chattanooga Code for America Brigade started one in May 2014, Open Oakland began a CUTGroup in December 2014, Code for Miami was recently announced as a Knight Cities Challenge finalist for their Civic User Testing Group, and KC Digital Drive announced the start of their own CUTGroup just a couple of weeks ago!

It’s exciting when groups in other cities see the value in the work that we do and replicate it. Being open is a leading principle at Smart Chicago:

We are open. In the technology industry, the primary manifestation of that is the use of open source code. We have dozens of repositories on Github, for every piece of software we’ve made over the last three years. But being open means more than using a particular license for our software. It means having open processes, so that people know what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and how they can affect it. This is about allowing others “in”, wherever that may be in any particular situation.

For the CUTGroup, the first part of this was easy. The code for our website and management tool are on GitHub. We share all of our test results, our tools, the questions we ask, and the responses from our testers. We wrote the CUTGroup book in September 2014 as a resource and set of best practices to run a CUTGroup. These steps were crucial, but we wanted to find a way to allow more people in—to engage directly with workers in other cities not to only to replicate our model, but also establish a network that helps create sustainable and successful CUTGroups. 

CUTGroup Collective

Smart Chicago’s goal for the CUTGroup Collective is to convene organizations and institutions in cities to help others establish new CUTGroups, create a new community, and share and learn from one another.

First, we will broaden the ways we communicate by having a Slack channel dedicated to CUTGroup work. We will also host monthly calls to discuss processes, successes and challenges. This will lead to even more documentation that will be useful to other cities.

We will promote a system for sharing information and stories from before, during and after the test so we can learn about the different technologies being tested and what is and isn’t working for residents.

We will host a meeting in Fall 2016 that focuses on the intersection of UX testing, digital skills, and community engagement that is present in our CUTGroup model. More to come on this!

We are grateful to the Knight Foundation, which makes the CUTGroup Collective possible. They are funding this work through our Deep Dive, where we are part of a cohort representing a diverse set of approaches to expanding community information and increasing community engagement.

If you are interested in a model, or have already established a CUTGroup, we want to hear from you. Questions? Email me here:

Fill out the form below and let’s get in touch!