Joining the Bay Area Governance Project

Daniel Golliher — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:25:50 GMT

I founded Maximum New York, a new civics school, in late 2021. When you examine most of the civic deficiencies in NYC and New York State, you’ll find that they share a common upstream cause: very few people know how the government or law works, not even many of the people in government itself. At best they have an ad hoc knowledge acquired on the job, but there is upsettingly little formal training that prepares people to receive further on-the-job development.

So I’m making that training, and replacing the wildly deficient political science degree.

And while I focus on New York City and State, I also teach people and cultivate civic technical expertise across America. We cannot do what must be done without more wide-based citizen expertise. This goes beyond de Tocqueville. I am raising a coalition of the knowledgeable, and connecting citizens with a bias towards execution.

I’m joining the Bay Area Governance Project as a founding researcher, because:

New York City has a rich history of municipal reconfiguration that is useful for the contemporary Bay Area.
I bring general expertise in local and state governance that will support the project’s research efforts.
I am a Five Borough Partisan, and a proud citizen of the Empire State. But I am also an American, and a properly governed Bay Area would help us all to flourish.

I first met Michael at an urbanist conference in New York City in March 2023, and we quickly realized our mutual interest in effective governance. He comes from a STEM background, and I come from the world of the humanities and social sciences. But we each clearly possessed enough knowledge of the other’s domain to work together effectively.

Fundamentally, we both speak the language of systems and complexity.

The Bay Area Governance Project is the product of this synthesis. It is an urbanist project of consilience, and we hope it will be an effective model for others going forward.

New York and San Francisco. STEM and humanities. Techno-optimism and lexo-optimism.

Excelsior.

Introducing the Bay Area Governance Project

Michael Adams — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:23:25 GMT

In many respects, the Bay Area is where the future starts. Globe-shifting technological and cultural paradigms regularly emerge from visions of a better future that are born here. But this is not utopia; our cities are struggling and our governments have not delivered results. We can do better and we must. Many of our local issues require regional action. So we’re introducing the Bay Area Governance Project - we’re sketching a vision of good government for the Bay Area. We’ll do it by tracing our problems to the source and investigating a wide range of possible solutions, along with how they can be achieved technically and politically.

I believe good government requires good citizenship, and in this case, that means understanding the structure of state and local government and how they interact. Citizens with this knowledge are powerful because they can uncover and pursue specific, object-level political solutions. Anything less is just vibing. As founding researcher, I am building on the civic research and education work under way at the Civ Lab and bringing it to all citizens of the Bay.

Daniel is also joining as founding researcher. He is the best citizen I know. He’s an absolute expert in state and local government, and even better, he founded the first civics school you’d actually want to attend. His deep knowledge of NYC’s history of municipal reconfiguration offers lessons learned for us here in the Bay. Together, we span the breadth and depth necessary for such an undertaking.

We will soon begin mapping the landscape and marking the paths forward. You can expect to see detailed accounting of local, state, and federal governing structures, along the legal obstacles and affordances they provide.